Columbia’s $200M deal with Trump administration sets a precedent for other universities to bend to the government’s will

Columbia University agreed on July 23, 2025, to pay a US$200 million fine to the federal government and to settle allegations that it did not create a safe environment for Jewish students during Palestinian rights protests in 2024.

The deal will restore the vast majority of the $400 million in federal grants and contracts that Columbia was previously awarded, before the administration withdrew the funding in March 2025.

It marks the first financial and political agreement a university has reached with the Trump administration in its push for more control over higher education – and stands to have significant ripple effects for how other universities and colleges carry out their basic operations.

Amy Lieberman, the education editor at The Conversation U.S., spoke with Brendan Cantwell, a scholar of higher education at Michigan State University, to understand what’s exactly in this agreement – and the lasting precedent it may set on government intervention in higher education.

What’s in the deal Columbia made with the Trump administration?

The agreement requires Columbia to make a $200 million payment to the federal government. Columbia will also pay $21 million to settle investigations brought by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Columbia will need to keep detailed statistics about student applicants – including their race and ethnicity, grades and SAT scores – as well as information about faculty and staff hiring decisions. Columbia will then have to share this data with the federal government.

In exchange, the federal government will release most of the $400 million in frozen grant money previously awarded to Columbia and allow faculty at the university to compete for future federal grants.

How does this deal address antisemitism?

The Trump administration has cited antisemitism against students and faculty on campuses to justify its broad incursion into the business of universities around the country.

Antisemitism is a real and legitimate concern in U.S. society and higher education, including at Columbia.

But the federal complaint the administration made against Columbia was not actually about antisemitism. The administration made a formal accusation of antisemitism at Columbia in May of this year but suspended grants to the university in March. The federal government had initially acknowledged that cutting federal research grants did nothing to address the climate for Jewish students on campus, for example.

When the federal government investigates civil rights violations, it usually conducts site visits and does very thorough investigations. We never saw such a government report about antisemitism at Columbia or other universities.

The settlement that Columbia has entered into with the administration also doesn’t do much about antisemitism.

The agreement includes Columbia redefining antisemitism with a broader definition that is also used by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. The definition now includes “a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews” – a description that is also used by the U.S. State Department and several European governments but some critics say conflates antisemitism with anti-Zionism.

Instead, the agreement primarily has to do with faculty hiring and admissions decisions. The federal government alleges that Columbia is discriminating against white and Asian applicants, and that this will allow the government to ensure that everybody who is admitted is considered only on the basis of merit.

The administration could argue that changing hiring practices to get faculty who are less hostile to Jewish students could change the campus climate, but the agreement doesn’t really identify ways in which the university contributed to or ignored antisemitic conduct.

Is this a new issue?

There has been a long-running issue that conservatives and members of the Trump administration – dating back to his first term – have with higher education. The Trump administration and other conservatives have said for years that higher education is too liberal.

The protests were the flash point that put Columbia in the administration’s crosshairs, as well as claims that Columbia was creating a hostile environment for Jewish students.

The administration’s complaints aren’t limited to Columbia. Harvard is in a protracted conflict with the administration, and the administration has launched investigations into dozens of other schools around the country. These universities are butting heads with the administration over the same grievance that higher education is too liberal. There are also specific claims about antisemitism on university campuses and the privileges given to nonwhite students in admissions or campus life.

While the administration has a common set of complaints about a range of universities, there is a mix of schools that the administration is taking issue with. Some of them, such as Harvard, are very high profile. The Department of Justice forced out the president at the University of Virginia in January 2025 on the grounds that he had not done enough to root out diversity, equity and inclusion programs at the public university. The University of Virginia may have been a target for the administration because a Republican governor appointed most members of its governance board and agreed with Trump’s complaints.

How could this change the makeup of Columbia’s student population?

The Supreme Court ruled in 2023 that Harvard’s affirmative action program, which considered race in admissions, violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. This effectively ended race-based affirmative action for all U.S. colleges and universities.

Now, with the Columbia deal, the government could say that it would expect to see a proportion of students who are white increase and students who are Black and Latino to decrease at Columbia. That’s a legal approach that America First Legal, a conservative legal advocacy group founded by Stephen Miller, a Trump administration official, has already tried.

Back in February 2025, America First Legal alleged in a federal lawsuit that the University of California, Los Angeles, was using illegal admissions criteria, because of the number of Black and Latino students that were admitted by the school. That lawsuit is ongoing.

What does this agreement mean for US higher education as a whole?

It is an enormous, unprecedented shift in how the federal government works with higher education. Since the McCarthy era in the 1940s and ’50s, when professors were blacklisted and fired because of their alleged communism, Americans have not seen the federal government interrogate education.

The federal government does have a role in securing people’s civil rights, including in the context of higher education, but this is very, very different from how the federal government has done civil rights investigations and entered into agreements with universities in the past.

This agreement is very broad and gives the federal government oversight of things that have long been under universities’ control, such as whom they hire to teach and which students they admit.

The federal government is now saying it has the right to look over universities’ shoulders and guide them in this work that has long been considered independent. And the government is willing to be extremely coercive to get universities to comply.

What signal does this agreement send to other universities?

This agreement sets a precedent for the government to direct colleges and universities to comply with its political agenda. This violates the long tradition of academic independence that had helped to make the U.S. higher education system the envy of the world.

Columbia can afford paying $200 million to the federal government. Most universities can’t afford to pay $200 million.

And most campuses cannot survive without federal resources, whether that comes in the form of student financial aid or research grants. This agreement sets a standard for other universities that, if they don’t immediately do what the federal government wants them to do, the government could impose penalties that are so high it could end their ability to operate.

Brendan Cantwell is a Professor in the Department of Educational Administration at Michigan State University.