Columbia University is facing a near existential crisis. The federal government has cut off hundreds of millions in funding and has said billions more are at stake. Colleges across the country are watching the university’s response, fearing that they could be next. Scholars from within its walls and elsewhere have concluded that it has a strong case to make if it were to sue to protect its funding.
And yet, the university appears ready to capitulate to the Trump administration’s demands. Why?
“They have a lot of incentive to get that money back and keep the feds from whacking them again,” said Holden Thorp, the former chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Universities have for decades relied on federal funding in the form of research grants, student financial aid, and for those with a hospital system, Medicaid and Medicare. It’s well understood that public colleges are in the thrall of their state lawmakers. But it’s become painfully clear this week to private institutions that federal officials have enormous leverage.
“We’ve just reached the point where they decided to use it,” Thorp said, “which was something that was hard to imagine until three months ago.”
Before even considering formal negotiations over Columbia’s funding, the Trump administration informed the university last Thursday that it would have to meet a set of conditions. It is nearly unprecedented for the federal government to exert such influence in higher education. The administration extended a deadline to meet those demands to Friday, The New York Times reported. Some of them, including expelling students who protested the war in Gaza and placing its department of Middle East, South Asian, and African studies under “academic receivership,” have struck scholars as particularly intrusive.
Columbia announced on the same day it received the letter that it had expelled some students who had protested to demand the university divest from Israel, while others were suspended or had their degrees temporarily revoked.
The pressure on Columbia is immense. The Trump administration canceled $400 million in federal funding because, officials say, the university has not done enough to protect Jewish students from antisemitism. Over the past two weeks, researchers on many National Institutes of Health projects, including studies on diabetes, breast cancer, and maternal mortality, have gotten notifications that their funding is gone. A total of $5 billion in federal grants to Columbia is under review.
Legal scholars reached this week by The Chronicle agreed that Columbia would have a strong case to make if it were to sue to protect its funding.
“Absolutely I could foresee a case, because what the Trump administration has done is blatantly in violation of both Title VI and the First Amendment,” said David D. Cole, a law and public policy professor at Georgetown’s law school.
Violations of Title VI — the civil-rights law barring discrimination in education based on race, color, and national origin, such as shared Jewish ancestry — are difficult to prove, scholars said. To make a strong claim, the Trump administration would have to first conduct evaluations of Columbia’s programs, give notice of specific failures, notify Congress of its intentions, and give Columbia the chance to respond. None of that has happened.
This is a time for standing up and speaking out, not acquiescing in illegal demands by an administration.
Even if federal officials had identified specific failures on Columbia’s part, they would have to show that the university was “deliberately indifferent,” a legal standard, Cole said. Allowing a protest to take place may not be enough, because many forms of protest are protected by the First Amendment.
So far, Columbia hasn’t pushed back on the lack of process. On Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported that the university was negotiating with federal officials and ready to comply with Trump’s letter of demands.
“I fear it will set an unfortunate precedent that will only encourage the Trump administration to intervene further in affairs of the university that are protected by academic freedom,” Cole wrote in a follow-up email after the Journal’s report. “This is a time for standing up and speaking out, not acquiescing in illegal demands by an administration.”
Veena Dubal, general counsel of the American Association of University Professors and a law professor at the University of California at Irvine School of Law, said that though she could put herself in the shoes of a college president who sees their role as safeguarding the university’s funding, what is at stake here is “fundamental to democracy.”
“From the faculty perspective, the chilling effect is real,” Dubal said. “Across our membership people are canceling conferences, pulling papers, stepping off the boards of organizations.”
Calls for Columbia to stand up to the Trump administration in the face of its demands grew throughout the week. Columbia’s chapter of the AAUP condemned the university’s decision to expel students, saying the university “sacrificed its own students to authoritarianism.”
A group of Columbia law professors published a blog post over the weekend outlining the legal problems with the Trump administration’s letter to Columbia.
“As scholars of constitutional law, administrative law, and antidiscrimination law who teach at Columbia, we feel compelled to point out some of the most glaring legal problems with this letter,” they wrote.
Then on Wednesday, Christopher L. Eisgruber, president of Princeton University, published a piece in The Atlantic warning that the Trump administration’s attack on Columbia was a threat to all colleges. He suggested litigation as a potential tool to fight back.
“The attack on Columbia is a radical threat to scholarly excellence and to America’s leadership in research,” Eisgruber wrote. “Universities and their leaders should speak up and litigate forcefully to protect their rights.”
History professors at Columbia signed a letter calling on scholars, students, and administrators to reject “efforts to dominate colleges and universities.”
Conservative and libertarian law professors weighed in, too. A group of constitutional law scholars from across the political spectrum published a letter on Thursday in The New York Review of Books, outlining the legal case against the government’s actions and arguing that the Trump administration was setting a “dangerous precedent for every recipient of federal financial assistance.”
Everybody throughout the academy is watching what’s happening with Columbia.
Among the right-leaning academics who signed the letter were a co-founder of the Federalist Society, Steven G. Calabresi, who is a law professor at Northwestern Law School; a former appellate judge, Michael W. McConnell, now a professor at Stanford Law School; and Eugene Volokh, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
A Columbia spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.
In interviews, several scholars speculated that the university did not want to sue because it might put the $5 billion in federal funding at greater risk. Perhaps Columbia is calculating that it might get a better outcome if leaders negotiate with the government.
“It is true that the American university system is propped up to a significant extent by government money in a variety of ways,” said Genevieve Lakier, a law professor at the University of Chicago Law School. She also signed the New York Review of Books letter.
A lawsuit takes time, and if Columbia waited for a hypothetical case to make its way through the courts, the Trump administration could inflict more damage. Plus, the amount of work it would take to implement $400 million in cuts would likely drive up the cost of those cuts, Thorp said.
But there is no guarantee that the Trump administration will restore $400 million in federal grants if Columbia does comply. And scholars said they believe the university risks more than its grants if it gives in.
“Everybody throughout the academy is watching what’s happening with Columbia,” said Samuel Bagenstos, a law professor at the University of Michigan Law School. “They’re obviously a test case.”
On Wednesday, another target emerged. The Trump administration announced that it had frozen $175 million in federal grants for the University of Pennsylvania. The White House posted on X that the funding pause was in response to the university’s policies on transgender athletes’ participation in sports.
“Columbia is not some small, under-resourced institution unable to fight back,” Bagenstos said. “If this institution, with a strong legal case, does not push back, that sends a pretty chilling message to the American academy generally.”
