Following the cancellation of $400 million in federal grants earlier this year, nearly 180 researchers are expected to lose their jobs, according to the Columbia Daily Spectator.
Campus Reform's Zachary Marschall says the university has "failed and bungled their negotiations with the Trump administration" over enacting more policing measures and beefing up security to combat antisemitism on its campus, and now, they are literally paying the price for that.
He thinks this downsizing is a good thing.
"Columbia and every other university should learn to pay its own way," he submits. "They can't be entitled to taxpayer money, no matter how badly they operate as an institution. This is what the university should be doing – funding their own activities – and then they should be slimming down and cutting out the things that they don't care about, the things that are not really priorities."
Financially speaking, he says Columbia has around $15 billion in endowments, plus other annual revenue through donations and tuition, so it can afford to defy the Trump administration indefinitely.
It comes down to priorities.
"There's more than enough money to pay for the things they want," Marschall asserts. "As long as they are able to make those choices, then we don't need to be using taxpayer money to fund them."
Trump canceled the Ivy League university's federal funding due to the school's response to antisemitism on campus.
Last week, House Republicans grilled the presidents of three other institutions – Haverford College, California Polytechnic State University, and DePaul University – for tolerating antisemitism and continued anti-Israel protests on their campuses.
Jason Bedrick, research fellow in the Center for Education Policy at The Heritage Foundation, says the presidents were better prepared for this hearing than they were for a similar one held at the end of 2023, but it still did not go well for them.
He describes the questioning as tough but appropriate.
"When Representative Elise Stefanik (R-New York) was quizzing the president of Haverford about incidents on her campus, she would say, 'Well, we're not gonna defend that. That was absolutely inappropriate,'" Bedrick relays.
But President Raymond could not say what was done about it.
Bedrick says she and the others are hiding behind the First Amendment, falsely presenting themselves as "free speech absolutists."
"These are the same campuses that have been silencing conservative students, that have been throwing the book at students for so-called microaggressions," he notes.
Hillel International, a Jewish student organization, reports antisemitic incidents on college campuses increased 700% since the start of the Israel-Hamas war.
The Education Department has said that Harvard University will not receive any new federal grants until the school meets the Trump administration's demands on this and other issues.
Trump already froze more than $2 billion in federal grants to Harvard and wants to strip the school of its tax-exempt status.
Harvard has continued to call those actions "government overreach."
