NEW YORK: The sudden shutdown of millions of dollars in federal funding to Columbia University this month is already disrupting medical and scientific research at the school as it confronts a Friday deadline to bow to government demands for sweeping changes in how it deals with dissent on campus.

The administration of President Donald Trump said two weeks ago it was immediately terminating grants and contracts worth $400 million to the private New York university, the epicentre of last year’s nationwide pro-Palestinian student protest movement, which Trump has called antisemitic and anti-American.

A week later, the administration sent a letter with nine demands related to how the school deals with protests and how it oversees its Middle East studies department. Meeting the demands, which Columbia law professors and civil rights groups say are unconstitutional, is a precondition for negotiations over Columbia’s “continued financial relationship with the United States government,” the letter said.

The sudden cancellation is having a deep and immediate impact at Columbia’s medical campus, some 50 blocks north of the main campus where protesters staged weeks of tents encampments and a brief takeover of a campus building last year.

Scientists and doctors who were awarded grants by the National Institutes of Health after months or years of work described the shock of receiving unusual notices by email last week saying their projects were terminated because of “unsafe antisemitic actions.”

Columbia researchers and administrators say the cancelled projects include the development of an AI-based tool that helps nurses to detect the deterioration of a patient’s health in hospital two days earlier than other early-warning systems. The administration also canceled funding for a study designed to improve the safety of blood transfusion therapies for adults, children and newborns, and research on uterine fibroids, non-cancerous tumors that can cause pain and affect women’s fertility.

“It’s devastating to scientific research,” said Dr. Marc Richmond, a pediatric cardiologist and associate professor at Columbia University Medical Centre. Richmond’s team is part of a consortium of New York City hospitals in the Pediatric Heart Network, which was awarded a seven-year grant last year to improve the treatment of heart disease and children born with congenital heart defects.

He received an email from a Columbia administrator that his grant, much of it used to train and pay investigators and a pediatric research nurse, was on the Trump administration’s termination list.

The university received more than $1.3 billion through government grants and contracts in the 2024 fiscal year, according to its financial statements.

The face-off between the private university and the White House is an extraordinary test of the extent of a president’s executive powers. Civil rights groups say the president is violating the US Constitution’s free speech and due process protections, while supporters of the administration’s actions say that it is necessary to protect the Columbia community from antisemitism.

Columbia’s response is being watched by other universities that the administration has sanctioned as it advances its policy objectives in areas ranging from campus protests to transgender sports and diversity initiatives. The administration has warned at least 60 other universities of possible action over alleged failure to comply with federal civil rights laws related to antisemitism. It has targeted at least three law firms that the president says helped his political opponents or helped prosecute him unfairly.

Among its demands on Columbia, Trump’s administration wants the school to place its Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies department under academic receivership for at least five years, taking control away from its faculty. Some Republican lawmakers in the US House of Representatives last year criticised at least two professors of Palestinian descent working in the department for their comments about the conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.

Academic receivership is a rare step taken by a university’s administrators to fix a dysfunctional department by appointing a professor or administrator outside the department to take over. It is unheard of for the US government to make such a demand.

The list of demands includes a ban on face masks on campus and seeking arrest powers for its security employees. Columbia is also being asked to reform its student admissions policies and adopt a definition of antisemitism backed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, which lists certain criticisms of the Israeli government as examples of antisemitism.

University senate

Many of the administration’s demands entail policy changes that would have to pass its University Senate, made up of elected students, staff, alumni and faculty. Columbia has shared governance with the senate since the late 1960s, when anti-war students organised disruptive protests in which they seized control of buildings and briefly held a dean hostage.

The senate has repeatedly criticised any signs that Columbia administration was side-stepping the body’s governance powers, including in April when the administration, without senate permission, called police on campus to arrest student protesters for the first time since 1968.

Published in Dawn, March 22nd, 2025