$400 million of Columbia University's federal funds canceled by Trump administration

ThatRobGuy said:

$400 million of Columbia University's federal funds canceled by Trump administration

The Trump administration moved Friday to cancel $400 million in grants to and federal contracts with Columbia University, citing antisemitic incidents on campus.

www.cbsnews.com

The Trump administration moved Friday to cancel $400 million in grants and contracts to Columbia University, citing "the school's continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students."

"Since October 7, Jewish students have faced relentless violence, intimidation, and antisemitic harassment on their campuses – only to be ignored by those who are supposed to protect them," Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said. "Universities must comply with all federal antidiscrimination laws if they are going to receive federal funding. For too long, Columbia has abandoned that obligation to Jewish students studying on its campus. Today, we demonstrate to Columbia and other universities that we will not tolerate their appalling inaction any longer."

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That is utterly pathetic. There is no particular reason, other than blatant partisan politics, to single out Columbia University. If there is an actual situation at Columbia regarding any form of discrimination (racial, religious, ethnic, or gender) there are abundant Equal Opportunity laws on the books and the case can be adjudicated accordingly and, if found guilty, Columbia would be fined accordingly. For Mr. Trump and his administration to act as prosecutor, judge, and jury for this case, is Constitutionally invalid and he and his administration ought to be held accountable.

ThatRobGuy said:

I can see this from a few different angles.

1) On one hand, I think opponents of this move could have a valid gripe that federal funding shouldn't be a leverage tool to "force" institutions to institute policies that an administration prefers. For instance, if the roles were reversed, and a private entity in Texas was the recipient of funding for some thing or another, and a Democratic administration said "no, you're not going to get the money unless you start putting up 'no-guns' signs in the windows". I would imagine conservatives would have comparable gripes about something like that.

2) On another hand, I do think some of these universities have unequal enforcement policies when it comes to "when it's okay to hurt feelings and offend people", and they clearly have an ideological bend on the Israel/Palestine conflict, and one set of protests are being embraced and protected, while the others are getting people shunned and attacked (verbally, and sometimes physically)

So, while an administration shouldn't be making funding contingent on "you have to only do things that my base approves of", likewise, government money shouldn't be getting funneled to organizations that rallying support and overtly biased on one side of a contentious issue.


But...
3) Ultimately, the big one... I'd like to know why an expensive university, with a $15 Billion endowment, and making $2.2 Billion in tuition revenue each year, and another $3.6 Billion in revenue from their Irving medical center, needs $400 million worth of government money in order to operate.


I haven't "fact checked" these figures below, but if these numbers below are even remotely accurate, I have some 'questions'...

Columbia University employs approximately 7,200 full- and part-time faculty members, with 2,741 serving full-time.
In contrast, the university has over 5,000 administrators, according to data released by Columbia's Office of Planning and Institutional Research. This indicates that the number of administrators is roughly three times that of full-time faculty members.
Over the past decade, the number of full-time administrators increased by 54%, while the number of students and full-time faculty increased by 24% and 29%, respectively. This growth has led to a ratio of approximately 818 administrators for every 1,000 students, or roughly two administrators for every three students.

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You have some interesting comments. I offer the following in response.

1. Columbia is hardly unique in facing problematic situations such as this. To name just a few extremely wealthy Ivy League universities such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and the University of Pennsylvania whose responses have been just as, if not more, troubling than Columbia's is merely the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Why Mr. Trump singled out Columbia is a complete mystery to me.

2. As you noted, there are numerous other issues such as gun control which could elicit equally egregious actions from either end of the political spectrum, given the opportunity.

3. The government does not have research laboratories or capabilities in the hard sciences, unlike other countries. For various reasons, the government has decided not to set up its own monopolistic research establishment, but leave it primarily to private enterprise. There are various sectors of research which are not profitable, nor remotely profitable, for private corporations such that the research has been shifted to universities. For example, many areas of physics - nuclear to stellar - are the responsibility of universities. Although the results of such tedious research may be of very limited use in many cases, there have been significant breakthroughs, as in medicine, which would have been impossible without university researchers. One recent example is the vaccine for COVID-19 which would have been delayed almost indefinitely without the participation of university researchers.

4. Virtually all of the $400 million in federal grants that Columbia University receives is for such research. One can pooh-pooh and deride such research and cite examples ad infinitum of, what appears to us, as utter silliness. The fact, however, remains that it is the government resources invested in university research programs that have made the United States of America the technological giant that it is. If one sincerely wishes to "make America great again" then it is absurd to attempt to eliminate its foundation in scientific research.

5. My basic point seems to on the verge of being lost in this conversation. My point is that the United States, unlike most other countries on earth, has a governmental system divided into three branches - legislative, judicial, and executive. When one branch subverts the activities of another branch, then there is a legal process in place to address and correct the problem. Thus far, we have the leader of the executive branch very busily legislating and adjucating from his office in the White House.

ThatRobGuy said:

Even something like "okay, we're the 400M, and dividing it 4 ways and adding it to what we give to Johns Hopkins, UPenn, Duke, and Northwestern" is a completely acceptable approach if one of the research partners is perhaps having some "internal issues".

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If you really think it's that simple to just shift research projects around, I've got a bridge to sell you.

RocksInMyHead said:

If you really think it's that simple to just shift research projects around, I've got a bridge to sell you.

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Agreed. Thanks for your response.

ThatRobGuy said:

$400 million of Columbia University's federal funds canceled by Trump administration

The Trump administration moved Friday to cancel $400 million in grants to and federal contracts with Columbia University, citing antisemitic incidents on campus.

www.cbsnews.com

The Trump administration moved Friday to cancel $400 million in grants and contracts to Columbia University, citing "the school's continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students."

"Since October 7, Jewish students have faced relentless violence, intimidation, and antisemitic harassment on their campuses – only to be ignored by those who are supposed to protect them," Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said. "Universities must comply with all federal antidiscrimination laws if they are going to receive federal funding. For too long, Columbia has abandoned that obligation to Jewish students studying on its campus. Today, we demonstrate to Columbia and other universities that we will not tolerate their appalling inaction any longer."

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why is a university with a 15 billion dollar endowment getting 400 million from the government exactly?

Oh, and don't forget, prior to Trump's first term and the TCJA, Columbia was paying ZERO taxes on the gains from that endowment, paying fund managers millions, and pretty much operating a tex-free hedge fund

and not one person on the left complained about that --because it is OK for our people to get tax breaks apparently

ThatRobGuy said:

No, not easy, but legal.

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Just because something is legal does not mean it's a good idea.

ThatRobGuy said:

But, in most cases for these types of medical research projects/grants, the government doesn't put all their eggs in one basket. They employ parallel research and redundancy to avoid setback by a single point of failure or catastrophic events.

For example, they're not going to have a single university be the only one doing a particular type of cancer research, because if the research facility gets levelled by a tornado, or the 2 members of the research team get in a car accident, etc... they always have a plan B (and in many cases, a plan C, D, and E).

The covid vaccine was a good example. There was a half dozen universities working on that one.

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All of this is irrelevant - chucking extra money at a program is meaningless if they don't have the staff or facilities to utilize it. And that's before you get into the issues of killing off a branch of research out of pettiness (rather than lack of promise or performance).

ThatRobGuy said:

The issue itself may not be unique. But I suspect that there are a few aspects of Columbia University that make it a little bit different with regards to impacts of Anti-Israel protests and antisemitic protests.

A) The location. Having anti-Israel "protest camps" and sometimes-hostile rhetoric in that regards has more of a "powder keg" propensity in NYC given the demographics. NYC has the 2nd largest Jewish population in the world outside of Israel.

It'd be sort of like if there were two protests harshly critical of Islam (both with the same signage, rhetoric, etc...). The one happening in at the college campus in Lexington Kentucky is less likely to erupt into chaos than the one at a campus in Dearborn Michigan.


B) Columbia is also home to "Apartheid Divest", which (unlike some other pro-Palestinian protest groups), has made statements that are overtly pro-Hamas, and pro-Hezbollah

Pro-Palestinian Group at Columbia Now Backs ‘Armed Resistance’ by Hamas

Columbia University Apartheid Divest has withdrawn an apology it made last spring for a member who said “Zionists don’t deserve to live.”

www.nytimes.com

Citing revolutionary thinkers, like Vladimir Lenin and Frantz Fanon, it explained how solidarity was essential with members of the so-called Axis of Resistance — which includes Iran, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Hamas — because they oppose imperialism.

Since then, the group has praised a Tel Aviv attack by Palestinian militants that killed seven people at a light rail station on Oct. 1, including a mother who died while shielding her 9-month-old baby. It also praised Iran’s missile attack on the Jewish state




I understand that, but Columbia University isn't the "only game in town" for outsourcing that kind of research.

So if faculty and administrators are allowing certain bad behaviors (or even empowering those bad behaviors), there's no reason why funding can't be redirected away from them and toward other universities that don't have some of the same issues.

In fact, they're not even close to having an "only game in town" status in terms of that kind of research.

• Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, MD)
• University of California, San Francisco (UCSF)
• University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, MI)
• Stanford University (Stanford, CA)
• University of Pennsylvania (Penn Medicine, Philadelphia, PA)
• Harvard University (Boston, MA)
• University of Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh, PA)
• Duke University (Durham, NC)
• Yale University (New Haven, CT)
• Northwestern University (Chicago, IL)

Meaning, pulling funds from them isn't jeopardizing research as a whole.

Even something like "okay, we're the 400M, and dividing it 4 ways and adding it to what we give to Johns Hopkins, UPenn, Duke, and Northwestern" is a completely acceptable approach if one of the research partners is perhaps having some "internal issues".

It depends on how the Trump admin handles this.

While congress does allocate the funding, it's the executive branch that manages the distribution.

In essence, congress dictates "How much money we spend on X", and the various executive agencies decide the "who gets it".

So, if Trump is planning on taking that 400 million and reallocating it to helping fund tax cuts, then that would be a major overstep.

However, if he says, "we're taking that 400 million, and giving it to this other school that does the same kind of research in this space until you guys can get your house in order", then that's within his scope of power.

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To draw an analogy, I would like to propose the Caterpillar company as an example. As we all know Caterpillar is a huge corporation which produces much, if not a majority, of equipment used for infrastructure projects. Caterpillar abides by United States laws, pure and simple. It does not operate in rogue countries such as North Korea. It does, however, do business in virtually every other country. It sells its equipment to anyone who is able to legally purchase it. That means that, among the vast universe of its customers there are customers in Israel, including the Israeli government. The amount of sales for infrastructure projects in Israel by Caterpillar is a tiny drop in their overall income. Although they definitely seek out sales there, it is hardly the end of their world if Israel purchased equipment from Komatsu or John Deere.

However, there are those who have tarred Caterpillar as being inherently evil to its core because it has the government of Israel as a customer, while ignoring the fact that the same government purchases equipment from Komatsu and John Deere which, apparently, are not evil, if not necessarily righteous. The result has been calls for disinvestment from Caterpillar in order to force it to disengage in sales to Israel, thereby destroying the nation of Israel as well as forcing Caterpillar into bankruptcy.

So, how has this worked out over the last five years? Caterpillar continues to sell its equipment to Israel, so it has been business as usual. Israel is thriving, at least to the point, where it has been able to mount a successful response to the attack by Hezbollah. As for Caterpillar, its stock price has well outperformed both the S&P500 and the Dow Industrial Average, as you can see below.



The bottom line is that any politician who wants to defund an opponent, whether a direct political opponent or an ideological opponent, only succeeds on the very rare occasions when popular consensus aligns with the supply and demand side of the equation.

We have been through the efforts to defund police and to defund Wall Street, both of which were dismal and embarrassing failures. Now we have an activist president who, willy-nilly, is grandstanding by selectively defunding an array of relatively small departments and programs. This is the same president who unleashed a tsunami of cash into the economy during COVID-19 which not only created massive inflation and distorted the economy by provided an ocean of money which, as is standard in any capitalist economy, found its way into the equity markets, resulting in a 23% rise in the Dow Industrial Average last year, far in excess of inflation and highly popular among investors.

Merrill said:

why is a university with a 15 billion dollar endowment getting 400 million from the government exactly?

Oh, and don't forget, prior to Trump's first term and the TCJA, Columbia was paying ZERO taxes on the gains from that endowment, paying fund managers millions, and pretty much operating a tex-free hedge fund

and not one person on the left complained about that --because it is OK for our people to get tax breaks apparently

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Columbia, like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and the University of Pennsylvania is a for-profit corporation. Although its primary business is higher education, it also operates research facilities for the United States government which, for a variety of political reasons, decided to outsource its research to universities. None of these universities need to perform this research in order to survive, but the United States government does need them to provide the necessary information to keep the United States great (note, this is not to be confused with the ill-defined notion that America needs to be made great again). If the United States government decides to eliminate research funding from all of these universities (all of which permit a great diversity of political and cultural opinions to be expressed on their campuses which do not at all align with the present narrative of Mr. Trump) then either the federal government will need to develop its own research department (which, of course, will upsize the government) or the research will simply cease.

ThatRobGuy said:

No, not easy, but legal.

But, in most cases for these types of medical research projects/grants, the government doesn't put all their eggs in one basket. They employ parallel research and redundancy to avoid setback by a single point of failure or catastrophic events.

For example, they're not going to have a single university be the only one doing a particular type of cancer research, because if the research facility gets levelled by a tornado, or the 2 members of the research team get in a car accident, etc... they always have a plan B (and in many cases, a plan C, D, and E).

The covid vaccine was a good example. There was a half dozen universities working on that one.

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It may very well be the case that a specific line of research is only being done in one location. "Cancer research" is an incredibly broad term and not really how these things work - the projects tend to be much much more narrow than that. One researcher or team might be looking at something like how a specific protein reacts in specific circumstances. The folks I've known doing this sort of work get a bit antsy about being scooped when there are one or two other teams in the world looking at the same question.

Merrill said:

why is a university with a 15 billion dollar endowment getting 400 million from the government exactly?

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Because that's how research in this country gets done. In most cases, the government pays for it while letting other orgs do the actual work. You'd blow through $15b pretty quickly spending $400m/yr just on research

Merrill said:

Oh, and don't forget, prior to Trump's first term and the TCJA, Columbia was paying ZERO taxes on the gains from that endowment, paying fund managers millions, and pretty much operating a tex-free hedge fund

and not one person on the left complained about that --because it is OK for our people to get tax breaks apparently

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If you don't think folks on the left complain about how universities spend their endowments, you haven't been paying attention to anybody on the left.

bbbbbbb said:

None of these universities need to perform this research in order to survive

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eh.... Maybe the undergraduate colleges don't need to perform the research to survive, but the PhD programs do.

iluvatar5150 said:

It may very well be the case that a specific line of research is only being done in one location. "Cancer research" is an incredibly broad and not really how these things work - the projects tend to be much much more narrow than that. One researcher or team might be looking at something like how a specific protein reacts in specific circumstances. The folks I've known doing this sort of work get a bit antsy about being scooped when there are one or two other teams in the world looking at the same question.

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Quite true. Thank you for the essential clarification.

iluvatar5150 said:

Because that's how research in this country gets done. In most cases, the government pays for it while letting other orgs do the actual work. You'd blow through $15b pretty quickly spending $400m/yr just on research


If you don't think folks on the left complain about how universities spend their endowments, you haven't been paying attention to anybody on the left.


eh.... Maybe the undergraduate colleges don't need to perform the research to survive, but the PhD programs do.

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Thanks also for that clarification. As many know, the undergraduate program in universities such as Columbia is considerably smaller (8,902 students) than the graduate and post-graduate programs (26,902 students).

iluvatar5150 said:

Because that's how research in this country gets done. In most cases, the government pays for it while letting other orgs do the actual work. You'd blow through $15b pretty quickly spending $400m/yr just on research


If you don't think folks on the left complain about how universities spend their endowments, you haven't been paying attention to anybody on the left.


eh.... Maybe the undergraduate colleges don't need to perform the research to survive, but the PhD programs do.

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There are many private research institutes and even colleges (like Hillsdale) who conduct research without taking money from the government

Major technology corporations conduct R&D on a global scale, and typically do not take any kind of government money

But I am not against giving grants to universities for research. What I am against is those same universities piling up 30-40 billion dollar endowments and then claiming they can't do research without federal money --that is complete nonsense

I also have an issue with college presidents making 3 million dollar salaries and then whining about how the school isn't getting enough research funding

Merrill said:

There are many private research institutes and even colleges (like Hillsdale) who conduct research without taking money from the government

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What research is being done at Hillsdale College? They don't have graduate programs in anything related to science or engineering.

Hillsdale does not do the kind of stuff we're describing.

Name some private ones that don't take government funding.

Merrill said:

Major technology corporations conduct R&D on a global scale, and typically do not take any kind of government money

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That's just incorrect. Most anything related to medicine has government funding somewhere in the chain. Lots of stuff related to basic research in other sciences does, too.

ThatRobGuy said:

I know you were asking someone else, but would the Howard Hughes Medical Institute fit the description you're asking about?

Understanding the Howard Hughes Medical Institute - Peeref

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) is a leading U.S. biomedical research organization, funding long-term research through an endowment-based model. It supports interdisciplinary initiatives, early-career scientists, and inclusive science education, fostering transformative discoveries in...

www.peeref.com

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute operates as a private, nonprofit research organization. Unlike many other research institutes, HHMI does not rely on external donations or government grants to sustain its operations. Instead, it derives its funding from a substantial endowment. At the end of fiscal year FY23, the Institute had $24.2 billion in consolidated net assets, making it one of the world’s largest basic biomedical research and science education philanthropies.


I could be wrong about this next one, but I think the one that Paul Allen (the co-founder of Microsoft) founded uses the same model the one mentioned above.

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Sounds like it would. I would point out that such an institution -that does not incur all of the expenses associated with running a university- has an endowment that, were it a university, would put it at around 6th largest in the country, roughly tied with MIT's: