Yves here. Trump is engaged in an ideological and even legitimacy war with major US universities, and has scored a lot of wins. As we warned, this is Pol Pot lite, trying to decimate the creation of highly credentialed and trained individuals who have for decades been part of the US power structure. This campaign, particularly against medical and other faculties that received Federal research grants, will in short order undermine what was left of US leadership in many fields of inquiry.
One bona fide ground for right-wing upset was the way universities have grossly bloated their staffs, particularly administrators, in large measure due to debt-slavery-inducing student loans. University employees are a large and influential Democratic cadre. But do we see the Feds trying to attack adminisphere bloat? Addressing inflated tuitions and other costs to students? This is all about promoting right wing ideology, as opposed to helping students and American intellectual and economic performance.
By Brendan Cantwell, Professor of Higher, Adult, and Lifelong Education, Michigan State University. Originally published at The Conversation
The Trump administration and Harvard University are reportedly close to reaching a settlement that would require Harvard to pay US$500 million in exchange for the government releasing frozen federal funding and ending an investigation into antisemitism on campus.
This follows similar deals the White House struck with Columbia University and Brown University in July 2025. Both of those universities agreed to undertake campus reforms and pay a large sum – more than $200 million in the case of Columbia and $50 million for Brown – in order to receive federal funding that the Trump administration was withholding. The White House originally froze funding after saying that these universities had created unsafe environments for Jewish students during Palestinian rights protests on campus in 2024.
As a scholar of higher education politics, I examined the various deals the Trump administration made with some universities. When Harvard announces its deal, it will be informative to see what is different – or the same.
I believe the Columbia and Brown deals can be used as a blueprint for Trump’s plans for higher education. They show how the government wants to drive cultural reform on campus by giving the government more oversight over universities and imposing punishments for what it sees as previous wrongdoing.
Here are four key things to understand about the deals:
1. Antisemitism isn’t a major feature of the agreements
The Trump White House accused Brown and Columbia of tolerating antisemitism during campus protests. But the administration neither followed federal standards for investigating antisemitism, nor did it dictate specific reforms to protect Jewish students.
Ahead of its deal, Columbia in March 2025 adopted a new, broader definition of antisemitism that was created by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. The United Nations and most European Union countries also use this definition.
Yet the school’s 22-page deal mentions antisemitism only once, where it says Columbia is required to hire an additional staff member to support Jewish students’ welfare.
Brown’s deal, meanwhile, did not involve the university adopting a particular definition of antisemitism. But Brown did commit to offering “research and education about Israel, and a robust Program in Judaic Studies.” Brown already hosts a Judaic Studies program, and it is unclear from the agreement’s text what additional measures are required.
The deals also extend well beyond antisemitism concerns and into questions of gender and the composition of student bodies.
Columbia agreed to provide “single-sex” housing and sports facilities, for example. The university has an optional Open Housing program that allows mixed-gender roommates and several gender-neutral restrooms.
This places the school in line with Donald Trump’s January executive order that says a person’s gender is based on their sex as assigned at birth.
Brown’s deal also requires single-sex sports and housing facilities. In addition, Brown committed to using definitions of men and women that match Trump’s executive order.
Columbia, which enrolls about 40% of its students from other countries, also agreed to “decrease financial dependence on international student enrollment.”
The Brown deal says nothing about international education.
2. Both deals are expensive but vague about financial details.
Columbia must pay a fine of more than $200 million to the federal government, while Brown will make $50 million in donations to Rhode Island workforce development programs.
In both cases, it is not clear where the money will go or how it will be used.
Congress passed The Clery Act in 1990, creating a legal framework for fining campuses that failed to protect students’ safety.
Since then, the government has reached different settlements with universities.
Liberty University, in Lynchburg, Virginia, was required to pay the federal government $14 million in 2024, for example, for failing to investigate sexual assault allegations.
But Columbia’s payment is far larger than any previous university and government settlement. Columbia will make three payments of about $66 million into the Treasury Department over three years, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education. But it isn’t clear how the money will exactly be spent and what will happen after those three years, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported in August 2025.
Only Congress can legally decide how to spend Treasury Department funds. But Trump has ignored Congress’ appropriation directives on a number of occasions.
Brown, meanwhile, will not pay the government anything. Instead, its deal will go “to state workforce development organizations operating in compliance with anti-discrimination laws, over the ten years.”
The Brown deal doesn’t say what qualifies as qualified workforce development organizations.
3. Trump wants to influence university admissions.
While the Brown and Columbia deals have several differences, the agreements have nearly identical language givingthe Trump administration oversight of the way they admit students.
The deals say that the universities must provide the government with detailed information about who applied to the schools and was admitted, broken down by grades and test scores, as well as race and ethnicity. The government could then conduct a “comprehensive audit” of the schools, based on this information.
This information could also be used to determine if universities are showing a preferences for students of color. Without providing evidence, conservative activists have alleged that selective colleges discriminate against white people and that this is a violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Experts have said that these reporting requirements appear to be intended to increase the number of white students admitted to Ivy League schools.
4. The deals could open more doors to federal intrusion.
Claire Shipman, Columbia’s acting president, said in July that the deal would allow the university’s “research partnership with the federal government to get back on track.”
Christina Paxson, Brown’s president, also defended the agreement in a statement, writing that it “enables us as a community to move forward after a period of considerable uncertainty in a way that ensures Brown will continue to be the Brown that our students, faculty, staff, alumni, parents and friends have known for generations.”
But the deals could invite more scrutiny from the federal government.
Both deals spell out the government’s right to open new investigations against Brown and Columbia, or to reopen old complaints if the administration is not satisfied with how the universities are implementing the agreement.
Trump is now pressuring Harvard, UCLA and other universities to strike deals, also based on similar antisemitism allegations.
The White House announced on Aug. 8 that it could seize the research patents, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, that Harvard holds. Since 1980, universities have been able to legally hold, and profit from, patents resulting from federally funded research.
The federal government has long influenced higher education through funding and regulation. But the government has never tried to dictate what happens on campus before now.
Higher education experts like me believe that political goals now drive the way the government approaches higher education. Some of Trump’s conservative allies are now urging the president to go even further, saying “we have every right to renegotiate the terms of the compact with the universities.”
Given these and other pressure tactics, academics who study the law and government warn that the university deals indicate encroaching authoritarianism.
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Who pays the piper calls the tune. The PMC running universities always assumed that their buddies would run the Federal Government. There’s a new sheriff in town.
A few years back I calculated the total direct Federal dollars spent on higher education, and the total sum spent on administrators at universities. The Federal money is a great return for the government: while contributing 1/6th or 1/7th of the funding, they control ALL the spending. The Federal funding is about the same amount as the total spent on administrators across all universities, many of whom were hired to ensure compliance with Federal regulations.
If the universities don’t want to kowtow to men like Trump, they could pursue a solution.
I agree that when you take government money you’re ultimately at the whim of who runs the government, but even if universities took zero federal dollars someone as determined as Trump has many options, like revoking accreditations, taxing endowments, or restricting the full-tuition paying foreign students.
The top-tier schools with giant endowments (e.g., Harvard with $53.2 billion) can do what they choose, but I suspect a number of institutions with less capital — even R1 tier — would think twice.
This, because I gather over 90% of all student loan debt is federal (source: Education Data Initiative), and depending on the school, many students are there only because they get loans.
If universities said: “we will no longer accept federal student aid”, could every one of those federal loan recipients say “sure, no problem; I will just switch to a private lender”…? Methinks the answer is “no” and that there would be headaches galore and many students would pause their studies. This would cause problems for many middle-tier schools that rely on that federal loan money.
In a way, the universities got themselves into this situation, by hiring so many admins, Provosts, Assistant Provosts, Assistant Deans, etc. (all of whom are getting paid six-digit salaries, even at state schools), and the resulting administrative bloat is part of the story of how tuition has gone up so much.
I think these actions can be seen as an attempt to re-religionize/re-classize universities. Traditionally universities were highly religious institutions with particular dogmatic ethos, built for the needs of the upper class WASPs, with quotas for Jews and other groups.
Trump’s “reforms” seem to be pushing back in this direction. To create sectarian Jewish universities, protestant universities, catholic universities, and of course at the bottom of the pile muslim universities. Maybe even white, black, Asian, etc universities. But above all universities whose ethos and political life adheres to state policy. This was the norm in Europe up to the late 60s.
This can be sold to the maga base on the back of young white male discontentment, with academia, with their job prospects, with the old liberal radicalism. But like every Trump action the primary beneficiary will be the state religion of Zionism, as the first creed of the universities now must be the total political support of Israel, over and above any old order aspirations of merit or diversity.
But hadn’t pressure from wealthy alumni already made the Ivy League a protected space for Zionism? It was only Israel’s over the top genocide that shook things up.
I don’t read Turley any more but one of his points was that high status universities are overwhelmingly Democrat in their faculties and openly hostile to the right. So it’s likely this push by Trump is in line with the arguments of Fox guy Turley (also a big Zionist) and also in line with his hypocrisy on the subject of “free speech absolutism” (doesn’t apply to those Turley etc designate as “terrorists). Of course the universities with their giant endowments and long since obeisance to the ruling class aren’t fighting back very hard. They are the beating heart of the ruling class.
No. That required state intervention. It was only after congressional hearings that the university presidents were outdated. It took significant political pressure to crack down on campus protests.
They weren’t beating in time.
If you view Zionism as a budding state religion in the US (I do), then it makes sense that the universities would revert back to their older forms of established church alignment for the main institutions, with a smaller number of institutions for minor faiths as a concession to minority faiths or political groupings among the elite.
I won’t be in the least surprised if the next move is to allow or force universities to tailor admissions and hiring to department of education approved “ethos” parameters. Chaplainships are going to be a growth sector.
To add, young Jews since the early 2000s (as reported then by Peter Beinart) are not into Israel, Many of the campus protestors were Jews. The need to defend Zionism, as opposed to Jewish students, didn’t come into the crosshairs until the protests. Plenty of profs, both Jewish and not, joined or otherwise supported the anti-genocide efforts.
The initial Columbia crackdown came under Biden, not Trump. To be sure young Jewish students were the ones being cracked but old Jewish financiers were the one demanding it. Plus don’t forget the persecution of Finkelstein and others going back years.
I stand by my assertion that Zionists had earlier conquered the Ivies–Trump making this more public.
Even here in SC there’s a law forbidding state university employees from making anti Israel statements.
Erm, what other sorts of genocide are there?
That they are loud and proud about it.
By contrast, the Nazi genocides were not widely known until the Allies rolled into the concentration camps and found mass graves and gas chambers.
my two cents:
There was also very limited interest in the world outside the Axis.
We know of Jan Karski´s secret mission by 1943 giving testimony to Churchill and FDR.
Underground had also reached out via other contacts. The Zionist movement had an excellent network.
So the basic facts must have been around after 1943 for sure (major extermination didn´t start until 1942 with the Wannsee Conference taking place as late as January 1942.)
Air Force reconnaissance was also aware of things going on and chose not to bomb railway lines.
And in Germany people knew or felt that something was wrong. The fear of concentration camps was profound. Especially among German intellectual circles where resistance was not unlikely.
But since it concerned Jews only unless one was invovled in treasonous activities (nobody would be then admit to be Communist) it was easy to ignore.
Also, foreign correspondents willingly went along mostly ignoring the topic: Who wanted additional horrific news?
And of course there was US domestic opposition to saving Jews. Another aspect.
p.s. Karski´s account STORY OF A SECRET STATE came out in the US in winter of 1944 and became a best-seller and contained no real names as to protect individuals who had helped him in Europe.
To this day there has been no serious film adaptation, surprisingly.
However when I researched this issue Simon&Schuster responded to an email by me some 20 years ago that all rights (such as dramatisation) except translation lay with an ominous lawyer in Switzerland whose identity in the short time I invested I couldn´t track down.
It was later reported that Karski´s relatives had sold or granted the rights to Claude Lanzmann who apparently was a rather difficult guy and for artistic reasons (?) made sure no “Spielbergian” adaptation of Karski´s story would happen. So instead there is no major feature at all. I have no idea if the usual suspects for such a project did try to get the approval/rights or not.
At least this according to the rumours then.
The book you are talking about. Of course there was no reason for any of the Allies to want to make a movie about this just after the war and in fact the USG took up with the leftover Nazis to spy on Russia and build our rockets.
And later, when attention was focused on the camps, subjects like Ann Frank were a lot more cinematic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Story_of_a_Secret_State
Also the Poland angle was a bit more ambiguous since anti-Semitism was historically strong in Poland as well as Germany/Austria/Russia. Wiki says the book itself shades some facts.
The second edition corrects some errors, such as the misidentification of the transit camp near Izbica Lubelska as the main Bełżec death camp. Karski also noted that in the first edition, he purposefully falsified the identity of a guard who escorted him into that camp (changing his true Ukrainian nationality into Estonian), in an attempt to avoid pointing to Ukrainians as Germans’ accomplices in the extermination of the Jews because of the complex Polish-Ukrainian relations. The first edition also minimized the complexity of the Polish-Jewish relations, both to avoid confusing the readers and to avoid damaging these relations. In effect, as noted by the historian Joanna Rzepa, the first edition “presented a relatively black-and-white picture of World War II, with Poles and Jews struggling for survival under the Nazi regime”.[1]
And finally the connection between the founding of Israel and the Holocaust is tenuous at best. During the 30s some German Zionists even welcomed Hitler’s persecution thinking it would encourage emigration to Palestine.
The thing with “Hollywood” aka “film industry”: That system is not about historic truth. And in fact it needn´t be. Fiction is it´s own reality. And if a film “works” in its intellectually modest sense it creates its very own reality of events. That´s not necessarily an error, it´s the nature of the medium. You can´t really do it in any different way. What you can or could do in these narrowly formatted narrative contexts is choose heroes and villains and the greys in between in one way or another way. So you could do a film about Gaza with Israel being the villain and create mass entertainment. Or could also do it the other way around. The question is of course whether you are allowed to do that. Or not.
I guess the next best thing we could see one day is one of those pieces with a false balance – “but Oct. 7th”-approach.
But I doubt it would be American financed.
As of Karski I was rather alluding to potential adaptations since 1990s.
Any such film would have ironed out the inconsistencies you mentioned one way or the other. Scholarship and entertainment have almost nothing in common.
From the business-side I was just surprised to not see Karski´s story adopted.
FWIW, the U.S. Copyright Office Public Records System shows no current options on that book. There was an option in 1992 (# PAU001671363), but that has almost certainly expired.
Universities let the camel’s nose into the tent when they signed on for research dollars. They took more and then more. Trump is forcing in the hindquarters and what goes with them on largely bogus grounds. Pretending an independence you are not willing to defend: bad idea.
Finkelstein and Strossen in their discussion a week ago about 1st Amendment made it clear that action by the government against free speech on campus on ideological grounds (in contrast to administrative non-political reasons) and partisan is unconstitutional.
https://www.normanfinkelstein.com/norman-finkelstein-in-conversation-with-cornel-west-and-nadine-strossen-free-speech-and-gaza/
These agreements sound like they were put together by a committee. First is Trump’s priority of shaking down those universities for money just like the mafia would (‘Nice university that you have there. It would be a shame if anything happened to it.’). You think that the Democrats would demanding to know where all that money from those ‘fines” is going but I have read nothing on it. And all those charges of antisemitism turned out to be only window dressing. Good thing that the students in those universities will have no resentments about this.
The bit about “single-sex” housing and sports facilities sounds like a bone tossed to the happy-clappers as a reward for their support here. But having the Federal government aka Trump’s people controlling admissions sounds like trouble. They are already knocking back people because they wrote a mean post about Israel – a foreign country on the other side of the world. But I bet that what they really want is to stop the possibility of students protesting ever again. You protest something – you are out of you university. This will not end well.
This is also my take — the street-corner shake-down as pwn-ing the libs while the true impetus is the repression of speech.
Trump presided over the annus horribilis of 2020. In his twisted sense of racist entitlement the Black Lives Matter movement was an existential threat. He seems to have realized after January 6 that fighting fire with fire was going to be bad for business. Better to crack-down on the institutions that enabled young people to associate and organize.
The current elite see no problem with the side-effects of stifling research and innovation, as the current stage of American capitalism is based on looting and financialization rather than productive activity.