The Volokh Conspiracy
Mostly law professors | Sometimes contrarian | Often libertarian | Always independent
The Trump Administration and Columbia University
A threat to academic freedom
Yesterday the Trump administration launched yet another massive financial blow at a university because it has done some things the administration does not like. This time the University of Pennsylvania's medical research is being decimated because the administration disagrees with the Penn athletic department's transgender policies.
Today I have a piece out in The Dispatch focusing on the earlier actions regarding Columbia University. New reporting suggests Columbia will soon cave to the administration's demands. Not surprising given the stakes at issue, but it will be important to see the details of what Columbia actually agrees to do and how the administration actually responds to the win.
My piece is titled "Funding with Strings Attached Risks Strangling Academic Freedom." A bit overstated, as titles often are, but this action by the administration certainly poses such a threat. Both the administration's approach to handling funding cut-offs under the Civil Rights Act and the specific demands being made of Columbia pose extraordinary threat to a pluralistic society and universities as independent centers of scholarly activity and intellectual exchange. Columbia deserves the reputational blow that it is now suffering, but Columbia's bad actions do not justify the administration's own troubling behavior.
From the piece:
These actions by the administration do not comply with existing federal civil rights laws and severely impose on the independence of a private university to set its own policies regarding speech and scholarship. The administration has seized any weapon at hand—without much concern for the legality of how it is using that weapon—to try to bend a university to its will. In doing so, it goes far beyond attempting to remedy any particular civil rights violation. No, the White House wants to force Columbia to pursue its educational and scholarly mission differently. This is not something the government should demand of a private university.
You can read the whole thing here.
