White House Wants Colleges to Pay Up, as Columbia Did

The Trump administration has begun negotiations with several universities in an attempt to get them to pay millions of dollars in fines to ensure federal funding keeps flowing—as Columbia agreed to do this week. A White House official said the Columbia deal is the new model, the Wall Street Journal reports. The universities facing the pressure include Harvard, Cornell, Duke, Northwestern, Michigan, and Brown. Columbia's agreement to pay $200 million to settle with the administration over antisemitism allegations had immediately drawn criticism for setting a precedent.

A Columbia law professor called it a shakedown, per Reuters. "The agreement gives legal form to an extortion scheme," David Pozen wrote in a blog post. The administration wants Harvard to pay much more than Columbia did, per the Journal. White House officials say striking a deal with Harvard is key to implementing its plan for other schools. "The payments will be in exchange for access to federal funds," an official told the Washington Post. "I wouldn't call it cookie cutter, but the general understanding of what we are looking for was seen in" the Columbia settlement.

A lobbyist who works closely with administration officials laid out the approach. "They're going to ramp up their civil rights investigations, and it's not hard on college campuses to find instances of antisemitism," he said. "They will then say, 'Okay, you've got a problem.'" The president of Wesleyan University in Connecticut analyzed what universities are facing. "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,'" said Michael Roth. "Which is the federal government."