Could Columbia University Use Its $15 Billion Endowment To Fight Trump?

Should Columbia University dip into its $15 billion endowment to challenge President Trump’s crackdown on campus antisemitism? The proposal was suggested last week in an op-ed for the New York Times by an economics professor at the University of California, Merced.The idea gained momentum over the weekend after Columbia University’s interim president, Katrina Armstrong, announced her resignation. She passed the baton to a former television journalist, Claire Shipman, the school’s former board of trustees co-chairwoman. The leadership handover sparked speculation that the newly elected president might renege on the reforms her predecessor agreed to implement last week as part of a deal with the Trump administration to reinstate hundreds of millions of dollars in revoked federal funds. Should Ms. Shipman choose to reverse course and back out of the agreement, though, the university would need to find some way to cover the gaps in funding. Some are suggesting the school tap into its endowment to do that. A group of Columbia University alumni and faculty, however, say the proposal is a “really, really, really stupid” idea. “It’s a tempting, feel-good slogan, but here’s the problem: this argument is financially illiterate, institutionally reckless, and strategically suicidal,” the Stand Columbia Society said in a newsletter published over the weekend.The Stand Columbia Society, a non-partisan organization dedicated to restoring the New York City Ivy’s “excellence,” says “there is no world where Columbia University can outspend or outmaneuver the federal government.” The first problem? The majority of the endowment is composed of gifts subject to donor-imposed restrictions. According to Columbia’s financial statement, unrestricted assets only make up $4.8 billion of the endowment. Even then, though, the endowment isn’t just cash sitting in an account somewhere. The money is tied up in private equity, venture capital, hedge funds, and real estate — relatively illiquid investments that can’t be turned into cash immediately. Should the school attempt to liquidate parts of the portfolio on short notice, Stand Columbia Society insists, they would incur significant fees. After applying a 10 percent liquidation penalty — a modest estimate — the school’s cash supply would further dwindle to $4.3 billion from $4.8 billion, Stand Columbia writes. Subtracting the amount of reserve cash the university needs just to operate every year — Stand Columbia clocks it at $500 million — brings the pool of cash down to $3.8 billion. Unfortunately for Columbia, $3.8 billion would only cover the funding yanked by the administration for an estimated 1.89 years. That gives the Ivy League school less than two years to successfully “fight Trump” before it would run out of money. Beyond the financial limitations, Stand Columbia points to another problem. For the strategy to succeed, “you’d have to believe in a sequence of highly optimistic, borderline fantastical outcomes.” Columbia would need legal victories at every level, no retaliation from the executive branch, Congress to intervene, no exodus of Columbia’s faculty, a decade of Democratic election victories, and a surge in alumni giving. “If even one of those goes sideways, then it’s game over,” Stand Columbia says. Stand Columbia’s searing analysis comes as academics and university leaders are grappling with how to respond to the Trump administration’s strong-armed approach to making higher education in America “great again.” Columbia University, home to some of the country’s most virulent anti-Israel protests, was thrust into the center of the debate after the Trump administration pumped the brakes on $400 million in federal grants and contracts earlier this month because of the school’s “continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.”The Trump administration suggested a number of reforms that would serve as a “precondition” for reinstating federal financial assistance. Among them were bans on masked protesters, enforcement of the university’s existing disciplinary policies, imposing an academic receivership over the school’s department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African studies. Debate exploded over how Columbia should respond. Last week, Ms. Armstrong came to an agreement with the administration that appeared, at first, to satisfy the government’s demands and put the school back in the administration’s good graces. It later emerged, however, that Ms. Armstrong had held closed-door meetings with faculty members during which she insisted that there would be “no change to masking,” and “no change to our admissions procedures” — both policies which she had publicly agreed to.Amid a firestorm of attacks from both those on the left and the right, Ms. Armstrong resigned on Friday, seven months into her tenure. Her replacement, Ms. Shipman, will take over as acting president. Ms. Shipman — Columbia’s third president in less than a year — appears to already be off to a rocky start, with recently unearthed comments about campus antisemitism drawing fresh criticism. According to an antisemitism report published by the House in October, Ms. Shipman derided a 2023 congressional hearing on antisemitism as “Capitol Hill nonsense” in a text to the former Columbia president, Ms. Shafik. The newly appointed leader also texted that she was looking to “unsuspend” the anti-Israel groups found by Congress to have violated school rules by staging pro-Hamas and antisemitic protests. In response to Ms. Shipman’s promotion, Congresswoman Elise Stefanik reckoned that “it is only going to be a matter of weeks before she is forced to step down as well.”

Could Columbia University Use Its $15 Billion Endowment To Fight Trump?

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