The Dishonesty of the Northwestern Deal

Let’s suppose a robber puts a gun to your head and demands your wallet. You don’t want to give it to him, but you also don’t have a choice. So you cough up the wallet.

I get that. But don’t tell me that everything is fine now because you’re free to go about your life. We both know that’s not true. And lying about it won’t make it any better.

That’s what Northwestern did last Friday, when it announced a deal with the Trump administration. To restore nearly $800 million in research funding that the White House had frozen, the university revoked a pact it had made with pro-Palestinian protesters in 2024. It also agreed to pay the Trump administration $75 million to settle a federal investigation into the treatment of Jewish students on campus.

Northwestern pledged to abide by speech rules it promulgated after the protests. It promised to survey students about antisemitism on campus and to conduct required antisemitism trainings. And it said its Feinberg School of Medicine would not provide hormonal or surgical interventions to transgender minors.

But here’s the kicker: Northwestern insisted that it has also safeguarded the rights of teachers and students to say and write what they wish. “Preserving Northwestern’s academic freedom and autonomy were hard red lines for the university,” its Office of the President declared, announcing the deal with the Trump administration. “This agreement protects the ability of our faculty and students to study, research, and teach freely and to continue to push the boundaries of discovery.”

Please. In striking a deal with the White House, Northwestern forsook its academic freedom and autonomy. Anyone with two eyes can see that.

Suppose you’re a professor at the medical school who studies gender dysphoria in young people. You’ve found some new evidence suggesting that hormonal or surgical interventions might lower the rate of suicide among this population. Do we think Northwestern will allow you to “push the boundaries of discovery” in your research?

Or let’s imagine you’re a student who takes issue with the university’s new speech code, which restricts protests to designated areas. The university leadership considers your critique and decides to allow peaceful demonstrations anywhere on campus. Under the pact with the Trump administration, however, the speech rules can’t be changed without White House approval. Does that sound like “autonomy” to you?

The pact also says that the university will revise its mandatory antisemitism training “as appropriate.” What happens if the campus survey about antisemitism — which is also required under the agreement — reveals that discrimination against Jews isn’t a widespread problem?

I don’t know. But I do know that the Trump administration has insisted that the nation’s colleges are deeply steeped in antisemitism, which the administration has used to justify investigations of dozens of institutions. It’s hard to imagine it agreeing to any revision of that narrative, no matter what the facts show.

Then there’s the deal that Northwestern had struck with pro-Palestinian demonstrators, who agreed to end their encampment in the spring of 2024 in exchange for the university providing transparency about its investments in Israel and elsewhere. Northwestern also agreed to create two faculty slots and five student scholarships for Palestinians facing hardship because of the war in Gaza. And it pledged to provide more support to Middle Eastern, North African, and Muslim students, including establishing temporary spaces for their respective cultural associations.

Jewish leaders condemned the arrangement, which they said rewarded groups that had created a hostile environment on campus. But if that was the reason to revoke the deal with the protesters, the university would have done so a long time ago. It made this call to protect its bottom line.

“If our frozen federal research funding had continued, it threatens to gut our labs, drive away faculty and set back entire fields of discovery,” Henry Bienen, Northwestern’s interim president, said in a video message on Friday. The alternative to settling with the Trump administration was to sue it. But the “cost of a legal fight was too high and the risks too grave.”

Yet there’s a cost to caving to the White House, too: You have to relinquish your full autonomy and freedom. Northwestern officials proudly noted that their pact with the White House explicitly declares that the agreement doesn’t allow the government to dictate “the content of academic speech and research” at the university. But the pact itself restricts speech and research at the university. Saying otherwise won’t change that.

Reasonable people can disagree about transgender medicine, antisemitism on campus, and everything else in the agreement. But it’s going to be harder for them to do that at Northwestern now. To escape the Trump administration’s crosshairs, the university sacrificed its freedom to deliberate and determine these matters on its own. I just wish it was honest enough to say so.