Columbia University announced on Friday its plans to comply with the Trump administration’s demands to overhaul student disciplinary procedures, increase on-campus policing powers, and place one of its departments under the review of a senior vice provost.
Two weeks ago, the Trump administration announced it was planning to pull $400 million in federal-funded grants “due to the school’s continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.” Over the past year and a half, Columbia’s campus has been embroiled in pro-Palestinian protests as students have called on the university to divest from Israel.
The demands outlined in the March 13 letter from the Trump administration were described as “a precondition for formal negotiations regarding Columbia University’s continued financial relationship with the United States government.” Billions more are at stake in the form of grants and contracts from various agencies.
The Trump administration has yet to announce whether Columbia will receive its $400 million in federal funding back now that it has complied.
In a Friday statement to the campus community, Katrina Armstrong, the interim president, wrote Columbia’s response to the federal government’s request followed “substantive work” the university had already committed to over the past year to ensure students and faculty feel safe on campus, and academic activities remain uninterrupted.
“We have much to be proud of as a community, and it has been a privilege to share our progress and plans,” Armstrong wrote. “In the spirit of great American universities, we expect Columbians to engage in robust debate and discussion about our way forward, and we welcome it as an opportunity to shape the future of Columbia.”
Under Pressure
Columbia’s decision followed a brief but intense period of pressure exerted by the new administration. Just a few days before its announcement that it was pulling $400 million in federal funding, the Trump administration said a task force was conducting a funding review.
But tensions between the university and the federal government go further back, beginning with the pro-Palestinian protests that erupted in October 2023, which led to the widely criticized testimony to Congress by Minouche (Nemat) Shafik, the then-president. Shafik’s subsequent crackdown on the protesters inflamed the campus while failing to earn the support of critics who said she’d been too soft. (Shafik later resigned as president.)
Columbia will make some administrative changes to acquiesce to the Trump administration’s demands regarding student disciplinary processes, and rules for protest. Columbia’s University Judicial Board — which oversees adjudications and sanctions related to violations of the Rules of University Conduct — will not be abolished per the Trump administration’s demand. The UJB will be centralized by the Office of the Provost, which reports to the Office of the President.
This academic year, the university created the Office of Institutional Equity (OIE) to oversee “policy and processes for discipline of all student groups that stems from discriminatory conduct.” In response to the Trump administration’s demand to “hold all student groups accountable,” the announcement reads, new and existing OIE policy will “permit sanctions from defunding, suspension, to derecognition” of student groups.
The Trump administration’s disciplinary demands also included the implementation of time, place, and manner restrictions related to on-campus demonstrations. While the university first implemented these restrictions in February 2024, it announced plans to clarify protest rules.
In addition, in its Friday announcement, Columbia stated it would adopt the definition of antisemitism that was recommended by its task force on that subject.
“Antisemitism is prejudice, discrimination, hate, or violence directed at Jews, including Jewish Israelis,” the definition states. “Antisemitism can manifest in a range of ways, including as ethnic slurs, epithets, and caricatures; stereotypes; antisemitic tropes and symbols; Holocaust denial; targeting Jews or Israelis for violence or celebrating violence against them; exclusion or discrimination based on Jewish identity or ancestry or real or perceived ties to Israel; and certain double standards applied to Israel.”
Columbia will also implement a mask ban. Such coverings are not allowed for the purpose of concealing a person’s identity so that they can violate the law, the announcement states: “We have had important instances in the recent past where individuals unaffiliated with the University have caused significant disruptions on our campus.” Face masks or coverings are allowed for religious or medical reasons, however.
In response to the Trump administration’s demand that Columbia ensure its security forces have “full law enforcement authority, including arrest and removal of agitators,” the university announced it had hired 36 “special officers” with arrest powers.
To quell unrest, Columbia and Barnard College, the university’s undergraduate sister college, had previously authorized the New York Police Department to come to campus, which resulted in the arrests of students. The university currently employs over 230 full-time security officers, 75 uniformed supervisors, and contract security guards who are “not part of a sworn police agency with its own inherent power of arrest,” according to its 2024 annual security and fire safety report.
Columbia did not explicitly state that it would agree to the Trump administration’s demand to place its Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African studies department under academic receivership — a seldom-used process that typically places a department under the supervision of a scholar from another department. However, the university did announce plans to place all regional studies under review of a senior vice provost.
The department includes the Center for Palestine Studies; the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies; the Middle East Institute; the Tel Aviv and Amman global centers; the School of International and Public Affairs’ Middle East policy major; and other programs focused on the Middle East.
The senior vice provost will be tasked with reviewing educational programming, leadership and curricula, the creation of new programs, and the hiring of nontenured faculty, and to make recommendations to the president and provost about “necessary changes.” The senior vice provost will be appointed this upcoming week, Columbia said.
The Trump administration also demanded the university deliver a plan to reform its undergraduate- and graduate-admissions policies and international recruiting to conform with federal and state law. Columbia said that its admission processes already comply with existing law, and it will also establish a new advisory group to oversee trends in enrollment — including a downturn in Jewish and Black students.
‘It Was Extortion’
Columbia’s compliance raised worries about how other universities will respond to the Trump administration’s threats to federal funding. Dozens of colleges, including the University of Pennsylvania, are also facing federal inquiries. On Wednesday, the Trump administration announced it would freeze $175 million in federal funding for Penn amid an ongoing investigation into campus policies governing transgender athletes’ participation in sports. (According to a university spokesperson, as of Friday, Penn had not received any official notification.)
But critics were troubled by Columbia’s announcement, even as some observers thought the university had a strong legal argument. “It was extortion by the federal government,” said Todd Wolfson, president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). “And unfortunately Columbia University caved to that extortion, which sets a bad precedent.”
Dani Friedrich, an associate professor of curriculum at Columbia’s Teachers College, said that while the university has had “struggles ... with different kinds of discrimination and different acts against Jewish students, against Muslim students, against protesters,” agreeing to the Trump administration’s demands “is not the way to go.”
“The university should know, and it’s become very obvious, that acceding to the Trump administration’s demands is not going to restore the funding,” Friedrich added.
Several scholars were particularly dismayed by Columbia’s willingness to place one of its departments under an administrator’s control.
Decisions about curriculum and faculty appointments are fundamentally academic decisions, made for academic reasons by faculty members, said Michael Thaddeus, a professor of mathematics and vice president of the Columbia AAUP chapter, who emphasized that he wasn’t speaking on behalf of the chapter. “If administrators are making those decisions, there’s not just a danger that they’ll be politicized,” said Thaddeus. “There’s a near certainty that they’ll be politicized.”
And the effects of Columbia’s decision, some worried, will be lasting. “This is going to be very, very difficult to understand how we really move forward as a world-renowned institution of higher education,” said Kay James, an associate professor of neuroscience and education at Teachers College. “It feels like we just gave our values away.”
Megan Zahneis, a senior reporter, contributed to this story.
