Trump Threatens to Scrap Columbia's Accreditation After the University Capitulated to His Previous Demands to Fight Campus Antisemitism

Jun 05, 2025

Columbia University led the way in caving in when Donald Trump began threatening it with the loss of government funds. So what is the university’s reward for compliance? A threat to their accreditation, which could block their students from receiving federal financial aid.

The BBC reports:

The Trump administration is looking to strip Columbia University of its accreditation over claims it violated the civil rights of its Jewish students. …
“Accreditors have an enormous public responsibility as gatekeepers of federal student aid,” [Secretary of Education Linda] McMahon wrote in a letter on Wednesday, calling Columbia’s actions “immoral” and “unlawful.”
The letter informs the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, which oversees Columbia, that Columbia “no longer appears to meet the Commissions accreditation standards” by its alleged violation of anti-discrimination laws.
In February, the Trump administration stripped Columbia of $400m in federal funding, alleging antisemitism at the campus. Columbia followed up by enacting campus rule changes demanded by the White House, including the re-organization of its Middle Eastern studies department.
The move was meant to appease the White House, but the deal appears to have had little impact.

Compliance did not protect Columbia; it made it more vulnerable. This result should convince universities and other institutions that Harvard’s response is the correct one. The best defense against this administration is firm and early resistance.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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