One by one, elite universities are signing away some of their autonomy to the Trump administration after it has accused them of civil rights violations and withheld federal funding.
The University of Pennsylvania banned transgender women from participating in women’s college sports as part of an agreement with the Trump administration earlier this month.
Columbia University agreed last week to pay $200 million in penalties and fulfill a laundry list of other demands, from slashing diversity, equity, and inclusion programs to reviewing the curricula and personnel of its Middle Eastern studies department.
Brown University agreed to pay $50 million Wednesday to support Rhode Island state workforce initiatives, to abide by the Trump administration’s policies on trans athletes, and to apply what it refers to as “merit-based” university admissions.
Harvard University, despite seeking to fight the administration’s allegations of antisemitism and demands in court, is also reportedly in talks to pay the federal government $500 million as part of an agreement similar to the one signed by Columbia.
These Ivy League schools have large endowments, billions of dollars in reserve funds that should put them in the best financial position among institutions of higher education to resist the administration’s allegations and attempts to hold their federal funding ransom. But so far, they have chosen to settle with Trump instead — and in so doing, campus free speech advocates say they are compromising academic freedom and dialogue throughout higher education.
Other schools, especially those less resourced, are likely to follow. The Trump administration has announced investigations into more than 100 universities related to their policies on DEI, transgender students, students with disabilities, disclosure of foreign gifts and contracts, and alleged antisemitism following student protests against Israel’s war in Gaza.
“This does set up a bit of a road map, unfortunately, that I think is probably going to ripple across higher education,” said Kristen Shahverdian, program director for campus free speech at PEN America, an organization that advocates for freedom of expression. “This most likely has emboldened the Trump administration.”
The Columbia agreement serves as a concerning blueprint
Columbia has reached the most comprehensive deal signed by any university so far, and Education Secretary Linda McMahon has said that it will “change the course of campus culture for years to come.”
Trump had accused Columbia of failing to shield its students from antisemitic harassment and withheld $400 million in federal grants as a result.
The deal restores that funding. In exchange, Columbia did not admit any wrongdoing but agreed to comply with Trump’s demands on key policy priorities, and to pay $200 million to the US Treasury, as well as a separate $21 million to resolve civil rights complaints by Jewish students and staff.
In the deal, the school agreed to crack down on student protests after the major protests over the war in Gaza on campus last year. As a private institution, Columbia is not required to protect freedom of expression on its property to the degree required by the First Amendment. But along with its peers, Columbia has historically sought to hold itself to that standard. Its agreement with the Trump administration marks a paradigm shift in that respect.
The university vowed to discipline or expel students involved in demonstrations at Butler Library, enforce a ban on wearing masks during student protests, hire new security officers, and prevent student occupation of university buildings. Responsibilities for student discipline will also now be shifted from the faculty senate to the provost’s office to ensure additional oversight.
Those provisions have the potential to chill free speech. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a free speech advocacy group, has argued that masking, for example, may give individuals who are not involved in illicit activities the opportunity to articulate controversial opinions without fear of retribution or to draw focus to their message over their identities. The Supreme Court has repeatedly overturned identification requirements for expression under the First Amendment, acknowledging that there are legitimate reasons to protest anonymously.
Columbia will also adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, which explicitly includes criticism of the state of Israel. That definition, that antisemitism is a “certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews,” seeks to restrict speech that would not be punishable under federal antidiscrimination law. Free speech advocates say it is overly broad and will chill freedom of expression.
“The IHRA definition doesn’t leave open what’s necessary on a college campus, which is dialogue, digging into issues being presented with different people’s different opinions, different research. It instead allows the university to restrict discussion and potentially to censor,” Shahverdian said.
The university will also conduct a review of its curricular offerings and leadership in the departments focused on Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African studies to ensure “balanced” content. It will create new joint faculty appointments to both the school’s Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies and to the departments of economics, political science, and the School of International and Public Affairs in order to promote an “intellectually diverse academic environment.”
Columbia will reevaluate the number of international students it admits and ask them about their reasons for studying in the US. About 40 percent of the student body, both undergraduate and graduate-level, is foreign.
It has agreed to share information about disciplinary action that results in expulsions or suspensions of international students, as well as their arrest records or other criminal history that the university is aware of, with federal immigration authorities. That means the university could now report students to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement if they’re found to be in violation of the now more stringent campus policies on student protests, and the administration could take away their visa and deport them on that basis.
And the university will end “unlawful” DEI programs — including those that “provide benefits or advantages to individuals on the basis of protected characteristics.” In the agreement, it pledges not to consider race, color, sex, or national origin of a candidate in hiring or admissions decisions.
Some higher education experts, including Columbia’s acting president, have pointed to one provision in the deal as a win for academic freedom: that no part of the settlement “shall be construed as giving the United States authority to dictate faculty hiring, university hiring, admissions decisions or the content of academic speech.” (That same language shows up in the agreement that Brown signed this week.)
However, it’s important to note that an independent monitor, jointly selected by Columbia and the federal government, will oversee and report on compliance with the Columbia deal. That monitor, Bart M. Schwartz from the compliance consulting company Guidepost Solutions, has already been chosen. That kind of arrangement is “incredibly unusual, really almost unprecedented,” Shahverdian said.
Despite the provision some call “a win,” then, the agreement could still significantly curtail Columbia’s institutional independence and threaten constitutional protections for academic freedom. Indeed, courts have repeatedly recognized that the First Amendment protects academic freedom — that is, that the freedom of speech clause protects schools’ and individual professors’ ability to disseminate expert knowledge.
“To make high-level decisions about academic work in these departments is core academic governance that we wouldn’t want to see [from the government],” said Connor Murnane, campus advocacy chief of staff at FIRE. “We think that the federal government doesn’t have a say in how a private institution reforms itself, if even possible.”
Notably, the Trump administration’s demand that Harvard similarly appoint an independent monitor has reportedly been a sticking point in ongoing negotiations. It’s still unclear whether, as part of an eventual agreement like Columbia’s and Brown’s, Harvard will continue to pursue its lawsuit seeking to prevent the federal government from withholding federal funds. The school argues that those funds have been used “as leverage to gain control of academic decisionmaking at Harvard.”
What the agreements mean for campus free speech
The Trump administration has managed to extract these agreements without doing much to even back up its claims of civil rights violations at elite universities.
Harvard argues in its lawsuit that the administration did not follow the required procedures to temporarily withhold federal funds. There is a process associated with adjudicating claims of discrimination under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, but the White House followed no such process before retracting the funds.
In order to withhold funding permanently, the Trump administration would have had to prove, in a Title VI hearing before an administrative judge, that the alleged discrimination was committed. The universities would have had the opportunity to formally submit evidence and respond to the allegations against them.
Murnane said he’s not sure if Columbia would have successfully defended itself against allegations of antisemitism or if it would have been able to sufficiently reform its policies to come into compliance with federal civil rights law and avoid penalties. What actually constitutes antisemitism in the context of student protests over the war in Gaza was hotly debated even at the time.
And it’s worth noting that Columbia’s reaction to the protests last year was significantly harsher than its peers. It was the first elite school to call the police on its own students, escalating campus unrest, and it swiftly expelled some of the students involved in the protests, while its peers pursued lesser disciplinary actions. Columbia also suspended its campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, one of the organizations that helped organize the protests, whereas its peers did not.
And before the agreement was reached, the university had already increased funding for Jewish student programs, enhanced security for Jewish centers on campus, and appointed a new vice provost for campus climate tasked with combating antisemitism.
Murnane noted that Harvard has also taken steps to improve the campus climate while respecting free speech, including adopting a pledge that classroom discussions cannot be attributed to particular individuals under Chatham House rules, launching a program for students to debate issues with people who don’t share their opinions, and adding a question to their application asking about how students interact with people they disagree with.
Brown, too, reached an agreement with Gaza protesters in 2024 that was widely praised as a better means of encouraging campus dialogue compared to the approaches pursued by its peers.
But instead of evaluating the allegations against these universities and the steps they took as part of a formal process, the administration temporarily cut off funding unilaterally, as a tactic to bring the schools to the negotiating table and reach an alternative resolution to the legal cases against them. Given the amounts of federal funding on the line, in the hundreds of millions of dollars, universities have to some extent been backed into a corner.
But those with the endowments to weather the storm, including Columbia, whose endowment is $14.8 billion (Harvard’s, for its part, is more than $53 billion) did have a choice — and now all of higher education may pay the price.
“In the end, Columbia’s capitulation and Harvard’s behind-the-scenes negotiation send a troubling message to colleges and universities nationwide: yield to political pressure, and the pressure may momentarily subside. But behavior that gets rewarded gets repeated,” Murnane said. “This is not civil rights enforcement, it is political coercion under the color of law.”