Columbia president denies caving to Trump after settlement

Columbia University’s agreement to pay over $220 million to the US government in a settlement with US President Donald Trump’s administration to resolve federal probes was not capitulation but a means to restore vital federal funding, the university’s acting president says.

Claire Shipman tells CNN the university could have won short-term legal victories against the government but would have faced the long-term loss of billions of dollars in funds for cutting-edge research, like finding a cure for cancer.

She says the school would have also faced the potential revocation of the visa status of thousands of international students.

“This was not capitulation,” Shipman says, adding that the deal protected the university’s “academic integrity.”

Under the settlement, Columbia will pay $200 million to the US Treasury and a further $21 million to a fund to resolve alleged civil rights violations against Jewish employees following the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, senior administration officials said.

The fund is for janitors caught inside Columbia’s Hamilton Hall during a protest as well as Jewish faculty and staff, says an official, calling it the largest employment-discrimination public settlement in almost 20 years and the biggest on record for antisemitism.

Columbia law professor David Pozen calls the agreement a “shakedown” and said it set a precedent for “pay-to-play” deals the Trump administration is seeking with other schools.

“The agreement gives legal form to an extortion scheme,” Pozen says in a blog post, calling it the first time antisemitism and DEI have been invoked as the basis for a government-enforced restructuring of a private university.

But Shipman says the agreement contains no provisions that “shall be construed as giving the United States authority to dictate faculty hiring, university hiring, admissions decisions, or the content of academic speech.”