As the US government launches investigations and threatens to pull federal funding, some elite universities have decided to take the path of least resistance. Colleges across the country have responded to the Trump administration’s attacks on diversity programs and student protesters by complying with these “anti-woke” witch hunts. In recent weeks, university administrators at Columbia University, Johns Hopkins University, and other schools have let the government interfere with entire academic departments, fired professors over allegations of antisemitism lobbed by right-wing groups, and announced their refusal to intervene in immigration arrests on campus.
The Trump administration has warned it will yank funding from institutions that it claims have engaged in racial discrimination in the form of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs and enabled antisemitism by not being hard enough on pro-Palestine protesters. These aren’t empty threats: in March, the administration rescinded $400 million in funding from Columbia and froze $175 million slated for the University of Pennsylvania over the school’s policies on transgender athletes. This week, President Donald Trump paused “several dozen” grants issued to Princeton University and announced that it’s reviewing $9 billion in federal grants and contracts awarded to Harvard University.
Universities are largely responding to these attacks by preemptively cracking down on free speech. The Rhode Island School of Design shut down an art exhibition — which it had previously approved — put on by the school’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine. New York University canceled a talk on USAID cuts over concerns that the topic could be seen as “anti-governmental.” Yale Law School suspended, and later fired, an international law scholar after an “AI-powered” right-wing news site falsely accused her of being linked to a Palestinian group under US sanctions. After Trump pulled funding from Columbia, the university agreed to comply with a host of the administration’s demands, including completing “disciplinary proceedings” for student protesters, making changes to its admissions process, banning masks on campus, and placing its Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies department under new supervision.
If universities are complying as a protective measure, it’s not guaranteed to work. When CNN asked if Columbia would get its funds back, Education Secretary Linda McMahon said the university was on the “right track” but refused to confirm whether the money would be reinstated. She was more blunt in a subsequent interview: “They have to abide and comply with the terms that we’ve set down,” she told reporters.
After years of criticizing universities for their supposed stifling of free speech, conservatives now in power are weaponizing anti-discrimination law to quash student protests and eliminate diversity initiatives.
In March, the Department of Education announced it was investigating 45 universities over their involvement with the PhD Project, a program aimed at increasing racial diversity among business school professors. The administration claimed the PhD Project’s focus on hiring more professors of color violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin in any programs that receive money from the federal government.
The administration is also using Title VI as a cudgel against campus protests. Several universities have been probed by the Justice Department Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism. The task force, formed in February, has plans to visit at least 10 universities across the country to determine whether they “failed to protect Jewish students and faculty members from unlawful discrimination” and therefore violated Title VI.
“The integrity of civic discourse and the freedoms that form the basis of a democratic society are under attack.”
Columbia, Harvard, and the University of Pennsylvania are among the schools that have been visited by the task force — and have had their federal funding pulled as a result. While university administrators have largely complied with the administration’s demands, student and faculty groups across the country have pushed back on Trump’s campus incursions. Recent lawsuits have challenged Trump’s funding freezes and deportation policies on First Amendment grounds, claiming that the administration is retaliating against students’ constitutionally protected speech.
Unsurprisingly, the first of these suits involved Columbia. Last week, a coalition of labor unions sued the Trump administration, alleging that its revocation of Columbia’s funding violated the First Amendment. Trump’s attacks on Columbia were an “unprecedented effort to overpower a university’s autonomy and control the thought, association, scholarship, and expression of its faculty and students,” the suit, filed in federal court in New York by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and the American Federation of Teachers, claims.
“Columbia is in the crosshairs because of the Trump administration’s disagreement with the perceived political views of students and faculty at the university,” the complaint reads. In addition to violating students and faculty’s right to free speech, the suit argues the Trump administration didn’t follow Title VI procedure before pulling the university’s funds.
The budget cuts have “caused severe and irreparable damage” not only to Columbia but also to the broader community, the suit claims, affecting “crucial public health efforts including research to prevent Alzheimer’s disease, to ensure fetal health in pregnant women, and to cure cancer.”
Worse still, faculty members say, university leadership is capitulating to Trump’s demands instead of fighting back.
“We’re seeing university leadership across the country failing to take any action to counter the Trump administration’s unlawful assault on academic freedom,” Columbia professor Reinhold Martin, who is also the president of Columbia-AAUP, said in a press release. “As faculty, we don’t have the luxury of inaction. The integrity of civic discourse and the freedoms that form the basis of a democratic society are under attack.”
The AAUP is suing the Trump administration for using an “ideological-deportation policy” to chill speech on college campuses, according to a separate suit filed in Massachusetts. That suit, filed on March 28th in a New York federal court alongside the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia and the Middle East Studies Association, alleges that Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) recent arrests of student protesters violate the First Amendment.
ICE has arrested at least five students over their alleged involvement in pro-Palestine activism on campus. The government is using an obscure provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 to initiate deportation proceedings against the students. The law, enacted at the height of the McCarthy era, lets the secretary of state declare someone “deportable” if their presence in the country would “compromise a compelling United States foreign policy interest.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio has alleged that the students targeted by ICE have expressed support for Hamas, a claim for which the administration has provided next to no evidence.
For example, officials with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) claim that Rumeysa Ozturk, a graduate student at Tufts University who was arrested by ICE last week, had “engaged in activities in support of Hamas.” Ozturk, a Turkish citizen, wrote an opinion piece for the campus newspaper urging the university to “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide” and divest its endowment from companies with ties to Israel, common demands made by student activists across the country. The essay almost entirely focuses on university procedure and at no point mentions Hamas. But it was cited as an example of Ozturk’s “Anti-Israel Activism” by the website Canary Mission, a database that tracks pro-Palestinian students — a sentiment it conflates with antisemitism.
Other international students targeted by DHS have left the country. Ranjani Srinivasan, a Columbia student who was in the country on an F-1 visa, fled for Canada after ICE agents showed up to her dorm looking for her. In a statement published on March 22nd, Srinivasan wrote that Columbia’s administration didn’t help her and that the university “has been cooperating with ICE instead of protecting its students.”
Meanwhile, the Justice Department is reportedly investigating whether Columbia officials were “harboring and concealing illegal aliens” on campus from DHS.
Momodou Taal, a Cornell PhD student who sued the Trump administration in March over two executive orders ostensibly related to national security and combating antisemitism on college campuses, also left the United States. In a statement posted on X on Monday, Taal said he hoped his lawsuit would “offer reprieve for myself” and other students who had been targeted for their activism. “But Trump did not want me to have my day in court and sent ICE agents to my home and revoked my visa,” Taal wrote.
The administration’s efforts to arrest student protesters “has created a climate of repression and fear on college campuses,” the AAUP lawsuit claims. “Out of fear that they might be arrested and deported for lawful expression and association, some noncitizen students and faculty have stopped attending public protests or resigned from campus groups that engage in political advocacy.”
Rubio recently claimed he has revoked visas daily since taking office, rescinding around 300 since January, including of students involved in pro-Palestine protests. The State Department reportedly launched a “Catch and Revoke” effort in March, which involves AI-assisted reviews of thousands of people’s social media accounts for pro-Palestinian or anti-Israel sentiment.
Some universities have chosen to comply with Trump’s efforts to deport their students. Johns Hopkins instructed faculty and staff not to “intervene” in ICE arrests on campus.
The Trump administration isn’t acting alone. Its efforts to eradicate DEI and crack down on pro-Palestine protesters have been aided by a coalition of right-wing groups that share the administration’s goals.
Several pro-Israel groups have taken credit for ICE’s arrests of student activists. The former executive director of Betar, a far-right Zionist organization, claimed he had personally spoken with aides for Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and John Fetterman (D-PA) about Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia student who was arrested in his university-owned housing despite having a green card. Betar claims it has compiled a list of foreign students that have criticized Israel and shared them with the Trump administration. And in late March, Canary Mission, which has tracked pro-Palestine student activists for years, added an “Uncovering Foreign Nationals” page to its website. The project identifies international students that Canary Mission would like the Trump administration to deport and even claims that immigration law “allows for the denaturalization and deportation of naturalized American citizens for serious offenses involving national security and terrorism.”
A post by Jewish Onliner, a self-proclaimed AI-powered “online hub for insights and exposés,” was reportedly the catalyst for Yale Law School’s suspension of international law scholar Helyeh Doutaghi. The Jewish Onliner post claimed Doutaghi was a member of a terrorist group.
Vigilantes have also sought to expose allegedly discriminatory practices in university admissions. A group of hackers recently leaked the names, test scores, and other identifying information of more than 3 million NYU applicants dating back to 1989. The hackers accused NYU of continuing to engage in “racial affirmative action” after the Supreme Court outlawed the practice in 2023.
Thus far, few universities have pushed back against the Trump administration’s assaults on higher education. But there is one notable example. The Rutgers University Senate passed a resolution last week calling for a “Mutual Defense Compact” in defense of “Academic Freedom, Institutional Integrity, and the Research Enterprise.” The alliance would include the universities in the Big Ten Academic Alliance, a consortium of 18 institutions including the University of Minnesota, Ohio State University, and the University of California, Los Angeles.
“We’ve all been trying to figure out how to solve this collective action problem,” Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, a professor at the University of Minnesota, said in a Bluesky post. “This seems like a very positive big step in the right direction.”
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