Cornell Becomes Latest University to Submit to Trump's 'Extortion' Over Student Protests
The government claimed that Cornell had violated civil rights law by allowing students to protest against Israel. Even though the agreement required the school to admit no wrongdoing, it still agreed to pay a $30 million fine.
Cornell University became the latest school to cave to demands from the Trump administration on Friday, inking a deal that would restore $250 million in unpaid research funds stripped by the federal government as part of its crusade against higher education and efforts to punish schools that allowed students to freely express pro-Palestine views.
Following a months-long investigation by the government for allegedly violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, the Ivy League school agreed to pay a $30 million fine to the government, which claimed that Cornell had violated the law by not sufficiently cracking down on student protests against Israel's genocide in Gaza. The administration accused the school of failing “to protect Jewish students.”
In March, the Department of Education launched investigations into 60 major US universities, with Education Secretary Linda McMahon describing students' peaceful demonstrations against Israel that had swept campuses the previous year as "relentless antisemitic eruptions."
As The Guardian reported earlier this week, the civil rights investigation at Cornell had been spurred by a nonspecific, anonymous complaint that a professor “is supporting Hammas [sic] and their beliefs. He is literally brain washing students to hate and discriminate towards a certain religions [sic]–Jews." The complaint demanded that the professor be "black listed" from teaching.
Following this complaint, the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights announced an investigation into the school for "failing to respond to incidents of harassment."
In a letter to the school community on Friday, Cornell's president, Michael Kotlikoff, said that the resolution made explicit that its agreement to pay out the lofty fine to the Trump administration was "not an admission of wrongdoing" by the university.
In addition to paying the fine, the school also had to set aside another $30 million to invest in "research programs that will directly benefit US farmers through lower costs of production and enhanced efficiency.”
And while Kotlikoff said he would refuse a deal that allowed the government to “dictate our institution’s policies,” the agreement requires the school to comply with several of the Trump administration's ideological goals.
It agreed to restrict its use of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies and turn over data on the racial makeup of its student body to demonstrate that it is complying with the 2023 Supreme Court decision outlawing affirmative action. It also agreed to train staff using a Justice Department memo ordering colleges to abandon "transgender-friendly” policies.
Cornell also agreed to "conduct annual surveys to evaluate the campus climate for Cornell students, including the climate for students with shared Jewish ancestry." The school specifically agreed to query students about "whether they believe the changes Cornell has made since October of 2023," when Israel launched a two-year genocide in response to Hamas attack, "have benefited the Cornell community."
The Trump administration has notably ordered schools to abide by a wide-ranging definition of "antisemitism" that not only punishes displays of bigotry against Jewish people, but also criticisms of Israel's government and policies.
Cornell also agreed to seek out “experts on laws and regulations regarding sanctions enforcement, anti-money laundering, and prevention of terrorist financing,” suggesting that the school will be expected to discipline and investigate pro-Palestinian organizations on campus, which the administration has baselessly accused of "material support" for terrorism.
Cornell's agreement with the administration comes as students at more than 100 campuses across the country have launched demonstrations against Trump's efforts to coerce schools into signing his “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” in exchange for priority federal funding and other “positive benefits.” Critics have described it as a "loyalty oath" and an "extortion agreement."
Though several schools have declined to sign onto the compact, Cornell is not the first school to bend to the Trump administration's demands to restart the flow of federal funding: Brown University, Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Virginia have all cut similar deals.
Jameel Jaffer, the director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, has argued that there was little basis for Cornell to be fined for civil rights violations.
"If the Trump administration had evidence that Cornell systemically discriminated against Jewish students in violation of Title VI, it wouldn't let the university off the hook for a $30 million investment in research about AI, robotics, and farming," Jaffer said. "But, of course, there's no such evidence. The settlement only confirms what we already knew—that the Trump administration's Title VI allegations were baseless and made in bad faith."
"That doesn't mean there weren't antisemitic incidents on Cornell's campus. There were. But there's just no support for the notion that Cornell or other major American universities were indifferent to antisemitism," he continued. "The problem wasn't that universities were indifferent to antisemitism, but that they allowed trustees, advocacy groups, demagogues, etc. to pressure them into treating as 'antisemitism' all kinds of political expression and advocacy that was entirely legitimate."
A report from the American Association of University Professors and the Middle East Studies Association, which analyzed discrimination complaints sent to the Civil Rights Office found that "all but one of the 102 antisemitism complaint letters we have analyzed focus on speech critical of Israel; of these, 79% contain allegations of antisemitism that simply describe criticisms of Israel or Zionism with no reference to Jews or Judaism; at least 50% of complaints consist solely of such criticism."
Though the payout was far less than the $200 million settlement Columbia agreed to pay earlier this year, Spencer Beswick, a postdoctoral associate at Cornell's Humanities Scholars Program, wrote on social media that his university was guilty of "capitulation to extortion."
