What’s New
Brown University reached a deal with the Trump administration on Wednesday that does not involve paying the government hundreds of millions of dollars, as Columbia University agreed to do last week.
Brown’s leaders will allocate $50 million toward state work-force development organizations over the next 10 years in exchange for the restoration of all terminated grants from the Department of Health and Human Services and resolving open Title VI investigations. The Trump administration froze $510 million in early April, a White House official confirmed to the Brown Daily Herald, the student newspaper.
At that time, the university was not formally notified of the reason for the funding freeze, according to a community message from the university’s president, Christina H. Paxson. Ultimately, the government largely cited allegations similar to those made at Columbia: a failure to combat antisemitism.
“The university’s foremost priority throughout discussions with the government was remaining true to our academic mission, our core values and who we are as a community at Brown,” Paxson wrote in the message. The agreement includes the release of more than $50 million in unpaid grant disbursements that have accumulated since Brown’s funding was frozen, Paxson said.
Brown is the third Ivy League university to settle with the federal government to get back critical research dollars, joining Columbia — which agreed to pay $220 million — and the University of Pennsylvania. Columbia and Penn were found by the Trump administration to have violated civil-rights laws; Brown was not. In their respective agreements, neither Columbia nor Brown admitted to wrongdoing.
The Details
The nine-page agreement outlines many similar stipulations to the Columbia document. Brown will, among other things:
- Turn over to the government admissions data on applicants’ race, color, standardized-test scores, and GPAs, and stop using any “proxy for racial admission” in its processes.
- Share a “timely report” outlining the university’s compliance with civil-rights laws “to ensure its programs do not promote unlawful DEI goals.”
- Provide all-female and single-sex housing options and bathrooms for residential and athletics facilities, with “female” and “male” defined in accordance to a previous executive order dictating that gender is the same as biological sex.
- Not perform gender-reassignment surgery or administer puberty blockers or hormones to minors. The university will refer students who seek such care to area specialists.
- Provide all discrimination complaints and investigative files to the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, spelling out actions taken to resolve reports of harassment.
- Carry out a campus-climate survey in 2025, led by an external party jointly chosen by Brown and the federal government. The survey will specifically touch on “the climate for students with shared Jewish ancestry” and “social-media harassment.”
- Review student course evaluations “to identify any reports of antisemitism.”
Brown also made broad commitments related to antisemitism, including that the university will provide “research and education about Israel.”
But the deal does not require Brown to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, which many academics have panned as conflating some criticism of Israel with antisemitism.
Brown also did not agree to pay for an independent monitor to review the university’s compliance with the agreement, as Columbia did. (The federal government emphasized that it could conduct such reviews at Brown and pursue other enforcement actions.)
The agreement does not touch on international students — a key part of the Columbia deal and the ongoing battle between the federal government and Harvard University, which is rumored to be nearing a deal that could see the university paying $500 million. About 14 percent of Brown’s students are international; that share is 40 percent at Columbia and 28 percent at Harvard, according to data from The New York Times.
The Backdrop
Brown’s deal binds another university to the Trump administration’s definition of gender as inextricable from biological sex, and its interpretation of civil-rights laws — including that Title IX, the gender-equity statute, requires barring transgender female athletes from women’s teams.
The agreement also legally binds the university to a more expansive ban on race-conscious admissions practices than what was codified in the 2023 Supreme Court ruling. While the court decision stated that colleges could still consider an applicant’s race if it was discussed within the context of their personal experiences, Brown can no longer do so.
The Trump administration’s crusade against diversity, equity, and inclusion practices is present, too: Brown cannot provide “benefits or advantages” based on race or identity in programs, departments, or any other academic units.
“The Trump administration is successfully reversing the decades-long woke-capture of our nation’s higher education institutions,” said Linda McMahon, secretary of education, in a news release. She pointed specifically to the agreement’s measures on antisemitism, admissions practices, and Title IX.
What to Watch For
After Columbia settled with the Trump administration, higher-education experts and faculty critics warned that it could set a precedent for other institutions to take a similar path.
Other universities are soon expected to announce agreements for the stated sake of restoring millions of lost research funding. Cornell University is reportedly nearing a deal, while Northwestern University recently announced it is slashing 425 positions as it continues to navigate a $790-million funding freeze.
Harvard — which has waged a public battle in the courts as the first university to present a legal challenge to the Trump administration over the funding cuts — might reach its own settlement that would require paying as much as $500 million to the government, according to The New York Times. Penn was the first to settle by agreeing to change its policies related to transgender athletes, but no financial commitments were made.
And now, Duke University has been caught in the crosshairs. Some $108 million of its medical-research funding was frozen on Tuesday over two separate complaints on discriminatory practices.
Brendan Cantwell, a professor of education at Michigan State University, said the Brown agreement demonstrates how the Trump administration appears to be carrying out its higher-education agenda by way of these deals and “not by establishing what the law is, creating a framework and an evidentiary standard.”
“Rather than through negotiated rule-making, rather than through legislation, rather than even through an executive order and systematic enforcement,” Cantwell said. “It’s like the government wants everything, but it doesn’t exactly know what it wants or how it wants it, and so the best way to do this is through these individual deals.”
