Columbia University has agreed to a list of demands laid down by United States President Donald Trump in return for negotiations to reinstate its $400m federal funding which he revoked last month citing “a failure to protect Jewish students from antisemitic harassment”.

Among other concessions, the university has agreed to ban face masks and to empower 36 campus police officers with special powers to arrest students.

Recommended Stories

list of 3 itemsend of list

A new senior provost will also be installed to oversee the department of Middle East, South Asian and African Studies and the Center for Palestine Studies.

So what happened and what has Columbia agreed to do?

Why has the US government made demands of Columbia?

Last year, the school was a major hub during a wave of campus protests that swept the US as Israel’s war on Gaza escalated. On April 30, a group of students, staff and alumni occupied Hamilton Hall, an academic building on campus at Columbia, before being forcibly cleared by New York police at the request of the university’s leadership.

Advertisement

Trump’s administration has taken a hardline approach to those involved in the demonstrations last year, pledging in its first week to deport students involved. Earlier this month, it revoked Columbia’s federal funding and issued a list of demands the university must agree to before the funding would be reinstated.

This month, Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil, 29, who played a key role in organising the pro-Palestine protests, was arrested from his university residence in New York’s upper Manhattan by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents who said they would revoke his green card – permanent residency – following an order from the Department of State.

“It is a privilege to be granted a visa to live and study in the United States of America. When you advocate for violence and terrorism that privilege should be revoked, and you should not be in this country,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a news release about the arrest.

On March 10, US authorities sent a letter to 60 academic institutions, including Columbia, informing them they were under investigation for “antisemitic harassment and discrimination” and warning them of potential law enforcement actions if they do not “protect Jewish students”. The letter also threatened further funding cuts. In response, Columbia said it had expelled, suspended or revoked the degrees of students involved in the Hamilton Hall occupation.

As a deadline for Columbia to meet the rest of the government’s demands approached on Friday night, the university sent a new memo to the US administration, saying it had also agreed to them. Critics say the move could fundamentally alter academic freedom and the right to free speech in the United States.

Advertisement

What has Columbia agreed to do?

In its memo to the Trump administration on Friday night, Columbia University listed the new rules and policies which will now apply on its campus and laid out plans to reform its disciplinary processes.

Face masks will be banned, protesters will be required to identify themselves, security officers with special powers to arrest students are to be appointed and departments offering courses on the Middle East are to be reviewed and overseen by a new senior provost.

The Trump administration had demanded that the school place the Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies department into “academic receivership” for five years – a step which can be taken by a university’s administration to take control of a department it deems to be dysfunctional away from the faculty.

In the memo, the university said: “All of these steps have been underway and are intended to further Columbia’s basic mission: to provide a safe and thriving environment for research and education while preserving our commitment to academic freedom and institutional integrity.”

In the lead-up to Friday’s deadline to meet the government’s demands, US media reported that Columbia’s trustees had been meeting behind closed doors for several days, with some board members “deeply concerned the university is trading away its moral authority and academic independence for federal funds”, while others said that the school has limited options, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Advertisement

Agreeing to the demands does not guarantee the return of federal funds. The Trump administration said meeting its demands was merely a “precondition for formal negotiations”.

How have activists and academics responded?

Critics say the government’s demands go far beyond traditional compliance or conduct policies and that they amount to an attempt to stifle pro-Palestinian voices.

Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), said these conditions amount to political control over how universities function, what they teach and who is allowed to speak.

She emphasised the danger of such federal overreach, saying Columbia’s compliance with these demands would “set a terrible precedent and eviscerate academic freedom throughout the United States”.

“Never before in US history have we seen such an unbridled assault on American civil society, including our constitutional freedoms and protections,” Whitson told Al Jazeera.

According to her, the worst thing universities can do now is “stay quiet and think they won’t be next”. Complying with the government’s demands “will open the door for identical actions against every other university in the country”, she added.

Advertisement

She said the future of academic discourse itself is now at stake.

“The central driving mission of these assaults is first and foremost to silence not just speech but even study of Palestinian rights and history,” she said. “It’s about creating an environment where universities can teach only content that a particular administration deems acceptable.”

Tariq Kenney-Shawa, a US policy fellow at Al-Shabaka: The Palestine Policy Network, called the administration’s move “absolutely absurd” and added that the university is “effectively selling away its legitimacy and independence as an academic institution”.

“For an administration that is supposedly so dedicated to shrinking the influence of the federal government in the private affairs of everything from universities to women’s bodies, to now be interfering in the matters of university conduct is a clear example of authoritarian overreach,” Kenney-Shawa told Al Jazeera.

He argued that the Trump administration and its pro-Israel supporters are “losing the debate about Israel” on college campuses and are resorting to forcing them to shut down discussions entirely.

“There is no doubt that Trump is applying a template that his administration will use against anyone who opposes its far-right agenda,” he said. “But it’s critical to highlight that this is a deliberate targeting of those who advocate for Palestinian rights and criticise Israel.”

Professor Jonathan Zimmerman, a graduate of Columbia and now a historian of education at the University of Pennsylvania, told Reuters it was “a sad day for the university”. He said: “Historically, there is no precedent for this. The government is using the money as a cudgel to micromanage a university.”

Advertisement

Todd Wolfson, president of the American Association of University Professors, said the move was “arguably the greatest incursion into academic freedom, freedom of speech and institutional autonomy that we’ve seen since the McCarthy era. It sets a terrible precedent.”

Will students be deported?

The government is certainly making efforts to do this but will face legal challenges.

In recent weeks, reports of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents appearing on campus have unsettled many and advocacy groups say the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil is part of a broader pattern to target protesters. Khalil, who is a permanent resident of the US and whose American wife is eight months pregnant, was placed in immigration detention, first in New York and, later, Louisiana. The Trump administration said it plans to strip him of his green card.

Khalil has mounted a legal challenge, arguing that the effort to deport him violates his rights to free speech and due process, which are guaranteed under the US Constitution. This week, a federal court rejected Trump’s attempt to have the case dismissed.

“These are serious allegations and arguments that, no doubt, warrant careful review by a court of law; the fundamental constitutional principle that all persons in the United States are entitled to due process of law demands no less,” Judge Jesse Fruman wrote in his ruling.

Last week, a second Columbia University student protester, Leqaa Kordia, was arrested and accused of overstaying her F-1 student visa. She was detained by ICE agents and detained for deportation. Another foreign student, Ranjani Srinivasan of India, had her student visa revoked for participating “in activities supporting Hammas”, a misspelling of the Palestinian armed group Hamas.

Advertisement

Earlier this week, government agents detained Badar Khan Suri, an Indian postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown’s Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. He is being held in Louisiana for deportation for “spreading Hamas propaganda and promoting antisemitism” on social media, Tricia McLaughlin, an assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), said on Wednesday.

Khaled Elgindy, a visiting scholar at Georgetown who focuses on Palestinian-Israel affairs, said the enforcement efforts appear to be entering “a different realm with this case”, extending beyond protest activity.

“This person seems to have been targeted, not for his activism,” he said, “but simply for being suspected of holding certain views.”

Legal efforts to prevent universities from sharing information about students with the government are under way.

Earlier this week, the US District Court for the Southern District of New York granted the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)’s request for a legal injunction barring Columbia from sharing student information with federal agencies without due process. The ruling comes amid mounting concerns that universities may be pressured into handing over sensitive data on students, particularly those from Muslim or Arab backgrounds.