The Free Press
The Trump administration’s antisemitism task force has sent a letter to Columbia University, detailing how it can win back its federal money. The message comes one week after Trump’s government punished the Ivy League university by cutting off $400 million in grant funds for failing to combat antisemitism on campus.
The letter, sent Thursday and seen by The Free Press, states that “Columbia has. . . fundamentally failed to protect American students and faculty from antisemitic violence and harassment” and “outlines immediate next steps that we regard as a precondition for formal negotiations regarding Columbia University’s continued financial relationship with the United States government.”
Sent to Columbia’s interim president Katrina Armstrong and co-chairs of the Board of Trustees David Greenwald and Claire Shipman, the letter states that in order to get its funding back, the university must make changes to its disciplinary procedures, including enforcing actions against the protesters who stormed Hamilton Hall last spring.
“Meaningful discipline,” according to the letter, “means expulsion or multi-year suspensions.” The letter also states that Columbia must ban masking and abolish the university’s Judicial Board, leaving all disciplinary decisions to the discretion of the university president’s office.
Columbia must have seen the letter coming. An hour before it was sent, the Columbia University Judicial Board announced plans to suspend students involved in the break-in and occupation of Hamilton Hall last spring. In some cases, the university announced it will expel students and revoke degrees. Police arrested 46 people on trespassing charges for the break-in, though nearly all of the charges were later dismissed by the district attorney’s office.
The letter goes on to state that Columbia must “implement permanent, comprehensive time, place, and manner rules to prevent disruption of teaching, research, and campus life.” Additionally, the letter calls for the Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies department to be placed under “academic receivership” for a minimum of five years, meaning faculty will lose control of their department.
Joseph Massad, a professor in the department, described the Hamas invasion of Israel as “awesome” one day after the atrocity, on October 8, 2023. Massad is now teaching a course on Zionism, even though, in a recent TV interview, he decried the concept of an “ancient Israel” and the idea that Jews are the “descendants of the ancient Hebrews” as modern-day “inventions.”
Of the $400 million in funding, over $250 million is being cut from National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants to the university. Leo Terrell, the head of the DOJ’s antisemitism task force, said last week that the cuts to Columbia are likely “only the beginning.”
The instructions in the letter are “the bare minimum” the university needs to do in order to keep its federal funding, one person familiar with the matter told The Free Press. “This is what’s required for Columbia to even be invited to a negotiating table.” Columbia University did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
This week, Columbia informed department chairs, PhD students, and professors of their canceled NIH awards. But many of the “people being punished are not the people that have been causing the trouble,” one Columbia professor told The Free Press. “Most of the faculty that supported the protests and have been stalling discipline are in the humanities or at Barnard.”
One such example is X. Edward Guo, a professor and department chair of biomedical engineering, who posted on X that he was informed via email his NIH grant would be “terminated effective immediately.” Guo commented on his post: “No words.”
Guo’s lab was dedicated to training scientists in musculoskeletal diseases like osteoporosis, and aims to bring together “world-leading musculoskeletal researchers and clinicians at Columbia University with expertise in biomedical engineering, cell and molecular biology, pathology and cell biology, mechanical engineering, and innovation,” according to the lab’s website. The Integrated Musculoskeletal Training Program lab at Columbia received $197,168 in NIH funding in 2024. Guo has been awarded four new NIH grants totaling $6.3 million to support his bone bioengineering research in the last two years alone.
Guo did not respond to a Free Press request for comment.
A cancer researcher at Columbia told The Free Press that the “grant cuts have put the entire medical center in disarray.”
“These grants support scientists who are doing cancer research. Both Americans and foreigners doing doctoral or postdoctoral work here are ambivalent about their desire to stay in the country and work in American universities if there’s going to be so much uncertainty about funding.”
A total of 60 universities are under investigation for antisemitism from the Trump administration, according to a letter sent Monday from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. The letter stated that colleges—including Harvard, Yale, and Princeton—could also lose their funding “if they do not fulfill their obligations under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act to protect Jewish students on campus, including uninterrupted access to campus facilities and educational opportunities.” In addition to five Ivy League institutions, the letter targets large university systems such as the State University of New York (SUNY) and University of California schools.
But Columbia is the first to have its federal funding revoked by the Trump administration.
