Columbia University is nearing a deal with the Trump administration that would require the school to compensate the victims of unlawful discrimination and increase the transparency of its hiring and admissions process, according to six people familiar with the negotiations.
The deal, which the university’s board of trustees met to discuss on Sunday, does not include some of the more onerous provisions initially demanded by the White House, such as a consent decree and reforms to Columbia’s governance structure.
The draft agreement would see the university recoup most of the $400 million in grants and contracts that were frozen by the White House’s task force on anti-Semitism in March. In exchange, Columbia would adopt a number of measures designed to combat race discrimination and anti-Semitism.
A senior White House official told the Washington Free Beacon that the deal would “solidify reporting obligations related to foreign gifts”—such as the millions in undisclosed funding that Columbia has received from Qatar, whose patronage of universities has been linked to anti-Semitic incidents on campus—and that the “victims of civil rights abuses will be compensated” by the university. The amount of compensation and the identities of the recipients are not known.
The deal will also force Columbia to publicly disclose hiring and admissions data to ensure that the school is complying with the Supreme Court’s ban on affirmative action, other sources briefed on the negotiations said. Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, will be involved in supervising compliance.
The deal would be the first of its kind between the federal government and an elite university and could provide proof of concept for other institutions, including Harvard and Cornell, that have been negotiating with the White House in an attempt to restore billions in federal funds.
The White House is characterizing the deal as a major victory, with the senior White House official describing it as a “historic agreement that will make massive changes throughout higher education.”
But some of the concessions the government has made in the course of the negotiations are prompting concerns from administration allies keen to see the president follow through on his commitment to crack down on campus anti-Semitism. They say the deal lacks the sort of systemic reforms required to fundamentally transform the school’s culture, which became a national symbol of the mayhem that played out on university campuses in the wake of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
Columbia was forced to cancel in-person classes and its graduation ceremony in the spring of 2024 after student activists set up an encampment in the center of campus and stormed a university building. Clearing them ultimately required the intervention of the NYPD.
The current draft of the deal does not include the consent decree previously proposed by the White House. Nor does it include reforms to the University Senate, a governing body that includes the school’s disciplinary committee and has been criticized for its failure to sanction some of the radical activists who disrupted the campus over the past two years. The White House also dropped demands that a presidential search committee to replace interim university president Claire Shipman include politically diverse members.
“The Jewish community at Columbia wants a deal, but it should be a good, strong deal that leads to fundamental transformation and culture change at Columbia,” said a source close to the university, who pressed the administration to push for “demonstrable reform on discipline, governance and leadership that puts rigorous scholarship first instead of the woke DEI culture that leads to antisemitism and civil rights violations.”
The deal has also sparked debate internally, with some administration officials arguing it will not force change on campus. “Columbia is unlikely to be able to uphold even the quite lenient terms of the agreement because Columbia doesn’t actually want to change—they just want their federal grants turned back on and are willing to do a lot of fancy footwork to make it happen,” a senior administration official told the Free Beacon.
Advocates of the deal, however, note that a consent decree would have left enforcement in the hands of the Southern District of New York, a left-leaning district court that employs a disproportionate number of Columbia graduates as judges and clerks.
Those factors, along with the court’s massive caseload, made it a poor venue to ensure compliance, the senior White House official argued. SDNY also includes a number of judges who have overseen verdicts against Donald Trump, including Lewis Kaplan, the judge who presided over the defamation and battery case brought by E. Jean Caroll.
The negotiations with Columbia have been led by Trump adviser Stephen Miller’s team at the White House rather than by the interagency task force on anti-Semitism, with Deputy Assistant to the President May Mailman running point. Jay Lefkowitz and Matt Owen of Kirkland and Ellis are representing Columbia. Lefkowitz served in the George W. Bush administration and Owen is a former law clerk to Supreme Court justices Antonin Scalia and Neil Gorsuch with bonafides in the conservative movement.
The deal would also lock in some provisions that Columbia agreed to in March as a precondition for negotiating with the government. Those provisions include tightening rules around campus protests and putting the school’s Middle Eastern Studies department into receivership.
It is not clear whether President Trump has reviewed the deal or when Columbia trustees will vote on it.
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