Columbia faculty groups sue Trump administration over funding cuts, academic demands

By Brendan Pierson and Jonathan Allen

(Reuters) -Groups representing Columbia University professors on Tuesday sued the Trump administration over its effort to force the university to tighten rules on campus protests and put a Middle Eastern studies department under outside oversight, among other measures, by canceling $400 million in federal funding and threatening to withhold billions more in the future.

“This action challenges the Trump administration’s unlawful and unprecedented effort to overpower a university’s academic autonomy and control the thought, association, scholarship, and expression of its faculty and students,” the American Association of University Professors and the American Federation of Teachers said in their lawsuit in Manhattan Federal Court.

“The Trump administration is coercing Columbia University to do its bidding and regulate speech and expression on campus by holding hostage billions of dollars in congressionally authorized federal funding – funding that is responsible for positioning the American university system as a global leader in scientific, medical, and technological research and is crucial to ensuring it remains so,” they said.

The Trump administration has accused the university of having antisemitic harassment on campus and demanded that it place one specific department – Middle East, South Asia, and Africa Studies – into academic receivership, an unusual move where university administrators take control away from the faculty at a department that has been deemed dysfunctional. The Trump administration declined to specify evidence of its claims.

Critics of the Trump administration have said that the receivership demand did not provide constitutional, statutory or regulatory authority and is meant to punish scholars in the department for views that the Trump administration does not like.

Columbia has already partly acquiesced to the administration’s demands in an effort to regain funding, saying it had already begun hiring security with arrest powers, that it was working to hire new faculty with joint positions in the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies and the School for International and Public Affairs, as well as hire a new administrator to review the leadership and balance of Middle Eastern programs.

The actions against Columbia have created a “pervasive climate of fear and self-censorship” not only at its New York City campus but at universities around the country fearing retaliation from the administration, the lawsuit said, adding the actions chilled speech and threatened academic freedom.

It is asking the court to order the administration to restore the $400 million in canceled grants and contracts and to block it from taking any action to enforce its demands.

Also on Tuesday, the AAUP and other academic associations filed a separate lawsuit in Massachusetts federal court seeking to block the administration from deporting non-citizen students for engaging in activism for Palestinian rights, saying that the arrest earlier this month of Columbia graduate and Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent resident of the United States, and Trump’s threat of further arrests had “created a climate of repression and fear on university campuses.”

They are seeking a court order barring the administration from deporting or threatening students based on their political views.

Both lawsuits accuse the administration of trampling on the right to free speech under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

The White House and Justice Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Columbia, which is not a party in either lawsuit, also did not respond to a request for comment.

Khalil, who was born and raised in a refugee camp in Syria, entered the U.S. on a student visa in 2022 and became a legal permanent resident in 2024. A federal judge last week ruled that he must remain in the United States for now.

The administration claimed after Khalil’s arrest that he had withheld his previous work for UNRWA, the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, in his visa application, saying that was grounds for his deportation. UNRWA has said Khalil was briefly an unpaid intern.

(Reporting by Brendan Pierson and Jonathan Allen in New York; Editing by Aurora Ellis)