Columbia University agreed to a list of requests by the Trump administration to begin negotiations to recover $400 million in federal funds that were stripped from the university earlier this month.
The Trump administration cancelled the university’s federal grants on March 7, denounced New York schools for “inaction in the face of permanent harassment of Jewish students.” Abrupt cancellation of funds would end dozens, if not hundreds, of the university’s state-of-the-art medical and scientific research projects.
However, last week, the administration sent a letter to the university laying out nine requests that Colombia need to accept to restore funds and save research.
In a document provided by the university to the federal government and published online Friday, the Trump administration appears to have gotten much of what it wanted.
The university has agreed to ban students from wearing masks in protests and employ 36 new campus security officers who have the ability to arrest students, unlike previous security guards, and who have the ability to appoint new senior secondary professionals to oversee research in the Middle East, South Asia and Africa.
Colombia also promised “a greater institutional neutrality” and said it was “cooperating with the faculty committee to establish policies across the institutions implementing this stance.” The university added that it will consider admission procedures to “ensure an equitable admission process,” as requested by the Trump administration.
Columbia’s interim president, Katrina Armstrong, said Friday that the school responded to the Trump administration to “ensure uninterrupted academic activity.”
“As a community, we have so much to be proud of, and it was a privilege to share our progress and plans,” she said in a statement. “In the spirit of the great American university, we expect Colombians to engage in solid discussions and debates about our progress and welcome it as an opportunity to shape the future of Colombia.”
The concessions by one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious universities represent an unprecedented change in how the federal government will utilize it to the problems of higher education in the United States.
On Thursday, Columbia University Apartheid, a student-led group that organizes and leads school protests, denounced the concept that Columbia would strike a contract with the Trump administration.
“Columbia has refusing to leave the Palestinian genocide and even double the number of people, responding incredibly clearly to the Trump administration’s ransom memo for the past 17 months,” the group wrote on Instagram. “Colombia is not going to defend students or faculty from government repression of Palestinian activities, so instead they will actively participate with the fascist state and sell out their communities.”
On Thursday, 41 of the approximately 100 members of the university’s history department warned the university to allow the administration to interfere in its policies. They compared the regime’s actions to the attempts of the “authoritarian regime” to seek control over independent academic institutions.
“Such interventions jeopardize the ability to think honestly about the past, present and future, and threaten the ability to do so with students. “If this control was realized here or elsewhere, it would make real historical scholarships, education and intellectual community impossible.”
The Trump administration’s demands were the latest hit for Ivy League Schools, considered the epicenter of student-led pro-Palestinian demonstrations, and ultimately outpaced life on university campuses around the country.
The protest was spurred by the Israeli government’s fierce response to the Hamastero attack on October 7th. Israeli forces killed nearly 50,000 people living in Gaza and exiled millions. Student activists staged demonstrations to try and get the university to be sold from companies associated with the Israeli government.
For weeks last spring, Colombian students made daily protests, establishing dozens of tent camps on the university’s lawns, and at one point occupying the university’s buildings. Dozens of students have been arrested at demonstrations that regularly featured controversial political slogans, including “from river to sea.”
Some Jewish students joined the protesters on university campuses, while others said they felt the demonstration was hatred. Several Jewish students also reported being assaulted at other universities.
Allie Wong, PhD A student arrested while protesting on campus last April said that while the protests are divisive, he believes that the challenges facing Colombia will unite students with a common cause.
“When it comes to student responses, I think you actually have a lot of students involved in this because it’s no longer the sale, Israel, or Palestine you know. “And I’m going to insist on campus that there’s no group on which these issues don’t reach.”
The threat to federal funding followed the launch of the Department of Justice in February, a task force to “harvested” what is called “anti-Semitistic harassment on school and university campuses.”
During negotiations over the grant, federal immigration officials arrested at least two Colombian students who participated in a student-led protest, including 30-year-old Mahmoud Khalil. Indian doctoral student Ranjani Srinivasan also fled to Canada after his student visa was revoked.
Mohammad Hemida, who chairs Columbia’s Student Management Committee, said he hopes immigration officers will fire students by allowing the Trump administration to declare victory.
“The Colombian bow looks bad,” he said. “But what I am mostly concerned about is that students are being targeted and I feel they used it as a tactic to put pressure on the institution.”
The arrest urged new protests on campus and raised concerns nationwide about federal violations over free speech.
The university’s Journalism School described anxiety as “we witnessed and experienced incredible cold.”
“We don’t need to agree with the political views of certain individuals to understand that these threats have been cut to the heart of living in a pluralistic democracy,” the Journalism School said in a statement last week. “The use of deportation to suppress foreign critics will be carried out in parallel with an aggressive campaign to use laws of honor and loss in novels to silence or threaten independent reporting.”
Columbia students are on spring break and will return to campus next week.
