Following the October 7, 2023, Hamas massacre of more than 1,200 Israelis and the ensuing Israeli war against Hamas in Gaza, Columbia University became a hotbed of anti-Israel demonstrations. That activism boiled over in April 2024, when activists set up a Gaza Solidarity encampment on a university lawn; occupied a university building; and prompted the cancellation of in-person classes. A rabbi at Columbia urged Jewish students that month to go home for Passover and not return because “Columbia University’s Public Safety and the NYPD cannot guarantee Jewish students’ safety in the face of extreme antisemitism and anarchy.”
Earlier this month, the Trump administration’s Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism announced that it was cutting $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia University “due to the school’s continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.” Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said in a statement that “universities must comply with all federal antidiscrimination laws if they are going to receive federal funding.” The National Institutes of Health announced it was cutting $250 million in grants to Columbia, but Inside Higher Ed reported last week that “neither the Trump administration nor the university have provided a comprehensive accounting of what’s being cut,” and it’s “hard to tell” whether the NIH were included in the $400 million cut or on top of it. One Columbia professor told The Dispatch: “The individual [Columbia] researcher knows if their grant has been pulled, but the public doesn’t know which researchers have been affected.” The task force made clear the $400 million in cuts were just the start, and “additional cancelations are expected to follow.”
“You take federal money, and you accept the strings that come with it. Those strings include civil rights laws,” Ilya Shapiro, a constitutional scholar with the conservative think tank the Manhattan Institute, told The Dispatch. Shapiro contends that Columbia has indeed violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin. Though the law does not mention religion, it has been interpreted by the federal government to protect Jewish and Muslim students, and universities can be held liable for violating the law if they permit a hostile discriminatory environment for students. “It’s not just speech,” Shapiro said. “It’s student programs being disrupted, classes being disrupted … blocking access, harassment, and intimidation. All of these things violate Title VI.”
The fight playing out now in Columbia could be replayed at dozens of other colleges where anti-Israel encampments and disruptions occurred since October 7, 2023. And it raises important legal questions—not only about whether Columbia and other universities ran afoul of the Civil Rights Act but also about whether the Trump administration’s attempts to enforce it are legal.
The Trump administration has not actually taken Columbia to court yet, and according to Harvard law professor Noah Feldman that means the initial $400 million in cuts are unlawful. “The administration hasn’t even specified in particulars—at least not publicly—what the Title VI violations are,” Feldman told The Dispatch. “Federal law and regulations say the government can’t terminate these grants or contracts for violation of the anti-discrimination law unless a court has found that it has done so after a hearing at which the university has the right to defend itself,” Feldman wrote in a column for Bloomberg View. He also noted that federal law states that funds can’t be terminated until the federal government has both determined “compliance cannot be secured by voluntary means” and informed congressional committees of its plans to cut funding; furthermore, the cuts can only apply to “the particular program” in which the violation has occurred. Asked about Feldman’s argument, Shapiro replied: “I’m confident that if and when the Ts are crossed and Is dotted, the administration’s position on the substance will prevail in court.”
But more than a week after the Trump administration announced its $400 million cuts, Columbia hasn’t given any sign it intends to challenge the administration’s move before a judge. The university has actually already begun caving to some of the administration’s demands. On March 13, Columbia announced it was issuing “sanctions to students ranging from multi-year suspensions, temporary degree revocations, and expulsions related to the occupation of [Columbia University building] Hamilton Hall last spring.”
If the university has such a strong legal case against the Trump administration’s funding cuts, why is it negotiating rather than fighting in court? “It’s rational for a university to first, before it brings out the big guns of a lawsuit, to see if they can negotiate with the administration,” Feldman told The Dispatch. The total amount of money that the federal government could withhold from Columbia could “become an existential threat pretty quickly,” he said. The university has $5 billion in federal funding tied up in multi-year commitments—that amounts to nearly a third of the university’s $15 billion endowment. “Sometimes when you’re sued, you settle the lawsuit,” Feldman said.
Yet, it’s possible the Trump administration could push Columbia into a position where it feels it has no choice but to fight it out in court. On the evening of March 13, the Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism wrote a letter to Columbia that outlined “immediate next steps that we regard as a precondition for formal negotiations regarding Columbia University’s continued financial relationship with the United States government.” In addition to issuing expulsions and multi-year suspensions for students who occupied the university building, the task force made several other demands of Columbia—including adopting a specific definition of antisemitism that includes anti-Zonism; delivering “a plan for comprehensive admissions reform”; and placing the Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies department “under academic receivership for a minimum of five years,” which means faculty in that department would lose control of it. (A professor in that department praised the October 7 massacre.)
The list of the Trump administration’s demands from Columbia “is very expansive and goes well beyond anything that’s very tightly connected to remedying specific civil rights violations,” Yale law professor Keith Whittington told The Dispatch. Whittington pointed, for example, to the demand that the Middle East studies program be placed under academic receivership as a potentially unconstitutional infringement on academic freedom.
“Even if you think that this department fosters troubling and problematic ideas and philosophies in various ways, telling a private university what kind of academic departments and academic research and courses they ought to be teaching is an extraordinary intrusion into the academic freedom of that institution,” Whittington said. “Even laying aside the constitutional issues, I think we should be extremely reluctant to want to empower government officials to intrude into private university affairs in that way.”
Whittington noted that because of the amount of money involved, “universities much prefer to comply with whatever it is the federal government’s demanding than to actually try to fight them in court.” During the Obama presidency, the Department of Education successfully used such threats to get universities to change their disciplinary processes for handling sexual assault allegations in a way that, many conservatives said, violated the due-process rights of the accused.
The outcome of the fight between the federal government and Columbia will have implications for dozens of universities across the country. While the Trump administration announced in February that it was investigating Columbia and four other universities for potential Title VI violations, that list expanded to 60 colleges and universities on March 10.
“I find it completely plausible that, not only at Columbia but some other universities, there were genuine Title VI violations,” Whittington said. “Disrupting classes, preventing students from being able to freely move across campus, singling out individuals for harassing activity would all start running afoul of [Title VI] if the university doesn’t do anything to step in.”
One such example of a clear-cut Title VI violation occurred at UCLA, where Jewish students who refused to denounce Israel were barred by activists from accessing parts of campus. In August 2024, U.S. District Court Judge Mark Scarsi issued a preliminary injunction saying the university could not tolerate this behavior and issued a scathing rebuke of UCLA:
In the year 2024, in the United States of America, in the state of California, in the city of Los Angeles, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith. This fact is so unimaginable and so abhorrent to our constitutional guarantee of religious freedom that it bears repeating. Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith. UCLA does not dispute this. Instead, UCLA claims that it has no responsibility to protect the religious freedom of its Jewish students because the exclusion was engineered by third party protesters. But under constitutional principles, UCLA may not allow services to some students when UCLA knows that other students are excluded on religious grounds, regardless of who engineered the exclusion.
Such incidents were not isolated occurrences across the country. In October 2024, House Republicans on the education and workforce committee released a 325-page report documenting universities failing to address antisemitism that appears to have crossed the line from mere speech to violations of civil rights law. How much that inaction will cost universities, both in terms of dollars and academic freedom, remains to be seen.