By SUSAN JONES
The Trump administration has now threatened to revoke federal funding from four Ivy League schools — Columbia, Penn, Harvard and Princeton — and may soon add Brown University to the list over what the administration says is a failure to protect Jewish students from antisemitism. There was plenty more that happened over the past two weeks that impacts higher education. Here's a rundown:
March 21
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Columbia University announced significant policy changes after the Trump administration revoked $400 million in federal funding over campus protests related to the Israel-Hamas conflict. The new measures include restrictions on demonstrations, revised disciplinary procedures, and a review of its Middle East studies curriculum.
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The Trump administration moved to detain an international student at Cornell University who has led protests on its Ithaca, N.Y., campus, according to the New York Times. A lawyer for Momodou Taal, a doctoral student in Africana studies, said in court papers that he had been notified by email that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement was seeking his surrender. Last year, Taal was among a group of pro-Palestinian activists who shut down a career fair on the Cornell campus that featured weapons manufacturers. As a result, the university had ordered him to study remotely for the spring semester.
March 24: The NAACP, the National Education Association, and AFSCME Maryland Council 3, along with several public-school parents, filed a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration's actions to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education, calling the moves unconstitutional and harmful to millions of students nationwide.
March 25
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The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and the American Federation of Teachers sued the U.S. departments of Justice, Health and Human Services, and Education; the National Institutes of Health and the General Service Administration, along with the leaders of each agency, over what they described as an “unlawful and unprecedented effort to overpower” Columbia University’s academic autonomy and “control the thought, association, scholarship, and expression of its faculty and students.” The plaintiffs accused the Trump administration of “holding hostage billions of dollars in congressionally authorized federal funding” from the Ivy League institution without following legal guidelines.
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The national AAUP, three AAUP chapters, and the Middle East Studies Association sued to stop the Trump administration from deporting noncitizen students and professors who advocate for Palestinian rights and other political causes, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. In a lawsuit filed in Massachusetts district court, lawyers for the AAUP and MESA argued that the Trump administration’s actions violate the First Amendment by penalizing constitutionally protected speech. The complaint says the threat of deportation has created a climate of fear on college campuses, which has kept students and faculty from speaking freely.
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A federal judge blocked the Trump administration from deporting a Columbia University student, who moved to the United States from Korea when she was 7 but is now a legal permanent resident. The New York Times reported that the government argued Yunseo Chung’s “presence in the United States hinders the administration’s foreign policy goal of stopping the spread of antisemitism.” The judge said that “nothing in the record” showed that Chung posed a “foreign-policy risk.”
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Turkish national Rumeysa Ozturk’s arrest by masked officers near Tufts University’s campus in Massachusetts was caught on camera and quickly went viral. Ozturk is a Ph.D. student at Tufts on a valid F-1 visa. She was detained and her visa revoked, but no reason was given. Last year, she cowrote an op-ed in the school’s newspaper in which she criticized Tufts’ response to a call for the university to divest from companies with ties to Israel because of the conflict in Gaza.
March 27
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The Trump administration announced that it was laying off 10,000 employees at the Health and Human Services Department as part of a broad reorganization that reflects the priorities of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The FDA and CDC will be particularly hard hit, losing roughly 20 percent of their staff. The National Institutes of Health is expected to lose 1,200 jobs. These cuts are in addition to around 10,000 people already leaving the agencies under the administration's voluntary resignation offer and early retirement.
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Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters that the State Department under his direction had revoked the visas of possibly more than 300 people and was continuing to revoke visas daily.
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The University of Michigan announced it will eliminate its central diversity, equity and inclusion program. Michigan said it would discontinue its diversity “strategic plan,” known as D.E.I. 2.0, and effectively dismantle the large administrative bureaucracy constructed to drive it through the university’s colleges and professional schools. The university also said it would expand its existing prohibition on so-called diversity statements in faculty hiring, banning their use more broadly in admissions, promotions, awards and annual reviews.
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The Trump administration opened investigations into the admissions policies at Stanford University and three campuses within the University of California system, including UC Berkeley, UCLA and UC Irvine, the Department of Justice said Thursday. U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi has directed the department’s Civil Rights Division to investigate whether the schools’ policies comply with the 2023 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that ended affirmative action in college admissions.
March 27-28: Republican-controlled legislatures in Ohio and Kentucky passed laws requiring post-tenure review policies at public universities and banning diversity, equity and inclusion offices, along with other DEI activities. Ohio’s law also bans strikes for a large group of faculty.
March 28: Columbia University announces interim president, Katrina Armstrong, is stepping down after less than eight months in the role. The move comes just one week after the institution unveiled sweeping policy changes that appeared to align with Trump administration demands tied to federal funding.
March 31: The Trump administration said it is reviewing billions of dollars in federal grants and contracts to Harvard University over what it claimed was a failure to protect Jewish students from antisemitism. The announcement came from the Department of Education, Department of Health and Human Services, and General Services Administration, according to Higher Ed Dive. Under review are $255.6 million in contracts and $8.7 billion in multi-year grant commitments to Harvard and its affiliates, the largest sum yet that the Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism has targeted.
April 1
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Princeton University said federal agencies, including the Department of Energy, the Department of Defense and NASA, have suspended “several dozen” federal research grants to the Ivy League university. Princeton President Chris Eisgruber said in a community message that “the full rationale” for the agencies’ cancellation wasn’t clear yet but stated the university will comply with the law and is “committed to fighting antisemitism and all forms of discrimination, and we will cooperate with the government in combating antisemitism.”
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The U.S. Naval Academy removed nearly 400 books from its library after being told by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s office to review and get rid of ones that promote diversity, equity and inclusion.
April 2: Researchers, unions and others sued the National Institutes of Health over the agency’s termination of at least 678 diversity, equity and inclusion-related research projects. They are asking a federal court to block NIH from enforcing its anti-DEI directives both in the short term and permanently and to restore grants to researchers that the agency has cut under the Trump administration, according to Higher Ed Dive.
Susan Jones is editor of the University Times. Reach her at suejones@pitt.edu or 724-244-4042.
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