Cornell University is the latest university to reach a deal with President Donald Trump to resume federal grant funding, and their price is steep.
The Ivy League school is coughing up $30 million that will go directly to the Trump administration while giving an additional $30 million to research programs that “will directly benefit US farmers through lower costs of production and enhanced efficiency,” reports CNN.
But that’s not the most concerning part. Part of Trump’s attack on higher education and his requirements coming out of holding money hostage has centered around claims of discrimination against white people during the admissions process.
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Because of this, the president, with the help of Education Secretary Linda McMahon, has required universities to provide anonymized admissions data through 2028. In other words, the White House will be watching schools to make sure they don’t make any race-based decisions.
Schools previously used the now-banned affirmative action to help underrepresented races achieve education goals that might otherwise be out of reach. However, the Supreme Court struck down the program in 2023.
In its place, schools reached for other means to even the admissions playing field. As of his second term, though, because of Trump’s administration-wide move to push the narrative that diversity programs are an attack on white people, those efforts have been stalled as well.
Cornell didn’t seem to make this decision easily. Because of the funding freeze, the university was preparing for future layoffs to mitigate the money they were bleeding.
“We have been using institutional resources to try to plug these funding holes in the short term, but these interim measures are not sustainable,” university leaders wrote in a June statement obtained by The New York Times. “We must immediately address our significant financial shortfalls by reducing costs and enacting permanent change to our operational model.”
The university is not the first to cave amid mounting financial woes, either. Cornell joins Brown University, University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, and the University of Virginia in cutting deals to restore the flow of funds.
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But other schools, like UCLA and Harvard University, are still holding out against the “anti-woke” pressure. In September, a judge restored grants the president withheld to UCLA. And Harvard, despite Trump saying in September that they were close to reaching a deal, has yet to cave. While the school is reportedly feeling the hit from the missing funds, though, their endowment is still growing.
This attack on universities is seemingly straight out of the playbook for Vice President JD Vance who has long campaigned against higher ed, proclaiming in 2021 that “universities are the enemy.”
The question is what long-term damage this will do to academic freedom.
