One factor contributing to the complacency that Americans have long held about the strength of our democracy has been the conviction that, should it come under threat, institutions such as our universities would fight to safeguard our political norms.

Columbia University, through a thoroughly pusillanimous capitulation to a multi-million-dollar threat from the Trump administration, has put that conviction in the grave.

The details have been widely reported. On March 7, the Trump White House announced the "immediate cancellation" of some $400 million in government grants and contracts to Columbia, citing the university's "continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students."

The General Services Administration and the departments of Education and Health and Human Services followed up on March 13 with a letter to Columbia's interim president, Katrina Armstrong, specifying the steps Columbia must take to open "formal negotiations" over the blocked funding and the broader "financial relationship" with the government.

Those steps included suspending or expelling some participants in a pro-Palestinian takeover of a campus building last spring; abolishing the University Judicial Board, which imposed disciplinary judgments, and placing those decisions in the hands of the president; banning mask-wearing on campus except for religious or health reasons; heightening the law-enforcement authority of campus police; and placing the Middle East, South Asian and African Studies department under "academic receivership" for at least five years.

It should go without saying that these steps amounted to an outrageous imposition by politicians on the internal workings of a private university.

Nevertheless, Columbia (from which I hold a master's degree) bowed to these demands.

On the very day it received the letter, it announced the suspension or expulsion of an undisclosed number of students who participated in the campus takeover; restructured the judicial board to place it under the president's authority; banned masks except for religious or health reasons; hired 36 more campus police and invested them with authority to make arrests on campus; placed its Middle East programs under the jurisdiction of a newly appointed administrator; and made other changes that in all but name met the demands of the White House.

In an open letter to the Columbia community, Armstrong asserted that these actions were "guided by our values," including "putting academic freedom, free expression, open inquiry, and respect for all at the fore of every decision we make."

Armstrong also said that the university had "shared our progress on several of our key priorities with the U.S. Department of Education, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the General Services Administration" — the three agencies that had applied the direct pressure.

Columbia's capitulation sparked an uproar among advocates for higher education and academic freedom. David Cole of Georgetown University observed that the university had "sacrificed principle to the coercive power of the federal government's purse."

I asked Columbia to respond to such criticisms, but didn't receive a reply.

Sadly, Columbia isn't alone in capitulating to Trump. The University of California banned a practice of requiring applicants for its faculty to provide "diversity statements" attesting to how they have worked to enhance and support racial and other kinds of diversity in their fields.

Numerous institutions have eliminated or scaled back their diversity, equality and inclusion policies, now that the Trump administration has taken direct aim at DEI programs.

In opposition to Trump's maelstrom of punitive, illegal and unconstitutional assaults on academic freedom, a few courageous voices have been heard.

One belongs to William M. Treanor, dean of Georgetown Law School, who in mid-February received a letter from Edward Martin, the interim U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., calling the school's teaching and promoting of DEI "unacceptable" and stating that no student "affiliated with a law school or university that continues to teach and utilize DEI will be considered" for employment in his office.

Treanor crisply informed Martin that he was way out of line. The 1st Amendment, he told Martin by letter, "guarantees that the government cannot direct what Georgetown and its faculty teach and how to teach it."

It's a category error to see Trump's actions as truly about antisemitism. Although claims are widespread that universities have not acted aggressively enough against antisemitic expressions on their campuses, conservatives have used accusations of antisemitism as a tool to pursue the true goal of undermining higher education in the U.S., and free speech on campus, by taking aim at the most prominent and important universities in the land.

Red state governors and legislators in places such as Wisconsin, Florida and Texas have been openly pursuing this project for years by leaning on their state universities to withdraw tenure protections from faculty members and restrict what they can talk about in class.

As it happens, Trump may have held a grudge against Columbia for a quarter-century; the New York Times recently reminded its readers that the university rejected Trump's offer of a Manhattan parcel for a university expansion. Negotiations ended when Trump named a price of, curiously, $400 million, which was four to six times more than the university's appraisers thought it was worth.

In trying to rationalize its capitulation to Trump, Columbia indicated that the loss of $400 million a year in federal funding would be devastating for its budget — "an existential threat," in the words of Lee Bollinger, who retired as Columbia's president in 2023 after some two decades of service.

Yet Columbia is among the few American institutions with the resources to fight back, with an endowment of about $15 billion. Although it's true that much of that money carries strings dictating how it must be spent, the university says that its income provides about $756 million a year for the university budget. That's not as much as Columbia collects in federal funding — $1.3 billion last year, or 20% of all revenues — but it certainly can help pay for a serious legal challenge to Trump.

That's important because what's been overlooked in much of the commentary about Trump's $400-million blockade is that it's almost certainly illegal.

After the Trump administration's announcement of the immediate cutoff of the funding, Michael C. Dorf of Cornell Law School asked on his blog: "Wait, can they actually do that? The answer is plainly no."

Dorf and other legal experts described the process that has to take place to cut off funding under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which the government cited as its grounds for the Columbia cutoff.

The Trump administration asserted that its action was taken because Columbia "fundamentally failed to protect American students and faculty from antisemitic violence and harassment in addition to other alleged violations of Title VI."

As David Pozen of Columbia law and several colleagues observed, the Trump administration offered "no explanation of the alleged violations, ...and no account of how Columbia has been deliberately indifferent to ongoing antisemitic discrimination or harassment on its campus." One reason might be that "any such account would be implausible."

During the anti-Israel demonstrations on campus, Columbia brought the New York Police Department onto its campus to arrest students participating in the protests and established an antisemitism task force. Its president, Manouche Shafik, was forced to step down over assertions that she had gone too easy on the demonstrators.

Even if the White House could make its case, it didn't bother to follow the legally mandated process for doing so.

"Title VI requires 'an express finding on the record, after opportunity for hearing,' of any failure to comply with the statute, as well as 'a full written report' submitted to House and Senate committees at least 30 days before the cutoff takes effect," Pozen wrote. Instead, the White House announced an immediate funding cutoff and dictated prerequisites that had to be met before "negotiations" over the funding. "The statute does not allow this approach."

Nor does the law allow blanket funding cutoffs. Instead, wrote Pozen, the cutoff must be "limited in its effect to the particular program...in which noncompliance has been so found." Pozen notes that "there has been no allegation — much less a finding — of noncompliance in the many parts of Columbia from which funding has been cut, including from urgent medical and scientific research."

All this suggests that if Columbia chose to fight back against the funding block in court, it would have a very good chance of winning. But the battle would be costly, and even a victory in this particular case might not be the last word. "Columbia leadership may be rightly worried that even if it obtains a restoration in its funding under existing grants, the Trump-led agencies will deny applications for future grants," Dorf noted.

Universities that have taken the path of submission to Trump will find it very hard to regain their reputations for upholding academic freedom after he's gone. They've blotted their own copybooks by choosing to seek short-term relief at the expense of their long-term mission. Appeasement on this scale never works.

Cole may have put the ramifications of Columbia's cravenness best: Thanks to the model it established, "the Trump administration will undoubtedly be emboldened to engage in unlawful, vindictive defunding of other universities, and now it will be politically harder for the next university to fight back."

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