Trump is attempting to take over American Universities
garymarcus.substack.com
garymarcus.substack.com
Authoritarian regimes hate disobedience. Coming up with your own ideas or rejecting what your priest, parent, or politician says is very disobedient.
Reasoning about the world is a threat to authority. Studying the history of something and keeping records about what is happening in order to attribute disastrous policy accurately is equally threatening. That de-legitimizes authority and justifies disobedience. This administration has worked to delete graphs that would require action or that show bad policy decisions rather than to take action or change policy.
Authoritarians need to subordinate institutions that ground themselves in reality and devote themselves to reason. Universities are the natural enemies of authoritarians.
A functioning democracy requires that academics, journalists, and law firms remain independent of the state.
Much of it was re litigated with respect to title IX educational compliance.
I can't speak to specifics, but my understanding is that there are limitations on the withholding of funding and it must be directly tied what the funds are actually being used for.
As you say, Columbia is a private entity, so that is a major distinction. However, there's also a body of law around selective punishment for speech. An example of this came up when the White House selectively punished the AP because it did not like the content of its speech.
Taking the aid $$ is accepting soft power. Same as with foreign aid.