Despite Columbia’s deal with Trump, there is no guarantee that he won’t make new demands tomorrow.View this email in your browser [link removed]

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**JULY 25, 2025**

**On the

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****Kuttner on TAP****

**Columbia Caves; Is Harvard Next?**

**Despite Columbia’s deal with Trump, there is no guarantee that he won’t make new demands tomorrow.**

**Columbia’s capitulation** [link removed] to the Trump administration’s $221 million extortion demand now puts pressure on Harvard and other universities to do the same. Columbia, which has played a weak hand badly at every stage of this entire saga, had already conceded the substance of many of the administration’s bogus criticisms of alleged antisemitism and DEI excesses. The $200 million fine (plus another $21 million to settle discrimination claims) is effectively a further admission of wrongdoing, based on criteria that the administration made up out of whole cloth.

Rather than defending academic freedom and taking Trump to court for illegally freezing federal grants and contracts, Columbia’s lawyers, trustees, and president made a crass cost-benefit calculation. The administration was threatening to freeze or cancel all $1.3 billion of Columbia’s federal funding, **up from $400 million** [link removed] in its initial freeze order of March 7. For the bargain price of $221 million, Columbia could keep $1.3 billion. And the terms of the agreement are less onerous than some of the original administration demands. Such a deal!

But while the agreement does explicitly resolve “pending claims” by the administration against Columbia, there is nothing to prevent Trump from making new claims based on new supposed incidents or findings, and make new extortionate demands tomorrow morning. As we know too well from Trump’s tariff deals, appeasement only invites new conditions. He doesn’t stay bought. **According to**

**The Wall Street Journal** [link removed], Trump sees the Columbia deal as a template, and is in talks for a similar deal with several universities, **including Cornell** [link removed], Duke, **Northwestern** [link removed], and Brown.

Meanwhile, at Harvard, university president Alan Garber finds himself in the role of reluctant hero, and the Columbia deal ups the pressure on Garber to settle. Larry Summers, a reliable wind sock for bad advice, called the Columbia deal “**the best day higher education has had in the last year** [link removed].” Similar pressure on Garber will come from some trustees and donors.

The stakes for Harvard are immense. The Trump administration has canceled or suspended some $2.7 billion in federal grants and contracts, devastating biomedical research. Trump has also weaponized against Harvard every bit of federal leverage he can think of, from visas for foreign students and visitors to Harvard’s tax-exempt status and more. At the center of the campaign against Harvard and other universities is alleged antisemitism and supposed excesses of DEI.

Until April, Harvard was frantically looking for common ground with Trump. Then on April 11, **a letter arrived** [link removed] making such extreme demands for authority over Harvard’s internal affairs that Garber and Harvard trustees decided instead to take the administration to court.

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What’s awkward for Garber, should he be inclined to pursue a Columbia-type deal, is that Harvard has been winning in court. **On Monday, in a Boston courtroom** [link removed], U.S. District Court Judge Allison D. Burroughs was plainly not buying the administration’s arguments.

Harvard took the position in its suit that the suspension of its grants and contracts was based on animus against Harvard, in violation of both procedural requirements and the First Amendment. The sole administration lawyer present at Monday’s hearing, Michael Velchik, argued that this was simply a contracts case, and the government had the right to cancel or revise the terms of any contract at its pleasure.

However, as the judge was quick to note, that premise violated the administration’s original rationale for punishing Harvard. The demands in the April letter for internal control and the leverage of suspended grants and contracts, which prompted Harvard’s suit, included “**viewpoint diversity** [link removed]” and outside scrutiny of “those programs and departments that most fuel antisemitic harassment or reflect ideological capture.” The government also sought to alter criteria for faculty’s influence over governance, and new hiring and admissions policies.

Judge Burroughs was plainly skeptical of the disconnect between the administration’s stated concerns and its remedy of cutting federal funding. “Let’s assume for the sake of argument that Harvard has not covered itself in glory on the topic of antisemitism,” she said. “You’re not taking away grants from labs that have been antisemitic.”

It would be one thing if NIH decided not to renew grants or contracts because its own research priorities had changed; say, more money for childhood cancer, less for Alzheimer’s. It’s something else entirely to cut off grants because Trump is blackballing Harvard.

The judge is expected to rule within a few weeks. It’s unlikely that Garber would settle before the ruling, though talks between Harvard’s lawyers and administrtation officials are continuing. This case and others will eventually find their way to the Supreme Court.

Anurima Bhargava, a former senior Justice Department civil rights lawyer, is serving as counsel to the Harvard alumni who have submitted an amicus brief supporting the lawsuit and who want the university to resist making a deal. “If the Supreme Court were to decide that the administration can cancel any contract, without regard to the clear statutory requirements or the Constitution,” she told me, “that is a monumentally crazy moment.”

**~ ROBERT KUTTNER**

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