Trump Announces $220M+ Settlement with Columbia Over Antisemitism, Civil Rights Violations

President Donald Trump announced a historic agreement with Columbia University Wednesday night, wherein the Ivy League institution will pay over $220 million in penalties and settlements and will enact sweeping policy reforms to address rampant antisemitism and protect student civil liberties.

The deal marks a major victory for an administration that has put higher education on notice for what it calls systemic discrimination and a failure to protect students.

President Donald Trump heralded the agreement as a turning point for American universities. “I am pleased to announce that the Trump Administration has reached a historic agreement with Columbia University,” Trump stated. “Columbia has agreed to pay a penalty of $200 Million Dollars to the United States Government for violating Federal Law, in addition to over $20 Million to their Jewish employees who were unlawfully targeted and harassed.”

The settlement resolves a period of intense federal scrutiny that saw the administration withhold hundreds of millions in federal funding. The pressure campaign was launched in response to what the administration and numerous critics described as Columbia’s failure to quell a hostile, antisemitic environment that flourished on its campus, particularly during the Israel-Gaza war that began in October 2023.

Jewish students and faculty reported enduring sustained harassment, intimidation, and a pervasive sense of fear at the hands of antisemitic pro-Palestinian protestors and an indifferent university administration, leaders of which were caught on audio recordings downplaying the incidents. Jewish students were not permitted to attend classes and antisemitic protestors set up encampments on campus to interfere with student activities.

Under the terms of the deal, Columbia will pay a $200 million penalty to the government over three years and an additional $21 million to settle investigations by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on behalf of its Jewish employees. In exchange, the White House will reinstate $400 million in federal funding it had previously stripped from the university.

The agreement averted a potential catastrophe for the research institution, which researchers estimated faced an additional $1.2 billion in frozen funding from the National Institutes of Health.

The financial penalties are coupled with dramatic institutional changes aimed at the root of the problem. “Columbia has also committed to ending their ridiculous DEI policies, admitting students based ONLY on MERIT, and protecting the Civil Liberties of their students on campus,” President Trump announced, signaling a direct assault on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs that critics argue have fostered division and discrimination.

The settlement is the first of its kind, setting a powerful precedent for other universities under federal investigation, including Harvard, Brown, Cornell, and the University of Pennsylvania. President Trump warned that more actions are forthcoming. “Numerous other Higher Education Institutions that have hurt so many, and been so unfair and unjust, and have wrongly spent federal money, much of it from our government, are upcoming.”

In a statement, acting university president Claire Shipman acknowledged the difficult chapter for the university. “This agreement marks an important step forward after a period of sustained federal scrutiny and institutional uncertainty,” she said. In a June letter to alumni, Shipman had warned that the university was in “danger of reaching a tipping point in terms of preserving our research excellence and the work we do for humanity,” highlighting the immense pressure exerted by the funding cuts.
As part of the settlement, Columbia has already disciplined over 70 students for protest activities and codified significant reforms, including adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism and mandating additional antisemitism training. An independent monitor, agreed upon by both parties, will oversee the university’s compliance, reporting to the federal government every six months.