Trump’s ‘extortion’ is destroying university autonomy: AAUP

Under the second Trump administration, university autonomy is being sacrificed to authoritarian state power by means of ‘mass extortion’, according to a new report published by the American Association of University Presidents (AAUP).

Extorting Compliance: A Threat to Institutional Autonomy, Academic Freedom, and Shared Governance, released by the American Association of University Professors on Wednesday 22 July, amounts to a bill of particulars presented to the court of public opinion.

While the report attacks on institutional autonomy and academic freedom by states like Florida and Texas, which have been covered in University World News, the bulk of the report shows officials in the administration of President Donald J Trump act more like characters from The Godfather than stewards in a democratic polity.

According to the report: “One especially dangerous development has been the extraordinary and unprecedented effort by the federal government under the second Trump administration to compel universities and colleges to sign so-called compliance agreements, under which institutions are obligated to accept a laundry list of imposed conditions and policies – and sometimes pay a hefty ransom – in order to qualify for essential federal funding, including for existing and future research contracts, with no demonstrable connection to the government’s expressed concerns,” as University World News has covered.

The draft “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education”, proposed back in October 2025, is an example of how Trump’s officials, in this case Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, act in an extortionate way.

After months of investigations, lawsuits, funding freezes and other actions against universities meant to fulfil the executive orders Trump issued against antisemitism, DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion), divisive concepts, and curricula matters in universities, McMahon proposed a “proactive improvement of higher education for the betterment of the country”.

According to the AAUP report, the Compact’s promise of “purport[ing] to offer ‘multiple positive benefits’ and ‘substantial and meaningful federal grants’ to those universities that would abide by its provisions” mattered considerably less than the unprecedented threat in the document’s concluding paragraph.

“Adherence to this agreement shall be subject to review by the Department of Justice. Universities found to have wilfully or negligently violated this agreement shall lose access to the benefits of this agreement for a period of no less than 1 year,” the AAUP report documents.

“Subsequent violations of this agreement shall result in a loss of access to the benefits of this agreement for no less than two years. Further, upon determination of any violations, all monies advanced by the US government during the year of any violation shall be returned to the US government.

“Finally, any private contributions to the university during the year(s) in which such violation occurred shall be returned to the grantor upon the request of the grantor,” it states.

There is no law that allows the government to withhold “benefits” of an agreement. But the AAUP notes, “signing such a contract, would in effect yield that right to the government” and, indeed, grant to it the sole determination of whether the college or university has violated “enumerated commitments”.

This is a juridical way of a Mafia don saying: “Nice little college you have there; shame if something were to happen to it.”

Democrats’ ‘blueprint for mass extortion’

Written by the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure and the Committee on College and University Governance, Extorting Compliance shows that under Trump, “US higher education has, in effect, become a target of a massive extortion racket.”

Yet, it also shows that administrations of Barack Obama and Joe Biden, both liberal Democrats, provided an important blueprint that Trump’s officials would follow.

Between November 2023 and May 2024, when Biden was president, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) opened more than 100 investigations of antisemitism on US campuses.

In 2024 the Department of Education reached 21 resolution agreements on investigations involving race and national origin, that “mandated changes in policy, training programmes and climate surveys, as well as submission to the OCR of reports on ‘complaints alleging discrimination, including harassment, on the basis of shared ancestry’,” which is banned under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The agreement Biden’s OCR reached with the University of California went further, requiring, for example, “all complaints and reports alleging discrimination, including harassment and disparate treatment, on the basis of actual or perceived national origin, including shared Jewish, Palestinian, Muslim and/or Arab ancestry, or association with these national origins/ancestries” to be reported on a sortable spreadsheet – “and that names of those accused of discrimination be included (even if the investigation found that the complaint was invalid)”.

Antisemitism weaponised

Shortly after taking office, Trump’s officials began investigations, many of which were justified by saying they were meant to root out antisemitic harassment – which became a major issue during the pro-Palestinian protests that followed Israel’s attack on Hamas in Gaza that followed Hamas’ attack on Israel in October 2022.

On 3 February 2025, a month after Trump issued an executive order against antisemitism, the government opened investigations of six universities, including Columbia, UC Berkeley and Northwestern, with another five, including Duke, George Mason and UCLA, being added later.

On 10 March 2025, the OCR sent letters to 60 universities warning that they would be investigated if they did not protect their Jewish students.

Antisemitism was not the only issue weaponised by the Trump administration. On 5 February, after Trump signed an order banning transgender people from taking part in university sports in their present gender designation, the OCR opened an investigation into the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) and San José State University.

During the investigation, US$175 million in grants to Penn were frozen.

The OCR found that by allowing Lia Thomas, a transgender athlete, to compete in women’s sports (2021 and 2022), Penn had violated the law.

The OCR ordered Penn to “vacate honours won by Thomas and apologise to female athletes whose experiences, the department says, were ‘marred by sex discrimination’.”

The agreement that Penn signed with the OCR in July required erasing Thomas from its record books, barring transgender athletes from future competition, sending personal apology letters “to each impacted female swimmer”.

In exchange for these and other concessions, the Trump administration restored the frozen funds.

“The Trump administration’s effort differs dramatically from that of previous administrations, however, and not only in its severity and scale. Its aggressively extortionate deal-making, pre-emptive cutoffs of funding and cross-departmental enforcement efforts are both novel and largely illegal,” says the AAUP report.

Trillion dollar funding freeze

Extorting Compliance details the administration’s partially successful effort to pressure America’s most prestigious universities by freezing more than a trillion dollars of research funds.

Brown University regained access to more than US$500 million by agreeing to realign its policies to accord with the administration’s anti-DEI and anti-transgender positions.

Brown further agreed to “report all allegations of antisemitism appearing on student course evaluations to the OCR”. According to a faculty member quoted by the report, this “effectively recruited students to [perform] government monitoring”.

Cornell University regained access to hundreds of millions in federal funds after “agreeing to pay a US$30 million fine and invest an equal amount in [its] agricultural and farming programmes.”

More importantly for university autonomy, “Cornell also agreed to provide anonymised undergraduate admissions data to the federal government on a quarterly basis and to ‘conduct annual surveys to evaluate the campus climate for Cornell students, including the climate for students with shared Jewish ancestry’.”

Assault on Colombia

The government’s assault on Colombia merited a section of its own in Extorting Compliance.

On 7 March 2025, the Federal Task Force to Combat Antisemitism announced the cancellation of US$400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia, charging that the university had failed to protect Jewish students and employees.

Half of the total cuts were grants made by the National Institutes of Health, and there was no indication that in any of the projects Jewish students were harassed or discriminated against.

Rather, the government was punishing Colombia for antisemitism in the pro-Palestinian encampment.

The AAUP shows that on 13 March, in a letter to Katrina Armstrong, the CEO of Columbia’s medical centre, who at the time was serving as interim university president, the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services and the General Services Administration provided a list of demands upon which the restoration of funding to Columbia would be conditioned.

“These included abolition of the University Judicial Board, implementation of a mask ban, and granting ‘full law enforcement authority, including arrest and removal of agitators,’ to public safety officers.”

The letter also called for placing the Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies Department under “academic receivership”.

The university was directed to meet the demands by 20 March to begin “formal negotiations” with the administration.

On 21 March, Columbia announced a series of actions in response to the government’s demands. Among other things, the administration said it would ban some masks on campus, hire thirty-six “special officers who will have the ability to remove individuals from campus and/or arrest them”, and place the Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies Department and the Center for Palestine Studies under the purview of a senior vice provost.

The latter would be appointed by the university president and tasked with supervising the curriculum and contingent faculty appointments.

“The university also agreed to officially adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s controversial definition of antisemitism, which the AAUP and others, including the definition’s author, have criticised as inappropriate for an academic context and detrimental to academic freedom.”

In response, McMahon said that the actions would not guarantee restoration of funds but could put Columbia “on the right track”.

Extorting Compliance quotes David E Pozen, Columbia University’s Charles Keller Beekman Professor of Law, on these and other concessions Columbia made to regain funding.

“They [mark] the first time that antisemitism and DEI have been invoked as the basis for a government forced restructuring of a private university,” Pozen said.

“The agreement was engineered by a novel collaboration among the Department of Education, the Department of Health and Human Services, the General Services Administration and the White House, which pooled their resources to ratchet up the pressure on Columbia (with some help on the side from the Department of Justice).

“The agreement is also the first to require a college to fork over money to the government as a condition of receiving money from the government, bringing a new brand of pay-to-play into the world of scientific and medical research,” Pozen added.

“And let’s not forget that the agreement grows out of the executive branch’s first-ever cutoff of congressionally appropriated funds to a college, to punish that college and impel it to adopt sweeping reforms, without any pretence of following the congressionally mandated procedures.

“In short, the agreement gives legal form to an extortion scheme – the first of its kind – that defies the relevant statutes as well as the constitutional separation of powers and the First Amendment.”

Defending autonomy ‘is priority’

Speaking for the American Association of Colleges and Universities, Jermey C Young, senior advisor for strategic initiatives, said: “The AAUP’s thoughtful new report on extorted compliance underscores AAC&U's own call, in our recent report The Trust Agenda, for a coordinated, mission-centred defence of higher education.

“In the current crisis, it is unproductive for campuses to cut separate deals with the government rather than coordinating with their peer institutions, or for groups like faculty and administrators to be at each other's throats over how best to respond. All of us are, or should be, on the side of defending the autonomy of ideas on college campuses from government overreach.

“Institutions should prioritise that goal as central to their mission – and should work within their campuses and across institutions to stand in solidarity with that mission. The AAUP’s report shows just how urgent that work truly is.”