Brown’s total surrender

Brown paid less money than the other Pierre Laval ivies, but the deal it made was even worse:

In return for Brown agreeing to several measures aimed at dismantling certain diversity, equity and inclusion programs, the federal government will reinstate all frozen grants from the Department of Health and Human Services, restore the school’s eligibility for future funding, and close all pending investigations into the university, a White House official said.

But Brown, which was under financial strain even before the Trump administration began slashing research funding at a number of higher education institutions, was largely able to escape the nine-figure settlements the White House reached with Columbia and is seeking with Harvard University.

Under the deal announced Wednesday, the Providence-based school will pay $50 million in grants over 10 years to Rhode Island workforce development organizations, according to the White House official and Brown President Christina Paxson.

[…]

Under the terms of the deal, Brown has agreed to “not engage in unlawful racial discrimination in admissions or university programming” and will provide the federal government access to relevant data on the matter, the White House official said. The school is also expected to adopt definitions of “male” and “female” from an executive order signed by President Donald Trump earlier this year for “women’s sports, programming, facilities, and housing.” The school’s health facilities “will not perform gender reassignment surgeries on minors or prescribe them puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones,” and the school “will take steps to improve the campus climate for Jewish students,” according to the official.

Paxson said that most of the agreement’s provisions codify existing policies and practices. However, in a nod to the pressure the school was facing, she added in her letter: “There are other aspects of the agreement that were not part of previous federal reviews of Brown policies but are priorities of the federal administration in resolving the funding freeze.”

These two clauses back-to-back make it clear what Brown agreed to:

Like all of these deals, the agreement on the one hand opposes “DEI” and also requires the schools to search out evidence of one particular from of offensive speech/condict. The problem here is obvious:

I keep on wondering if you conduct oversight only anti-semitism and not say for instance, anti-women bias or anti-black bias, whether you are committing an equal protection violation against other students. These are enforcement nightmares.

[image or embed]— Professa Murray (@kalimurray.bsky.social) Jul 30, 2025 at 9:22 PM

This is incoherent and unworkable even before we get to the obvious fact that what the Trump administration means by “antisemitism” is primarily “criticism of the policies of the Israeli government.”

But Brown takes this a step further, by allowing the federal government to scrutinize student evals. That’s an explicit foot in the door to allow the federal government to directly intervene in academic affairs, and that’s going to be a one-way racket. The chilling effect on speech is self-evident.And then there’s also the fact that Brown has to commit itself to overt discrimination against trans people in housing, athletics, and medical care.

It’s a disgraceful capitulation, and it’s the beginning of the shakedown, not the end.