With a Trump Administration on the Horizon, America’s Universities Face an ‘Uncomfortable Reckoning’

With President Trump promising to make higher education “great again” once he returns to office, American universities will face increasing pressure to comply with his administration — that is, if they don’t want to lose billions in federal support. That’s the warning from a group of Columbia University faculty, staff, students, and alumni, who estimate that Columbia could lose out on $3.5 billion in federal funding — 55 percent of the school’s annual operating budget — should they face government retaliation. Citing Trump’s campaign pledge to push for significant reforms to America’s higher education institutions, the Stand Columbia Society — which is a self-declared non-partisan organization dedicated to restoring the New York City Ivy’s “excellence” — identifies a handful of ways in which the federal government could pull financial support from Columbia, or any other university. The most likely governmental action, the group says, would be for the government to pump the brakes on issuing new research grants to the university, a move that would require no justification at all. The government could also squeeze the enrollment of international students — a majority of whom pay full tuition without aid — by curbing issuance of student visas. Columbia boasts upwards of 13,800 international students. Losing out on the cohort could cost them up to $800 million in tuition money. Neither one of these scenarios requires the administration to take legal action. Trump could simply direct governmental agencies to pause new grants or curtail student visas. Moreover, the government could, additionally, push to withhold all federal funding should it determine that a university had violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. That statute bars recipients of federal funding from discriminating based on race, color, or national origin. It was later clarified in 2004 by the then-assistant secretary for the Department of Education, Kenneth Marcus, that Title VI also protected the rights of ethnic groups that shared a religious faith, such as Jews. Given the explosion of antisemitism that erupted on college campuses in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attack, and the well-documented evidence that university administrations failed to protect Jewish students from harassment, intimidation, and assault, it doesn’t appear it would take much to make the case that Columbia, and a whole host of other universities, violated Title VI. Columbia, for its part, faces at least three Title VI lawsuits over campus antisemitism. Harvard’s grappling with two. University of California Los Angeles, University of Pennsylvania, New York University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology are also on the list. Another option for the Trump administration would be to rally behind a House proposal to increase excise taxes on university endowments’ financial gains to 20 percent. That would significantly haircut the Columbia Endowment’s $1.5 billion gross investment return of the past year. It would be even worse for Harvard’s endowment — the largest of any university in the country — which grew this year by $2.5 billion. If Vice President-elect Vance has his way, that tax could even come out to 35 percent. In a less likely scenario, Stand Columbia judges the government could cut off Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements to university-affiliated hospitals, which case law suggests also falls under the protections of Title VI. Thus, Columbia and any other university medical center could lose out on revenue from patients enrolled in government-supported health insurance programs. Trump, for his part, has been vocal in his disapproval of the state of higher education, particularly in light of the anti-Israel protests that exploded on college campuses following Hamas’s attack on October 7. During his campaign, Trump promised to ax federal support and accreditation for universities that fail to put an end to “anti semitic propaganda” and deport international students that are involved in violent anti-Israel campus protests. Most recently, he’s pledged to dismantle the Department of Education altogether. Mr. Vance has hurled even harsher criticisms at America’s higher education institutions, calling for lawmakers to “honestly and aggressively attack the universities.” While delivering a speech at a conference titled “Universities are the Enemy,” Mr. Vance accused higher education of transmitting “not knowledge and not truth but deceit and lies.” Stand Columbia intentionally avoids casting judgment on any of the administration’s criticisms or promises for reform. Rather, the group hopes that the report will serve as an “uncomfortable reckoning” that compels Columbia’s leaders away from playing “chicken” in the face of significant financial risk, which they claim could very well tip the school into an “existential crisis.” “The irony,” Trump’s former assistant secretary of education for civil rights, Kenneth Marcus, tells The New York Sun, “is that Columbia wouldn’t have a dime’s worth of legal risk if it simply complied with the minimum requirements of federal law. Given that Columbia is one of the greatest universities in the world — or at least used to be — it should be able to far exceed those requirements, right?” Now that the institution has opted to “flout legal requirements,” Mr. Marcus notes, the government can tap the many “enforcement tools” that are made available to the Departments of Justice and Education, as well as other federal agencies. “All we need to do is listen to what President Trump has said during his campaign to understand that this administration will be serious about enforcing anti discrimination laws in ways that could be problematic to those institutions that have been getting a free pass for too long,” Mr. Marcus tells the Sun. Of course, doomsday scenarios need not play out. All the university administrations should do, Stand Columbia reckons, is avoid “being at the ‘epicenter of public outrage.’” In line with that goal, they offer Columbia and others an extensive “toolkit of actions” which includes actionable recommendations like enforcing school rules, publishing disciplinary statistics on a regular basis, and imbuing the school’s public safety officers with formal police powers, among others. “These problems have existed for some time,” a contributing member of Stand Columbia, Alexandra Zubko, who is a Columbia graduate, tells the Sun. “This might be the moment that administrators look in the mirror and decide that they can’t let them continue.”

With a Trump Administration on the Horizon, America’s Universities Face an ‘Uncomfortable Reckoning’

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