When Columbia University announced its unprecedented $221-million settlement with the Trump administration, its acting president, Claire Shipman, made clear what was at stake.
Since the Trump administration’s cancellation of $400 million in federal funding in March, research at the elite private university has been “at a fairly catastrophic point,” Shipman told the student newspaper Wednesday night.
Columbia and the Trump Administration
Under the finalized deal — higher education’s first over the Trump administration’s claims of antisemitism on college campuses — the “vast majority” of Columbia’s research funding will be reinstated. In exchange, Columbia will pay $221 million to settle pending Title VI and Title VII investigations. It also agreed to sprawling changes targeting admissions practices and financial dependency on international-student enrollment.
Was it worth it? Columbia researchers who spoke to The Chronicle expressed a mixture of relief and frustration over the deal. While many were grateful their work could continue, some worried about the settlement’s implications for the rest of the university and higher education as a whole.
Others questioned whether Columbia truly benefits from the deal when it’s still paying over half of what it stands to get back.
No matter how the costs are measured, faculty acknowledged that Columbia didn’t have much of a choice. “We’re more or less negotiating the terms of our own mugging,” said Karl Jacoby, a professor of American history.
Researchers Left in Limbo
For Gerard Karsenty, chair of the genetics department, the feeling is one of “joy and relief.”
“If this is the price to pay for me to be able to work and my students not to go and sell shoes at Walmart, I think I can live with that,” Karsenty said.
With so much at stake, Donna Farber, a professor of microbiology and immunology who leads a lab and a team of researchers largely supported by NIH funding, felt relieved when she first saw the deal, but she soon “felt kind of empty and sad.”
We’re more or less negotiating the terms of our own mugging.
“We’re not out of the woods, because this whole thing that happened wasn’t fair,” Farber said. “This whole negotiation at gunpoint, whatever you’re going to call it, is just so unfair. Where did this fine come from? Who decided that? It was just some random number somebody came up with, and all of a sudden we have to pay it?”
Other provisions, such as decreasing financial dependence on international-student enrollment, could trickle down into research programs. International students dominate STEM research departments, contributing to vital laboratory operations and serving as teaching assistants for undergraduate courses.
But while the federal government will restore canceled grants from the Department of Health and Human Services, including $250 million in grants from the National Institutes of Health, it will not restore terminated grants from the Department of Education or “any other terminated contracts.”
That means, despite the deal, some professors won’t get their funding back.
Ezekiel Dixon-Román, director of the Edmund W. Gordon Institute for Urban and Minority Education at the Teachers College, said three grants were canceled in his department that were handled by the Education Department and the National Science Foundation. “I’m not expecting them back,” he said.
Dixon-Román believes the focus on unfreezing grants from the NIH signals to researchers that studies dealing with other issues, such as social- and public-policy regulations, are “wasteful spending.”
One of the grants canceled in his department focused on training master’s students in school psychology to work in underserved school districts and provide “culturally informed trauma care.” The grants were cut after a flurry of anti-DEI measures, including executive orders signed by Trump, he said.
At the same time, some studies can’t just be booted back up, said Jean E. Howard, an at-large member of the Columbia chapter of the American Association of University Professors.
“It’s a kind of false promise,” said Howard, who is also a professor emerita in the humanities. “The expert researchers who worked on them have been laid off many times. There’s a continuity of research that, once it’s interrupted, you just can’t pick it up again.” In May, Columbia announced that almost 180 people would be laid off due to the cuts to federal research grants.
Dixon-Román’s biggest worry about the agreement lies in an assumption that the federal government will act in good faith. “You’re playing with an administration that has shown bad faith in relation to the rule of law, let alone even other agreements.”
‘An American Tragedy’
Some faculty say the damage to Columbia’s reputation and the precedent set by the settlement outweigh the benefits of rescuing research dollars — and its implications will be felt far outside of campus labs and faculty offices.
Farber worries that Columbia’s settlement will empower the federal government to continue threatening research funds as a bargaining chip in its own higher-education agenda. Other universities that are on NIH-funding freezes, like Cornell and Northwestern, might take a similar path, she said.
Now Farber and her colleagues are looking to secure other sources of research funding outside of the NIH, and continuing to collaborate and publish their research.
“Our best protection is just to be scientists,” Farber said. “I’m still a scientist even if I’ve lost a few grants.”
Professors are considering leaving Columbia because of the settlement, said Jacoby and Dixon-Román. “It’s very demoralizing to teach in a university that’s, from my perspective, acceding to authoritarian demands,” Jacoby said.
Heading into the fall under these new concessions, Aharon Dardik, a rising senior and co-founder of CU Jews for Ceasefire, said he does not feel like he’s entering into a healthy learning environment.
“I know that I’m going to be scared for my classmates who are not Jewish, who are not Israeli, who are at much greater risk of punitive measures should they protest, should they open their mouth and speak,” said Dardik, who’s Jewish American and Israeli and a pro-Palestinian organizer.
To Elisha Baker, a vocal pro-Israel student advocate, the settlement is “a very important moment for the Jewish community.”
“This deal is not the end of the story,” Baker wrote in a statement. “It is an important start. Reforming Columbia for the better is a long-term endeavor that could never be covered in one deal, and need not be overly intertwined with the government.”
Anything is reparable, including the university’s reputation, said Howard, the Columbia AAUP member. But fixing will take “an awful lot of time.”
“What is happening is an American tragedy,” Howard said.
