WASHINGTON (AP) — In the face of significant funding cuts, Columbia University leaders face tough decisions. Extraordinary control For the federal government – or they could fight back, risking further debilitating reductions in potentially escalating conflicts.
But it responds, Colombia carries a tremendous amount of weight. It is the first school to face active intervention from the Trump administration, but dozens of other people are next notified if they ignore the president’s orders on issues relating to anti-Semitism. Diversity Program or Transgender woman in girl sports.
“People at academies across the country want to see what Columbia is doing here,” said Samuel Bavenstos, a law professor at the University of Michigan, served as an advisory adviser to the Department of Health and Human Services until December.
The Trump administration is moving swiftly to form Columbia. This is because it calls for stronger action against allegations of anti-Semitic bias on university campuses. Just 32 days after the investigation began in the Trump administration of Columbia on March 7th. We’ve reduced 400 million dollars Research grants and other federal money. It threatened to cut billions of dollars more than its university protests against the war in Gaza and anti-Semitism allegations.
Last week, the threat escalated with a list of requests that Trump officials called “prerequisites” to receive federal money. He directed the universities to place research departments in the Middle East, South Asia and Africa in “academic receiverships” and reorganize the discipline process, among other changes.
It was given to adhere to Colombia until this week.
Colombia has not signaled the plan. In response to the latest demands, interim president Katrina Armstrong promised that the school would “be at that value,” but he was not familiar with it. School leaders have previously promised to work with the Trump administration. Fighting anti-Semitism.
Internally, Colombia faces pressure to counterattack. Some faculty want to resist demands that are seen as an attack on academic freedom, and some students have denounced recent decisions. Expel some students A person who participated in a pro-Palestinian protest last year.
Some jurists said the school could make strong claims that Trump officials illegally plucked Columbia’s federal money.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 allows the education sector to terminate funding to universities that violate the Civil Rights Act only after certain measures have been taken. According to Title VI of the Act, the department must first make a formal finding of the violation, provide a hearing, notify Congress, and wait 30 days before withdrawing assistance.
At least some of the steps appear to be untracked, Babenstos said.
“There were no explicit discoveries. There were no records. There were no opportunities for a hearing,” he said. “This simply violates the procedural requirements under Title VI.”
Seven Columbia Law School professors published their own legal analysis on Saturday, finding that the Trump administration letter violated the standards of Title VI. First Amendment Protection And among other issues, due process rights.
Government demands threaten “the basic legal principles and missions of universities and universities across the country,” according to an analysis posted online by constitutional professor David Pozen.
Colombia has the weight of the next step, so there are few precedents to draw. The presidential administration has traditionally adopted a cooperative approach to ensuring universities comply with federal laws, supporting voluntary agreements on sanctions. However, the Trump administration has played a hostile role, with little room for negotiation and is rapidly moving from demand to penalty.
Kenneth Marcus, who headed the Education Bureau’s Civil Rights Office during Trump’s first term, said the administration appears to be using federal contracts widely to put pressure on Columbia, rather than limiting it to the “unmistressed, bureaucratic and relatively weak” Title VI process.
“The Trump administration is moving faster than we’ve seen in the past, hitting punches hard, and that will clearly have a greater impact than previous administrations,” said Marcus, who now heads the Brandes Center, a nonprofit for Jewish civil rights.
Marcus called it a creative and novel strategy that has not been tested in court, but he said it would be wise for Colombia to take a cooperative attitude.
“Columbia has no doubt that the initial $400 million problem could swell into a multi-billion dollar disaster if the response is insufficient,” he said.
The administration’s strategy is part of a hard-line approach laid out in the March 7 memo Anti-Semitism as a top priority For the Civil Rights Bureau of the Department of Education. Instead of terminating the case with a “toothless reform proposal,” we request meaningful changes to campus policy “with a strong focus on compliance.”
One of the new goals for the office is to “prevent people from becoming civil rights violators in the first instance,” according to a memo obtained by the Associated Press.
Rachel Moran, a law professor at Texas A&M University, says Columbia’s responses set an example of other higher education, but there are no easy options. She said the Trump administration appears to have inappropriately cut university funding, but there is no guarantee that the judge will recover aid amid legal challenges. And Colombia needs to consider other factors, such as the possibility of future retaliation from the administration.
“It’s a very tough situation,” Moran said. “And Colombia is really on display in some respects in this controversy.”
Bavenstos sees it as another attempt to test the Trump administration’s legal boundaries and see what pushback it gets.
“Columbia is one of the most prominent and most revived institutions of higher education in the world, and has a very strong case. “If they’re not pushed back, it’s going to signal the Trump administration and other academies.”
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