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An Agreement That Settles Nothing

From the Columbia University Chapter of the AAUP, for immediate release: July 29, 2025

The Agreement between the federal government and Columbia University announced on July 24, 2025, has been presented as a settlement of Title VI violations, specifically the university’s alleged failure to curtail bias and harassment directed toward Jewish faculty, staff, and students. However, as has been pointed out by several of our colleagues, the statutory processes encoding Title VI enforcement have been entirely ignored in arriving at this deal. Far from being a legal settlement, the Agreement merely fulfills the Trump administration’s desire to dominate a prominent university, to diminish its autonomy, and to silence critical speech. This Agreement and the many concessions that have preceded it will ineluctably transform Columbia for the worse and stain its reputation in the eyes of the world.

One-off deals that result from coercion are not only antithetical to the rule of law, but also implicate the university in corrupt and authoritarian practices. The illegal rescission of funds, including research grants, community outreach, and all CUIMC training grants has already caused irreparable damage; threatened permanent reductions in budgets that support science research portend even more profound harm. While this Agreement offers some short-term relief to some of those impacted, there is no reason to believe that the deal is a stable one, given the Trump administration’s record on honoring its commitments and the acknowledgment, in the document itself, that perceived breaches of the terms of the deal may result in additional demands and penalties.

The Agreement is, in short, the blunt instrument through which the Trump Administration has demonstrated its power to bludgeon American universities into undermining the traditions of free and open inquiry, robust political speech, and shared governance that have long distinguished them. Despite the university’s leadership’s claims that Columbia has held true to these fundamental principles, it has not.

The Agreement formalizes recent changes to rules governing student/faculty conduct and discipline, and prescribes the acceleration of hearings and punishments (articles 26-27). It authorizes the review and restructuring of departments and areas of study, mandating new hiring in certain fields (12-13). It imposes ideological tests as a precondition for the admission of international students (21-22). It eliminates diversity as a factor in admissions, hiring, and promotion, while also requiring the sharing of all admissions and hiring data “broken down by race, color and national origin” (18-19). Compliance with these and other measures will be ensured by an internal “Administrator” and an external “Resolution Monitor” with broad yet largely undefined powers (11).

We are already inhabiting a changed university.

In this changed university, the Board of Trustees and an Acting President chosen from that Board are making unprecedented concessions to the federal government about matters such as admissions, faculty hiring, and the oversight of departments and curriculum that have historically been exercised by the faculty and university Senate. Consultation with the elected representatives of the faculty has been replaced by ad hoc listening sessions and dean-dominated special committees. The powers of the Senate have been curtailed, and further review of its operations is threatened. Students engaging in political protest, such as those who occupied a reading room in Butler Library in May, face punishments of unprecedented severity. Soothing rhetoric assuring us that we have remained true to our “north star” is, in these circumstances, laughable.

The Columbia AAUP chapter urges every member of the community to read the Agreement carefully and to weigh its implications. For example, we ask our colleagues to consider and call upon the university leadership to explain:

Why, despite no admission of wrongdoing, and no legal finding of guilt, has the university agreed to pay the enormous sum of $200 million to the federal government? Where will the funds for these payments be found? Will they come out of financial aid budgets, or faculty and staff salaries and benefits? And to which individuals or branches of government will this money flow?

● As the Agreement allows for the possibility of new action against the university in the case of perceived non-compliance (6, 39), what ensures that there will not be additional funding cuts in the future? Will funding that has been terminated for projects that do not align with the government’s ideological priorities, e.g., research on climate, vaccines, social justice, or gender, be restored?
● On what basis was the Resolution Monitor selected, and how will the internal Administrator be chosen? What are the powers of each and to whom are they accountable? What is their relationship to the usual bodies of faculty governance?
● The Agreement guarantees single-sex housing for women who request it as well as all-female sports, locker rooms, and showering facilities (20). What protections and opportunities will be offered to non-binary or trans students and colleagues?
● Acting President Shipman’s statement of July 15, 2025, in combination with the Agreement, implement additional measures to combat antisemitism, including the appointment of a student liaison and the adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Association’s definition of antisemitism, which qualifies certain criticisms of Zionism and the state of Israel as antisemitic. Under the framework of “zero tolerance” announced by Acting President Shipman, how will it be decided whether texts, syllabi, lectures and published research, in addition to protest actions, cross this line? Will any member of the faculty feel safe teaching or publishing on the history of Palestine, for example? Will off-campus activity, including social media posts and opinion pieces in news outlets, be subject to surveillance under this aspect of the Agreement?
● The Agreement makes no mention of anti-Muslim or anti-Arab bias and discrimination, though a recent survey found that the fear and anguish of Muslim and Arab students is comparable to that of Jewish students. If the goal is to eliminate discrimination and create a safe and welcoming environment for all, why are both the Agreement and Columbia’s public rhetoric silent on this point?

At this inflection point in the history of the university, it is essential that all members of the community—students, faculty, and staff—scrutinize and publicly debate the terms of this so-called settlement and decide together on appropriate forms of action. In the absence of strong and principled leadership from Columbia’s Board of Trustees and Acting President, it falls to the faculty, above all, to defend the values and norms that have defined the university and allowed it to flourish. It is essential at this moment of crisis to support the work of our elected governance bodies such as the university Senate and the Planning and Policy Committee of the Arts and Sciences. Indeed, we urge all schools to establish institutions of self-governance to defend institutional norms and the rights of faculty and students.

The Columbia Chapter of the AAUP is expanding its own response by planning public forums needed to understand the current situation and build consensus on future action. We are also actively reaching out to elected officials to advocate for robust science and basic research budgets, and to enlist support both for Columbia and for all institutions of higher education. And we are creating and expanding coalitions with the many groups on and off-campus that oppose outside interference in Columbia’s institutional practices and wish to defend all members of the community from discrimination, illegal deportation, and the exercise of academic freedom. We invite all members of the Columbia community to join us in this difficult but vital work.

Kim Lane Scheppele on the Columbia capitulation

From The Contrarian

Bullying universities

The Trump administration’s pressures go beyond bespoke deals and attack all the ways universities are funded.

Kim Lane Scheppele

Jul 28, 2025

By Kim Lane Scheppele

Columbia University’s David Pozen called Columbia’s new agreement with the federal government “regulation by deal.” In regulation by deal, the administration forgoes the process of developing general standards enforced by regular processes, under the watchful eyes of courts, and instead bargains directly with institutions, striking a bespoke arrangement with each. This approach permits what Pozen called a “government-enforced restructuring” of an institution that is far more detailed and intrusive than any general regulatory approach would permit. As Pozen put it, “the agreement gives legal force to an extortion scheme.”

In many ways, this regulation-by-deal approach is similar to what President Donald Trump is doing with tariffs, leveraging the United States’s economic power to force particular countries to particular bargaining tables where the United States demands what it wants from each one separately. There is no general policy, only particular extortion agreements. And we can expect that the regulation by deal will not end there. The format is similar across sectors: Trump withholds some benefit that his targets were promised in agreements, and he makes them beg to get those benefits back. It’s a strategy that uses the power of the government outside the development of general rules and therefore outside the law.

Of course, Columbia should have learned by now that making a deal doesn’t mean that the pressure stops. Appeasing a bully only empowers the bully—and he’ll be back for more. Regulation by deal, precisely because it bypasses general lawmaking procedures, leaves open the possibility that any deal can be supplemented with even more demands in the future. It can provide no legal guarantees of security.

But as we learn more about what Trump has done to Columbia, we should also keep in mind a bigger picture that Trump and his allies envision for the future of universities. The Trump administration follows other leaders like Viktor Orbán, who brought Hungary to heel by weaponizing the national budget. (Background: I lived and worked in Hungary’s judicial system for most of the 1990s and have been a critic of Orbán since he came to power—to the point that I am persona non grata there.) Orbán learned that money is the avenue to political control. And the Trump administration has learned that it can force universities to cave by following (and controlling) the money.

Read more at the link…

Cornell AAUP Chapter Statement Condemning Cornell’s Disinvitation of Kehlani

The disinvitation of Kehlani – preceded by a revision to their contract specifying that they could not have any “political events” at their performance – raises serious academic freedom issues. Some of these were addressed in a diverse series of letters to the Daily Sun, by AAUP members, alumni, musicians, students, of various political persuasions. Below is the Cornell AAUP Chapter’s statement, contrasting the cancellation of Kehlani to the invitation provided other speakers.

On March 13, 2024, then-Provost Mike Kotlikoff offered a full-throated defense of his decision to host Ann Coulter, a right-wing provocateur with a history of racist and anti-Semitic comments, on Cornell’s campus. An earlier visit by Coulter had been disrupted by student protests: the Provost wanted to give her a second bite of the apple. Kotlikoff wrote: “I agreed that there could be few more powerful demonstrations of Cornell’s commitment to free expression than to have Ms. Coulter return to campus and present her views. This is certainly not because I agree with what she has to say, or because I feel that the content of her presentation is important for our community to hear, but because I believe that Cornell must be a place where the presentation of ideas is protected and inviolable. Shielding students or others in our community from viewpoints with which they disagree, or filtering campus speakers based on the content of their presentation, undermines the fundamental role of a university.” This theme was repeated in now-President Kotlikoff’s March 31 op-ed in the New York Times.

In spite of protestations by many—including those who wrote a letter to the Sun, titled “Jewish Students and Faculty Speak Out Against Coulter”—University leadership staked out a position that the platforming of hateful and hurtful presentations, was a “powerful demonstration” of the University’s commitment to free expression.

Fast forward to Wednesday morning, April 23, when the campus received an email announcing that the performer selected by students to headline this year’s Slope Day had been uninvited by President Kotlikoff. The grounds were that the artist, Kehlani, the first Black woman headliner, had “espoused antisemitic, anti-Israel sentiments in performances, videos, and on social media.” No evidence for the first claim was provided: faculty have asked for such evidence, particularly of comments that were antisemitic, separate from those that were critical of the government and policies of the state of Israel or of an ideology, such as Zionism. Kehlani, herself, has explained that her protests are against the State of Israel and Zionism, not against Jews.

As we wait for the President’s reply, we might reflect on the differences between Coulter and Kehlani. Coulter was given a prominent platform to share her views, accompanied by a robust defense of free expression. Kehlani was first censored and then, after having agreed to the content restrictions imposed upon them, disinvited. We have gone beyond “shielding students … from viewpoints with which they disagree.” Kotlikoff determined it was sufficient for Kehlani to even have such views – whether expressed or not – to bar them from performing. While Kotlikoff had distanced himself from Coulter’s views, he insisted the “fundamental role of a university” was to provide a place in which they could be presented. Kehlani, by contrast, was publicly repudiated and defamed, with a meager concession by Kotlikoff that “any artist has the right in our country to express hateful views.” In “our country,” but not – it seems – in a University whose “fundamental role” seems to have changed in the last year.

The inconsistency of celebrating free expression in the New York Times only to censor and cancel it three weeks later is obvious. Accordingly, President Kotlikoff leans heavily on Slope Day as an exception: It is a “cherished tradition,” the “signature social event” of the year, and a day for “uniting our community, not dividing it.” But we cannot condemn Kehlani’s views as having no legitimate place at Slope Day without also condemning those students who were looking forward to attending on the basis of those views. When President Kotlikoff acts to “ensure community,” who does he drive out? If we are going to now be screening artists on the basis of their political views, as he has suggested, who will be drawing the line and on what basis?

Cornell leadership seems to believe that by censoring speech we can avoid being further targeted by the federal government or putting a “bullseye on our back.” In fact, it makes us the instrument of the Trump administration’s far-reaching assault on the First Amendment and civil society. As stated in a recent letter signed by 550 US rabbis and cantors, “We cannot allow the fight against antisemitism to be twisted into a wedge issue, used to justify policies that target immigrants and other minorities, suppress free speech, or erode democratic norms.”

The Cornell University Chapter of the AAUP condemns the cancellation of Kehlani’s performance as yet another instance of discrimination by the central administration against Palestine-related speech and expression. It calls on President Kotlikoff to affirm the University’s unequivocal commitment to safeguarding academic freedom and freedom of speech and expression on our campus. Speakers and performers, just like staff, students, and faculty, should not be required to censor themselves. For the University to undertake preemptive screenings of Slope Day performers’ politics would inevitably result in violations of academic freedom through viewpoint discrimination and the prioritizing of some students over others.

On behalf of the Cornell AAUP Chapter
David Bateman, President
Suman Seth, Vice President
Risa Lieberwitz, Former President

National day of action speeches, Michael Dorf

The April 17 National Day of Action had a great turnout at Cornell. We had speakers from across the university, in the sciences, humanities and social sciences, and the law school.

Michael Dorf’s remarks were not printed, and so don’t lend themselves to being re-printed. Instead, we cross-post material from his blog – www.dorfonlaw.org – which was also posted at the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Harvard University’s rejection of the Trump administration’s April 11 demand letter (styled as a proposed agreement in principle) almost immediately led the White House to announce a freeze on $2.2 billion in federal funds to Harvard. Undoubtedly, Harvard’s leadership contemplated such an announcement as a possible consequence of its resistance. Thus, its decision deserves either praise for courage or condemnation for foolhardiness. I choose praise–in no small part because, as we have already seen with Columbia, capitulation to President Donald Trump’s demands brings only more demands. There’s no point in selling your soul if all you receive in exchange is a worthless I.O.U.

That’s generally the way things work with bullies and hostage takers. Appeasement leads to more bullying and more hostage taking. But there’s an additional reason why appeasement by universities will not work in the current moment. The anti-intellectual ideologues (no, that’s not an oxymoron) running education policy within and adjacent to the White House do not wish to reform higher education; they want to break it. A university that concludes it can survive only by bending to the Trump administration’s demands will find that what survives is not recognizable as a university.

Consider just one aspect of the astounding ultimatum that three agencies of the Trump administration sent to Harvard. It contained this demand: “Every department or field found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by hiring a critical mass of new faculty within that department or field who will provide viewpoint diversity.”

“Every department” includes the sciences. I majored in physics at Harvard in the 1980s. At the time, there was debate about how many dimensions of space-time string theory should postulate as well as whether string theory was valuable at all, given its failure to make falsifiable predictions. Similar debates now rage. Suppose Harvard had acceded to the administration’s demands, including for viewpoint diversity. The administration’s proposed agreement included a requirement that Harvard appoint “an external party, which shall satisfy the federal government as to its competence and good faith” to conduct a viewpoint diversity audit. How exactly would such a body decide how many string theorists, how many string theory skeptics, how many solid state physicists, how many cosmologists, and how many experimentalists the Harvard physics department should employ to achieve adequate viewpoint diversity?

Perhaps the Trump administration wouldn’t care about diverse views about physics. After all, the focus of the viewpoint diversity demand are supposed “criteria, preferences, and practices . . . that function as ideological litmus tests.” But what counts as ideological?

House Speaker Mike Johnson–a close Trump ally–has done legal work for the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter, which he describes as “one way to bring people to this recognition of the truth, that what we read in the Bible are actual historical events.” Other so-called “young Earth creationists” are likely well represented in the Trump administration. If Harvard had acceded to the administration’s demands, would it have been obligated to hire creationists to its biology and geology faculty to achieve viewpoint diversity? It is not unrealistic to think that any auditor the Trump administration would approve would regard acceptance of evolution as an unacceptable ideological litmus test. So too for acceptance of the reality of human-generated climate change.

To be clear, substantial viewpoint diversity is often a virtue in an academic institution, at least when the varying viewpoints reflect the diversity of views among knowledgeable people in a field. An economics department can benefit from interchange among and opportunities for students to study with neoclassicists, Keynesians, and monetarists. Methodological diversity is also valuable. Most good law school faculties include doctrinalists, legal historians, empiricists, philosophers, economists, critical theorists, and more.

However, that doesn’t mean that all forms of viewpoint diversity are equally valuable or even valuable at all. The creationism example makes that clear for the natural sciences, but the observation also holds true in the humanities, the social sciences, and professional schools. Is a philosophy department sufficiently diverse if it numbers among its moral philosophers utilitarians, deontologists, and skeptics but no Aristotelians who believe that some people are rightly born to be enslaved? Must a political science department appoint people whose work asserts that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen, even if they offer no credible evidence for that view? Should a medical school be required to diversify its faculty by adding anti-vaxxers?

Those and countless other examples that could be marshaled illustrate the proposition that–as Yale Law Professor and former Dean Robert Post has argued at much greater length–academic freedom properly exists within disciplinary boundaries defined by people with relevant expertise. The point is not that experts always know best or that the conventional wisdom is always correct. On the contrary, disciplinary assumptions should always be open to challenge through evidence and argument. But not all evidence and not all arguments are equal–and thus neither are all viewpoints.

Moreover, it should be open to an academic institution to build on its strength. The University of Chicago economics department in the 1970s and 1980s grew its reputation by favoring libertarian-leaning neoclassicists. The Yale English Department became a center of deconstructionism in the same period. In my own field of law, the George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School and the University of San Diego Law School have made constitutional originalism a focus of their faculty and programs. Whatever one thinks of any of these particular orientations, they reflect legitimate choices that create cross-fertilization of ideas among like-minded scholars and special opportunities for students who wish to study from a particular viewpoint or methodology. Specialization of this sort contributes to what Yale Law Dean Heather Gerken has aptly called “second-order diversity,” which is itself valuable and, in any event, should be a matter of institutional self-direction.

Meanwhile, the same Trump administration demand letter that, in the name of diversity, would impose on Harvard an affirmative action program for under-represented viewpoints–surely intended to mean conservative ones–also demands that Harvard “shutter all diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, offices, committees, positions, and initiatives.” The letter thus reveals its own lawlessness. Recipients of federal funds like Harvard have implemented DEI programs in part to satisfy their obligations under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Yet the Trump administration demands that such programs–which it is charged with enforcing–be shut down and a new one wholly outside its jurisdiction and in no way responsive to any illegal conduct be erected in its place.

Harvard was right to reject the Trump administration’s unlawful and unreasonable demands. Other universities in the administration’s crosshairs should take inspiration from its leadership.

Michael C. Dorf is the Robert S. Stevens Professor of Law