AAUP and AFT sue Trump administration over threats to defund Columbia University

Dive Brief:

• Two major educator unions on Tuesday sued a raft of federal agencies and officials over what they described as 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 — the American Association of University Professors and the American Federation of Teachers — accused the Trump administration of “holding hostage billions of dollars in congressionally authorized federal funding” from the Ivy League institution without following legal guidelines.
• That includes $400 million in contracts and grants canceled earlier this month. Officials’ list of demands for Columbia to get the funding back “unconstitutionally inserts the federal government as managers of a private academic institution,” plaintiffs said. The unions’ lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, seeks a federal injunction to restore all funding to Columbia.

Dive Insight:

Much of the higher education world has watched with trepidation as an unprecedented situation unfolded at Columbia in less than three weeks. 

In early March, the federal Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism — a multi-agency coalition created by President Donald Trump through a January executive order — announced an investigation into Columbia over allegations that the university failed to protect Jewish students from harassment amid ongoing pro-Palestinian protests.

As part of the probe, the task force said it would review more than $5 billion in federal funding to Columbia to “ensure the university is in compliance with federal regulations, including its civil rights responsibilities.”

Just four days after launching the investigation, four federal agencies said they were immediately canceling $400 million in grants and contracts to Columbia, including for scientific research, and signaled more cancellations would likely follow. They cited “continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students” but offered no evidence or details. 

The next week, the administration made the reinstatement of Columbia’s funding contingent on an expansive list of demands, including significant changes in how the university handled disciplinary due process and “comprehensive admissions reform.”

The task force directed Columbia to put its Middle East, South Asian and African Studies department under direct control of university administrators for at least five years, under a process known as academic receivership. The AAUP and AFT lawsuit described that demand as “entirely unprecedented.”

Facing such a threat to its funding, Columbia — to the dismay of many faculty and students — on Friday agreed to comply with the Trump administration’s demands to varying degrees. 

In all of this, the Trump administration sidestepped statutory processes meant to protect institutions from agencies “withholding funding “cavalierly” as well as to safeguardprotect academic and civil freedoms, AAUP and AFT allege. These processes are tied to Title VI, which bars discrimination based on race, color or national origin in federally funded programs — and is the law cited by the administration in its threats to Columbia. 

In their complaint, AAUP and AFT — which represent a combined 1.8 million members and — said that before pulling funding, the government must try to obtain voluntary compliance from an institution, provide hearings, wait a specified amount of time and give notice to the university and Congress.  

“These restrictions exist precisely because Congress recognized that in a system where institutions depend on federal funds, letting federal agencies withhold funding cavalierly would give them dangerously broad power,” the plaintiffs said. “Defendants did not follow any of these required steps here.”

In a Tuesday statement, AAUP President Todd Wolfson was even more explicit. 

“The Trump administration’s threats and coercion at Columbia are part of a clear authoritarian playbook meant to crush academic freedom and critical research in American higher education,” Wolfson said. “Our constitutional rights, and the opportunity for our children and grandchildren to live in a democracy are on the line.”

The Education Department and Department of Justice — which were both named as defendants — did not immediately reply to a request for comment. 

Tuesday’s suit came one day after AAUP and AFT sued the Education Department over mass firings and a plan to wind down the agency.