AAUP Condemns Trump Administration’s Punitive Weaponization of Federal Grant Funding at Columbia

AAUP President Todd Wolfson issued the following statement in response to the cancellation of approximately $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia University over accusations of antisemitism as well as the detention of Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Kahlil on March 8.

The Trump administration has taken the unprecedented move of cancelling $400 million in federal contracts and grants to Columbia University in alleged response to “inaction by Columbia’s administration on antisemitism.” This heavy-handed partisan intrusion into Columbia’s academic, research, and health care operations will damage students’ education, stop progress toward lifesaving biomedical therapies, and harm patients being treated in Columbia’s hospitals. As we are seeing with the Trump administration's reckless cuts to NIH research funding, the result of this defunding will cause real harm to everyday Americans. Trump’s cuts to biomedical research kill.

The AAUP wholly condemns this punitive weaponization of federal grant funding. This attempt to discipline and control a university campus is a transparent hallmark of authoritarian rule and harshly violates the central mission of education: teaching, research, and service to the broader society for the public good. We also believe it to be illegal.

Columbia AAUP President Reinhold Martin warns, “The revoking of these funds will be immediately catastrophic to the Columbia community. This is not about antisemitism. This is about crushing dissent and privatizing government supported research.”

The premises for the cancellation of federal funding are false. Immediately after the October 7 attacks in Israel and subsequent war in Gaza, largely peaceful protests broke out on college and university campuses across the United States, with Columbia University being a focal point. Former Columbia President Minouche Shafik responded to these protests by banning both pro-Palestinian student groups and the campus chapter of Jewish Voices for Peace and attempted to intimidate students and faculty into silence. In the spring of 2024, after being grilled by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, Shafik bent over backward to appease politicians and invited the NYPD onto Columbia’s campus to brutally break up protests and arrest students, thus trampling on student rights to freedom of speech and peaceful assembly.

Shafik’s violent crackdown on pro-Palestinian student speech at Columbia, which was met with a no confidence resolution by Columbia faculty, was a precursor to Saturday’s arrest of peaceful activist and Columbia student Mahmoud Kahlil. The Trump administration is now conveniently ignoring this recent history of Columbia's capitulation to political interference in order to generate an excuse to imprison a permanent legal US resident and push toward a larger goal of criminalizing all campus political protest. This abduction is an assault not only on basic immigration law but on our First Amendment protections of freedom of speech and assembly.

Civil rights, freedom of expression, and due process are not mutually exclusive and must all be upheld at Columbia and all American college and university campuses. As we saw last summer with the wave of administrative policies intended to crack down on peaceful campus protests, we fully anticipate that this campaign of fear and political retribution will be expanded to other higher education institutions. The AAUP is actively working with our members across the nation in preparation to resist these draconian policies that severely undermine the academic freedom and freedom of speech and expression that are fundamental to higher education.

Together, the revocation of grants and visas strike at the heart of widely shared American values: the freedom to learn, research, speak, and act in accordance with the norms and responsibilities of campus communities. We join with our Barnard College and Columbia AAUP chapters in strongly condemning the arrest of nonviolent student protesters and capitulation to political pressures that the AAUP has long warned against.

We call for the immediate release of Mahmoud Kahlil, a permanent legal resident of the United States.