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The White House is pushing Harvard University and several other elite colleges to pay millions to the government to settle investigations into alleged antisemitism, a senior administration official said Friday.
The administration is seeking payments from the University of Michigan as well as Northwestern, Cornell and Brown universities, in an effort to make deals similar to the $200 million agreement announced Wednesday with Columbia University.
The financial dragnet could impact dozens of other colleges and universities that are also facing - or were threatened with - investigations by the Trump administration, the White House said.
The Columbia deal requires the Ivy League school to pay more than $200 million to settle claims over antisemitism and discriminatory hiring. The school also agreed to oversight by an independent monitor and $21 million in payments to Jewish staff and faculty who experienced antisemitism and harassment. In return, the government agreed to unfreeze more than $1 billion in federal grants and funding to the university.
A senior White House official said Friday that the Columbia deal "is a framework, it's a blueprint" for deals with dozens of other schools in which the Trump administration will seek financial payments for what they see as failures to address antisemitism.
The senior official characterized the payments as "settlements," saying each school in talks with the administration has either been sued or "there is a potential investigation pending.
"The payments will be in exchange for access to federal funds," the official said. "I wouldn't call it cookie cutter, but the general understanding of what we are looking for was seen in that deal," the official said of the agreement with Columbia.
The Columbia agreement, months in the making, came as the school had grown increasingly concerned about its ability to maintain some of its research operations in the face of the funding freezes, Claire Shipman, Columbia's acting president, said in a statement this week.
Columbia, the first school targeted with federal funding cuts, was the epicenter of pro-Palestinian campus protests against the Israel-Gaza war that roiled campuses during the 2023-24 school year.
Harvard, Michigan, Northwestern, Brown and Cornell are on a list of 60 universities that the Education Department said in March are under investigation for antisemitic discrimination and harassment in the wake of protests.
Spokesmen for Northwestern and Harvard declined to comment. Spokespeople for Michigan, Brown and Cornell did not respond to requests for comment.
Harvard has sued the government, alleging that its attempts to force changes at the institution by withholding federal grants are illegal and unconstitutional.
Columbia's deal follows an agreement reached between the University of Pennsylvania and the Trump administration earlier this month. The administration had announced this spring that it was freezing $175 million to Penn over its policies on transgender athletes - which were in alignment with the NCAA's rules at the time. Penn agreed to no longer allow transgender women to compete on its female teams and said it would send apology letters to swimmers who were affected by its policy. The administration unfroze funding to Penn as part of the agreement.
A lobbyist close to the administration, speaking on the condition of anonymity said that, for the White House, the Columbia deal is the first important building block. "They're going to ramp up their civil rights investigations and it's not hard on college campuses to find instances of antisemitism," he said. "They will then say, 'Okay, you've got a problem.' And then they will pressure them to sign an agreement much like Columbia's.
"Now they're going to use this template and go and say, 'We've got a complaint from three Jewish students … Do you want a full investigation and humiliate you or do you want to reach this agreement?'"