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On Wednesday, Columbia University and the Trump administration announced that they had agreed to a deal to restore federal hundreds of millions of dollars in federal research funding to the school in exchange for a number of concessions by Columbia, including $200 million to settle discrimination allegations. The Trump administration’s targeting of Columbia and 60 other universities has been framed by the White House and its allies as an effort to combat campus antisemitism, though in reality it’s part of a larger culture war against higher education.

The deal ends, for now, civil-rights investigations into antisemitism at the school following a number of high-profile anti-Israel demonstrations on campus over the war in Gaza. Columbia also agreed to codify a number of policy changes it had already made to address criticism of how it handled the protests. The 22-page agreement is also focused on other reforms long sought by conservatives, including provisions to end DEI programs at the school, protecting white and Asian students from so-called discrimination, agreeing to the Trump administration’s anti-trans interpretation of Title IX regarding women’s sports, and greater scrutiny of foreign students and restrictions. (NPR has a full rundown here.) The deal also establishes an independent “resolution monitor” for ensuring the university’s compliance.

The Trump administration is celebrating the agreement as a bellwether victory, while acting Columbia president Claire Shipman has characterized it more as a necessary concession that ends the conflict without forfeiting the school’s autonomy. Some experts and observers think Columbia probably got the best deal it could considering how little leverage it had. Many others consider the agreement not just a capitulation to Trump but one that sets several dangerous precedents for other universities. Below is a look at some of the most compelling criticism that’s come out since the deal was announced.

The government sees the Columbia deal as a blueprint — and Harvard is next

The administration is making it very clear that it will pressure other schools to cut deals like Columbia’s. And President Donald Trump himself has framed the agreement as a way to strong-arm Harvard, which, unlike Columbia, is defending itself against the administration’s multi-front attacks in federal court. And it wants a lot more money from Harvard in that potential settlement, as The Wall Street Journal reports:

The administration is in talks with several universities, including Cornell, Duke, Northwestern and Brown, the person familiar with the talks said, though it sees striking a deal with Harvard, America’s oldest university, as a key target. The White House hopes to extract hundreds of millions of dollars from Harvard, in a deal that would make Columbia’s $200 million payment look like peanuts, the person said.

The Washington Post has more:

A lobbyist close to the administration, speaking on the ,condition of anonymity said that, for the White House, the Columbia deal is the first important building block. “They’re going to ramp up their civil rights investigations and it’s not hard on college campuses to find instances of antisemitism,” he said. “They will then say, ‘O.K., you’ve got a problem.’ And then they will pressure them to sign an agreement much like Columbia’s.

“Now they’re going to use this template and go and say, ‘We’ve got a complaint from three Jewish students … Do you want a full investigation and humiliate you or do you want to reach this agreement?’”

Columbia lost too much — for itself and others

At The Atlantic, Franklin Foer argues that that while he agrees some of the reforms it agreed to were necessary, Columbia didn’t just sacrifice its own freedom but paved a perilous path for other universities, too:

[I]n the government’s ideological intervention into campus culture, a precedent has been set: What Secretary of Education Linda McMahon calls “a roadmap for elite universities” is a threat to the free exchange of ideas on campuses across the country, and abuse of that map is painfully easy to contemplate. …

The university has already agreed, under duress, to alter the ideological contours of its faculty. And even if I happen to support those particular changes, I can’t ignore the principle they establish. The tactics now being used to achieve outcomes I favor can just as easily be turned toward results I find abhorrent. That’s the nature of the American culture war. One side unearths a novel tactic; the other side applies it as retribution.

The Trump administration is likely to take the Columbia template and press it more aggressively upon other schools. It will transpose this victory into other contexts, using it to pursue broader purges of its perceived enemies. There’s no need to speculate about hidden motives: Both Donald Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance have been explicit about their desire to diminish the power and prestige of the American university, to strip it of its ability to inculcate ideas they find abhorrent. They are trying to tame a profession they regard as a cultural adversary. “This is a monumental victory for conservatives who wanted to do things on these elite campuses for a long time because we had such far-left-leaning professors,” McMahon told Fox Business.

Universities are desperately in need of reform. The paucity of intellectual pluralism in the academy undermines the integrity of the pursuit of knowledge. Failure of university trustees and presidents to make these changes on their own terms has invited government intervention. But the government has a new toehold in faculty rooms, not just at Columbia but at every private university in the country.

Regulation by extortion is a dangerous new precedent

At Balkinization, Columbia constitutional law professor David Pozen notes that the deal validates the Trump administration’s extortion tactics:

[L]et’s not forget that the agreement grows out of the executive branch’s first-ever cutoff of congressionally appropriated funds to a college, so as to punish that college and impel it to adopt sweeping reforms, without any pretense of following the congressionally mandated procedures. Lawyers have been debating the exact circumstances under which the executive branch may freeze particular grants and contracts to particular institutions. Yet as far as I’m aware, no lawyer outside the government has even attempted to defend the legality of the initial cutoff that brought Columbia to its knees and, thereafter, to the “negotiating” table. In short, the agreement gives legal form to an extortion scheme — the first of its kind! — that defies the relevant statutes as well as the constitutional separation of powers and the First Amendment.

He warns that the most consequential part of the agreement may be how “regulation by dealis coming to higher education”:

Without any clear grounding in the civil-rights statutes themselves, the Trump administration has begun to effect another, more dramatic regulatory shift — away from guidance documents addressed to the entire sector, and toward bespoke deals foisted upon individual institutions after summarily terminating or threatening their federal funds. It is important to emphasize that this shift does not reflect an increased interest in enforcement, leading to an increased number of consent decrees or out-of-court settlements. These deals will not be the product of thorough investigations or judicial findings of misconduct by the colleges in question. No established legal process was followed for the Columbia agreement; no genuine legal dispute was resolved. The dealmaking isthe main regulatory event from start to finish.

This emerging model raises profound concerns not just for universities’ budgets and independence but also for the rule of law. By relying on “particular transactions to effectuate government policy,” scholars have observed in other contexts, regulation by deal bypasses all of the “notice, comments, [and] due process standards that we ordinarily expect from public administration.” While guidance documents may share some of these deficits, they are not actually binding on regulated parties and at least aspire to uphold bedrock legal principles of “generality, clarity, publicity, stability, and prospectivity.” The style of regulation reflected in the Columbia deal is at once far more coercive and far more arbitrary—opaque in development, unpredictable in application, deeply susceptible to personalism and corruption, and only contingently connected to the laws Congress has written.

Taken together, Pozen writes, the agreement is an authoritarian victory over academic freedom:

Authoritarianism feeds on manufactured emergencies and hardball tactics that give the executive leverage to attack political opponents and compel obedience. Basic research, on the other hand, thrives under stable institutional frameworks, reliable funding commitments, and a climate of free inquiry. Deals like Columbia’s enhance the power of presidents and their allies within targeted universities; sideline Congress, the courts, and most faculty; and sow fear and uncertainty throughout civil society. They are fundamentally inconsistent with the logic of academic freedom.

The Columbia deal is a good model for other universities, including Harvard

That’s what former Harvard president Larry Summers thinks. When the news of the agreement came out, he tweeted that “this may be the best day higher education has had in the last year.” He later elaborated in an interview with the Chronicle for Higher Education:

A deal in which the government will not be involved in faculty appointments or setting curriculum or choosing particular students, but will expect that the law be complied with; a deal that respects academic freedom and that restores normality; a deal that is heavily based on things that are good to do, anyway — correcting antisemitism, moving towards ideological diversity, and the celebration of excellence — I believe that is a desirable thing.

Summers also stipulated that considering the immense power the Trump administration has to mess with universities, negotiated agreements may be the only feasible way forward:

I wish that the administration was not on the trajectory that it is. I deplore the vast majority of its methods, and I deplore a number of its objectives. If it were feasible to file an appeal and three months later have the problems all go away because of a court order, that might be an attractive strategy. But I would be very surprised if, given the range of tools that were available to the government, given the climate of the current judiciary, that is a feasible strategy. The ultimate mission of a university has to be education and carrying out research, and those objectives are best served by being prepared to explore whether a negotiated agreement is possible.

Any deal is a mistake because the Trump administration cannot be trusted

In a New York Times op-ed, Columbia professor Suresh Naidu writes that if Columbia or any other university thinks agreeing to a deal with the Trump administration will protect them, they are fools:

The federal government, and this administration, is simply too powerful and too arbitrary to be credibly bargained with. Do we really think this arrangement, however destructive of academic autonomy it is, will prevent the Trump administration from stopping the money again? Anyone who thinks the administration will mutely walk away after the ink is dry needs to look at both the past behavior of autocratic regimes in general and this administration’s in particular.

This deal won’t end Columbia’s torture. Whatever onerous terms the school has agreed to will be deemed to have been broken in the face of a campus protest, an edgy syllabus, a leaked classroom discussion or even an acerbic student opinion piece. New civil rights violations will be imagined, new vistas of anti-Americanism on campus will be discovered, and the attacks will continue.

It’s a setback for campus free speech

Some libertarians aren’t pleased, either. Will Creeley, the legal director of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which has been at the forefront of the campus free-speech fight, told Inside Higher Ed that the agreement endangers First Amendment rights at schools:

The reforms themselves require Columbia students to commit to laudable values like free inquiry and open debate, but demanding students commit to vague goals like ‘equality and respect’ leaves far too much room for abuse, just like the civility oaths, DEI statements, and other types of compelled speech FIRE has long opposed.

Higher ed can’t win this fight

Former Macalester College president Brian Rosenberg offers a reality check in an op-ed at The Chronicle of Higher Education:

The Columbia story is compelling not because it is an outlier or because Columbia is uniquely compliant, but because it is so clearly an embodiment of the response across a wide range of institutions, organizations, and businesses to the ongoing actions of a government that has little tolerance for dissent and an insatiable appetite for power.

The story of Columbia is the current story of America and, more broadly, the story of authoritarian takeover. Confronted by the overwhelming power of the government — in our case, all three branches of government — most opt for compliance over resistance, for protection or profit over risk. …

Compared to the actions — or, more often, inaction — of most American industries and institutions, Columbia’s attempt to preserve at least some of its research activity and some of its autonomy appears relatively benign. I wish that from the start the university had made different decisions, but I prefer to direct my anger chiefly at those who are enabling and profiting from the current chaos and criminality.

The painful message delivered by the humbling of wealthy and prestigious universities is that higher education, on its own, has few tools with which to push back against governmental overreach. There are, as always, “the courts,” but that road leads ultimately to a Supreme Court that seems quite comfortable with our slouch toward autocracy. For now, for most institutions, the best option seems to be to try to avoid notice, to make only the least damaging concessions, and to hope, like Mr. Micawber, that “something will turn up.” As the impact of recent legislation and of efforts to undermine accreditation becomes more widespread, this option will become more challenging for more colleges.

Get ready for campus censorship

Here’s how the New York Times summarized the various provisions included to combat antisemitism:

[Columbia] agrees to abide by pledges it made in March to the Trump administration to reduce antisemitism and rein in protests on campus. Among them: Columbia will keep its new senior vice provost, who will review Columbia’s regional studies programs, including their leadership and curricula, starting with the university’s Middle East programs. Columbia will appoint new faculty who have affiliations with the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies and other departments. The university will maintain restrictions that bar students from protesting inside academic buildings, and will require that demonstrators wearing masks show identification when asked. Columbia also agrees to employ some public safety officers with arrest powers. To further support Jewish life on campus, Columbia will add an administrator to serve as a liaison to students experiencing antisemitism issues.

It will lead to censorship, warns University of Pennsylvania education professor Jonathan Zimmerman:

Our entire model of learning is based on the unfettered expression of ideas. Once you start telling people what they can and cannot say, it’s game over. And it’s even worse when we let the government in on the game. That’s what Columbia did by agreeing to a monitor who will oversee the deal and report on the university’s “progress” every six months.

How will the monitor interpret charges of genocide against Israel? If a professor compares Gaza to the Holocaust, and Columbia fails to take action against her, will the monitor declare that the university broke the agreement? And what kind of action will be enough? If Columbia requires the offending professor to undergo mandatory training — an appalling prospect in its own right — might the monitor say it should have suspended or fired her instead? …

It is true that the agreement declares that nothing in it “shall be construed as giving the United States authority to dictate … the content of academic speech.” That’s “our North Star,” the acting president, Claire Shipman, wrote in a letter to the university community, “and we did not waver from it.”

Please. We didn’t just waver from it; we threw it under the bus.

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