Columbia Gives In

This is a bigger win than you might think. Here's why.

Universities across the country recoiled in horror at President Donald Trump’s decision to suspend $400 million of government grants to Columbia University—endowment: $14.8 billion—with further rounds of cuts expected, and his promise to do the same to other academic institutions receiving massive amounts of taxpayer money.

“Columbia University currently holds more than $5 billion in federal grant commitments,” the Department of Education noted in its press release announcing the cancellation. Most of the public probably did not know that, though the ongoing revelations by the Department of Government Efficiency ensure that few would be surprised by it by this point.

The universities’ response to the cancellation of federal grants and contracts was just as one would expect, as was the strong support from the press and other paid members of the intellectual class. Academia was highly sympathetic to what is, after all, one of their competitors.

Columbia, by contrast, kept rather quiet about it all, choosing instead to negotiate with the White House on what the university could do to keep the money flowing. On Friday, the university gave in. The Wall Street Journal reports:

Columbia University will cede to President Trump’s far-reaching demands in negotiations over $400 million in federal funding he revoked this month, according to a memo from the school to the administration.

Columbia agreed to ban masks, empower 36 campus police officers with new powers to arrest students and appoint a senior vice provost with broad authority to oversee the department of Middle East, South Asian and African Studies as well as the Center for Palestine Studies.

Control of the Middle East department has been a central dispute in negotiations and sparks controversy across campus. Faculty at Columbia and nationwide are expressing deep reservations about letting the federal government dictate how they can operate an academic department. The new vice provost, appointed by Columbia, will review curriculum, nontenure faculty hiring and leadership “to ensure the educational offerings are comprehensive and balanced.”

While those in favor of Columbia’s inaction had hoped to characterize their position as a heroic defense of academic freedom, the Trump administration cast it as approval of ethnic and religious prejudice. As their main complaint against Columbia, Trump and his team cited the institution’s failure to protect Jewish students, faculty, and others from harassment and physical attacks:

The decisive action by the DOJ, HHS, ED, and GSA to cancel Columbia’s grants and contracts serves as a notice to every school and university that receives federal dollars that this Administration will use all the tools at its disposal to protect Jewish students and end anti-Semitism on college campuses.

Title VI of the Civil Rights Act gives the government authority to cancel the grants because of this unequal treatment of an ethnic group, the General Services Administration (GSA) stated in a press release.

The GSA cited Columbia’s serious failure to keep order on the campus, quoting Education Secretary Linda McMahon as saying, “Unlawful encampments and demonstrations have completely paralyzed day-to-day campus operations.” McMahon finished that sentence with a clause specifying anti-Semitism and civil rights violations as the underlying problem, accusing Columbia of “depriving Jewish students of learning opportunities to which they are entitled.”

What McMahon is describing qualifies as a civil rights violation, and it therefore would seem to fit under the authority of the Civil Rights Act regarding equal treatment. It is interesting that the Trump administration took that particular angle, for two reasons.

One, the rationale is carefully tailored to find a clear justification under existing federal law for the administration’s action. Anti-Semitism may or may not be what the Trump administration sees as the most important element of this case, but it provides a strong legal foundation for it.

Two, the use of opposition to anti-Semitism as the administration’s rationale for this action jams a crowbar directly into one of the major cracks in the Democrats’ rapidly fracturing political coalition. Jews, who have long supported the Democrat Party, have not been getting much in return for their loyalty in recent years, and many have noticed. In last November’s election, “45% of Empire State voters who identify as Jewish cast their ballots for the Republican nominee in 2024—compared to just 30% who chose him as their candidate in 2020,” the New York Post reported, citing Fox News exit polls.

Columbia University is in New York City, it is surely worth noting.

The administration’s highly public commitment to stopping anti-Semitism in the United States also plays well with evangelical Christians, shoring up the president’s support in an important Republican demographic. Meanwhile, Trump will lose no votes among purple-haired college professors, the press, and other avant-Communist storm troops, as of course he has none.

It appears to me that the Trump administration is being very careful in crafting the president’s executive orders and other actions, as the Columbia rationale shows. (More on this tomorrow.) That will help them when the injunctions against the president’s every action reach appellate courts. It may well not be enough to sway the courts, but it may just be enough to get a sufficient proportion of the public on the administration’s side in the dispute. That is a lot more than nothing.

It is also clear that while the administration is doing the things it really wants to do and which it promised to its supporters—cutting costs, making the government less unfair in its policies and its dealings with the public, and putting the interests of the United States above other considerations—it is also using these as opportunities to attract interest groups and demographics that the Democrats have been neglecting or deliberately abandoning.