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On March 7, the hammer fell. The administration canceled about $400 million in research funding to the Ivy League university.
In four days, the administration had accelerated a highly codified process designed to take weeks or months. Over the next month and a half, it would turn to the same playbook to wrest billions of dollars from universities it accused of antisemitism and other forms of discrimination, ignoring legal and procedural safeguards that had been set up to ensure due process.
President Trump’s willingness to break norms and bend the rule of law has sparked confusion and alarm on college campuses. Many are trying to avert similar sanctions by rapidly dismantling diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and rushing through disciplinary cases against pro-Palestinian protesters.
The escalating threats and funding freezes have upended a decades-long agreement between the federal government and campus administrators over how to handle often messy and complicated complaints of discrimination. Former attorneys with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) say the agency is wielding investigations and funding freezes to compel colleges to comply with Trump’s priorities. But what colleges need, they say, is a guide, not a cudgel.
“Usually, our institutions want to help students, and it’s a matter of them not understanding the law, not knowing how to do it, and needing the support,” said Katie Dullum, a former OCR investigator. “And so I think a lot of them are scared. They’re now operating blind.”
In three separate lawsuits, Harvard University and union groups representing Harvard and Columbia faculty members are now suing the Trump administration, accusing it of illegally short-circuiting laws that determine how civil-rights complaints must be investigated on college campuses. In addition, hundreds of academic leaders have signed on to a statement circulated by the American Association of Colleges and Universities that accuses the Trump administration of “unprecedented government overreach and political interference.”
The fast-track approach taken with Columbia set the tone for the cases that followed. A lawsuit filed March 25 by the American Association of University Professors and the American Federation of Teachers referred to the threats against Columbia as “an existential ‘gun to the head’ for a university.”
By the time the spotlight had turned on Harvard, the pattern was clear. At the end of March, the Trump administration announced a “comprehensive review” of billions of dollars of commitments in research funding to Harvard, accusing the university of failing to protect Jewish students and of “promoting divisive ideologies.” Three days later, it delivered nine sweeping demands that Harvard rejected; the university’s president, Alan M. Garber, called them “assertions of power, unmoored from the law, to control teaching and learning at Harvard and to dictate how we operate.” Within hours, $2.2 billion of Harvard’s federal funding had been frozen.
“These restrictions exist precisely because Congress recognized that in a system where institutions depend on federal funds, letting federal agencies withhold funding cavalierly would give them dangerously broad power,” the AAUP’s March 25 lawsuit states. “Far from enforcing this civil-rights statute, the Trump administration has instead weaponized Title VI, using the threat of massive and indiscriminate funding cuts as a cudgel to coerce universities into policing free speech and academic inquiry.”
An Education Department spokesperson did not respond to The Chronicle’s questions about the scope of investigation that the Trump administration’s task force on antisemitism initiated before rescinding federal funding from multiple universities. As for the crackdown at Columbia, Madi Biedermann, a department spokeswoman, said the task force “followed all applicable law in holding Columbia University to account for the lawless antisemitism that it allowed to occur on its campus.”
At Columbia, Harvard, and the five other elite universities sanctioned so far, the administration is announcing reviews with what appear to be predetermined outcomes “and moving immediately to the punishment phase,” said Jon Fansmith, senior vice president for government relations and national engagement at the American Council on Education. “America has certain rules,” he said. “We don’t convict people without a trial, much less any evidence.” The way cases are being raced through now “precludes the possibilities for fixing the problem. It’s punishment for the sake of punishment.”
Trump, who’s made rooting out antisemitism on campuses a central theme of his administration, has enlisted three federal agencies in the task. The DOJ Task Force to Combat Antisemitism includes representatives of the Justice, Education, and Health and Human Services Departments. It’s headed by Leo Terrell, a lawyer and former Fox News contributor who’s made no secret of his animus toward the task force’s targets. He told his former employer last month that the universities in question have been “hijacked by Marxists.”
“We’re going to bankrupt these universities. We’re going to take away every single federal dollar,” he said during an appearance on Life, Liberty, and Levin. “If these universities do not play ball, lawyer up, because the federal government is coming after you.”
Immediately after it was formed, the task force announced Title VI investigations into Columbia and four other private and state universities. Without providing examples or suggesting remedies, it said that “widespread antisemitic harassment” had been reported on these campuses. Last month, 60 colleges received letters warning them that they could face Title VI-enforcement actions if they fail to protect Jewish students.
In the blitz of investigations and findings the task force has announced, it appears to be continuing to bypass most of the procedural steps required of Title VI probes. For instance, the government is supposed to notify colleges when it’s cutting off funding and explain the rationale, but some of the targeted institutions, including Cornell and Northwestern Universities, said they learned the spigot had been shut off through media reports or when stop-work orders began flowing in.
Critics have taken issue not only with how quickly punishments are being meted out, but also with the lack of specificity about who’s being targeted and why. The sanctions — the freezing of billions of dollars in federal contracts and grants — are mostly unrelated to the largely undefined acts of alleged antisemitism.
“It’s hard to understand how taking away medical-research funding is a response to a perception that antisemitic acts are taking place on that campus,” Fansmith said. Among the research areas halted at Columbia are studies into Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, and fetal health. At Harvard, some of the first projects to be stopped involved early diagnosis for Lou Gehrig’s disease, or ALS, and a multi-university project on tuberculosis, a disease that kills more than 1 million people each year. At Harvard and elsewhere, researchers are facing the prospect of laying off workers and euthanizing research animals.
The sanctions are punishing people and programs that haven’t been accused of wrongdoing, according to the March 25 lawsuit by the AAUP. That, the plaintiffs argue, is illegal, because Title VI only allows funding to be yanked if the effects are limited to the areas where noncompliance occurred. In at least the last 25 years, there’s no record of any college having federal funds canceled or revoked as a result of failing to comply with Title VI, the AAUP says. The Harvard cuts extended to its teaching hospitals, which are independent from the university, its lawsuit points out.
“The withdrawal of research funding for reasons unrelated to research sets a dangerous and counterproductive precedent,” the Board of Directors of the Association of American Universities said in a March 31 statement. “We urge the administration and Congress, in accordance with principles of due process, to work through the established Department of Education and Department of Justice procedures for investigating allegations of discrimination (including antisemitism, gender, or other forms of discrimination) on any campus.”
The battle over funding reveals a fundamental disagreement between the Trump administration and universities. Education Secretary Linda McMahon and other Trump officials contend that federal support is a privilege universities should be grateful for. Toby Smith, the AAU’s senior vice president for government relations and public policy, countered that universities’ compact with the government leads to scientific and technological breakthroughs that benefit everyone.
“Canceling funds for lifesaving research to punish universities for unrelated conduct hurts the American people,” Smith said.
In addition, the manual states that “all actions taken by OCR must comport with First Amendment principles.” The action taken against Harvard violates that statute by interfering with the curriculum and intimidating faculty members into censoring their speech, the lawsuit states. (The Trump administration’s demands included government audits of the viewpoints of Harvard faculty members and students.)
The investigation into Columbia blew by in a matter of days. It was announced the same day McMahon was confirmed as education secretary, just four days before the $400 million in grants was canceled and six days before Columbia was handed a list of demands and given one week to comply. The university was ordered to:
By March 21, Columbia had agreed to most of the demands, but the federal funding remained frozen. On April 8, all of Columbia’s grants from the National Institutes of Health were frozen.
In previous complaints of campus antisemitism, OCR investigations spanned months, with constant back and forth between the agency and university officials before resolution.
If these universities do not play ball, lawyer up, because the federal government is coming after you.
The civil-rights office’s handling of complaints at Drexel University offers a stark contrast to recent cases speeding to completion. In October 2023, a student’s door was set on fire in a freshman residence hall. In a complaint to OCR in December 2023, the Defense of Freedom Institute, a conservative-leaning nonprofit, argued that the student’s door was adorned with Jewish decorations, and that she was intentionally singled out for her outspoken support of Israel and family ties to the Israeli Defense Forces. The complaint accused Drexel of failing to protect Jewish students from antisemitic attacks.
Drexel’s former president, John Fry, later wrote in a letter to the community that the incident was being investigated to determine whether discrimination or hate motivated the arson. No one was arrested, and no disciplinary actions were announced, according to the complaint.
Drexel told OCR the decorations were Halloween-themed and not Jewish-specific, and the Department of Public Safety found no evidence of a hate crime. OCR agreed with the university’s handling of the arson, citing thorough communication and extensive interviews.
However, in reviewing more than 30 other antisemitism-related incidents, OCR found Drexel had treated each individually without recognizing that they were part of a pattern of antisemitic harassment that required a different approach.
Amid the investigation, the university entered into what’s called a rapid-resolution agreement, an “expedited case-processing approach” that can be used to resolve complaints with OCR before the agency concludes an investigation. Drexel agreed to review its policies and procedures to ensure they complied with Title VI, provide discrimination and antisemitism training for students and staff, and give OCR information about its investigations into shared-ancestry discrimination through 2026.
Drexel did not respond to The Chronicle’s request for comment.
If Drexel were to violate the terms of the resolution agreement, OCR could refer a complaint to the DOJ, a step that could result in federal funds being cut. But first, the civil-rights office would have to provide Drexel with a written notice of the alleged breach and 60 days to address it.
From the time the investigation was announced until the voluntary resolution was reached, seven months passed.
“If it takes two or three years sometimes just to get a complaint open for evaluation or opened and then investigated, and it goes on for years, a lot of times, the students have already graduated,” said Mark Perry, a former professor who has filed close to 1,000 OCR complaints over identity-conscious programs.
Even before Trump was inaugurated, OCR at the Department of Education was understaffed and investigators were swamped. Former staffers say cases can be stuck for years in the evaluation stage. At the start of the Biden administration, more than 900 cases were four or more years old. While the administration resolved around 16,000 of its more than 22,000 complaints last year, nearly 7,000 remained unresolved.
But instead of beefing up the office’s work force as it threatened dozens of new investigations, the Trump administration fired 40 percent of its employees. That decision, former OCR attorneys say, could increase the number of cases per investigator from around 50 to more than 200.
The office strives to resolve 80 percent of its cases within six months, Catherine E. Lhamon, a former chair at OCR, told The Chronicle. “That measure was more realistic at a time when the office received fewer complaints,” and when many of the cases were simpler, she said. “We didn’t meet that in the time that I was there. We were closer to 70, 75 percent.”
“With 50 cases per individual, each with highly sensitive issues, it simply is not possible for one person to move everything,” said Dullum, the former OCR investigator. “And so it can seem like things aren’t moving.”
The Trump administration isn’t the first to threaten funding cuts as a way to enforce compliance with OCR antidiscrimination mandates.
In a post last month on Facebook, Laura Kipnis, a film-studies professor at Northwestern University, wrote that “people might have forgotten that the Obama and Biden administrations also ‘weaponized’ federal research funding by threatening to withhold funds from institutions they deemed to be out of compliance with their mandates, in that case Title IX,” the federal gender-equity law. Kipnis was cleared of wrongdoing after being brought up on Title IX complaints filed by students who were upset over an essay she wrote in The Chronicle Review about sexual politics on campus.
OCR has investigated hundreds of colleges for potential Title IX violations. None have resulted in their federal funds being cut off.
Trump’s antisemitism task force is sending a message that cases will be moving quickly under its watch. That could change, of course, depending on the outcome of the lawsuits it’s facing.
“Other universities that are being investigated by the task force should expect the same level of scrutiny and swiftness of action if they don’t act to protect their students and stop antisemitic behavior,” Josh Gruenbaum, the Federal Acquisition Service commissioner and a member of the antisemitism task force, said in a March 24 statement.
The statement was responding to Columbia’s conciliatory choice to agree to many of the steps the government had spelled out. So far, the frozen money hasn’t been restored.
Nevertheless, the task-force statement said: “The decisive steps the task force has taken with Columbia have yielded positive results that should serve as a roadmap for universities with similar problems across the country.”
