Trump cancels $400m in federal funding to Columbia University over 'antisemitism'
The Trump administration announced on Friday that Columbia University will lose $400m in federal grants and contracts over accusations it has not done enough to combat antisemitism.
On Monday, 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 it would visit ten university campuses which have experienced antisemitic incidents since October 2023 after the Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel and the subsequent war on Gaza.
In a joint press statement on Friday, the agencies said the funding cuts were due to “the school’s continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students”.
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“Since October 7 [2023], Jewish students have faced relentless violence, intimidation, and anti-Semitic harassment on their campuses – only to be ignored by those who are supposed to protect them,” Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said in the press release.
The statement warned that the cancellations represent the first round of action and additional cancellations are expected to follow. Columbia University currently holds more than $5bn in federal grant commitments. The amount announced today is almost eight times more than the amount the federal task force announced it was considering halting on Monday.
Former Fox News commentator Leo Terrell, who is leading the task force, said: “Freezing the funds is one of the tools we are using to respond to this spike in anti-Semitism. This is only the beginning. Cancelling these taxpayer funds is our strongest signal yet that the Federal Government is not going to be party to an educational institution like Columbia that does not protect Jewish students and staff.”
The Ivy League university has been accused of allowing antisemitism on its campuses after a series of protests and encampments erupted last year that were sparked by Israel’s war on Gaza. After Columbia students held an encampment, universities across the country followed suit.
While university leadership has consistently condemned the protests, the institution has continued to be targeted by the government.
Both the Biden and Trump administrations have sought to characterise anti-Israel and anti-Zionist protests as "antisemitic", leading to congressional hearings, with members of congress grilling university administrators and law enforcement forcefully shutting down protests on campuses.
Last April, the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce staged a congressional hearing entitled, “Columbia in Crisis: Columbia University’s Response to Antisemitism.”
Congress members grilled former president Minouche Shafik and other board of trustee co-chairs in what was hailed as a “new McCarthyism” in a letter signed by almost two dozen Jewish faculty members at Columbia and its affiliate, Barnard College.
Observers say the targeting of one of the most liberal universities in the country is calculated to send a chilling effect across the country. The task force is also investigating nine other universities.
In the wake of the political backlash, universities like New York University and Harvard have scrambled to adopt the controversial IHRA definition of antisemitism as they come under federal scrutiny.
Since coming into office, Trump ordered a pause on federal grants and loans, which has since been blocked by a judge. The Associated Press reported in February that the Trump directive has universities nationwide "scrambling to determine how a funding freeze could affect their research programs, students and faculty".
Impact on Columbia and other universities
“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,” a professor of anthropology at a US university, who wished to remain anonymous, told Middle East Eye.
Tenured Columbia law professor Katherine Franke, who was forced into an 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, Josh Gruenbaum, a task force member, said, “Doing business with the Federal Government is a privilege.”
Franke added that Florida had been the testing ground for this curtailment of academic freedom, where they (Republicans) are reforming the education system, or as Franke put it, potentially “breaking it”.
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