Columbia University faces federal deadline to make changes or lose $400 million in funds

By Doug Williams, Ali Bauman

Click here for updates on this story

    NEW YORK CITY, New York (WCBS) — The Trump administration’s deadline to Columbia University to make changes is set for the end of the day Thursday.

If Columbia doesn’t make the changes requested by the Trump administration, $400 million in federal funding will be withheld.

Last week, Trump administration officials sent a letter to Columbia’s interim president Katrina Armstrong demanding that the university make changes with “immediate compliance” or the funding would be withheld. Demands range from inside the classroom and out; they include a mask ban on campus, reforming undergraduate admissions, and a third-party review of their Middle East, South Asian and African studies curriculum.

The Trump administration included in the letter that Columbia “failed to protect students and faculty from antisemitic violence and harassment,” and made clear that its involvement in university practices doesn’t end with compliance to the initial list of demands.

“We hope to open a conversation about immediate and long-term structural reforms,” Trump administration officials wrote.

Armstrong wrote a letter to the Columbia community Wednesday saying the university will “engage in constructive dialogue with our federal regulators,” but also added the university “will not waver from our principles and the values of academic freedom and free expression that have guided this institution for the last 270 years.”

“If we’re willing to treat academic instruction with creating a hostile environment, then I don’t know what comes next,” law professor Derek Black of the University of South Carolina said. “The federal government is prohibited, technically speaking, from interfering with the curriculum of K-12 and higher education. All they can do is can prohibit discrimination.”

“This is now about President Trump’s administration attempting to control how a private university runs its academic departments,” First Amendment attorney Ian Rosenberg said. “It is nothing more than a takeover attempt of the American university system by the Trump administration.”

The Trump administration has not said if it would reinstate the initial $400 million if Columbia complies or if they would cancel even more funding if they don’t, but other universities are sure to be watching. Dr. Ian Lipkin is the director of Columbia University’s Center for Solutions for ME/CFS, where he studies the debilitating chronic illness affecting about 3 million Americans.

“We really felt as though we were on the cusp of being able to come up with solutions for these people,” Lipkin said.

That was until earlier this month, when Lipkin says the federal government pulled millions of dollars in grants for their research as part of the $400 million that the Trump administration told Columbia it was canceling.

“I’ve devoted my whole life to this. I’ve never encountered anything like this,” Lipkin said.

He added, “The work has been terminated just shy of being able to come up with proposals for clinical trials that might improve their quality of life.”

“Does taking this funding away from the research that you’re doing, the work that you’re doing address handling antisemitism on campus?” CBS News New York’s Ali Bauman asked.

“They’re disconnected,” Lipkin said.

Lipkin says he’s now unsure what the future holds.

“I don’t really have any sense of what the university could do. And I don’t know what the Trump administration is going to do. All I know is we have to somehow persevere,” he said. Columbia students told CBS News New York they feel used.

“Trump is using us as a tool,” one student said.

“I do think he’s weaponizing antisemitism and wants to use it to consolidate more power, and go after people that he perceives as leftist, like this ‘woke’ culture that has taken over academia,” student Bettino Weisser said.

“The issue isn’t just one single university,” another student said. “Of course, we’re the epicenter of everything. But that grew into a global movement.”

Please note: This content carries a strict local market embargo. If you share the same market as the contributor of this article, you may not use it on any platform.