Deportations and defunding: Who’s next in Trump's Ivy League crackdown?

A little under two months since US President Donald Trump returned to office, he has shaken the established order at home and globally, leaving behind a trail of chaos and uncertainty. His latest target is academia. The Trump administration has cancelled $400 million in grants to Columbia University, an unprecedented government action on a single institution. Trump alleges that Columbia failed to protect Jewish students on campus during protests that broke out last year in support of Gaza. Demonstrations erupted at Columbia and other American universities following the October 2023 kidnappings by Hamas which led to Israel’s decimation of Gaza. More than 48,000 people have died in the Israeli attacks, a humanitarian loss without parallels in recent times.  

A Palestinian student-activist and recent graduate, Mahmoud Khalil, has also been detained by the Department of Homeland Security and the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). His deportation has been temporarily blocked by a federal judge. Trump, however, remains unfazed and calls it ‘the first arrest of many to come.’ He has promised to deport foreign students involved in ‘illegal protests.’

Khalil has been accused of leading the campus protests but not been charged with any previous crime. Yet, this legal national with his American citizen wife remains in a detention facility.  These actions by the Trump administration have further worried Americans. There is an ongoing debate about whether the Right to Free Speech enshrined under the First Amendment is no longer absolute.

On his campaign trail, Trump vowed to act on what he perceives as antisemitism. Closely monitoring the rapid chain of events since Trump’s inauguration in January, the latest actions will increase unease among students and naturalized Americans alike. At the moment, even US-born citizens with no fear of deportation are thinking twice about airing their opinion.

Columbia may only be the beginning. 60 schools are reportedly on standby for similar penalties as federal agencies have announced a cessation of $51 million in contracts. While every student irrespective of ideology or nationality must remain safe on campus, it is worth questioning how Trump defines antisemitism. Is he equating the act of pro-Palestinian protests, even those that were peaceful, as a failure to stop antisemitism on campus? Moreover, will America, which supported Israel’s actions in Gaza and vetoed multiple resolutions for a ceasefire, take similar action on Islamophobia? Remember the three Palestinian university students — two of whom were wearing keffiyeh scarves and were shot while walking down a Vermont street in 2023, leaving one paralysed?

Pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia made headlines last year as student protestors in large numbers camped on the university grounds. College President Minouche Shafik resigned after months of widespread demonstrations over allegations that she had mishandled the protests, which snowballed into a debate on whether universities were overstepping a boundary over campus activism or if this fell within the purview of freedom of speech. Since then, irrespective of the arguments on either side, Ivy League colleges have been battling a hit in their reputation with many questioning if they had lost their elite aura.  

Soon after Shafik’s resignation, a report under the aegis of the Republicans blamed colleges across the US for failing to stop antisemitism, highlighting cases at Columbia, Harvard and the University of California, Los Angeles. At a Congressional hearing, three university presidents, Claudine Gay of Harvard University, Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania and Sally Kornbluth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, were ambushed to resign. Gay and Magill gave in their papers. If Americans thought that with these high-profile departures, it was the end of uncertainty, they couldn’t be more wrong. They are on a fast-moving carousel with keys in Trump’s hands.

The New York Civil Liberties Union calls the move against Columbia unconstitutional and an escalation ‘to coerce colleges and universities into censoring student speech and advocacy that isn’t MAGA-approved, like criticizing Israel or supporting Palestinian rights.’ But the impact is filtering down. Harvard University has put a freeze on hiring and the University of Pennsylvania has withdrawn verbal admission offers to PhD students. In addition to key research departments, Columbia has a medical centre that could be impacted. More importantly, will the penalty burden be felt by foreign students and those on scholarships as funds allocated for them are diverted for research?

As the debate over freedom of speech and academic freedom gathers momentum, in the mix is also an influential lobby that includes affluent Jewish donors. ‘They yearn for the campus they remember, one that was notably less diverse and where there was much less discussion on racial politics,’ a past report in Financial Times quotes a professor at Trinity College. ‘What you’re seeing now is a handful of super-ultra-wealthy individuals — plutocrats that, I guess, you would call philanthropists — who have incredible leverage over higher education.’ Not much has changed since this report in 2023, except that for the moment, freedom of speech and diversity, the hallmark of modern-day America, seems to be a thing of the past.