Universities, Free Speech, and Trump: Columbia’s Settlement is a Watershed Moment

August 19, 2025
By Tal Fortgang ‘17

Columbia University’s recent settlement with the Trump administration represents a long-awaited watershed moment in the ongoing battle between the federal government and American universities. Its arrival is enormously symbolic within the ongoing saga and is a sign of things to come. How would the federal government treat free speech and academic freedom concerns? Was it looking to avoid going to court, or would it welcome the opportunity to litigate formally? And how much would each side be willing to compromise on its deeply entrenched positions?

A settlement – better described as a deal, not merely because dealmaking is the President’s preferred framework for governance but because the feds did not actually sue Columbia -- was always the most likely outcome of the showdown. It is not inherently inappropriate as a resolution to legitimate civil rights concerns, though the administration probably could have achieved its objectives more sustainably had it followed the procedure set out in civil rights law. Nevertheless, a deal has been struck, and assessing it is more complex than simply deeming it good or bad by virtue of its existing – though many certainly wish each side had simply declined to negotiate with the other.

Digging into the deal – and attending to its silences -- reveals a combination of promising reforms, distractions, and even some failures. Most critically, the agreement’s silence on admissions and hiring practices suggests that the underlying issues that precipitated this crisis will likely resurface, creating a cycle of federal intervention that will relegate this episode to a footnote.

Whether this intervention succeeds will depend on whether its terms respond appropriately to its causes. Columbia’s recent conflagrations are the result of long-simmering tensions boiling over after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel. The Morningside Heights campus became a hotbed for anti-Israel activism that frequently veered into overt support for foreign terror organizations and civil rights violations against Israelis and Jews. The details are often shocking, even to those inured to the state of elite campuses.

Jewish students and faculty reported widespread harassment and intimidation, while university administrators appeared paralyzed between competing demands for action and restraint. Nearly one hundred student groups joined Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), an umbrella organization that fashions itself as an American branch of Hamas and Hezbollah. CUAD organized repeated acts of civil terrorism – organized lawlessness meant to intimidate law-abiding individuals to capitulate on a political issue -- on Columbia’s campus. It and its affiliates repeatedly broke school rules and a host of laws to express its hatred of Israel, and what it saw as Israel’s key supporters: the United States and Columbia itself. The intimidation effort got out of hand quickly. There were pamphlets promulgated by Hamas’s press office. Someone held a sign calling campus Jews Hamas’s “next target.” Masked activists stormed into a class to distribute flyers depicting a boot stomping on a Star of David. At one point, a campus rabbi told Jewish students to go home because anti-Israel demonstrations had gotten so out of control that the university could not guarantee their safety. After multiple building takeovers, vandalisms, student-activist-imposed no-go-zones, and unhinged rants urging the administration to “be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists,” Columbia began reprimanding some students. To date, hundreds if not thousands of Columbia students and several professors have engaged in lawless behavior – some of which prevented students from getting to class, the most basic element of higher education – and a few dozen have been expelled. (Columbia has not provided exact numbers of how many have been expelled and how many merely suspended, though members of the latter group are likely to be reinstated.)

Columbia’s uneven response to this state of affairs has satisfied no one, which is why the university is now on its fourth president in just over two years and faces lawsuits from Jewish, Israeli, and Palestinian students. Its failure to expel or even deter homegrown rioters provided the Trump administration with the legal justification to match its political motivations. The government froze some $400 million in federal research grants, warning that this was just the beginning. Its initial demands were onerous, including putting some academic departments into receivership, reforming admissions, and more.

Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 empowers the federal government to pull federal funding from universities that do not comply with their civil rights obligations, including by allowing discrimination to mushroom. That inevitably pushes up against free-speech and academic-freedom concerns, which has led other schools, like Harvard, to mount a counter-campaign in court and with the public. Columbia took a different tack.

Its agreement to pay $200 million to the federal government, alongside $21 million to affected Jewish employees, acknowledges the severity of the violations without requiring an explicit admission of wrongdoing. This financial penalty serves as some deterrent to other institutions, while being small enough potentially to entice other administration targets to replicate the deal – if they can live with analogous provisions.

What is the substance of the deal? It mandates several structural changes that directly address campus climate issues. The adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism provides a tool for identifying discrimination that hides behind euphemisms and claims of mere political disagreement, though the definition is not without controversy. IHRA’s definition is not perfect, but it does represent one important step towards helping universities and the public understand a long-running yet unspoken predicament: If we are going to have civil rights laws bounded by free speech principles, violations of the former cannot simply use coded language to achieve the same aims under the protection of the latter. This is not special pleading by pro-Israel or anti-antisemitism activists; if the collision between civil rights and free speech here is troublesome, it’s because of the inherent tension between the two. Working out how our civil-rights and free-speech regimes are meant to coexist will be a significant topic of debate for years to come, and the deal takes a small step towards clarifying that debate’s terms.

More proximately, the agreement’s provisions regarding protest regulations and security coordination with the NYPD reflect necessary adjustments to inadequately enforced campus policies. Columbia’s greatest failures were its unwillingness to enforce time, place, and manner restrictions on demonstrations, and its hesitation to remind students that rules were mandatory and enforceable. To preserve genuine free-expression rights without compromising the university’s central purpose of being institutions of learning, demonstrations cannot run roughshod over every other university function. Columbia’s previous policies clearly failed this test. More accurately, it failed to enforce its policies, which makes external coordination necessary for addressing future campus unrest.

The settlement also focuses on eliminating “programs that promote unlawful efforts to achieve race-based outcomes,” implicating diversity statements and similar attempts to skirt “merit-based admissions policies.” As the settlement indicates, these programs were already “unlawful” under recent Supreme Court decisions. If this gets Columbia to comply with its preexisting duties, that will be for the good. But if they were not going to obey the Supreme Court’s orders it’s not clear why it would honor this commitment.

What the provision ought to indicate is that identity-engineering the campus is related to the toxic campus climate. When universities select for identity, rather than the kind of excellence that is related to its mission of learning, it gets identity-driven activists, precisely the kind of people who will spend their campus years railing against Israel, which they consider illegitimate because of the ethnic heritage of those who run it. Unfairness in form thus creates unfairness in function.

But a settlement by its nature does not make this argument, or any argument about this provision’s pertinence to civil rights problems, leaving critics to point to this as proof that the administration is weaponizing civil rights law to achieve other political goals. In that sense, the settlement is a mixed bag by virtue of being a settlement; such are the tradeoffs of not litigating this case through the courts.

Other tradeoffs occur when systemic problems threaten to turn positive developments into negative ones. The expansion of the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies with new faculty positions suffers from such risk. It sounds like it could foster a richer understanding of Jews’ connection to Israel and why calling it a settler-colonial state is discriminatory, all within the paradigm of academic inquiry and argument. Academic programming does seem to be at least partly responsible for promulgating the one-sided perspectives that led students to think opposing Israel was just like opposing anti-black racism, and thus contributed to the hostile environment for Israelis and Jews. But experience has shown that these “studies” are quite like American Studies programs; they tend to have an invisible “anti-” before their names. If they apply the tools of critical studies to Jews and Israel, they will only yield more conspiracy theories about how powerful groups have oppressed the powerless – and that is no improvement, at best.

This only highlights the settlement’s most significant weakness, which lies in what it fails to address. Admissions and hiring practices created an ideological monoculture that pings from supporting speech codes to crying “free speech!” when there is an effort to root out discrimination on campus. Such volatility is the result of the campus being dominated by an ideology that is not neutral on substantive questions while remaining committed to balancing speech and civil rights. The ideology is obsessed with power, rather, and will support restrictions on speech and the equal protection of campus rules so long as those restrictions serve the interests of perceived oppressed groups. Yet universities continue to select such individuals in admissions, credential them, and hire them as professors and administrators. Moving away from identity-based admissions and hiring helps. But without a more comprehensive effort to identify the component parts of this cycle – what are admissions officers looking for in applicants, which tends to translate to on-campus radicalism unmoored from the principles that allow a university function? – universities will be unable to break out it. The process, down to government intervention, is bound to repeat.

Universities that maintain homogeneous faculty and student bodies will continue to generate environments hostile to minority perspectives, whether those minorities are defined by race, religion, nationality, or political belief. Without structural changes to promote genuine intellectual diversity in service of a campus explicitly dedicated to academic inquiry, federal interventions will become routine rather than exceptional. And they will be warranted.

Tal Fortgang ’17 is a Legal Policy Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a regular contributor to PFS, and a contributing writer at The Dispatch.