The Journal. - Trump's College Crackdown

Episode Date: March 24, 2025

Columbia University gave in to President Trump’s demands after he revoked roughly $400 million in federal funding. WSJ’s Douglas Belkin explains how the university made its decision, and the impact that may have on campuses across the country. Further Reading:  - Universities Sprint from ‘We Will Not Cower’ to Appeasing Trump  - Columbia Yields to Trump in Battle Over Federal Funding  Further Listening:  - Pro-Palestinian Protests and Arrests at U.S. Colleges   - The 2024 College Financial Aid Mess  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Earlier this month, the Trump administration gave Columbia University an ultimatum. Get tougher on student protests, or else lose hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding. Universities are, especially a research university like Columbia, is dependent on the federal government. The federal government has the is dependent on the federal government. The federal government has the capacity to shut the tap off. So the school can't operate without the federal government. And that gives the federal government huge leverage.

That's our colleague Doug Belkin, who covers higher education. Trump's ultimatum put the storied university between a rock and a hard place, and kicked off a big debate inside the school. — If we allow the president to dictate how we work inside the campus, we give away academic freedom, and they're really anxious to protect that. So that's why this choice was so difficult to make,

because you're pitting gold versus principle. — But on Friday, after an intense internal debate, Colombia gave in and agreed to make the changes Trump wanted. How big of a deal could this showdown be for America's colleges and universities? It's like two tectonic plates slamming into each other. And it has the potential to change higher education significantly going forward.

We are absolutely in a generational shift. I think we're probably in a once in 50 year shift. This decision will resonate for a long time to come. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knudson. It's Monday, March 24th. — Columbia University got into Trump's crosshairs last year, when protests broke out over Israel's war against Hamas in Gaza. Free, free Palestine! Students camped out for weeks.

At one point, some of them occupied a school building. They were calling for a ceasefire and for the university to divest from companies doing business with Israel. And even some faculty joined in. You've got all of this faculty that very much believe that protest is critical, the ability to speak freely is critical.

They believe that these kids are doing the right thing. Some of them are teaching that this is part of, you know, how the world needs to be a better place. But the protests made other students uneasy. And a lot of Jewish students begin to feel like they're not safe, they're being screamed at, they don't want to go to class. At one point a rabbi from Hillel says,

don't come back to the campus, we can't protect you. It gets pretty ugly. The school's leadership came under intense criticism, especially from conservatives, like then candidate Donald Trump, who said Colombia didn't do enough to rein in the protests and crack down on anti-Semitism. Columbia University was a great school. It's been, you know, badly damaged, I think, reputationally. But the person that heads it up, a woman, she waited so long, she was so weak, she was so afraid.

Columbia's president, Manoush Shafik, ended up resigning. And Trump seized on the protests as evidence that college campuses are too left-leaning. So he campaigns on this notion that elite universities have been taken over by Marxist left-wing ideologues, and he is going to stop it. And the way he's going to do it is he's going to cancel the federal funds. My first week back in the Oval Office, my administration will inform every college president that if you do not end anti-Semitic propaganda, they will lose their accreditation and federal tax payers.

Support. Now that Trump's in office, he's putting his money where his mouth is. And he started withholding federal funding at colleges across the country, including Columbia. And so he says, I'm canceling $400 million in contracts and grants. And it's connected to your inability to rein in anti-Semitism on campus. So it seems like he's sort of following through

on a campaign promise to... kind of smack down colleges a little bit and change their culture. That's exactly what he's doing. He has identified an institution in this country that a lot of Republicans are not happy with. And he has leveraged that to his political benefit. On March 13th, Trump sent Columbia a list of nine specific demands. If the school complied, it might be able to get its $400 million back. The demands included Columbia disciplining the students that had occupied that building during the protests, banning students from wearing masks to conceal their identity, and

giving campus police the power to arrest and detain students. What the Trump administration would like to see is time, place, and manner restrictions so that if you want to protest something political, you keep it out of the classroom, you let kids you want to go to school, go to school and study. The Trump administration also wanted Columbia

to adopt a formal definition of anti-Semitism and take disciplinary power away from a judicial board and give it to the office of the university president. And there was another demand that made a lot of faculty angry. He demanded that the Middle Eastern Studies Department be put into receivership, which essentially really was the big sticking point with this issue and it really meant that they rein in

some of the most far left professors in that department. What does that mean, the receivership? So that's when they replace, usually if there's a department that's infighting and just dysfunctional and can't make decisions and is just at each other, they'll bring a chair in from another department

to oversee that department. And that doesn't feel good for the department because they feel like we're the experts in philosophy they'll bring a chair in from another department to oversee that department. And that doesn't feel good for the department because they feel like we're the experts in philosophy and literature, we should be making decisions about what we teach and how we teach it. But if the problems are so hot, they'll put it into receivership.

How is it even possible that the President of the United States can just unilaterally cancel grants and contracts. Like on what grounds can he even make demands like this? Well, that question came to lawyers and they said he doesn't have the grounds that he's, he's skipping due process and that, and that Columbia should fight him in court and they would win. Do you want to take on the president? Maybe you'll win, maybe you won't.

This is what he's been doing with other issues, right? I mean, this was happening with Mahmoud Khalil. Right, the Columbia student who was acting as a spokesman to some of those protests who's now facing deportation. Right. It's a very aggressive move, and it's not entirely clear what would have happened if the school did fight him in court, but they opted not to. Which departments at Columbia stood to hurt the most from these funding cuts?

It was felt most deeply in the medical school. And of course the irony there is that most of the researchers in the medical school are not involved in the protests, first of all, than our different campus. Second of all, they're just not as connected to the politics that are driving the protests on the campus. So they're a little bit removed from all this stuff, but they're the ones who were bearing the brunt of the cuts. So this decision goes to the president, it goes to the board of trustees, and the board is split. How they're gonna deal with this,

they have different leanings. Some folks, their priority is protecting Jewish students. They see antisemitism on campus, they know students who've complained to them, they're not happy they want it shut down, they don't believe that the schools move fast or far enough. On the other hand, our board members who say this is,

if we give away academic freedom, if we allow the president to dictate personnel and policy, and to some extent curriculum, then you give up a lot. What the impact of their decision might be, that's after the break. Last week, Colombia outlined its decision regarding Trump's demands in a memo to his administration. And for the most part, it gave Trump what he was asking for. The first thing is that students will no longer be allowed to use masks to conceal their face during an unauthorized protest.

So kids will be detained if they're wearing the mask. If they're asked for ID, they have to give it to them. One of the things that they actually, the Trump team asked for was discipline of the students who had taken over Hamilton Hall last spring. And after almost a year, the Senate faculty actually announced that they were disciplining them and expelling a number of students and suspending a number of other students. So they were doing that already. The school also agreed to give campus officers more power.

So everything is a backstory. In the 1968 protests at Columbia, a lot of police came in and roughed up a lot of students. And so the campus law enforcement at Columbia don't have the power to arrest kids or to detain kids. And so these protests, they have to call in NYPD to break them up. There's now going to be 36 officers with the power to arrest and detain students.

So it's going to expedite discipline on campus very quickly. So that's one obvious thing that'll be clear to kids pretty quickly if the protests start again, they'll be arrested by Columbia police. And then there's the receivership. Columbia agreed to bring in a new administrator to oversee the department that includes Middle Eastern Studies, as well as the Center for Palestine Studies. Columbia said it worked hard to address legitimate concerns from both inside and outside the university,

and that it will adopt institutional neutrality, meaning it will stop taking official positions on most political issues. Doesn't Colombia, like a lot of universities, have this massive endowment with billions of dollars in it. Why couldn't the university find a way to lean on that instead of the federal funding? So the federal funding probably accounts for around a quarter

of their operating budget. It's quite a bit. Most of the endowment is earmarked for certain programs. People give money, they endow a chair, they endow a sports program, they endow something. So only some of that can they use. And they really try not to draw down more than 4% a year because it's for perpetuity, right?

They want to have the endowment, they want to keep it growing. If they have to pull it down, they can. That's how they would answer that question. This is to maintain the fiscal health of the university for the long run. And so if you're drawing it down very quickly in the short term, you're giving that away. Yeah, even in the endowment with billions of dollars in it, you take $400 million out of it every year

and it's gonna disappear pretty quick. Yeah, and he has the potential to take a lot more than that. I mean, he could probably take closer to a billion dollars. I mean, how much money is coming out of the federal government to fund Columbia? It's more than 400 million. Hmm. So there's more leverage that he could have applied? A lot more. Yeah. The Pell grants, the student loans, he could turn that tap off.

He didn't touch all of the research contracts and grants. There's plenty more where that came from, so he could shut that off. So now that Columbia has acquiesced, are they gonna get the funding back shut that off. So now that Columbia has acquiesced, are they going to get the funding back immediately? Like how does that work if the federal government has sort of canceled this stuff? They now have the right to sit at the table and negotiate the funding. This was a precursor to the negotiations that will lead to the funding. Huh.

So this isn't, they've given away all these things, but there's still no guarantee that they'll get all this money back. There's no guarantee, and there's a lot of people who are very concerned that Trump doesn't want to give them the money back, that he wants to essentially put Columbia on the cross and make an example of them,

and that this isn't gonna go well for them. So a lot of people were pushing back on this, saying he's not negotiating in good faith. Over the weekend, Education Secretary Linda McMahon was asked about this on CNN. And I believe that they are on the right track so that we can now move forward. Does that mean that the money will be unfrozen?

That means that we are on the right track now to make sure the final negotiations to unfreeze that money will be in place. Okay, so not yet. We're working on it. Okay. How has the academic world been reacting to Colombia's decision? Yeah, so this has drawn a huge amount of attention around the country

because people are saying if Colombia fails here to stand up for academic freedom, he's going to roll right through the next school and the next school and the next school. So that is probably the most significant shift of this entire story, is that there's now been kind of a breach in academic freedom at Columbia and that can continue on to schools, more schools down the line. So it's likely that Trump will go after other schools. He's announced that this task force on anti-Semitism, which was at the point of the spear of this investigation, has announced another nine schools they're going to visit,

and then there's 60 more schools that are in various stages of investigation. You know, they include a lot of brand-name schools that everybody's heard of. Hmm. So this fight almost certainly will change more than just Columbia. This fight will almost certainly change more than just Columbia. Earlier this month, Trump paused $175 million in federal funds to the University of Pennsylvania

for allowing a transgender athlete to compete on the women's swim team in 2022. Do you think this will result in fewer protests on college campuses? That's a really interesting question. I think that the kids who are on student visas are going to be a lot less likely to protest because he's picked some of them up now. There's a chill on campuses. We were down in Florida talking to kids about this last week. There is an incentive to be quiet, to stay home, to sit in your hands, to not raise your voice. That wasn't there before. That's all for today, Monday, March 24th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal.

Additional reporting in this episode by Sarah Randazzo and Liz Esley White. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.