Trump administration issues nine demands to Columbia University to restore federal funding
The Trump administration has issued nine demands to Columbia University before it will discuss lifting the cancellation of $400m in federal funding, according to a letter sent to the university's interim president, Katrina Armstrong.
According to the letter, the Trump administration has demanded the university adopt the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which academics and members of the Jewish community criticised as conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism.
The university was also told to begin the process of placing Columbia's world-renowned Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies department under academic receivership. This process requires an outside chair, who could be appointed by the government, to run the department for five years.
Other demands listed by the White House include a mask ban on campus, giving "full law enforcement authority" to campus security by allowing them to "arrest and remove agitators", and reforming the admissions process for its undergraduate and postgraduate programmes.
The Trump administration also ordered Columbia University to enforce its existing disciplinary policies, abolish its University Judicial Board, which includes student and staff representatives, and centralise its powers under the university president.
New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch
Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters
The White House told Columbia University to meet these demands by 20 March so it can enter "formal negotiations" with the federal government or risk losing all federal funding.
"We expect your immediate compliance with these critical next steps, after which we hope to open a conversation about immediate and long-term structural reforms that will return Columbia to its original mission of innovative research and academic excellence," the letter states.
Thursday's letter from the US Department of Education comes hours after the University Judicial Board issued expulsions, multi-year suspensions and temporary degree revocations to students involved in the occupation of Hamilton Hall.
The board did not release the names of the students facing expulsion. One of the students expelled was Grant Miner, the president of Columbia's student workers union and a PhD student at Columbia University.
According to the United Auto Workers union, Miner was expelled a day before contract negotiations with the university were set to begin.
Trump's decision to cut millions of dollars worth of funding to Columbia University comes days after federal immigration agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian graduate student and activist at Columbia.
Federal task force on antisemitism
Earlier this month, a federal task force notified the Ivy League institution that it would conduct “a comprehensive review” of the university’s federal contracts and grants as part of its ongoing investigations under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
Four government agencies - including the Department of Justice, Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Education and the US General Services Administration - make up the "Federal Task Force to Combat Antisemitism".
The task force was set up in February following Trump’s executive order, "Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism", signed at the end of January. The task force announced last week that it would visit 10 university campuses that have experienced antisemitic incidents since October 2023, following the Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel and the subsequent war on Gaza.
In the wake of the political backlash, universities like New York University and Harvard University have scrambled to adopt the controversial IHRA definition of antisemitism as they come under federal scrutiny.
Trump ordered a pause on federal grants and loans, which has since been blocked by a judge.
The Associated Press reported late last month that the Trump directive has universities nationwide "scrambling to determine how a funding freeze could affect their research programs, students and faculty".
A professor of anthropology at a US university, who wished to remain anonymous, told Middle East Eye that "the Columbia endowment is so big it can absorb the loss and subsidise research, but other universities - especially public research universities - would struggle immensely and their research could collapse. Second-tier or R2 universities would certainly not be able to absorb the loss of research grants and their research would fold”.
Tenured Columbia law professor Katherine Franke, who was forced into early retirement by Columbia for articulating concerns to Democracy Now! about Israeli students attending Columbia right out of military service, said that what happened to her is just part of a larger climate of targeting academic freedom.
“If you look at what is happening on our campuses, it has been about anti-Palestinian racism, which gets dressed up as fighting antisemitism. That’s not where they stop; that’s low-hanging fruit," Franke told MEE in January.
“Where they go next is critical legal studies, critical race theory, feminism, queer theory - all the stuff the right-wing has identified as dangerous ideas.”
In its press release, task force member Josh Gruenbaum said: “Doing business with the Federal Government is a privilege.”
Franke added that Florida had been a testing ground for this curtailment of academic freedom, where Republicans are reforming the education system - or, as Franke put it, potentially “breaking it”.
Middle East Eye delivers independent and unrivalled coverage and analysis of the Middle East, North Africa and beyond. To learn more about republishing this content and the associated fees, please fill out this form. More about MEE can be found here.
