National Review Online
Monday, July 28, 2025
In March, the Trump administration shocked academia by
abruptly canceling hundreds of millions of dollars of federal
research grants to Columbia, Harvard, and other elite universities. The
administration’s stated reasoning was entirely just: For decades — in a way
that became unavoidably visible to many Americans only in the wake of the
October 7 Hamas massacre — university administrators have allowed their
campuses to become teeming hives of antisemitism, where theories of racial
hatred and exclusion are bolstered by the ideological support structure of
“diversity, equity, and inclusion” standards common to all these institutions.
Last Wednesday, one major domino fell — and more may yet
fall. Columbia University announced that it had finally reached an agreement with the Trump administration to
restore $400 million in canceled federal funding. Earlier this year, Columbia
had already agreed to a series of concessions — among them a ban on wearing
masks on campus, the empowerment of police to make arrests, and putting the
Department of Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies under intellectual
receivership.
That, however, was prelude to this final agreement: On
top of the earlier changes, Columbia will pay $200 million to settle potential
federal antidiscrimination claims and another $21 million to the Equal
Employment Opportunity Commission, and appoint a “jointly selected independent
monitor” to oversee Columbia’s compliance. (This is a significant de-escalation
from the administration’s original demand for Columbia to be governed under a
judicial consent decree.) Normalcy will return to Columbia — for now.
Progressive activists are already raising hue and cry
over how Columbia has “bent the knee” to the Trump administration, just as
progressives did when the University of Pennsylvania officially announced it would adhere to Title IX and exclude men from women’s
sports. Academics have gnashed their teeth and wailed about the need to “defend
our institutions.” And nearly all of it is tired cant.
Columbia University specifically brought this upon itself
with years of racial discrimination and persecution of disfavored minorities.
For decades, America’s elite academic institutions have, in fact, generally
used their large government research grants as a shield from
accountability for the climate of intolerance on their campuses: “How dare the
government tell Harvard how to run itself when Harvard does such important work
for the government,” went the logic of the argument. The Trump administration
deserves credit for refusing to be persuaded by such arrogantly inverted
reasoning.
And, as even Harvard’s former president, Larry Summers,
was willing
to concede, this was the best possible deal Columbia could have hoped to
score: Its academic autonomy is preserved, its funding streams restored, and
all it had to do was agree to stop breaking the law. The Trump administration
has indicated that the Columbia agreement will be a template moving forward, a
framework for their claims against other similarly discriminatory universities.
The strategy is a sensible one, and other schools should follow in Columbia’s
footsteps. And to those upset that the federal government has finally
intervened to stop rampant discrimination on university campuses across
America, we add only that it should never have had to come to this.
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