White House may seek binding control over Columbia through consent decree
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I'm not saying this is good (I have no idea, but given the actors involved, probably not), and this isn't a normative claim.
The ADA is, in important contrast to this situation, a law.
We'll have to wait and see what the consent decree says to evaluate it further.
The administration also doesn't generally get to pick the judge. Given where Columbia is, it would presumably be a random SDNY judge.
It’s gives the judge control to enforce the White House’s decree. What meaningful distinction are you making?
I still think this will be a shitshow, but the headline that "the White House is seeking binding control via a consent decree" is misleading; that's not how a consent decree works.
https://www.columbiaspectator.com/news/2025/03/31/columbia-t...
> I know that many of our Jewish students, and other students as well, have found the atmosphere intolerable in recent weeks. Many have left campus, and that is a tragedy.
...
> The encampment has created an unwelcoming environment for many of our Jewish students and faculty. External actors have contributed to creating a hostile environment in violation of Title VI, especially around our gates, that is unsafe for everyone—including our neighbors.
https://president.columbia.edu/news/statement-columbia-unive...
> A consent decree is an agreement or settlement that resolves a dispute between two parties without admission of guilt (in a criminal case) or liability (in a civil case).
Why would this be in any way relevant to what I think is happening at Columbia from approximately ~20 min/week of random news snippets
It would give the Trump administration an unprecedented amount of control of a private university.
An alternative for Columbia is to just reject federal funding and look to its endowment and forprofit services
Last year, Columbia received over $1.3 billion as government grants and contracts. Even if they stopped everything that currently depends on the endowment and redirected the money to replace federal funding, it would not be enough.
It isn't a law of nature that the endowment must always grow. It serves the institution, not the other way around. What is the point if not to spend it when it matters?
Is there no institutional value or quality that is worth even reducing the size of the endowment? If so, then the institution is serving the endowment, not the other way around.
If you assume that the drop in federal funding is temporary and things will be back to normal in a year or two, it's reasonable to use endowment to soften the impact. But if you expect that the lower level of funding remains for the foreseeable future, depleting the endowment is the worst thing you could do. It the financial equivalent of wetting your pants in the cold. You leave the institution permanently weaker and less capable for some negligible short-term gains.
Especially since it likely wouldn't be 1:1 funding replacement, but facilitating more limited operations.
Better to negotiate from a position of strength, when the other party is inclined to push any advantage as far as they can.
But it is the nature of endowments that you must follow the explicit spending guidelines that almost always accompany them. A university cannot just "spend they money", because the money is earmarked for certain things and often includes certain guidance on timelines.
This is just about Israel. The US government is abolishing freedom of speech and engaging in arbitrary deportations and disappearances to curb activism and protests against Israel.
And it is so powerful that even in the face of repression and limitations to freedom of speech that clearly go to its advantage, you don't dare to point your finger at it but claim that it's just an excuse for something different.
It is not that this force does not exist. It is that it is means to end, not the end itself.
So is giving billions in aids to Israel every year, despite Israel being a rich country (and tens of billions in the last two years alone, and to bomb civilians, no less).
So is providing diplomatic cover to Israel in the UN and against institutions such as the International Criminal Court, at the cost of your own moral standing in the world.
So is passing laws punishing boycotts of Israel- which the US has done for many years, before Trump.
So is absorbing the cost of the instability caused by Israel in the Middle East and intervening in its defence every time they need it.
At what point will you start connecting the dots and realise that all these means to some different end always end up benefitting Israel, and no one else?
> At what point will you start connecting the dots and realise that all these means to some different end always end up benefitting Israel, and no one else?
Many US companies and US oligarchs benefit from the actions listed here. You are focused on Israel as if no one in the US is profiting from these actions.
US companies benefit from punishing boycotts of Israel? Benefit from sending it (and not to a different country) billions in aid? Benefit from illegally detaining students that oppose it? Benefit from condemning the ICC? Can you explain a) how; b) who these companies and oligarchs are; c) why always Israel and not any other country or mix of countries?
Most military defense companies. Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Raytheon are the main ones. Raytheon makes a ton of money from their work on the Iron Dome. 70% of Israel's weaponry comes from these US companies. https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/16/middleeast/where-israel-get-i...
Sending "aid" does not mean sending cold hard cash. Billions in aid could mean sending that equivalent amount in weapons. They are funneling cash into defense contractors.
> why always Israel and not any other country or mix of countries?
It is not always Israel you just don't look for examples that might prove your world view incorrect. Egypt, South Korea, and smaller middle eastern countries like Jordan receive millions in aid.
Besides, this would explain just a small fraction of what I mentioned above: what about the punishment of dissent, what about the UN vetoes- does that also hold for Egypt, South Korea or Jordan?
And what about the widespread censorship, originating from Israel and enacted by US social media, is that also related to oligarchs and military expenditure? Does Jordan get the same treatment?
And maybe the funniest part of this theory is that it tries to explain the disproportionate influence on the US of a foreign country by means of the money that the US is giving it for free. So if the US gave me, say, 4 billions per year (a pittance, really) I would get the privilege of influencing the US' politics more than Israel does today. For free!
Come on. Occam would like to have a word with you.
tbh I’ve never really understood why universities don’t separate their grant-funded research institutions from their academic pursuits. Why keep it all under the same entity?
And since you mentioned libraries, IMLS recently was DOGE'd which used to provide funds to a lot of libraries.
[1] https://fortune.com/2025/04/07/trump-birthday-military-parad...
The government could spend the equivalent of a university’s endowment many times over and nobody would notice. If it wants to spend more money on scientific research, great - but I’m questioning how effectively that can be used as leverage if the universities don’t really “need” it.
They have an endowment but even columbia can not afford to finance half a billion dollars worth of research off the residuals from their investments.
Need is also an interesting question. A lot of the money that has been cut off across the federal government was already allocated, but just not paid out yet. So people won a grant, built out a service around the grant, and then they are getting stiffed by the government. Suddenly having to find another source for those funds is not tenable even if the school has an endowment, and thus you see everything shutting down. The worst part of the whole thing is this will eventually cost the US more money because the government will likely lose most of these lawsuits but then it costs more to stand the machinery back up once the grants are paid.
As to the separation of research and education, where we have achieved the noble goal is a worthwhile discussion but the intent was that the creation of knowledge through research and the transference of knowledge through education have such significant parallels that the should co occur.
Last Spring in particular there were a bunch of student protests against the genocide being done by Israel with material support from the US. Many of these protestors were themselves Jewish. Organizations such as the Jewish Voice for Peace [1] were heavily involved. Jewish people in the US have a long history of being active in civil rights movements. Notably, 3 of the 4 of the students who were killed by the National Guard at Kent State in 1968 were Jewish.
Genocide (and apartheid) supporters try and silence dissent by claiming anti-Zionism (that is, opposition to Israel as a settler-colonial state) is anti-Semitism, which it is not. For every Jewish Zionist in the US there are 20-30 Christian Zionists who are motivated by bringing on the Rapture [2]. It's worth pointing out that if this prophecy were to actually come true, all the Jews in Israel would be killed. The point here is that many Zionists are actually anti-Semitic.
The state came down hard on such protestors. There have been something like ~3500 arrests of college protestors (compared to ~1300 for January 6, an actual coup attempt). There's lots of lies disseminated to demonize the protestors. For example, false claims that Columbia protestors blocked Jewish students from going to classes.
The administration has used research funding as a weapon to bring colleges into line to expel or otherwise punish studnets who protested, implement policies to say that criticism of the state of Israel was anti-Semitism and so on. Columbia, in particular, has already completely capitulated.
All of this is a direct attack on free speech to silence any protest or critcism of US foreign policy in the Middle East. Columbia is being made an example of but it's odd that this is potentially going forward to a consent decree since Columbia has already fallen in line.
But it goes so much further than this. Protestors and organizers have been targeted for unlawful deportation. They have in some cases been black-bagged and illegally kidnapped 1000 miles away without due process and then deported without seeing an immigration judge to have a deportation hearing, under the ludicrous "state of emergency" related to a Venezuelan gang.
So where is ICE, who is the Gestapo in this scenario, getting these names? From places like the Canary Mission [3]. Canary Mission had already engaged in doxxing protestors. Now they seemingly have the ear of the administration to point the finger and have opponents black-bagged and sent to El Salvadore to a prison on a seemingly indefinite sentence.
This is the 1930s Nazi Germany playbook.
[1]: https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/
[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/30/us-evangelical...
[3]: https://www.thenation.com/article/world/canary-mission-israe...
You are correct that, to the best of our knowledge, no pro-Palestinian protestor has thus far been deported to El Salvador.
The precedent here is what's important, meaning the government is arguing that they have the right to deport anyone they want for pretty much any reason and put them in a foreign prison indefinitely.
The legal justification for all this is an over 200 year old law called the Alien and Seditions Act and a declared state of emergency and invasion/incursion by a Venezuelan gang, something which has gotten at least some support from the Supreme Court [3].
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has basically come out and said that Khalil is being deported for his views. If these people don't have rights to free speech and due process then nobody does.
[1]: https://apnews.com/article/mahmoud-khalil-columbia-universit...
[2]: https://www.axios.com/2025/03/09/ice-arrests-palestinian-act...
[3]: https://www.livenowfox.com/news/supreme-court-lifts-order-bl...
Your second and third point is confused. The foundation for the government's belief they can deport Khalil is not the Alien Enemies Act (which is what I assume you mean, as there is no Alien and Seditions Act-the term "Alien and Seditions Acts" refers to four separate acts, one of which is the Alien Enemies Act), it's the Immigration and Nationality Act, the same basis Trump tried to use for Executive Order 13769. More specifically, I think they're using 8 U.S.C. § 1227(a)(4)(C)(i).
That said, the government is absolutely using the Alien Enemies Act to round up people and send them to El Salvador.
>If these people don't have rights to free speech and due process then nobody does.
So this is an interesting legal question because non-citizens definitely do not have complete free speech protections, but the border of where their speech is protected vs unprotected is not entirely clear. It's not true that if they don't, nobody does - it is absolutely clear that citizens of the United States do have rights to free speech and due process. That has been established many times.
> So this is an interesting legal question because non-citizens definitely do not have complete free speech protections
All persons on American soil are entitled to constitutional protections [1].
Consider the implications if they're not entitled to due process, for example. The government could detain a citizen and deport them without a hearing to a foreign country and then, when told to return them by a court, claim they have no jurisdiction over that foreign country. The administration is actually using the last argument.
You might say "they can't deport citizens". They are in effect arguing they can and there's no remedy for you if you're mistakenly deported, possibly indefinitely detained.
That's what due process is for: to establish if there is a lawful basis for the deportation.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62gnzzeg34o
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_Americans_from_...
That's not why. Both are non-citizens. The reason the different laws are being applied matters, because they are totally different legal fights, taking place for different social and political reasons.
>All persons on American soil are entitled to constitutional protections [1]
Some, but not to the same extent as citizens where speech is concerned. For example, foreign nationals are not allowed to spend money to directly support a candidate for elected office, though they may spend to influence an issue. Cf Bluman v. FEC with Citizens United.
It's a matter of degrees, and certainly is impacted by immigrant status and ties to the United States. From a free speech issue and where concerning the speech I have heard from him, I think it's clear that Khalil should not be subject to any kind of government restriction or punishment. That said, it seems likely that he may be deported for other reasons.
I don't disagree with you re due process at all.