The Trump administration views the recent $200 million deal with Columbia University as a “blueprint” for how it can squeeze Harvard and other top colleges over claims they have failed to tackle antisemitism on campus, according to a report.
Columbia agreed to pay the Trump administration a $200 million settlement in exchange for access to federal funding that was cut over claims the Ivy League school failed to combat antisemitism, the university announced Wednesday. The college laid off nearly 180 staffers in May after funds were cut.
It comes as President Donald Trump’s White House has for months attempted to bend Harvard and other academic institutions to ideologically driven demands.
The deal with Columbia has paved the way for negotiations with other top schools, including Cornell, Brown, Duke and Northwestern, according to the Wall Street Journal, which cited an unnamed White House official.
In Harvard’s case, the school has fought back in a lawsuit arguing that the government has illegally cut $2.6 billion of its federal funding.
The Trump administration hopes to make an example of the country’s oldest academic institution.
“The White House hopes to extract hundreds of millions of dollars from Harvard, in a deal that would make Columbia’s $200 million payment look like peanuts,” the Journal reports, citing a person familiar with the talks.
The Independent has contacted Harvard, Cornell, Brown, Duke, Northwestern and the White House for comment.
The Trump administration pulled research funding from Columbia over what it described as the university’s failure to deal with antisemitism on campus during the Israel-Hamas war that began in October 2023.
Columbia then agreed to a series of demands laid out by the administration, including overhauling the university’s student disciplinary process and adopting a new definition of antisemitism.
Wednesday’s agreement, which does not include any admission of wrongdoing, codifies those reforms while preserving the university’s autonomy, acting University President Claire Shipman said.
But the deal has divided academics and university leaders.
“This cannot be a template for the government’s approach to American higher education,” Ted Mitchell, president of the university lobbying group American Council on Education, told the Journal.
Mitchell said it was “chilling” that Columbia’s fine came without typical due process when investigating antisemitism claims.
“We’re in a world now where the government can say to all these schools, ‘Hey, we’re serious, you’re going to have to pay the piper to get along with the most powerful organization in the world,’” Michael Roth, president of Connecticut’s Wesleyan University told the outlet. “Which is the federal government.”
Elsewhere, Harvard’s former president Lawrence Summers lauded the deal as “an excellent template” for other universities in a post on X. “This may be the best day higher education has had in the last year,” he wrote, arguing that the deal “preserved academic freedom.”
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