Against Tyranny?
by David Moore
In its first months back in power in 2025, the Trump White House launched an unprecedented attack on U.S. universities. To eliminate what the Department of Education called “nebulous goals such as diversity, racial balancing, social justice, or equity,” the administration weaponized the Civil Rights Act to freeze billions in university research funding, with a view to forcing changes in higher education policies, faculty, and governance.
More than 60 universities were put on notice in a March 10, 2025 letter from the Office for Civil Rights warning of potential enforcement actions from investigations into antisemitism on campus. In the weeks that followed, some $6 billion in already-awarded federal contracts and grants was suspended as the administration sought to exert control over policies it viewed as unacceptable DEI—and to extract financial concessions—from nine elite universities.
The University of Pennsylvania was first to settle with the White House in early July, agreeing to restrictions on the participation of transgender people in athletics, and removing the name of transgender swimmer Lia Thomas from a UPenn list of all-time school records in women’s swimming.
Columbia followed a few days later, with the announcement that it would pay a settlement of $221 million to the government in order to free more than $1 billion in research funding, agreeing also to the government’s imposition of an independent monitor to oversee required concessions on campus. Of the nine universities targeted last spring, only Harvard fought the Trump administration in court—and successfully, so far. In a ruling in Harvard’s favor, a federal judge wrote in September that the Trump administration’s antisemitism charges were “a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities.” Harvard’s case is currently on appeal; funding for a few of the other schools remains frozen or in litigation.
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