The Opinions - Is There a Smart Way to Cede Power to Donald Trump?

Episode Date: August 5, 2025

Three Opinion writers debate whether universities should make a deal with the administration.In this episode of The Opinions, David Leonhardt, an editorial director in Opinion, debates his colleagues Binyamin Appelbaum and Emily Bazelon on the agreements Ivy League universities have reached with the Trump administration, and what those deals mean for the future of higher education and other organizations fighting with the White House.Thoughts? Questions? Email us at [e-mail] Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times Opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it. I'm David Leonhard, an editorial director in New York Times Opinion. This week, I'm here with two of my colleagues, Emily Bazelon and Biniamen Applebaum. Thanks for being here. Thanks for having us. Great to be here. Emily Binia and I have been in an ongoing conversation and a bit of a friendly debate about the deals that colleges are making with the Trump.

Trump administration. As we're taping this on July 31st, Columbia Brown and Penn have all agreed to deals, and Harvard and some other colleges may soon. I find this issue to be more complicated than some of the other big questions about how Americans should respond to the Trump administration. It's not clear to me that the colleges have done something wrong by agreeing to these settlements. Today, we're going to dig into these tough questions. Emily, I want to start with you because you've been following this story for a while. You wrote a piece for the New York Times Magazine at the protests at Columbia. So can you step back and give us a sense of what led to the agreements that these schools have made with the White House? Yeah, sure. So, you know, lots of listeners will remember that after October 7th and the beginning of the war in Gaza, protests against Israel and in favor of Palestinian rights broke out at lots of campuses across the country and really became a galvanizing.

cause for a lot of progressive college students. And they took different forms of different schools. So a few schools really ended up, like, in the spotlight, in the news, for a lot of conflict and agitation. And one of those schools was Colombia. Protests took a dramatic turn at Columbia University overnight when some pro-Palestinian students occupied a building on campus. Protesters unfurled a banner and dedicated the building to Hind Rajab, a six-year-old who died in

Israel's war against Hamas. Columbia was an early target for this kind of wave we've seen of the administration, freezing hundreds of millions of dollars of research funds at certain universities to say to them, in the name of stopping anti-Semitism, we are going to prevent you from doing all this medical and scientific research. There's a list of schools, Harvard and Brown, which also Brown and Columbia reached settlements with the Trump administration and Harvard is in conversation. And so, you know, there was much less, I think, controversy at Brown.

Things were kind of quieter. And Harvard was kind of somewhere in the middle. And so, you know, essentially what had been a kind of big tempest on campus as students tried to influence campus university policy and U.S. government policy toward Israel and Palestine then became a set of questions about whether this is anti-Semitic. And then, I would argue, has become a kind of excuse. for the Trump administration to go after some of elite higher ed, which it doesn't like anyway. And I think that broader point is really important that clearly the sort of forcing mechanism here has been the war in Gaza and the protests and response to it.

But it feeds into this general sense, which has some basis in truth, which is that universities are very progressive places. And conservatives really don't like a lot of what happens at elite universities. And so this isn't just about the war. It is about the war and it's also about other things and all these debates we've had as a society. I assume, Emily, you think that's a fair characterization. Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's telling that while anti-Muslim sentiment was part of the protests and a lot of Muslim students also have reported feeling less sense of belonging at their schools and a sense of

Islamophobia, the Trump administration hasn't focused on any of that. The kind of excuse here, and I would argue the weaponization, has all been about anti-Semitism. Okay, so Binya, give us a sense for what these deals are. What have they agreed to? So the deals differ by institution, but Columbia's deal basically has three parts. The first is a payment to the federal government of $200 million over the next three years. The second part is a set of commitments to alter existing policies in various ways. and the third is a set of commitments around monitoring. Those pieces are different at Brown. There's a $50 million payment that's going toward workforce development rather than the Treasury Department.

And in Penn's case, the deal is narrower still. It's just focused on issues around trans participation and athletics. What all of the deals share is that the administration has succeeded in extracting concessions from the universities in exchange for a promise to restore existing research funding and to allow them to apply them to apply for new research funding going forward. And it's interesting to me when you go through that list, a lot of that has nothing to do with the war in Gaza. Or anti-Semitism.

Absolutely. And, you know, I guess if I were telling the story, I'd actually start before the war in Gaza because, I mean, it seems to me that, you know, Donald Trump and his allies have had universities, particularly elite universities, in their crosshairs for a long time. They think these schools are admitting the wrong people, educating them in the wrong way, using their influence in society in ways that are detrimental to the goals of the Trump administration or its view of what America should be. They want to remake these institutions. And I think the protests against the war in Gaza presented themselves as a convenient excuse and an opportunity to take action against a set of institutions that they would have found another way to attack if it was not this one. So let's start with what I think is our area of agreement, which is the way the Trump administration is going about this is wholly inappropriate.

That if the Trump administration wanted to start civil rights investigations of these schools for not taking anti-Semitism seriously enough or for violating the Supreme Court's ruling on affirmative action, there are established processes for doing that. And the administration could do that. That's okay. The problem here is they've made a bunch of accusations against these schools. They've completely ignored or bypassed the established processes for doing it. And they've essentially held up the schools and said, if you don't do all these things and give us this money and agree to this, we are going to make your lives miserable. And so that the way the Trump administration is doing it is just really wrong. I think we all agree about it.

But my guess is, Emily, you also have some kind of more specific thoughts. from your background in covering the law about why it's so worrisome. I mean, I do agree. And I also think it's just really important to back up a little bit and think about all of the guns that the government is training on some of these schools, especially Harvard. So it's $2.2 billion of frozen research funds. It's also threatening the school's tax exempt status and potentially accreditation and a fraud investigation. and the visas of international students. So the problem for the schools is that the government has so much leverage over them

that it's really hard to imagine how they can continue in their current forms as these major research institutions without in some ways making an agreement with the government. And whenever you see a government have this kind of overweening power and be able to kind of force this sort of settlements we're seeing, then you kind of worry about the underlying values here and the power imbalance. And it's really this question of disproportionate punishment that I think is important and worth dwelling on. And what we see here are these huge cuts to funding across the board. And then also, as I was saying, these other kinds of legal threats the schools are under.

And that is an impossible posture for the schools. And so, I mean, I think that then, leads us to what to me are the hard questions. I think the law firms that folded to Donald Trump. And just to back up for a second, Donald Trump threatened law firms with executive orders that had some similarities to the threats he made toward universities. He said, I won't let your lawyers work with federal investigators, which is a really big problem for a law firm. And a bunch of firms, like Paul Weiss, folded and made deals with Trump. And a few other firms confronted Trump. They sued him. They said these executive orders are illegal, and they won very quickly.

And I think those other firms that confronted Trump were doing the right thing, and the firms that folded like Paul Weiss were doing the wrong thing. And a bunch of people have said, well, Colombia is essentially like Paul Weiss. And I think this is a little bit different because I think it was much clearer that Trump was breaking the law with the law firms than it is clear that he's breaking the law with universities. So can you explain how you think about this question of whether the Trump threats are legal or not? I'd actually start not with the question of whether they're legal, but with another important distinction between this situation and the situation of the law firms, which is that a firm like Paul Weiss is pretty clearly an independent private business that happens to interact with the federal government. I don't think it is helpful to think of Columbia University or Brown or Penn or Harvard as independent private institutions. institutions. They are in many respects public institutions. More than half of all of the money that they spend on research comes from the federal government. And that's an arrangement that dates back.

It started during World War II. And then in the aftermath of World War II, there's a very famous report called Science, the endless frontier that basically argued that the United States should formalize and maintain this relationship with universities, use them as its research arm, fund it massively pursue a variety of national goals in health care, in science, in technology, and in defense through research funding for these universities. And in the succeeding decades, this marriage is really good for both sides. The universities grow and prosper and take on their present form, and the government derives huge benefits from the research that they're doing. During the same period, the government also begins to massively fund the tuition that students

pay to these institutions through various loan programs. what you get is a relationship that is essentially, you know, codependent and much closer than the relationship between the government and a law firm. And so today, a Columbia or a Harvard is not in a position to say, we don't want to deal with you anymore. They are beholden to the federal government. They work in many respects for the federal government. And they found themselves over the barrel because the federal government, which has long taken a view of their purpose that was pretty closely aligned with their own view of their purpose, is now taking an adversarial view of what they should be doing, how they should be operating. And it's like, you know, waking up in bed and finding out that the person who's next to you is not the person you thought.

And they're really in a position where, you know, it almost doesn't matter what the law is. They're stuck. Okay, but it's like waking up and finding that the person in bed with you suddenly turned into like an ogre after 70 years when before everyone was getting along and like actually the whole world was benefiting for. from the medical and scientific advances, right? And to go back to David, your question about how legal or illegal this is, legally speaking, these are private and independent institutions. And, you know, Harvard, which has sued, has a really good argument that this case is about the government's efforts to withhold federal funds as leverage to gain control of academic

decision-making at Harvard. There are legal protections for academic freedom that come out of the government. the First Amendment. And there are important principles that create some independence for these universities while they continue to do this work for the government. And I don't think that we want a legal regime in which the government can put any conditions it wants on a university's funding, however unconstitutional. You make a good point that Harvard has sued, so the universities have fought back. But Harvard hasn't been able to win many injunctions that basically prevent these policies from going into effect. And so I think there's just a lot more legal gray area about

whether this is legal or not. And I've talked to people at these universities who are working on this. And part of what they've said to me is, look, in terms of future grants, the administration has a lot of authority for what they want to do with future grants. And it just seems to me that in a long-term legal battle between the Trump administration and universities, universities are likely to lose or at least lose a lot. And that's very different from the situation with law firms where the law firms have won. And so I really lament it. I think what the Trump administration is doing is damaging and immoral. But I'm very sympathetic to these universities deciding that if they actually fought, they would lose and there would be a lot of damage along the way. I think, Emily,

you're less sympathetic to them than I am. I feel like it is really different. to sue and put some law on the books, hear from a judge, and also to pursue settlement talks and try to make an agreement for all the realistic reasons you gave, then to simply settle. And so one of the important principles here is that Harvard has gone to court, and it has asked for expedited relief. You know, that means like a relatively quick ruling from a judge. And there was a hearing last week in which the judge seemed very sympathetic to the university because what the administration is doing probably is illegal. So to me it seems really important to get a ruling from that judge before there is kind of a settlement from Harvard with the government so that we have some better answer to your questions.

I do think Columbia has handled this poorly for some of the exact reasons you just said, which is that they essentially settled without doing any fighting. I am more sympathetic to the notion that Harvard while suing might also decide to settle. Yeah, sure. I do think, though, the terms of the settlements really matter. And there was an interesting contrast between the Columbia and Brown settlements on that point. You know, Columbia agreed to turn over all its data on admissions and hiring to an independent monitor for years. That is a lot of oversight and, you know, potentially intrusion into Columbia's internal affairs, right? Brown, by contrast, did not agree to an independent monitor. And there's a lot of in some of the terms in these settlement agreements, which means in the Columbia case, you've given an extraordinary amount of power over Columbia to this independent monitor. And the Brown situation just seems better for the school going forward. I mean, I think it's great that Brown was able to get a better deal, but I think Columbia was in a very difficult position. And I think one also wants to be careful about talking about, you know, whose interests are being served by these deals.

there is a long-term interest in maintaining sort of maximum independence for these institutions. There's also a short-term interest in ending the disruption of research. You know, there is an argument to be made if you're Columbia that your interest is in getting that funding back online as soon as possible, even if there is some cost to your independence. Not because that's the situation you would have wanted, but because you live in a world in which Donald Trump is the president and is willing to engage in, at the very last, least the outer limits of hardball. And I think, you know, we'd all agree in some instances, even line crossing in his pursuit of these objectives. And there you are caught in the crosshairs.

And what are you going to do about it? You can wish that you'd been offered Brown's deal. But, I mean, if you're Columbia, you weren't and you need to decide what to do with the offers that are on the table. But, Binya, you would agree that that's not the only questions these institutions should ask themselves, right? I mean, law firms would say the same thing. Paramount, whose deal with Trump is really odious. They are asking them those. same question of what's good for our institution. I assume you would say when a democracy is under threat, people have multiple responsibilities to ask themselves, not just their self-interest. Of course, absolutely. And I, to be clear, wouldn't say that Colombia has ignored those questions.

I just think it's wrestling with them under different sort of pressures than some of these other universities because it has been particularly in the crosshairs. And I guess one question that I think we're seeing the answer to is there was a concern that if Columbia caved on all these points, that it would establish a precedent that would allow the Trump administration to roll up other universities on the same terms. You know, at least the early indications suggest that that's not necessarily going to happen, that if you're not Columbia, you can get a better deal. And I take some comfort in that as well. Yeah, I mean, we'll have to see what happens. I just feel like suing and also trying to settle is different from not going to court at all,

especially when you're thinking about setting precedents and how this is going to play out more broadly in a moment in which civil society is an incredibly important bulwark against the democracy just crumbling and falling apart. And I know that sounds dramatic, but it is a moment of high drama in the United States. And when you talk to people who have looked closely at what happened in places like Hungary and Russia, this really important role that universities and law firms and companies, play when democracy is under threat, like there couldn't be anything more crucial, really. And it can mean taking a real hit and some real pain in the short term with a kind of uncertain medium or long-term payoff. I just think that if we don't get some law on the book, some findings from a judge about the school's legal arguments here, that is going to be a real problem for all of us, really. Let's end by looking forward on two different things. And Emily, you've actually alluded to both of them. So the first is this data that Columbia is going to have to give to the federal government, which I assume means it'll become public, about their applicants and their accepted students in terms of grade point average, in terms of test scores, and in terms of race. And this really gets to this, I mean, multi-decade fight over affirmative action in the United States. And I think this is going to be a big deal. Emily, you have written in depth about affirmative action. You've followed the cases at the court.

Why is this release of data, not just for this one deal, but for the larger debate, important? I mean, I'll answer briefly, but I really want to hear what you think, because this is a subject you have lots of expertise about. We've never had public the kind of data we're talking about here from elite schools, right? And it is going to be about race and ethnicity and not about all the other kinds of preferences that schools give. like athletics and legacy and, you know, gender, all of which we know are happening. The other thing I worry about a lot is that by having all this public, you put the schools in a position where if they do admit black students or higher faculty of color, they're going to know it's under special scrutiny. And I worry about a kind of chilling effect there where you go beyond

making sure that people are being treated fairly and you actually are making it hard for the schools to have racial and ethnic diversity, which is a really important part of the schools and also something that if we lose it, we're going to be actively discriminating against people of color again in admissions and hiring. So, David, how much do you worry about all of that with this data going public and what else are you seeing here? I'm sympathetic to the argument from conservatives that there is now a law that says schools can't use the old version of affirmative action. and I think many conservatives suspect that schools are cheating. Maybe it's not just conservatives who suspect that. I think many people suspect that. And so I'm sympathetic to the idea that schools should have to release more information

so that the public, which finances these universities through large subsidies, can think about this issue. What I am deeply worried about is we do not want to have a college admission system where we imagine that all students are trying to, face the same odds and overcome the same odds. There are many students who are running with a stiff wind in their face. They attend high schools that are not like private high schools or are not like really good public high schools. And so to me, schools can actually do something deeply unfair if they expect a student like that who has run with wind in her face to get the same SAT score as a student who's had tons of advantages. And these sort of blunt statistics may end up hiding a lot of that issue. may end up making college admissions actually less fair. That's my big worry, even as I think that it's reasonable for us to have more public debate about this. And just to support that a little bit more, when you read the fine print of these agreements, the administration is saying that these

schools may not consider essays and narrative statements about diversities if they're a proxy for race. And I'm just honestly not sure how to read that in light of the Supreme Court ruling that ended race-based preferences that you were talking about, right? Because the court left open having essays about adversity or celebration of your life that could include talking about your race and ethnicity. And it seemed in that leaving open that there was still a way for schools to value the particular experience that students of color, black and Latino students bring and also the hardship that they can experience that is related to race. I can't tell if this new provision and the settlement agreements just kind of restates the Supreme Court holding or whether they're actually going beyond it.

And there is just some ambiguity there. I would love to be wrong about this. I think the Trump administration is making a bet here that it will be difficult for Columbia and other schools to defend these numbers once they are released and that this is more about getting this into the public debate than it is about a specific finding of the monitor. But we're going to have to see. Let me bring up the other issue here, which is, to me, there's one world in which they agree to these deals and the Trump administration essentially follows them. There's another world, and some of the critics of the deal have pointed this out, in which they agree to these deals, and the Trump administration turns around three months from now and imposes new penalties on them. And that, to me, feels like a very different situation. And Binya, I'm curious if we do get that world in which the Trump administration starts a new investigation of Colombia, and asks for $200 more million, how that would affect your thinking about this whole situation.

I mean, I guess I'd say big picture here that it's pretty clear to me that the administration isn't engaged primarily in an effort to administer punishment. It's engaged in an effort to administer policy. It wants to reshape the way that these institutions function. And I have every expectation that this is just the opening move in that effort. And I would be surprised, frankly, if Columbia is now done talking with the Trump administration, because, you know, the Trump administration clearly hasn't fully achieved its goals in this area. To me, you know, it doesn't really change the way that I think about this because I think many of the people who are sort of most ardently opposed to this or most upset about it, they had the hope that somehow these institutions would be insulated against the Trump administration, that the consequences of the election would not reach these special institutions, that they would be able to continue functioning in the way that they had, irrespective of who would. president. My big picture view is that it really matters who wins presidential elections in this country. And yes, the law can restrain them to some extent, and perhaps it could do so more fully in this instance. But the big picture is that the Trump administration has enormous

power to shift the course of higher education in this country, to change who is admitted, to change the way that they are educated, the research that they pursue, the services that these universities provide. And we should all be alive to that danger and not operate under the illusion that these institutions can just ride out the Trump administration and not have to worry about its positions on immigration or on scientific research or on any of these other hot-button issues. The lesson here isn't that Columbia is misbehaving. The lesson here is that Trump is misbehaving, and the only way to address it is to have a different president. Yeah, and I think that's actually a great place to leave it, which is that for people who are very alarmed about these deals, which certainly includes the three

of us in our different guises, and I'm guessing many, many of our listeners, there is a lot of isn't some special solution where Trump is in office and this doesn't happen. The way to prevent this from happening and from reversing some of the damage almost certainly involves there being a different president than Donald Trump. Binya and Emily, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. If you like this show, follow it on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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