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Columbia University announced a much-anticipated deal with the Trump administration to pay more than $220m, an agreement meant to bring a resolution to the threat of massive funding cuts to the school, but certain to rankle critics given the extraordinary concessions made by the Ivy League university.
Under the agreement, the school will pay a $200m settlement over three years to the federal government, the university said. It will also pay $21m to settle investigations brought by the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
“This agreement marks an important step forward after a period of sustained federal scrutiny and institutional uncertainty,” acting university president Claire Shipman said.
The administration pulled the funding because of what it described as the university’s failure to squelch antisemitism on campus during the Israel-Gaza war that began in October 2023.
Columbia first agreed to a series of demands laid out by the Republican administration, including overhauling the university’s student disciplinary process and adopting a new definition of antisemitism.
Wednesday’s agreement codifies those reforms, Shipman said.
On Tuesday, the university announced that it had disciplined more than 70 students for participating in a May protest against the war in Gaza.
The deal is the first between a university and a presidential administration that has described higher education institutions as “the enemy” and launched an unprecedented campaign to reshape them. The government has withheld billions in grants and contracts from schools in an effort to force university administrators to abide by a sweeping list of demands.
The news comes the same week that Harvard University appeared in federal court to argue that the Trump administration illegally cut $2.6bn in funding over what it described as similar, politically motivated attempts to reshape higher education.
Harvard is the first – and so far only – university to sue.
In April, the administration also threatened to freeze $510m in grants to Brown University, citing similar motives, and has raised the prospect of cutting funding to Cornell, Northwestern, the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton.
In exchange for Columbia’s concessions, the White House will reinstate $400m in federal funding it had stripped from the university earlier this year over allegations that it allowed antisemitism to fester on campus.
Researchers estimate that Columbia was likely facing another $1.2bn in frozen funding from the National Institutes of Health. After the Trump administration cut the original $400m from the top research university, the lead funder of scientific research also terminated or froze unspent dollars previously awarded to Columbia.
In a June statement to alumni, Shipman said the university was in “danger of reaching a tipping point in terms of preserving our research excellence and the work we do for humanity”.
While the Trump administration is likely to hail the agreement as a victory in its battle against universities, the deal fell short of some of the most restrictive measures the administration had sought, like a legally binding consent decree and an overhaul of Columbia’s governance structure.
Earlier this month, the university announced a host of new measures to further combat antisemitism on campus, including the adoption of the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition and additional antisemitism training. The measures add to several similar ones introduced as the university has come under mounting criticism over the last two years by students, alumni and lawmakers who accused it of failing to stop pro-Palestinian protests on campus that they deemed antisemitic.
The deal, which settles a bevy of open civil rights investigations into the university, will be overseen by an independent monitor agreed to by both sides and who will report to the government on its progress every six months.
