The White House is looking to use Columbia University’s $200 million settlement earlier this week as a template for how other schools can resolve their fights with the administration.
According to a Wall Street Journal report, the administration is in talks with Cornell, Duke, Northwestern, and Brown, with Harvard as the big fish that could yield the biggest payday for the White House.
Columbia’s deal has been called the first of its kind in higher education history, shifting the focus to the scores of other universities that have attracted Trump’s ire.
The deal didn’t just include a payout. Columbia also agreed to the appointment of an independent monitor who will determine if the school is abiding by the agreement, which includes provisions related to admissions, faculty hiring, and antisemitism on campus.
Trump celebrated the Columbia deal with a Truth Social post on Wednesday night, praising it as a “historic agreement.”
Harvard has sued the administration in federal court in an attempt to claw back some of the $2.2 billion in federal grants for research that were cancelled by the administration.
In a hearing on Wednesday in that case, a federal judge appeared to doubt the government’s rationale for holding Harvard’s federal funding hostage.
However, the White House hopes it could extract a payment from Harvard much larger than Columbia’s in exchange for restored access to federal funding.
A source familiar with the administration’s university negotiations told the Journal that the White House hopes to make Harvard broker a deal that would make the Columbia agreement “look like peanuts.”
A Harvard spokesperson and the White House did not respond to immediate requests for comment.
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