Trump's College Crackdown

Summary

Podcast Summary: "Trump's College Crackdown" – The Journal

Release Date: March 24, 2025

Hosts: Ryan Knudsen & Doug Belkin
Produced by: The Wall Street Journal & Gimlet, in collaboration with Spotify

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1. Introduction to the Conflict

In the episode titled "Trump's College Crackdown," hosts Ryan Knudsen and Doug Belkin delve into a significant confrontation between the Trump administration and Columbia University. The conflict centers around federal funding pressures imposed on the prestigious institution to curb student protests or face the revocation of hundreds of millions in federal support.

Notable Quote:

Ryan Knudsen [00:05]: "Earlier this month, the Trump administration gave Columbia University an ultimatum to get tougher on student protests or else lose hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding."

2. The Federal Government's Leverage

Doug Belkin explains the extent of the federal government's influence over research universities like Columbia, highlighting their dependency on federal funds.

Notable Quote:

Doug Belkin [00:18]: "Universities are, especially a research university like Columbia, dependent on the federal government. The federal government has the capacity to shut the tap off so the school can operate without the federal government. And that gave the federal government huge leverage."

3. The Genesis of the Conflict at Columbia

The episode traces the origins of the dispute to student protests sparked by Israel's conflict with Hamas and Gaza. These protests escalated to the point of occupying university buildings, demanding a ceasefire and divestment from companies associated with Israel.

Notable Quotes:

Ryan Knudsen [02:43]: "Columbia University got into Trump's crosshairs last year when protests broke out over Israel's war against Hamas and Gaza."

Doug Belkin [03:08]: "You've got all of this faculty that very much believe that protest is critical. The ability to speak freely is critical."

4. Escalation and Criticism of University Leadership

As protests intensified, so did criticism of Columbia's leadership, notably from Donald Trump, who accused the university of failing to manage antisemitism on campus effectively.

Notable Quote:

Donald Trump [04:04]: "Columbia University was a great. What's been, you know, badly damaged, I think, reputationally, but the person that heads it up, a woman, she waited so long, she was so weak, she was so afraid."

5. Trump's Ultimatum and Demands

Upon assuming office, President Trump began withholding federal funds from universities that did not comply with his demands to moderate protests and address antisemitism. Columbia was the first target, receiving a list of nine specific demands aimed at curtailing student activism.

Notable Quotes:

Donald Trump [04:30]: "My first week back in the Oval Office, my administration will inform every college president that if you do not end anti Semitic propaganda, they will lose their accreditation and federal taxpayers support."

Doug Belkin [05:52]: "What the Trump administration would like to see is time, place, and manner restrictions so that if you want to protest something political, you keep it out of the classroom."

6. Columbia's Compliance and Strategic Decision

After a heated internal debate, Columbia chose to comply with Trump's demands, prioritizing the preservation of federal funding over asserting academic autonomy. This decision has sparked a broader debate about the future of academic freedom in American higher education.

Notable Quotes:

Doug Belkin [01:22]: "It's like two tectonic plates slamming into each other. And it has the potential to change higher education significantly going forward."

Ryan Knudsen [07:58]: "Which departments at Columbia stood to hurt the most from these funding cuts?"

7. Specific Demands and Institutional Changes

The Trump administration's demands included prohibiting masks during protests, enhancing campus police powers, defining antisemitism formally, and placing the Middle Eastern Studies department under receivership. Columbia's agreement entailed significant changes to its governance and disciplinary processes.

Notable Quotes:

Doug Belkin [06:03]: "He demanded that the Middle Eastern studies department be put into receivership, which essentially really was the big sticking point with this issue."

Doug Belkin [11:14]: "So kids will be detained if they're wearing the mask. If they're asked for ID, they have to give it to them."

8. Financial Implications and Endowment Constraints

Despite Columbia's substantial endowment, relying on it to offset the loss of federal funds was not feasible. Endowment funds are typically restricted for specific purposes, and rapid withdrawal could jeopardize the university's long-term financial health.

Notable Quotes:

Doug Belkin [12:50]: "The federal funding probably accounts for around a quarter of their operating budget."

Doug Belkin [13:27]: "Even an endowment with billions of dollars in it, you take $400 million out of it every year, and it's going to disappear pretty quick."

9. Broader Impact on Higher Education

The compliance of Columbia signals a potential precedent for other universities. With the Trump administration actively investigating multiple institutions, the episode underscores a possible erosion of academic freedom across the nation's higher education landscape.

Notable Quotes:

Doug Belkin [15:15]: "Yeah, so this has drawn a huge amount of attention around the country because people are saying if Columbia fails here to stand up for academic freedom, he's going to roll right through the next school and the next school and the next school."

Doug Belkin [16:04]: "This fight almost certainly will change more than just Columbia."

10. Declining Campus Activism and Chilling Effects

The administration's aggressive stance has led to a palpable chilling effect on campus activism. Students, especially those on visas, are now more hesitant to engage in protests due to fears of retaliation and deportation.

Notable Quotes:

Doug Belkin [16:32]: "There's a chill on campuses. We were down in Florida talking to kids about this last week. There is an incentive to be quiet, to stay home, to sit in your hands, to not raise your voice."

11. Future Negotiations and Uncertainty

While Columbia has complied with the initial demands, the reinstatement of federal funds remains uncertain. Ongoing negotiations and the administration's intention to possibly extract more concessions add to the tension and unpredictability surrounding the situation.

Notable Quotes:

Doug Belkin [14:46]: "Donald Trump: We're working on it."

Doug Belkin [14:22]: "This was a precursor to the negotiations that will lead to the funding."

12. Conclusion and Looking Ahead

The episode concludes by emphasizing the long-term ramifications of this conflict on academic institutions nationwide. The potential for further federal interventions looms, raising critical questions about the balance between governmental oversight and academic independence.

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Additional Reporting: Sarah Randazzo and Liz Esli White contributed to this episode.

Listeners are encouraged to stay informed as this situation continues to develop, potentially reshaping the landscape of higher education in the United States.

Transcript

[Ryan Knudsen]

Earlier this month, the Trump administration gave Columbia University an get tougher on student protests or else lose hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding.

[Doug Belkin]

Universities are, especially a research university like Columbia is dependent on the federal government. The federal government has the capacity to shut the tap off so the school can operate without the federal government. And that gave the federal government huge leverage.

[Ryan Knudsen]

That's our colleague Doug Belkin, who covers higher education. Trump's ultimatum put the storied university between a rock and a hard place and kicked off a big debate inside the school.

[Doug Belkin]

If we allow the president to dictate how we work inside the campus, we give away academic freedom. And they're really anxious to protect that. So that's why this choice was so difficult to make, because you're pitting gold versus principal.

[Ryan Knudsen]

But on Friday, after an intense internal debate, Colombia gave in and agreed to make the changes Trump wanted. How big of a deal could this showdown be for America's colleges and universities?

[Doug Belkin]

It's like two tectonic plates slamming into each other. And it has the potential to change higher education significantly going forward. We are absolutely in a generational shift. I think we're probably in a once in 50 year shift. This decision will resonate for a long time to come.

[Ryan Knudsen]

Welcome to the Journal, our show about money, business and power. I'm Ryan KNUDSEN. It's Monday, March 24th. Coming up on the show, why Columbia gave in to Trump.

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[Ryan Knudsen]

Columbia University got into Trump's crosshairs last year when protests broke out over Israel's war against Hamas and Gaza. Students camped out for weeks. At one point, some of them occupied a school building. They were calling for a ceasefire and for the university to divest from companies doing business with Israel. And even some faculty joined in.

[Doug Belkin]

You've got all of this faculty that very much believe that protest is critical. The ability to speak freely is critical. They believe that these kids are doing the right thing. Some of them are teaching that this is part of how the world needs to be a better place.

[Ryan Knudsen]

But the protests made other students uneasy.

[Doug Belkin]

And a lot of Jewish students begin to feel like they're not safe. They're being screamed at, they don't want to go to class. At one point, a rabbi from Hillel says, don't come back to the campus. We can't protect you. It gets pretty ugly.

[Ryan Knudsen]

The school's leadership came under intense criticism, especially from conservatives like then candidate Donald Trump, who said Columbia didn't do enough to rein in the protests and crack down on antisemitism.

[Donald Trump]

Columbia University was a great. What's been, you know, badly damaged, I think, reputationally, but the person that heads it up, a woman, she waited so long, she was so weak, she was so afraid.

[Ryan Knudsen]

Colombia's President Manouch Shafiq ended up resigning. And Trump seized on the protests as evidence that college campuses are too left leaning.

[Doug Belkin]

So he campaigns on this notion that elite universities have been taken over by Marxist left wing ideologues. And he is going to stop it. And the way he's going to do it is he's going to cancel the federal funds.

[Donald Trump]

My first week back in the Oval Office, my administration will inform every college president that if you do not end anti Semitic propaganda, they will lose their accreditation and federal taxpayers support.

[Ryan Knudsen]

Now that Trump's in office, he's putting his money where his mouth is. And he started withholding federal funding at colleges across the country, including Columbia.

[Doug Belkin]

And so he says, I'm canceling $400 million in contracts and grants, and it's connected to your inability to rein in antisemitism on campus.

[Ryan Knudsen]

So it seems like he's sort of following through on a campaign promise to kind of smack down colleges a little bit and change their culture.

[Doug Belkin]

That's exactly what he's doing. He has identified an institution in this country that a lot of Republicans are not happy with, and he has leveraged that to his political benefit.

[Ryan Knudsen]

On March 13, Trump sent Columbia a list of nine specific demands. If the school complied, it might be able to get its $400 million back. The demands included Columbia disciplining the students that had occupied that building during the protests, banning students from wearing masks to conceal their identity, and giving campus police the power to arrest, arrest and detain students.

[Doug Belkin]

What the Trump administration would like to see is time, place and manner restrictions so that if you want to protest something political, you keep it out of the classroom. You let kids who want to go to school go to school and study.

[Ryan Knudsen]

The Trump administration also wanted Columbia to adopt a formal definition of antisemitism and take disciplinary power away from a judicial board and give it to the Office of The university president. And there was another demand that made a lot of faculty angry.

[Doug Belkin]

He demanded that the Middle Eastern studies department be put into receivership, which essentially really was the big sticking point with this issue. And it really meant that they reign in some of the most far left professors in that department.

[Ryan Knudsen]

What does that mean, the receivership?

[Doug Belkin]

So that's when they replace. Usually if there's a department that's infighting and just dysfunctional and can't make decisions and is just at each other, they'll bring a chair in from another department to oversee that department. And that doesn't feel good for the department because they feel like we're the experts in philosophy and literature, we should be making decisions about what we teach and how we teach it. But if the problems are so hot they'll put it into receivership.

[Ryan Knudsen]

How is it even possible that the President of the United States can just unilaterally cancel grants and contracts? On what grounds can he even make demands like this?

[Doug Belkin]

Well, that question came to lawyers and they said he doesn't have the grounds, that he's skipping due process and that Colombia should fight him in court and they would win. Do you want to take on the president? Maybe you'll win, maybe you won't. This is what he's been doing with other issues. Right. I mean, this was happening with Mahmoud.

[Ryan Knudsen]

Khalil, right, The Columbia student who was acting as a spokesman to some of those protests, who's now facing deportation.

[Doug Belkin]

Right. It's a very aggressive move, and it's not entirely clear what would have happened if the school did fight him in court, but they opted not to.

[Ryan Knudsen]

Which departments at Columbia stood to hurt the most from these funding cuts?

[Doug Belkin]

It was felt most deeply in the medical school. And of course, the, the irony there is that most of the researchers in the medical school are not involved in the protests. First of all, they're in a different campus. Second of all, they're just not as connected to the politics that are driving the protests on the campus. So they're a little bit removed from all this stuff, but they're the ones who are bearing the brunt of the cuts. So this decision goes to the president, it goes to the board of trustees, and the board is split how they're going to deal with this. They have different leanings, some folks. Their priority is protecting Jewish students. They see antisemitism on campus. They know students who've complained to them. They're not happy. They want it shut down. They don't believe that the schools move fast or far enough on the other hand are board members who say this is if we give away academic freedom, if we allow the President to dictate personnel and policy and to some extent curriculum, then you give up a lot.

[Ryan Knudsen]

What the impact of their decision might be. That's after the break.

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[Ryan Knudsen]

Last week Columbia outlined its decision regarding Trump's demands in a memo to his administration, and for the most part it gave Trump what he was asking for. The first thing is that students will no longer be allowed to use masks to conceal their face during an unauthorized protest.

[Doug Belkin]

So kids will be detained if they're wearing the mask. If they're asked for id, they have to give it to them. One of the things that they actually the Trump team asked for was discipline of the students who had taken over Hamilton hall last spring. And after almost a year the Senate faculty actually announced that they were disciplining them and expelling a number of students and suspending a number of other students so they were doing that already.

[Ryan Knudsen]

The school also agreed to give campus officers more power.

[Doug Belkin]

So everything is a Backstory. In the 1968 protests at Columbia, a lot of police came in and roughed up a lot of students. And so the campus law enforcement at Columbia don't have the power to arrest kids or to detain kids. And so these protests, they have to call in NYPD to break them up. There's now going to be 36 officers with the power to arrest and detain students. So it's going to expedite discipline on campus very quickly. So that's one obvious thing that'll be clear to kids pretty quickly. If the protests start again, they'll be arrested by Columbia police.

[Ryan Knudsen]

And then there's the receivership. Columbia agreed to bring in a new administrator to oversee the department that includes Middle Eastern Studies as well as the center for Palestine Studies. Columbia said it worked hard to address legitimate concerns from both inside and outside the university, and that it will adopt institutional neutrality, meaning it will stop taking official positions on most political issues. Doesn't Columbia, like a lot of universities, have this massive endowment with billions of dollars in it? Why couldn't the university find a way to lean on that instead of the federal funding?

[Doug Belkin]

So the federal funding probably accounts for around a quarter of their operating budget.

[Ryan Knudsen]

It's quite a bit.

[Doug Belkin]

Yeah. Most of the endowment is earmarked for certain programs. People give money, they endow a chair, they endow a sports program, they endow something. So only some of that can they use. And they really try not to draw down more than 4% a year, because it's for perpetuity. Right. They want to have the endowment. They want to keep it growing. If they have to pull it down, they can. That's how they would answer that question. This is to maintain the fiscal health of the university for the long run. And so if you're drawing it down very quickly, in the short term term, you're giving that away.

[Ryan Knudsen]

Yeah. Even an endowment with billions of dollars in it, you take $400 million out of it every year, and it's going to disappear pretty quick.

[Doug Belkin]

Yeah. And he has the potential to take a lot more than that. I mean, he could probably take closer to a billion dollars. I mean, how much money is coming out of the federal government to fund Columbia? It's more than 400 million.

[Ryan Knudsen]

Hmm. So there's more leverage that he could have applied a lot more.

[Doug Belkin]

Yeah. The Pell Grants, the student loans, he could turn that tap off. He didn't touch all of the research contracts and Grants. There's plenty more where that came from. So he could shut that off.

[Ryan Knudsen]

So now that Columbia has acquiesced, are they going to get the funding back immediately? Like, how does that work? If the federal government has sort of.

[Doug Belkin]

Canceled this stuff, they now have the right to sit at the table and negotiate the funding. This was a precursor to the negotiations that will lead to the funding.

[Ryan Knudsen]

Huh. So this isn't. They've given away all these things. There's still no guarantee that they'll get all this money back.

[Doug Belkin]

There's no guarantee. And there's a lot of people who are very concerned that Trump doesn't want to give them the money back, that he wants to essentially put Colombia on the cross and make an example of them, and that this isn't going to go well for them. So a lot of people were pushing back on this, saying he's not negotiating in good faith.

[Ryan Knudsen]

Over the weekend, Education Secretary Linda McMahon was asked about this on CNN.

[Donald Trump]

And I believe that they are on the right track so that we can now move forward.

[Doug Belkin]

Does that mean that the money will be unfrozen?

[Donald Trump]

That means that we are on the right track now to make sure the final negotiations to unfreeze that money will be in place.

[Doug Belkin]

Okay, so not yet.

[Donald Trump]

We're working on it.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Okay.

[Ryan Knudsen]

How is the academic world been reacting to Columbia's decision?

[Doug Belkin]

Yeah, so this has drawn a huge amount of attention around the country because people are saying if Columbia fails here to stand up for academic freedom, he's going to roll right through the next school and the next school and the next school. So that is probably the most significant shift of this entire story, is that there's now been kind of a breach in academic freedom at Columbia, and that can continue on to schools, you know, more schools down the line.

[Ryan Knudsen]

So it's likely that Trump will go after other schools.

[Doug Belkin]

He's announced that this task force on antisemitism, which was at the point of the spear of this investigation, has announced another nine schools they're going to visit. And then there's 60 more schools that are in various stages of investigation. You know, they include a lot of brand name schools that everybody's heard of.

[Ryan Knudsen]

Hmm. So this fight almost certainly will change more than just Colombia.

[Doug Belkin]

This fight will almost certainly change more than just Colombia.

[Ryan Knudsen]

Earlier this month, Trump paused $175 million in federal funds to the University of Pennsylvania for allowing a transgender athlete to compete on the women's swim team in 2022. Do you think this will result in fewer protests on college campuses?

[Doug Belkin]

That's a really interesting question. I think that the kids who are on student visas are going to be a lot less likely to protest because he's picked some of them up. Now there's a chill on campuses. We were down in Florida talking to kids about this last week. There is an incentive to be quiet, to stay home, to sit in your hands, to not raise your voice. That wasn't there before.

[Ryan Knudsen]

That's all for today. Monday, March 24. The Journal is a co production of Spotify and the Wall Street Journal. Additional reporting in this episode by Sarah Randazzo and Liz Esli White. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.