Columbia University gave in to President Trump’s demands after he revoked roughly $400 million in federal funding. WSJ’s Douglas Belkin explains how the university made its decision, and the impact that may have on campuses across the country. Further Reading: - Universities Sprint from ‘We Will Not Cower’ to Appeasing Trump - Columbia Yields to Trump in Battle Over Federal Funding Further Listening: - Pro-Palestinian Protests and Arrests at U.S. Colleges - The 2024 College Financial Aid Mess Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: Why did Trump target Columbia University?
Earlier this month, the Trump administration gave Columbia University an ultimatum. Get tougher on student protests, or else lose hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding.
Chapter 2: How dependent are universities like Columbia on federal funding?
Universities are, especially a research university like Columbia, is dependent on the federal government. The federal government has the capacity to shut the tap off. So the school can't operate without the federal government. And that gave the federal government huge leverage.
That's our colleague Doug Belkin, who covers higher education. Trump's ultimatum put the storied university between a rock and a hard place, and kicked off a big debate inside the school.
— If we allow the president to dictate how we work inside the campus, we give away academic freedom. And they're really anxious to protect that. So that's why this choice was so difficult to make, because you're pitting gold versus principle.
Chapter 3: What was Columbia's internal response to Trump's demands?
But on Friday, after an intense internal debate, Columbia gave in and agreed to make the changes Trump wanted. How big of a deal could this showdown be for America's colleges and universities?
It's like two tectonic plates slamming into each other. And it has the potential to change higher education significantly going forward. We are absolutely in a generational shift. I think we're probably in a once-in-50-year shift. This decision will resonate for a long time to come.
Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knudson. It's Monday, March 24th. Coming up on the show, why Colombia gave in to Trump. Columbia University got into Trump's crosshairs last year when protests broke out over Israel's war against Hamas in Gaza. Students camped out for weeks. At one point, some of them occupied a school building.
They were calling for a ceasefire and for the university to divest from companies doing business with Israel. And even some faculty joined in.
You've got all of this faculty that very much believe that protest is critical. The ability to speak freely is critical. They believe that these kids are doing the right thing. Some of them are teaching that this is part of, you know, how the world needs to be a better place.
But the protests made other students uneasy.
And a lot of Jewish students begin to feel like they're not safe. They're being screamed at. They don't want to go to class. At one point, a rabbi from Hillel says, don't come back to the campus. We can't protect you. It gets pretty ugly.
The school's leadership came under intense criticism, especially from conservatives, like then-candidate Donald Trump, who said Columbia didn't do enough to rein in the protests and crack down on anti-Semitism.
Columbia University was a great school. It's been, you know, badly damaged, I think, reputationally. But the person that heads it up, a woman, she waited so long. She was so weak. She was so afraid.
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Chapter 4: What were the main demands made by Trump to Columbia?
On March 13th, Trump sent Columbia a list of nine specific demands. If the school complied, it might be able to get its $400 million back. The demands included Columbia disciplining the students that had occupied that building during the protests, banning students from wearing masks to conceal their identity, and giving campus police the power to arrest and detain students.
What the Trump administration would like to see is time, place, and manner restrictions so that if you want to protest something political, you keep it out of the classroom, you let kids you want to go to school go to school and study.
The Trump administration also wanted Columbia to adopt a formal definition of anti-Semitism and take disciplinary power away from a judicial board and give it to the office of the university president. And there was another demand that made a lot of faculty angry.
He demanded that the Middle Eastern Studies Department be put into receivership, which essentially really was the big sticking point with this issue. And it really meant that they rein in some of the most far-left professors in that department. What does that mean, the receivership department?
So that's when they replace – usually if there's a department that's infighting and just dysfunctional and can't make decisions and is just at each other, they'll bring a chair in from another department to oversee that department. And that doesn't feel good for the department because they feel like we're the experts in philosophy and literature.
We should be making decisions about what we teach and how we teach it. But if the problems are so hot, they'll put it into receivership.
How is it even possible that the president of the United States can just unilaterally cancel grants and contracts? Like, on what grounds can he even make demands like this?
Well, that question came to lawyers and they said he doesn't have the grounds, that he's skipping due process and that Columbia should fight him in court and they would win. Do you want to take on the president? Maybe you'll win, maybe you won't. This is what he's been doing with other issues, right? I mean, this was happening with Mahmoud Khalil.
Right, the Columbia student who was acting as a spokesman to some of those protests who's now facing deportation.
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Chapter 5: How did Columbia's decision impact its departments?
What the impact of their decision might be, that's after the break. So Last week, Columbia outlined its decision regarding Trump's demands in a memo to his administration. And for the most part, it gave Trump what he was asking for. The first thing is that students will no longer be allowed to use masks to conceal their face during an unauthorized protest.
So kids will be detained if they're wearing the mask. If they're asked for ID, they have to give it to them. One of the things that they actually, the Trump team asked for was discipline of the students who had taken over Hamilton Hall last spring.
And after almost a year, the Senate faculty actually announced that they were disciplining them and expelling a number of students and suspending a number of other students. So they were doing that already.
The school also agreed to give campus officers more power.
So everything is a backstory. In the 1968 protests at Columbia, a lot of police came in and roughed up a lot of students. And so the campus law enforcement at Columbia don't have the power to arrest kids or to detain kids. And so these protests, they have to call in NYPD to break them up. There's now going to be 36 officers with the power to arrest and detain students.
So it's going to expedite discipline on campus very quickly. So that's one obvious thing that'll be clear to kids pretty quickly. If the protests start again, they'll be arrested by Columbia police.
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Chapter 6: What are the broader implications for academic freedom?
And then there's the receivership. Columbia agreed to bring in a new administrator to oversee the department that includes Middle Eastern studies, as well as the Center for Palestine Studies.
Columbia said it worked hard to address legitimate concerns from both inside and outside the university, and that it will adopt institutional neutrality, meaning it will stop taking official positions on most political issues. Doesn't Columbia, like a lot of universities, have this massive endowment with billions of dollars in it?
Why couldn't the university find a way to lean on that instead of the federal funding?
So the federal funding probably accounts for around a quarter of their operating budget.
That's quite a bit.
Yeah. Most of the endowment is earmarked for certain programs. People give money, they endow a chair, they endow a sports program, they endow something. So only some of that can they use. And they really try not to draw down more than 4% a year because it's for money.
perpetuity right they want to have the endowment they want to keep it growing they if they have to pull it down they can that's how they would answer that question it's no it's this is to maintain the fiscal health of the university for the long run and so if you're drawing it down very quickly in the short term you're giving that away yeah even even an endowment of with billions of dollars in it you take 400 million dollars out of it every year and it's gonna it's gonna disappear pretty quick
Yeah. And he has the potential to take a lot more than that. I mean, he could probably take closer to a billion dollars. I mean, how much money is coming out of the federal government to fund Columbia? It's more than 400 million.
So there's more leverage that he could have applied?
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