Columbia reaches $200M settlement with Trump administration over campus antisemitism

Columbia University said on Wednesday it will pay over $200 million to the US government in a settlement with President Donald Trump’s administration to resolve federal probes and to have most of its suspended federal funding restored.

Trump has targeted universities including Columbia since returning to the White House in January over the pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel student protest movement that has roiled college campuses since the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led terror onslaught that started the ongoing Gaza war.

In March, the Trump administration said it was penalizing the university over how it handled last year’s protests by canceling $400 million in federal funding. It contended that Columbia’s response to alleged antisemitism and harassment of Jewish and Israeli members of the university community was insufficient.

“Under today’s agreement, a vast majority of the federal grants which were terminated or paused in March 2025 — will be reinstated and Columbia’s access to billions of dollars in current and future grants will be restored,” Columbia said in a statement.

The statement stressed that “Columbia does not admit to wrongdoing with this resolution agreement” but said “the institution’s leaders have recognized, repeatedly, that Jewish students and faculty have experienced painful, unacceptable incidents, and that reform was and is needed.”

“The agreement builds on Columbia’s broader commitment to combating antisemitism,” it added.

The university said it has also agreed to settle investigations brought by the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for $21 million and that its deal with the Trump administration preserved Columbia’s “autonomy and authority over faculty hiring, admissions, and academic decision-making.”

Additionally, the settlement includes an agreement to ask prospective international students “questions designed to elicit their reasons for wishing to study in the United States,” and establishes processes to make sure all students are committed to “civil discourse.”

After the government announced the funding cancellations, the school announced a series of commitments in response to the Trump administration’s concerns.

Last week, Columbia adopted a definition of antisemitism that defines some forms of anti-Israel rhetoric as Jew hatred. The school also said it would no longer engage with anti-Israel group Columbia University Apartheid Divest, which has praised “violent resistance” by Palestinians, including, explicitly, Hamas’s October 7 attack. CUAD’s spokesman, Mahmoud Khalil, has been locked in a high-profile legal battle over the US administration’s effort to deport him.

The Trump administration had no immediate comment on the deal with Columbia. Trump had said in recent weeks that a deal with the university was close.

Wednesday’s announcement came a day after the university disciplined dozens of students over a pro-Palestinian protest in May in which demonstrators seized Columbia’s main library, and followed months of uncertainty and fraught negotiations at the more than 270-year-old university. It was among the first targets of Trump’s crackdown on campus protests against Israel and on colleges that he says allowed Jewish students to be threatened and harassed.

Columbia’s own antisemitism task force found last summer that Jewish students had faced verbal abuse, ostracism and classroom humiliation during demonstrations on campus last spring.