The lawsuit was filed after the Ivy League school agreed to conditions for protecting Jewish students in the future.
Organizations representing K–12 and higher education teachers asked a federal judge to restore $400 million in grants that the Trump administration rescinded from Columbia University following an investigation into campus anti-Semitism.
The lawsuit, filed on March 25 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York by the American Federation of Teachers union and the American Association of University Professors, accuses the Department of Education and the Department of Justice of violating the First Amendment by “using funding cuts as a cudgel to coerce a private institution to adopt restrictive speech codes and allow government control over teaching and learning.”
“Columbia is the testing ground for the Trump administration’s tactic to force universities to yield to its control,” Orion Danjuma, lead counsel for the plaintiffs, said in a statement issued by the group Protect Democracy. “We are bringing this lawsuit to protect higher education from unlawful government censorship and political repression.”
The funding was revoked earlier this month following a probe into pro-Palestinian encampments, vandalism of a school building, and other disruptions last year during which Jewish students were harassed.
In addition to the $400 million cut, the Trump administration also required Columbia administrators to satisfy nine conditions in order to be eligible for future federal funding, including a student mask ban, strict supervision of the Middle East studies department, an overhaul of the judiciary process for disciplining disruptive students, an increase in “intellectual diversity,” the implementation of a clear definition of anti-Semitism, and new student recruitment and admissions protocols to weed out anti-Semitic students in future classes.
This lawsuit was filed after several cabinet members acknowledged Columbia’s progress.
“Instead of inspiring universal condemnation, the October 7 holocaust triggered a global wave of anti-Semitism. Ivy league campuses became a greenhouse for poison,” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in a March 24 statement. “President Trump has ordered his cabinet to use every constitutional tool to uproot this divisive weed. I’m glad Columbia has agreed to this first step and will begin to restore itself as a garden of tolerance, reason, compassion, and respect.”
