Columbia University and the Trump administration announced a $221 million settlement agreement on Wednesday, putting an end, for now, to the standoff between the two that had thrown the Ivy League school into a financial crisis.
The deal was controversial both inside and outside the Trump administration. While the president is getting a pound of flesh and the university was forced to commit in writing to complying with a multitude of federal laws, the agreement did not include several structural reforms to the school that the parties had previously discussed.
How good a deal is it? Trump didn’t raze Morningside Heights, but he signalized he was willing to do so. He helped to make the state of our university campuses a national political issue that won’t recede anytime soon, and he took action on it out of the gate. Wednesday’s agreement is a demonstration that there are concrete penalties for schools that permit the harassment of Jewish students and allow radical activists to hijack the campus.
Columbia wasn’t brought to heel only because the Trump administration pulled federal funds. Aggressive media coverage, congressional hearings, and the presidential campaign together focused national attention on the sorry state of the campus, and the school sustained immense reputational damage. Disgusted donors walked away, and thousands of potential students never applied.
While the agreement calls for a federal “Resolution Monitor” to track Columbia’s compliance, the real watchdogs will be those of us—in the press, in the Congress, in the administration, and at Columbia—pushing to reform higher education and make America’s colleges and universities institutions that educate patriotic citizens.
But the war is not over, and the same forces that had a stake in the battle over Columbia must be redeployed to a fight already well underway at Harvard, where the stakes are even higher and the adversary even more fanatical.