The Columbia Capitulation
By 
The art of protesting too much:
Columbia’s acting president, Claire Shipman, said the university could have won short-term legal victories against the government but would have faced the long-term loss of billions of dollars in funds for cutting-edge research, like finding a cure for cancer.
She said the school would have also faced the potential revocation of the visa status of thousands of international students.
“This was not capitulation,” Shipman told CNN in an interview, adding that the deal protected the university’s “academic integrity.”
Columbia still has a faculty that deserves a better administration, and they can help explain how purely delusional this is. Suresh Naidu:
In economic history, we teach the 1688 creation of parliamentary supremacy as a solution to what economists call “commitment problems.” In the absence of a third party sufficiently strong to make sure all sides stick to their promises, the powerful can renege on the powerless. The powerless, seeing this, wisely choose to not contract with the powerful. Absolutist rulers are victims of their own lack of restraints; a sovereign who is too powerful cannot get inexpensive credit, because nothing stops the ruler from defaulting on any bond. President Trump, by smashing checks on his authority, has wound up undermining his own ability to make credible deals, including the one just reached with Columbia University, where I teach.
The entities that have been striking deals with Mr. Trump, my own employer included, have not learned the lessons of the Glorious Revolution. Trade negotiators from longtime partner countries, government contractors, law firms, federal employees, permanent residents, the Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell, even the Transportation Security Administration labor union are all experiencing contractual vertigo, finding out that the administration will not honor previous agreements.
[…]
I understand the desire for a deal. My colleagues and I have eagerly clicked on every news story hinting that Columbia’s leaders might have secured the hundreds of millions of dollars the Trump administration has frozen or cut. Our community has borne devastating cuts, with researchers and administrative staff members laid off and participants in medical research losing access to treatment midcourse. On top of that, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has detained a number of our students, and there have been endless leaks, doxxing attacks, campus lockdowns and computer hacks. All of this manifests as a never-ending stream of anxiety — financial, physical, moral — that narrows whatever intellectual horizons the research university is supposed to foster.
But this deal is unlikely to end the attacks. The federal government, and this administration, is simply too powerful and too arbitrary to be credibly bargained with. Do we really think this arrangement, however destructive of academic autonomy it is, will prevent the Trump administration from stopping the money again? Anyone who thinks the administration will mutely walk away after the ink is dry needs to look at both the past behavior of autocratic regimes in general and this administration’s in particular.
As we’ve discussed with respect to the Pierre Laval law firms, it’s striking that you can ascend to top positions at elite institutions and think that a protection racket is buying you protection.
And let’s not forget that the agreement grows out of the executive branch’s first-ever cutoff of congressionally appropriated funds to a university, so as to punish that university and impel it to adopt sweeping reforms, without any pretense of following the congressionally mandated procedures. Lawyers have been debating the exact circumstances under which the executive branch may freeze particular grants and contracts to particular schools. Yet as far as I’m aware, no lawyer outside the government has even attempted to defend the legality of the initial cutoff that brought Columbia to its knees and, thereafter, to the “negotiating” table.
In short, the agreement gives legal form to an extortion scheme—the first of its kind!—that defies the relevant statutes as well as the constitutional separation of powers and the First Amendment.
There is another unprecedented feature of the situation that is so obvious it is easy to overlook, and that might ultimately prove the most consequential of all: the way in which the federal government is seeking to reshape the internal operations of universities not through generally applicable directives, but rather through a series of bilateral “deals.” The Trump administration has made clear that while Columbia is first in line, it intends to reach comparable agreements with other schools—to scale the Columbia shakedown into a broader model of managing universities deemed too woke. As has already occurred with law firms, tariffs, and trade policy, regulation by deal is coming to higher education.
Shipman seems to think that there is a distinction between “directly claiming the ability to fire faculty and set curricula” and “retaining the right to levy huge fines and withdraw funding if Columbia retains faculty or has syllabi the federal government doesn’t like,” and if they really believe that they’re going to find out the hard way.
The details of the deal make things worse:
Columbia University has handed over its undergraduate admissions process to Donald Trump and his MAGA allies, who will now decide at their sole discretion whether the university has admitted enough white people. It's no longer an independent institution.
[image or embed]— Kevin Carey (@kevincarey1.bsky.social) Jul 23, 2025 at 7:22 PM
Inter alia, note that gender is not one of the categories admissions is forbidden to consider, for the obvious reason that Chris Rufo believes that admissions standards for men should be much lower than for women, It also doesn’t forbid preferences given to legacies (affirmative action for rich white people) or “students of interest” or whatever euphemism they’re using for applicants whose parents might by the university a new international airport. And also not the ban on “proxies,” which almost certainly will be read to forbid class-based affirmative action, a bait-and-switch way too many people fell for.
Make no mistake — this is a surrender of independence and academic freedom that will lead to others. At this point sending your kid to Columbia would be like hiring Paul, Weiss as your legal counsel.