The Trump administration plans to place Columbia University as part of a consent decree, according to a Wall Street Journal report, a dramatic escalation of the federal government’s repression against the Ivy League institution.
The University has already accepted a series of changes required by the administration as a prerequisite for the restoration of $ 400 million in federal subsidies and contracts that the government suspended last month for allegations that the school did not protected students from anti -Semitism on campus.
A consent decree – a binding agreement approved by a federal judge – would be an extraordinary decision of the Trump administration, which threatened government funding as a means of forcing colleges and universities to comply with Donald Trump’s political objectives on a range of issues, campus protests to transgender women in sport and diversity and inclusion initiatives.
As a party to the consent decree, Columbia should agree to enter it – and the newspaper report indicates that it is not clear if such a plan has been discussed by the University’s board of directors.
In a statement to The Guardian, the university did not directly deal with the report. “The university remains in active dialogue with the federal government to restore its critical research funding,” said a spokesperson.
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According to the journal, the proposal comes from the anti -Semitism of the administration, composed in part of the lawyers of the Ministry of Justice, which would have expressed the skepticism that Columbia acted in “good faith”. If Columbia resists, the Ministry of Justice should present its case for the agreement before the court, a process which could flow for years, the university risks its federal funding in the meantime.
The Republicans and the Trump administration sought to make an example of the University of Columbia, which was at the center of a student protest movement on the War of Israel in Gaza which broke out on campuses across the country. Last month, the federal immigration authorities arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate of Columbia and an eminent Palestinian militant who participated in campus demonstrations. He remains in detention.
During a meeting of the cabinet Thursday, Trump pressed his education secretary, Linda McMahon, to develop the efforts of the ministry to retain federal funds from universities that did not behave. “
The president asked McMahon if she retained the funding of Columbia. She hosted her head and appointed other schools, noting that the administration had frozen nearly $ 1 billion in cornell funding.
“We receive calls from the presidents of universities who really want to enter and sit and have discussions,” she said. “We are studying them, but in the meantime, we retain money from the grant fund.”
