The Trump administration has reached deals with Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania.
Now, the White House is seeking concessions from Cornell, among several elite universities that the Trump administration says failed to prevent campus antisemitism, in exchange for resuming federal funding, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The University is in active talks with the Trump administration and is likely to be one of the next schools to settle, according to Bloomberg. According to one of Bloomberg’s unnamed sources, a joint draft has been sent around but not yet signed.
The potential agreement is anticipated to largely reflect the model of the Trump administration’s recent deal with Columbia, including a fine for civil rights violations and a list of institutional policy demands, but the terms are still being shaped, and a finalized deal does not appear imminent, according to Bloomberg.
The University declined to comment to The Sun on the reported discussions between Cornell and the Trump administration.
Cornell and several of its peer institutions, including Northwestern and Princeton, have seen significant federal funding freezes by the Trump administration amid civil rights investigations into the schools.
The New York Times reported in April that the Trump administration had frozen over $1 billion in federal funding for Cornell, based on accounts from two unnamed U.S. officials. Cornell President Michael Kotlikoff told The Sun in early May that the University had seen approximately 120 stop-work orders until that point, along with the termination of grants over political concerns.
When asked by The Sun in May about communication between the University and the Trump administration, Kotlikoff had said, “We have had a number of talks.”
“We have an open OCR — [U.S. Department of Education’s] Office [for] Civil Rights — investigation into the University,” Kotlikoff said. “We've been trying to close those investigations, respond effectively to the questions of the federal government, and we've been having those conversations quite often to see how we can satisfy legitimate concerns of the government and also tell the federal government about Cornell and what's going on in Cornell so we can get back to normal and get back to what we do very well.”
The Trump administration’s agreements with Columbia and Penn include significant financial and policy concessions. In a deal announced Wednesday night, Columbia agreed to pay $221 million to the federal government over three years to settle anti-discrimination law violation allegations, in exchange for restoring the vast majority of its more than $400 million of terminated grants.
The Trump administration expects Cornell’s settlement to be substantial, though smaller than Columbia’s, according to one of Bloomberg’s unnamed sources.
The 22-page deal with Columbia also included campus policy reforms like maintaining its ban on protesting inside academic buildings and reporting admissions data on rejected and admitted students broken down by race, grade point average and standardized test scores to the federal government to prove the university’s adherence to post-affirmative action college admissions.
While Penn did not agree to a monetary concession, it promised to reconcile its policies of transgender inclusion in sports with those of the Trump administration. Following the agreement, Penn saw the restoration of $175 million in formerly suspended federal funding.
The WSJ reported that though the Trump administration is in discussions with several universities, including Cornell, the White House sees signing an agreement with Harvard as a primary objective, according to an unnamed source familiar with the talks. Compared to Columbia, Harvard has taken a more offensive approach against the White House, choosing to sue the Trump administration in federal court over its funding freeze.
In June, Cornell administrators announced several steps to combat the University’s financial challenges, including staff cuts and hiring restrictions.
“It is important that every member of this community understands both the scale of the challenges our university faces, and the seriousness of the risks,” administrators wrote. “While we are confident that we will weather this crisis, we will only do so by working together to make the difficult, but necessary, changes to ensure that Cornell will continue ‘to do the greatest good’ for many years to come.”
Dorothy France-Miller is a member of the Class of 2027 in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. She is the managing editor of the 143rd Editorial Board and was a news editor for the 142nd Editorial Board. She can be reached at dfrancemiller@cornellsun.com.
