Columbia University Settlement Prefigures Future Threats to American Higher Education

Columbia University security and public safety officers escorting an arrested student protestor after the Butler University student occupation and teach in, May 7, 2025. Photo credit: Bloomberg

On July 23, 2025, Columbia University (CU) announced that they reached an agreement with the Trump administration. While the deal will solve some of Columbia’s problems, such as restoring federal research and science funds to the institution, it also has the potential to create even bigger problems. The settlement, likely to become a template for the dealings between universities and the federal government, opens up unprecedented levels of governmental oversight and infringement on the autonomy of higher education institutions, a key aspect of academic freedom.

As part of the settlement announced on July 23, 2025, the government has agreed to resume the halted flow of federal funds to CU and close any ongoing investigations against it. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s investigations will also be concluded as part of the deal.

In return, and without admitting any wrongdoing on its part, CU has agreed to take certain steps in accordance with the demands of the federal government. First of these will be a payment of $221 million from Columbia to settle ongoing investigations.

However, the even more significant developments are the promises CU has made about incoming changes to its internal workings. The changes include taking additional steps to curtail campus “antisemitism”, promises to make changes to certain aspects of university structure and closing the door on potential other changes, changes to campus protest policy, agreement to provide the government international student disciplinary records, changes to admissions processes, setting up a surveillance system to “monitor” compliance with the settlement, and more.

Despite the significance and scale of changes announced, the university administration has said that the deal will not allow the government to “dictate what we teach, who teaches, or which students we admit”. However, the settlement does include making changes to all of these processes and demonstrates a readiness to eagerly cooperate with the federal government’s demands.

While this deal is a result of the demands of the Trump administration it is best understood in the context of the willingness of CU’s  administration to accept the government’s invasive demands,  it also signals an acceptance  of government’s vision for higher education. This willingness was apparent in two previous sets of changes, which were also referred to in the July 23 settlement. These were “Advancing Our Work to Combat Discrimination, Harassment, and Antisemitism at Columbia”, announced on March 21, 2025, and “Our Additional Commitments to Combatting Antisemitism” announced on July 15, 2025. In the former set of changes, the university severely restricted campus protest activity, introduced a mask ban, centralized disciplinary proceedings in the office of the president, and created a new “campus security” force specially trained to respond to protests and enforce compliance with campus protest policy. In the latter, it adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Association’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism as the official definition to be used by the offices of the university, such as Office of Institutional Equity, to determine and judge cases of discrimination.

The deal between CU and the government, is in many ways an official promise by CU to the federal government that they will keep these changes in place and add new ones to take the goals of these changes even further. An August 4, 2025 statement by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University outlined the significance of these changes for university life as well as academic freedom. As part of the deal, CU is obligated to make appointments to specific positions and review Middle East Studies course curricula. As for campus protests, the deal requires that CU ban all protests in “academic buildings and ‘places where academic activities take place’” as they would constitute “direct impediment[s] to maintaining Columbia’s core academic mission”. This understanding moves protests from being a core part of academia to being a fundamental threat to “academic freedom” and is a frequent move made by authoritarian regimes.

Finally, CU has to set up a framework for a “Resolution Monitor” to monitor compliance with the agreement. This monitor will have access to all non-privileged documents they deem related to their work. While the university announced that an impartial arbitrating firm will take on the monitoring, the task has since been given to the compliance firm Guidepost Solutions, which sponsored an event in June 2025 in support of Israel. The company has since removed “Israel” from the description of the event.

In reflecting on the settlement as a whole, the Knight Institute said that “The settlement narrows Columbia’s autonomy with respect to admissions, the hiring and promotion of faculty, and curriculum—all aspects of what the Supreme Court has called the “essential freedoms” of the university.”

While not a decisive end to the struggles between the government and Columbia, the university has said that the agreement places future potential disputes into a framework of arbitration and judicial processes. Others are concerned that this will invite further infringements into the autonomy of CU as well as other higher education institutions. Some CU professors, speaking to The Chronicle of Higher Education voiced this specific concern. For example, the President of the American Association of University Professors Columbia Chapter, Michael Thaddeus expressed skepticism regarding acting Columbia President Claire Shipman’s claim that this deal will not allow for government infringement by saying that “the creation of a monitor, charged with scrutinizing our admissions data and our Middle Eastern studies department, opens the door to just such interference.”

Another recent vocal critic of the deal is Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said Professor Emeritus of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University, who announced in an open letter published by The Guardian on August 1 that he will not be teaching his course on modern Middle East history that was scheduled for the Fall 2025 semester. Khalidi stated that “specifically, it is impossible to teach this course (and much else) in light of Columbia’s adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism” under which “any criticism of Israel, or indeed description of Israeli policies, becomes a criticism of Jews.” Khalidi also noted that classroom materials are not outside of the purview of the “monitoring” process and Columbia’s decision to allow this constitutes an “antithesis of academic freedom”, transforming CU into an “anti-university, a gated security zone with electronic entry controls, a place of fear and loathing, where faculty and students are told from on high what they can teach and say, under penalty of severe sanctions.”

Indeed, the consequences of the deal for CU members were made visible even before the deal was publicly announced. On July 22, 2025, the University Judiciary Board (UJB) announced its decision on disciplinary proceedings in regards to two separate incidents. The first one was the pro-Palestine student encampments in Spring 2024 that spearheaded the global university encampment movement. The second was the May 2025 Butler Library occupation and teach-in which resulted in around 80 students being arrested by the NYPD upon the request of the school administration. The Judiciary Board handed out punishments including “probation, suspensions (ranging from one year to three years), degree revocations, and expulsions”. According to The New York Times, approximately 60 of the students were suspended for two years, less than 10 were given probation and a few students were expelled. At least one person’s degree was revoked. However, according to Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a pro-Palestine student group active in campus protests, the suspensions are conditional upon the suspended students submitting formal apologies to the university. Refusing to do so will automatically turn suspensions into expulsions, dramatically increasing the severity of the university’s response.

While the university described its own ruling as “equitable” in their public statements and claimed that students “had an opportunity to be heard and make their case”, the reality is quite different from a just and open procedure. Under the new UJB structure that incorporated it into the Office of the President, there are no checks or balances to the president’s decisions when it comes to disciplinary matters. In other words, there is no other separate university body to which students can appeal the decisions of the UJB. Given that the office of the president is currently occupied by Claire Shipman, former co-chair and current member of the CU Board of Trustees, this disciplinary process is an act of executive decision by the Board that has centralized many governance functions to itself.

Because Columbia is a major Ivy League institution, it is not unreasonable to expect the proliferation of similar deals in the near future. In fact, recently another Ivy League school, Brown University, also announced an agreement with the federal government. While Brown’s settlement is much less comprehensive than Columbia’s, it still requires Brown to pay $50 million for workforce development in Rhode Island in return for resuming the flow of federal funds. Additionally, as part of the settlement, Brown University made further commitments to combat “antisemitism” such as providing Brown-RISD Hillel with additional security, to not consider race in admissions, and agreed to make changes to student residences and sports according to the Trump administration’s definitions of “male” and “female”. These definitions are outlined in the executive order, “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government”. In this document, a “female” is defined as “a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell” and a “male” is one that produces the small one.

Endangered Scholars Worldwide (ESW) is deeply concerned with the increased extension of undue government control over the internal workings of universities in the United States. We condemn the Trump administration’s efforts to pressure higher education institutions, and university administrations’ readiness to allow the violation of the principle of university autonomy, which is a central pillar of academic freedom. We call on American higher education institutions and the federal government to stop their actions eroding academic freedom and we invite the global community dedicated to join our call.