AAUP and AFT appeal after judge tosses lawsuit over canceled Columbia funds

Dive Brief:

• A federal judge on Monday tossed out a lawsuit filed by the American Association of University Professors and the American Federation of Teachers over the Trump administration’s cancellation of $400 million in federal research grants to Columbia University.
• U.S. District Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil, a Trump appointee, ruled that the plaintiffs lacked standing to sue and sided with the government’s defense of the March cancellations.
• AAUP and AFT appealed the decision the same day. “This is a disappointing ruling, but by no means the end of the fight,” AAUP President Todd Wolfson said in a statement Monday, adding that the university’s canceled funding is “part of an authoritarian agenda that extends far beyond Columbia.”

Dive Insight:

On March 7, four federal agencies announced the immediate cancellation of $400 million in funding to Columbia over what they described as “continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.” The decision came just four days after the federal government launched a probe into allegations of campus antisemitism at the Ivy League institution. 

The Trump administration then made a series of wide-ranging — and ambiguous — ultimatums to Columbia, calling for the university to comply fully or risk losing more funding.

The Trump administration’s actions against Columbia were the first in a series of unprecedented funding freezes and threats against several U.S. colleges. Harvard University, in particular, has become a recurring target for the Trump administration after the institution sued over more than $2 billion in canceled funding.

Unlike Harvard, Columbia ceded to many of the government’s demands — to the dismay of many of its faculty, students and alumni. Even so, the university hasn’t as yet seen its funding restored.  

AAUP and AFT, which together represent more than 300,000 higher education faculty members, sued the Trump administration in late March. In their complaint, they argued that the axed funding combined with its demands amounted to an “unlawful and unprecedented effort to overpower” Columbia University’s academic autonomy and “control the thought, association, scholarship, and expression of its faculty and students.”

The plaintiffs sought to have the university’s funding restored via a federal injunction.

But in her ruling, Vyskocil took issue both with the plaintiffs’ argument and the basis of the lawsuit — that the Trump administration’s move to cancel grant funding threatened the free speech of Columbia’s faculty. 

She pointed mainly to Columbia’s nonparticipation in the lawsuit — or any litigation of its own — despite being the recipient of the grants. She also concluded that the plaintiffs failed to demonstrate harm to their members from the cancellations. 

Moreover, she chided the plaintiffs for what she described as “sensational rhetoric about the ‘transcendent value’ of academic freedom, and ‘Trump administration’s’ effort to ‘control the thought’ of ‘faculty and students.’” 

Vyskocil also lobbed barbs at Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan advocacy group that helped represent AAUP and AFT. 

“With no apparent sense of irony, lawyers for an organization called ‘Protect Democracy’ insist that a district court judge should order the Executive Branch immediately to restore the flow of taxpayer dollars to an elite university, which funding Defendants represent is inconsistent with the priorities of the duly elected President of the United States,” Vyskocil wrote in her judgment. 

Orion Danjuma, counsel with Protect Democracy, said in a statement that the ruling was “disappointing but not final.”

“We remain confident in the strength of our claims and will continue to pursue every legal avenue to protect academic freedom and the rule of law,” Danjuma added.