Trump vs the Universities
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Students across America are receiving admissions letters from their schools of choice. At the same time, universities are getting some letters of their own from the Trump administration. Sixty schools have been told that they are under investigation for Title VI violations relating to accusations of anti-Semitism.

And this week we saw a huge backlash to Columbia University's response, as it essentially gave in to the Trump administration's demands in the hopes of clawing back some federal funding. And just a week later, the university's interim president is stepping aside, as we learned late Friday night. On this weekend episode of Reuters World News, what the White House wants in this fight and what it means for education and freedom of speech in America.

I'm your host, Jonah Green. This episode is brought to you by Universal Pictures. Today's the day. From Universal Pictures and Blumhouse come a storm of terror from the director of The Shallows, the woman in the yard. Don't let in. Where does she come from? What does she want? When will she leave? The woman in the yard in theaters. Democracy is well-

So we feel that the pressure is that the administration is putting on Columbia a very serious threat to freedom of speech, freedom of protest, and the university's role in democracy. That's Paul Wilson. He's an assistant professor at Columbia University. He and other faculty members were protesting Columbia's decision to comply with the Trump administration's demands that it overhaul its protest policy and how it runs its Middle Eastern Studies Department.

Critics fear that decision could have a huge ripple effect as the administration pursues other schools. Joining me now are reporters Helen Koster and Julia Hart, who have been investigating why these schools specifically were chosen and what this all means for other campuses in the country and its students. Hi, you two. Thanks for joining us today. Thanks for having us.

Hi, Jonah. Thanks for having us. So first, what are the types of incidents that are being alleged here? For the schools that have complaints on record with the education department of the 60, there is a wide range of actual incidents.

anti-Semitic or alleged incidents of anti-Semitic discrimination. We found schools that had been accused by students of not responding properly to physical attacks, arson attacks,

death threats. There were other cases where the only event listed in the complaint was, you know, a rally or a group of students chanting a slogan that people found offensive, you know, just nonviolent occurrences. So again, the wide range of bases for these complaints where there do exist complaints against the schools has puzzled

Right. So a lot of your reporting focused on why these 60 schools in particular were chosen. And it sounds like from your reporting, it's not exactly clear what the correlation is here. So our reporting found that there really is no rhyme or reason as to why these 60 universities in particular were included in the correlation.

in this list and receive these letters from the DOE. We went to each of the universities and heard back from about half of them and asked them why they were included, especially because 15 of the universities included on the list had received complaints from the DOE and resolved them according to a publicly available database maintained by the DOE.

We also looked at a campus anti-Semitism scorecard that's maintained by the Jewish organization, the ADL, which gives grades to different universities based on the level of anti-Semitic behavior on their campus. And even those grades did not track with the universities that were included on the list.

We went to the Department of Education and the DOE administrator who wrote these letters, and they did not provide us any indication of why these universities were included. So our reporting points to a pretty haphazard and

confusing and opaque explanation for these 60 universities to be included. We also interviewed two former attorneys with the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights who had been involved with

these investigations into universities for different forms of discrimination. They told us that they were not involved with this list. They did not know why universities were included on this list.

They were confused as to the makeup of this list and did not know who put it together and more significantly are no longer employed as a result of major cuts to the Department of Education that occurred this month. So it's unclear who will actually be available to implement these investigations with a highly diminished Department of Education staff.

And just to note here, Helen and Julia did reach out to the education department for comment, and they did not respond. Another interesting fact about some of the complaints that do exist for the 60 universities that received this letter from the education department is that several only have complaints on record that

allege discrimination against Arab and Muslim students or Islamophobic harassment, which also violates Title VI, but is not obviously the subject of the letters that were addressed to the schools from the Trump administration. And again, there's been no explanation from the administration or the education department about why those schools would be included in this group of 60. So the claim is that these

schools ran afoul of Title VI. Can you just quickly tell us what that is and what that entitles the federal government to do? So the idea is that Title VI is the law that allows the U.S. government to withhold funding from schools that discriminate on the basis of religion, national origin, and other protected classes. And the idea is that if these schools were to be found to violate Title VI,

the federal government would be able to withhold funding from them as they recently did with Columbia University. There's typically a pretty lengthy process involved with that withdrawal. But in the case of Columbia, the administration seems to have circumvented it, which leads to concerns that other universities might face the same future. So what is it the White House wants to see happen at these schools? I mean, we could take Columbia, for example.

The Trump administration demanded that Columbia University ban face masks on campus and give its security employees the power to make arrests. It also wanted reforms to the student admissions policies and wanted the administration

the university administration to place its Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Department under what's called academic receivership for at least five years, which means that the department would be, you know, control over the department would be taken away from its faculty. So that was a pretty extraordinary concession. And I think the focus specifically on this

changing curriculum kind of sparked a lot of fury at Columbia and elsewhere. And critics argue, and many of these critics are Jewish, that this claim of anti-Semitic discrimination is a pretext for the government to essentially harass liberal-leaning institutions and potentially try to control how they teach their students.

The Trump administration has been going after a number of elite institutions, from higher education to private law firms. And Trump and his allies have repeatedly criticized universities as being woke,

out-of-touch liberal bastions. There was a fact sheet that came out from the administration in January where Trump disparaged universities as infested with radicalism. So they have really been on his radar for a long time, especially during the campaign. So people who look at this

These letters and this list, many critics of this process are saying that, yes, indeed, this is a pretext. This is government overreach. And this could potentially have a chilling effect on academic freedom and the autonomy of these institutions. And that the threat of withholding federal funding is a way to essentially bend these institutions to the administration's will.

Yeah, and just to chime in, one of the higher education advocates that we spoke to was actually at J Street, which is a Jewish American lobbying group, and made the point that not only is this an attack on higher education under the guise of fighting anti-Semitism, but it's not actually going to protect Jewish students because of the fact that many of these schools are not on the top of the list for any

any group out there monitoring anti-Semitism. And there are other schools that actually came under much more criticism for the pro-Palestinian protests and their response to them that unfolded on their campus that are not on the list. Many of the schools that received F from the Anti-Defamation League on its campus anti-Semitism scorecard are not on this list. You know, we want to be clear that there are some very real

allegations of anti-Semitism and that the issue is not the severity or the existence of those acts, but rather the haphazard and opaque and seemingly random way in which these universities were targeted and singled out here in a way that

is really sowing a lot of chaos and confusion among those who've been included and those that are watching with the expectation that they may be targeted in the future. We've also seen a few high-profile arrests of international students. First, it was Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian legal resident who had his green card revoked and was detained for organizing pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia.

And just recently, a Turkish Tufts University student who voiced support for Palestinians was detained and had her visa revoked. So what does this do to the reputation of America as a beacon of higher learning? I mean, what's the effect of all this? This is a system that is currently under attack by Palestinians.

the U.S. government. I mean, the United States has long been valued for its institutes of higher education, the research that it does, the kinds of graduates that it produces, the innovation that comes out of it, and the different kinds of entrepreneurial ways in which its graduates go on to create companies and jobs around the world. It is currently under attack. It's one of those institutions like

law firms and arguably parts of the judiciary that are in the crosshairs of this administration. There's a big swath of the United States, however, that has long viewed academia as elite and liberal and out of touch with the needs

and lives of normal Americans. And so what we're seeing is in some ways a reflection of that ongoing simmering criticism as well. One common element that we see in all of the administration's dramatic moves against the universities over these pro-Palestinian protests, whether it's the detention and attempts to deport students or this, you know, threat that they are under investigation and face potential loss of funding,

is just, again, the lack of reason, of rationale. The students that have been targeted for deportation range from folks who were faces of the protest to people who really were not, by their own and others' accounts,

amongst the most highly involved students in the protests or even involved significantly in protests at all. Similarly, with this letter that's gone out, there doesn't seem to be the normal process that the Office of Civil Rights in the Education Department would follow. And you see that with, again, the lack of any complaint or the existence of complaints that had been resolved and the lack of any evidence

evidence showing why a new investigation has been opened or what was wrong with the way the university was fulfilling the terms of the previous agreement that it had reached with the department. So I think just that lack of due process and of

reasoning, at least transparently, is kind of a common thread to those. Another way that universities are under pressure right now is as a result of federal and foreign aid cuts, right? It's not just these letters. It's not just these detentions, but they're losing a lot of money. How is that sort of manifesting itself across higher learning?

Big institutions of higher education typically receive federal funding from agencies like the National Institutes of Health.

Earlier this month, Johns Hopkins University said that it would cut over 2,000 jobs in the U.S. and abroad after the Trump administration terminated $800 million in grants. Those were grants from the U.S. Agency of International Development, which has been dismantled essentially under the administration, but which has been a source of funding for public health and other types of research across the U.S.

Were these schools not prepared for this? Because we saw a lot of them, Columbia included, get targeted last year by the House Republicans before Trump was in office. And the controversy over those Gaza protests eventually toppled a bunch of university presidents. And so was there a plan there?

for what might happen if the government yanked funding like this, or did that not occur to them? We heard a range of responses from schools on this. Some schools said that they had just been prepared for anything, knowing that this administration was coming in with

a huge reform agenda. But other schools were taken aback, partly because they had, again, already reached agreements with the education department resolving existing complaints against them on this front and had not been told there were any new investigations. In some of the schools where these letters were received, the responses were...

immediate. So at the University of Hawaii, for instance, the governor of Hawaii got on the phone to the White House the day after the university received its letter and

told the White House that the university was not one of the worst offenders on the front of allowing campus anti-Semitism and said in a press release afterwards that he had been personally assured by someone in the White House that the school was not on the chopping block for anti-Semitism, his words. So each letter kind of

prompted a different reaction. And of course, we know what Colombia's response was, and yet it doesn't seem to have done the trick. Yeah. Well, and also I think in the Colombia example, it was notable that after Colombia essentially agreed to the administration's main demands, the administration described that response as, quote, a promising first step, implying that they were going to be, you know,

asking for even more from the university. And so I think there very much is a kind of heavy-handed negotiating tactic at play here of trying to ask schools to comply 100% with what the government wants from them, no matter how much that tramples on the

again, freedom of faculty to run their own departments or decide what they teach or for the school to set its own disciplinary processes. And the fact that Columbia has acquiesced so quickly, you know, that's enraged a lot of faculty at the university. And you've even seen faculty groups suing the Trump administration now over its effort to force the university to tighten rules on protests and put the Middle Eastern Studies Department under oversight. So, yeah,

It's very plausible that the administration will try similar tactics with the other schools that it's already started to go after.

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Thanks again to Helen and Julia for their time and expertise. Reuters World News is produced by Gail Issa, David Spencer, Christopher Wall Jasper, Sharon Reich-Garson, Kim Vanell, and me, Jonah Green. Our senior producers are Tara Oaks and Carmel Crimmins. Our executive producer is Lila de Kretzer. Sound design and musical composition by Josh Sommer. For more on this story, check out Reuters.com or the Reuters app.

Don't forget to follow us on your favorite podcast player. And we'll be back on Monday with our daily headline show.