Commentary: What the Columbia Settlement Really Mean

By Jameel Jaffer, Alex Abdo, Katy Glenn Bass, Nadine Farid Johnson & Larry Siems August 04, 2025 1 min read

By Jameel Jaffer, Alex Abdo, Katy Glenn Bass, Nadine Farid Johnson & Larry Siems
Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University 

Excerpt: After months of negotiation, Columbia University announced on July 23 that it had reached an agreement with the Trump administration to resolve investigations into alleged violations of federal anti-discrimination laws. 

We recognize that Columbia might have made some of these commitments on its own accord, without unconstitutional coercion from the Trump administration. But even if we assume, against the evidence, that Columbia would have adopted all of these commitments on its own, the settlement is a significant surrender of autonomy because the university has ceded the right to revise these commitments during the agreement’s three-year term.

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