Students walk through the University of Pennsylvania campus. Trump officials hope deals with two Ivy League schools create a template that others, including Harvard, Princeton, Brown, Cornell and Northwestern, will follow. File photo / Rachel Wisniewski, the New York Times
White House officials have reached deals with two Ivy League universities and are now armed with a proven strategy to pressure other schools to rewrite their policies and reorient campus politics.
First, they strip away hundreds of millions of dollars in research funding, based on vague accusations that a university abets anti-Semitism or unlawfully supports transgender rights.
Then they make demands, wearing down school administrators until making concessions to the White House appears to be the only way forward.
The strategy worked twice in the last month, with Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania.
That leaves at least five more embattled schools — Brown, Cornell, Harvard, Northwestern, and Princeton — with decisions to make about whether to fight or to bargain.
The White House has touted the deals with Columbia and Penn as victories.
They also offer frameworks for wary college administrators as they consider which sacrifices are worth making to try to placate a President bent on bringing elite institutions to heel.
Now Columbia has shown that a fragile peace can be purchased.
Under the deal announced yesterday, Columbia will pay US$221 million ($366m) and stand by an array of previous pledges, including limits on protests and greater internal oversight of certain academic programmes.
But it secured a provision saying that no part of the agreement “shall be construed as giving the United States authority to dictate faculty hiring, university hiring, admissions decisions, or the content of academic speech”.
Penn did not agree to pay anything, but promised, among other terms, that its athletics policies would align with the Trump Administration’s beliefs about participation by transgender people.
“Two hundred million dollars is not a lot of money when you have billions at stake, and any corporate person will tell you that,” said Donna Shalala, who was health secretary under President Bill Clinton and has led four schools, including the University of Miami and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“Basically, they’re cutting their losses and ensuring their future — for at least a short period of time.”
Assessments like Shalala’s are deeply unnerving to many people in academia.
Professors have spent months warning about how history shows that aspiring autocrats seek to tame and bully universities.
They worry that settlements like the ones signed by Columbia and Penn will encourage the White House to conjure reasons to make more demands and give administrators on campuses across the country cover to make agreements that could poison American higher education.
“Universities, as they make concessions, do not stop the demand for future concessions,” said David Bateman, the president of Cornell’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors. “They just open the door for more.”
Trump Administration officials are openly eager to use Columbia as an example of how to satisfy the craving among some conservatives to remake higher education, a sector they regard as a cradle of liberal indoctrination.
“Columbia’s reforms are a road map for elite universities that wish to regain the confidence of the American public by renewing their commitment to truth-seeking, merit, and civil debate,” Linda McMahon, the Education Secretary, said after she and two other Cabinet members signed the deal with the university.
Although the Administration maintained that it was pursuing Columbia in the name of stamping out anti-Semitism, the terms of the 22-page agreement went well beyond that issue.
Columbia said it would name a student liaison on anti-Semitism issues, for example, but it also agreed to “maintain merit-based admissions policies” and to provide “all-female sports, locker rooms and showering facilities”.
Columbia, which did not have to acknowledge any wrongdoing as part of the agreement, was keen to note what it had not had to surrender to reach a deal.
Claire Shipman, the university’s acting president, said the agreement had been “carefully crafted to protect the values that define us and allow our essential research partnership with the federal government to get back on track”.
In recent months, Washington’s onslaught has left university administrators urgently considering a web of competing, often deeply felt instincts.
They have grappled with their obligations to maintain their institutions’ independence, and their worries about kowtowing to an Administration that many in academia believe is a budding dictatorship.
A lot of money is on the line, though.
And they have wondered how much their institutions could actually contribute to society if their labs are closed and their employees are laid off, leaving groundbreaking discoveries undiscovered.
Beyond that, university leaders and their many lawyers are a traditionally risk-averse bunch, accustomed to facing all manner of investigations, lawsuits, public relations debacles, and legal settlements about everything from trademark infringement to criminal conduct.
The Penn and Columbia agreements give them case studies that they can use to measure the potential repercussions of any politically or morally fraught agreements they might strike with the White House.
Mark Yudof, who has headed the University of California and the University of Texas systems, said he expected the recent agreements to nudge administrators elsewhere to cut deals.
“It allows lawyers to sort of estimate the level of risk, and lets them know what is negotiable and what is not,” said Yudof, who added that universities would need to maintain red lines around, say, preserving academic freedom.
Although future deals are unlikely to be exact replicas of the Columbia accord, Yudof and others said the settlement gives other schools a Trump-approved precedent to cite.
It was not immediately clear what paths the other schools in the Trump Administration’s sights would pursue now.
On Tuesday, Harvard found a seemingly sympathetic ear in Judge Allison Burroughs as she weighed a motion to grant the university an outright victory in its lawsuit against the Government.
And hours before Columbia’s settlement became public, Harvard condemned a new State Department inquiry as “yet another retaliatory step taken by the Administration in violation of Harvard’s First Amendment rights.”
Even so, Harvard has been negotiating with the White House for more than a month. A spokesperson for Harvard declined to comment today.
Brown, Cornell, Northwestern, and Princeton have not sued the Government as Harvard did, nor is it clear how much those universities have negotiated with the Government. They each declined to comment or did not respond to inquiries in the wake of the Columbia settlement.
Turning Columbia into something of a template has been the Trump Administration’s plan for months.
In April, a health department lawyer sent Harvard’s legal team a four-page document that included a “menu” of changes the university might make.
Many of them were similar to terms that Columbia had agreed to a few days earlier.
And some items on the list, which was made public in connection with Harvard’s lawsuit, included specific references to Columbia.
Harvard baulked.
Despite the potential setback it encountered in the Harvard litigation, the White House is swaggering, with Trump’s top aides persuaded that they can now force concessions from other schools.
“Would I have negotiated? Maybe, depending on what the situation was,” Shalala said.
“Probably, because I’ve never headed an institution that had a large endowment. Would I have tried to cut a deal if I could do it without losing my integrity? Probably.”
Bateman of Cornell suggested that that was exactly the problem created by the Columbia deal.
He was worried that college administrators, even those who revere historical norms and cherish academic independence, would face crushing demands to cave.
The agreement, he said, “makes it harder for them to say no, because they’ll have donors and trustees say, ‘Look, it wasn’t a big deal at Columbia.’”
Trump seems to be counting on that. On social media, Trump wrote that schools that have “hurt so many, and been so unfair and unjust, and have wrongly spent federal money” were “upcoming”.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Alan Blinder
Photographs by: Rachel Wisniewski
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