Your Cart is Empty
Troy Closson, Alan Blinder and Katherine Rosman
New York Times
Excerpt: Many professors saw it as surrender, a reward to the Trump administration’s heavy hand. Conservative critics of academia celebrated it as an overdue, righteous reset by an Ivy League university.
Columbia University’s concession on Friday to a roster of government demands as it sought to restore about $400 million in federal funding is being widely viewed as a watershed in Washington’s relationships with the nation’s colleges. By design, the consequences will be felt immediately on Columbia’s campus, where, for example, some security personnel will soon have arrest powers and an academic department that had drawn conservative scrutiny is expected to face stringent oversight. But they also stand to shape colleges far from Manhattan.
Jessica Blake
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: Before James Ryan stepped down as president of the University of Virginia last month, the Department of Justice accused him and other leaders of actively attempting to “defy and evade federal antidiscrimination laws.” Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general of the DOJ’s civil rights division, said that needed to change.
In a series of seven letters obtained by Inside Higher Ed via an open records request, Dhillon and other Department of Justice officials laid out their increasingly aggressive case that the university was at risk of losing federal funding, just as Ivy League institutions like Harvard and Columbia Universities had in the months prior for allegations of antisemitism.
Kevin Carey
The Atlantic
Excerpt: In March 2019, a team of investigators from the U.S. Department of Education’s fraud-prevention team arrived at a Houston trade school for what was supposed to be a routine inspection. Several of the students the team wanted to interview, however, were nowhere to be found. At the end of a long and frustrating day, the investigators headed back to their car. That’s when two of the missing students appeared in the parking lot. They wanted to talk in a place where school administrators couldn’t overhear them.
Michael C. Bender, Alan Blinder, Michael S. Schmidt
New York Times
Excerpt: Harvard University has signaled a willingness to meet the Trump administration’s demand to spend as much as $500 million to end its dispute with the White House as talks between the two sides intensify, four people familiar with the negotiations said.
According to one of the people, Harvard is reluctant to directly pay the federal government, but negotiators are still discussing the exact financial terms. The sum sought by the government, which recently accused Harvard of civil rights violations, is more than twice as much as the $200 million fine that Columbia University said it would pay when it settled antisemitism claims with the White House last week.
