25-07-2025
Columbia University's $220m Trump settlement exposes the Left's basic hypocrisy
Columbia University has just agreed to a massive $220 million settlement with the Trump administration after a fight that centred around rampant anti-Semitism on campus. The university has also agreed to a number of policy reforms, designed to limit future attacks on Jewish students and faculty.
Of the settlement, $200 million will go to the federal government and the remaining $20 million to settle employment discrimination claims. Separately, the university has suspended or expelled students who seized the university library in the name of anti-Zionism.
The headlines imply that Columbia's settlement is unique, but it may not remain that way for long. Harvard's former president, Larry Summers, a former Secretary of the Treasury, has said the deal should set a template for Harvard to settle its own deepening clash with the Trump administration. The issues at the two universities are similar.
Left-wing academics are already furious about the Columbia deal, saying it is pure extortion and an unprecedented intrusion into academic affairs. The 'extortion' charge focuses on the Trump administration's efforts to cut Columbia's huge flow of federal money for research and limit its permission for foreign students to enrol. The issues regarding foreign students involve virtually all universities, and are still being argued in federal court.
But the Left-wing attacks are largely wrong. They are right in saying that the Trump administration's initial demands went too far in seeking to supervise teaching, appointments, and scholarly work. Those would be wholly inappropriate intrusions into areas where university faculty and administrators should have sole control, as long as they comply with federal law. For any university to approve that kind of intrusion would stifle free speech and set a terrible precedent. Fortunately, those excesses are not part of the Columbia agreement.
Where the Leftist criticism is wrong is to call financial threats against universities 'unprecedented' and to say that the Trump administration is using the fight against anti-Semitism as a mask for other punitive policies.
For years, under Democratic administrations, the federal government has threatened severe financial sanctions against universities that did not comply with bureaucratic regulations. Those threats went unnoticed, beyond a narrow circle who were directly involved.
Why didn't you hear about those threats? For two reasons. First, universities caved in very quickly because they were desperate for federal money. Second, most university faculty and administrators actually agreed with the then-government's politicised, progressive agenda. The mainstream media agreed with it, too, so they rarely if ever reported on this bureaucratic overreach.
I saw this supine agreement first hand when federal bureaucrats audited the hiring practices of a major university. The university's DEI administrator told a small, supervisory committee of faculty that the university had completed a federal audit and was in full compliance with all laws and regulations. Then the administrator announced that the federal bureaucrats were demanding 'only a few changes' – demands that went beyond any legal requirements but advanced the bureaucrats' ideological goals.
Faced with those demands, every scientist involved in the decision-making favoured immediate compliance with the government's extra-legal demands. Why? Because their research depended on federal money and they couldn't risk a drawn-out conflict, which could hold up their funding.
The same hidden fist lay behind the government's effort to require the inclusion of biological men in women's collegiate sports. The threat is that the government will cut off money for other grants if you don't buckle to those demands. You never heard about those threats because universities assented to them so quickly.
As for anti-Semitism on campus, it is wilful blindness not to see its pervasive, malign force today. It has been particularly visible and pernicious at Ivy League universities, except for Dartmouth, and at flagship state research universities, except for those in the South.
As anti-Semitism has spread across university campuses, administrators and faculty have done little to stop it. Neither did the Biden administration.
Many university administrators effectively tolerated the harassment of Jewish students and did almost nothing to punish the malefactors, at least until this week at Columbia. In some cases, faculty – especially in the Humanities, some Social Sciences, and some graduate programmes (notably, schools of divinity and social work) – actively supported the disruptions. The rationale is that social justice demands anti-Zionism, and anti-Zionism quickly turns into full-scale anti-Semitism.
If the settlement at Columbia and that university's belated decision to punish students who took over the library sets a precedent for other universities, that's good news and a victory for the basic Western values of religious toleration and civil discourse.
The impact is likely to be felt well beyond Columbia University. Now that the Trump administration has scored a major win in this culture war, expect them to keep pressing other universities.
Two final points about the Trump administration's willingness to confront Columbia and Harvard. First, taking on elite institutions is smart politics for a president who is reshaping his party around populist goals.
Second, Trump is characteristically going head to head with the strongest adversaries he can find, not the weakest. He is not going after some small teaching college, which would undoubtedly cave quickly because it needs the money. He is going after Harvard, which has the deepest pockets of any university and a campus population that generally loathes him. Confronting them is a high risk strategy for Trump, but a high reward one, too. When the top Ivy League schools begin to settle with Trump, as Columbia just has, who else can resist?
That question must be echoing through the ivied halls in Cambridge, New Haven, and Princeton. The answer, they will conclude, is increasingly obvious. It's time to strike a deal.
