Columbia University's $221 million settlement with the Trump administration this week will serve as a model for fines to be levied on other schools being accused of failing to stop campus antisemitism, according to a White House source.
Those fines, including hundreds of millions of dollars eyed from Harvard University, would come as a trade-off for allowing the schools to keep bringing in federal funding, reports The Wall Street Journal on Friday.
Columbia this week agreed to pay $200 million to the federal government over the next three years. Another $21 million will go into a claims fund for the Ivy League school's Jewish employees who faced discrimination during anti-Israel campus demonstrations after the Hamas terrorist attack on Oct. 7, 2023.
The settlement came after four months of negotiations with the Trump administration. Approximately $400 million in federal grants pulled from the New York institution will be restored as part of the agreement.
And now that the Columbia settlement has been reached, a source familiar with the administration's talks told the Journal that further discussions are underway with several universities, including Cornell, Duke, Northwestern, and Brown.
But the key target, the source said, is Harvard University, which the White House is targeting for a settlement that would make Columbia's agreement look tiny in comparison.
"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,' which is the federal government," Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan University in Connecticut, said.
Harvard officials declined to comment about the threat, but then again, the nation's oldest university has sued the administration as billions of dollars in federal research money have been frozen. The administration has blocked future grants for the Ivy League school.
The Columbia deal, in addition to the fines, also agreed to some demands made by the administration. These include scrapping DEI initiatives in student admissions and hiring faculty, appointing a senior vice provost to review programs in Middle Eastern studies, and appointing new faculty members in Jewish studies, economics, and political science.
The deal has met with mixed reactions.
Gerard Filitti, senior counsel with the Lawfare Project, an advocate for civil rights for the Jewish community, said he believes the fine will "deter Columbia from ignoring the civil rights of Jewish students in the future."
However, Filitti said he was disappointed that the deal did not do more about addressing antisemitism.
The Columbia deal was also chilling, said Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, as the fines came without the due process typically used when investigating claims of antisemitism.
"This cannot be a template for the government's approach to American higher education," Mitchell said.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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