Month: August 2025

The Trump administration and Harvard University are reportedly close to reaching a settlement that would require Harvard to pay US$500 million in exchange for the government releasing frozen federal funding and ending an investigation into antisemitism on campus.

This follows similar deals the White House struck with Columbia University and Brown University in July 2025. Both of those universities agreed to undertake campus reforms and pay a large sum – more than $200 million in the case of Columbia and $50 million for Brown – in order to receive federal funding that the Trump administration was withholding. The White House originally froze funding after saying that these universities had created unsafe environments for Jewish students during Palestinian rights protests on campus in 2024.

As a scholar of higher education politics, I examined the various deals the Trump administration made with some universities. When Harvard announces its deal, it will be informative to see what is different – or the same.

I believe the Columbia and Brown deals can be used as a blueprint for Trump’s plans for higher education. They show how the government wants to drive cultural reform on campus by giving the government more oversight over universities and imposing punishments for what it sees as previous wrongdoing.

Here are four key things to understand about the deals:

1. Antisemitism isn’t a major feature of the agreements

The Trump White House accused Brown and Columbia of tolerating antisemitism during campus protests. But the administration neither followed federal standards for investigating antisemitism, nor did it dictate specific reforms to protect Jewish students.

Ahead of its deal, Columbia in March 2025 adopted a new, broader definition of antisemitism that was created by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. The United Nations and most European Union countries also use this definition.

Yet the school’s 22-page deal mentions antisemitism only once, where it says Columbia is required to hire an additional staff member to support Jewish students’ welfare.

Brown’s deal, meanwhile, did not involve the university adopting a particular definition of antisemitism. But Brown did commit to offering “research and education about Israel, and a robust Program in Judaic Studies.” Brown already hosts a Judaic Studies program, and it is unclear from the agreement’s text what additional measures are required.

The deals also extend well beyond antisemitism concerns and into questions of gender and the composition of student bodies.

Columbia agreed to provide “single-sex” housing and sports facilities, for example. The university has an optional Open Housing program that allows mixed-gender roommates and several gender-neutral restrooms.

This places the school in line with Donald Trump’s January executive order that says a person’s gender is based on their sex as assigned at birth.

Brown’s deal also requires single-sex sports and housing facilities. In addition, Brown committed to using definitions of men and women that match Trump’s executive order.

Columbia, which enrolls about 40% of its students from other countries, also agreed to “decrease financial dependence on international student enrollment.”

The Brown deal says nothing about international education.

2. Both deals are expensive but vague about financial details.

Columbia must pay a fine of more than $200 million to the federal government, while Brown will make $50 million in donations to Rhode Island workforce development programs.

In both cases, it is not clear where the money will go or how it will be used.

Congress passed The Clery Act in 1990, creating a legal framework for fining campuses that failed to protect students’ safety.

Since then, the government has reached different settlements with universities.

Liberty University, in Lynchburg, Virginia, was required to pay the federal government $14 million in 2024, for example, for failing to investigate sexual assault allegations.

But Columbia’s payment is far larger than any previous university and government settlement. Columbia will make three payments of about $66 million into the Treasury Department over three years, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education. But it isn’t clear how the money will exactly be spent and what will happen after those three years, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported in August 2025.

Only Congress can legally decide how to spend Treasury Department funds. But Trump has ignored Congress’ appropriation directives on a number of occasions.

Brown, meanwhile, will not pay the government anything. Instead, its deal will go “to state workforce development organizations operating in compliance with anti-discrimination laws, over the ten years.”

The Brown deal doesn’t say what qualifies as qualified workforce development organizations.

3. Trump wants to influence university admissions.

While the Brown and Columbia deals have several differences, the agreements have nearly identical language giving the Trump administration oversight of the way they admit students.

The deals say that the universities must provide the government with detailed information about who applied to the schools and was admitted, broken down by grades and test scores, as well as race and ethnicity. The government could then conduct a “comprehensive audit” of the schools, based on this information.

This information could also be used to determine if universities are showing a preferences for students of color. Without providing evidence, conservative activists have alleged that selective colleges discriminate against white people and that this is a violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Experts have said that these reporting requirements appear to be intended to increase the number of white students admitted to Ivy League schools.

4. The deals could open more doors to federal intrusion.

Claire Shipman, Columbia’s acting president, said in July that the deal would allow the university’s “research partnership with the federal government to get back on track.”

Christina Paxson, Brown’s president, also defended the agreement in a statement, writing that it “enables us as a community to move forward after a period of considerable uncertainty in a way that ensures Brown will continue to be the Brown that our students, faculty, staff, alumni, parents and friends have known for generations.”

But the deals could invite more scrutiny from the federal government.

Both deals spell out the government’s right to open new investigations against Brown and Columbia, or to reopen old complaints if the administration is not satisfied with how the universities are implementing the agreement.

Trump is now pressuring Harvard, UCLA and other universities to strike deals, also based on similar antisemitism allegations.

The White House announced on Aug. 8 that it could seize the research patents, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, that Harvard holds. Since 1980, universities have been able to legally hold, and profit from, patents resulting from federally funded research.

The federal government has long influenced higher education through funding and regulation. But the government has never tried to dictate what happens on campus before now.

Higher education experts like me believe that political goals now drive the way the government approaches higher education. Some of Trump’s conservative allies are now urging the president to go even further, saying “we have every right to renegotiate the terms of the compact with the universities.”

Given these and other pressure tactics, academics who study the law and government warn that the university deals indicate encroaching authoritarianism.

Brendan Cantwell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

Historian Nell Painter remarked in 2011, “Being white these days isn’t what it used to be.”

For the past decade, wave upon wave of protests against police violence and mass incarceration have drawn the public’s attention toward the continued significance of America’s color line, the set of formal and informal rules that maintain white Americans’ elevated social and economic advantages.

Meanwhile, an explosion of popular literature scrutinizes those rules and places white people’s elevated status in sharp relief.

How are white people making sense of these tensions?

In his 1935 publication “Black Reconstruction in America,” sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois described the “public and psychological wage” paid to white workers in the post-Reconstruction era on account of their being white. Today those “wages of whiteness” remain durable as ever. Nearly 60 years removed from the high water mark of the Civil Rights movement, its aims have not been met.

White people still enjoy better jobs, health care, housing, schooling and more.

I’m a sociologist of race and racism. My team of graduate student researchers and I have spent the past four years interviewing white people to understand how they make sense of their white racial status today. We concentrated our efforts among white people living in the U.S. South because that region is seen as more responsible for shaping what it means to be white, and the social and economic advantages of being white, than any other.

There is not much research on how white people think about what it means to be white. Meanwhile, popular and scholarly treatments of white Southerners as overwhelmingly conservative and racially regressive abound.

Some white Southerners we spoke with fit those tropes. Many others do not. Overall, we found white Southerners across the political spectrum actively grappling with their white racial status.

As Walter, 38, from Clarksdale, Mississippi, told us, “It’s a complicated time to be a white Southerner.” We use pseudonyms to protect anonymity.

Crises cast a long shadow

The Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci defined a crisis as a historical period in which “the old is dying and the new cannot be born.” Within this space between, Gramsci argued, “morbid phenomena of the most varied kind come to pass.”

Many people we spoke with lived through the defining ruptures of the 20th century that forever changed the South, and America too: the formal demise of Jim Crow rule, violent and bloody struggles over integration, and the slow, uneven march toward equal rights for all Americans.

Still others came of age against the backdrop of the defining shocks of this new century: 9/11 and the war on terrorism, Hurricane Katrina, the racial backlash to the election of Barack Obama, and the Black Lives Matter movement.

For some, the political rise of Donald Trump and his willingness to traffic in racist rhetoric constituted a crisis, too. “He embodies everything that is immoral,” said Ned, 45, from Vardaman, Mississippi. The town Ned is from is named for James K. Vardaman, former governor of Mississippi who once declared that “if it is necessary every Negro in the state will be lynched; it will be done to maintain white supremacy.”

Taken together, these crises cast a long shadow of uncertainty over white people’s elevated social position and anchor how white Southerners understand their white racial status.

Resistance to desegregation

Miriam, 61, from Natchez, Mississippi, grew up under the last gasps of Jim Crow. She recalled her parents pulling her from public school and sending her to a nearby private school shortly after the Supreme Court’s 1969 Alexander v. Holmes ruling, which ordered the immediate desegregation of Southern schools.

Her new school was one of hundreds of “segregation academies” founded across the South in the aftermath of the court’s ruling.

“You didn’t go over there, by the Black school,” Miriam recalled. “You stayed over by the white school. … I remember as a kid that made quite an impression.”

Reflecting on what it means to be a white Southerner today, Miriam drew from these experiences living under the region’s long shadow of segregation.

“There’s been so much hatred and so much unpleasantness. I want to do everything I can to make relations better,” she said. “I think that is part of being white in the South.”

Daryl, 42, a self-described conservative, lived in several Southern communities as a child, including Charlotte, North Carolina, in the mid-1980s as the city wrestled with its court-ordered school busing program. Daryl recalled his parents and other white people complaining about the poor quality of newly integrated schools, including telling him “stories of things like needles on the playground.”

Daryl rarely, if ever, talked with his own parents about race, but he broaches these topics with his own children today.

A self-described “childhood racist,” Daryl draws from his experiences to frame his conversations with his own children. “I remind them that there used to be this day where this was OK, and this is how things were thought of,” he says.

‘Good reason to be mad’

The region’s history also includes more contemporary crises.

Lorna, 34, is a registered Republican from Marion, Arkansas. She described how recent protests against police violence are affecting her understanding of America’s color line.

“I feel like Black people are mad or angry. They’re tired of violence and, you know, profiling,” she said. “And I don’t think it’s just in the South. I think it’s all over the United States. And they have a good reason to be mad.”

Kenneth, 35, lives in Memphis. Like Lorna and others, Kenneth’s sense of what it means to be white has been shaped by more recent crises, including the racial backlash to Obama’s elections in 2008 and 2012 that motivated Trump’s election in 2016.

Reflecting on these episodes, Kenneth believes he has an obligation as a white Southerner to become more informed about “the legacy of racism in the South and the impact that it still has today.”

Becoming more informed, Kenneth says, “will cause me to reflect on how I should think about that, and what, if anything, I should do differently now.”

Uncovering what’s minimized or ignored

Our interviews reveal a range of beliefs and attitudes among white Southerners often discounted or dismissed altogether by more popular and scholarly treatments of the region.

Contrary to research that finds white people minimizing or ignoring their elevated social status, the white Southerners we spoke with showed a profound awareness of the advantages their white racial status affords them.

“I have to admit I’m glad I’m white,” said Luke, 75, from Melber, Kentucky. “Because in the United States you probably have a little advantage.”

Our research also shows that how white people make sense of who they are is also a matter of where they are.

Places – and not just Southern ones – are imbued with ideas and beliefs that give meaning and significance to the people within them. The region’s history of racial conflict, meanwhile, renders the “wages of whiteness” more plain to see for white Southerners in ways we are only beginning to understand.

Put plainly: Place matters for how race matters.

Emphasizing this more complicated understanding of race and place allows for a more complete account of the South, including how the unfolding racial dramas of the past several decades continue to shape the region and its people.

James M. Thomas’s research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the Russell Sage Foundation

​Politics + Society – The Conversation