Columbia and Beyond: Case Agreements in Higher Ed

Editor's Note: The PDF version of this White Paper can be found here.

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Introduction

Since January 2025, the Trump administration has engaged in a multi-pronged campaign to reform America’s institutions of higher education (IHE) by terminating their discriminatory policies, toleration of lawless conduct, and financial dependence on foreign entities. More concretely, the Trump administration’s reform agenda for higher education has focused on:

• University race and sex discrimination in student admissions, hiring of faculty and staff, and university programs and policies.
• University sex discrimination in the name of “transgenderism.”
• University tolerance of anti-Semitism, and (especially after October 7, 2023) mass lawbreaking by university members designed to intimidate and/or remove from campus all Jews.
• University non-compliance with foreign gift transparency laws.
• University dependence on international student admissions.
• University political discrimination to silence non-progressive speech and to remove non-progressives from the student body, faculty, and staff.

The four main tools the administration has used are executive orders, (non-)disbursement of federal funds, the Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, and—the subject of this report—case resolution agreements with individual universities. These four tactics aim for the same objectives and are intended to work together. Case resolutions, however, appear to be the means that the Trump administration hopes will provide actual reform of academia. Education reformers should pay close attention to what the Trump administration has been doing—and see how they can work to help maximize the effectiveness of the case resolution strategy.

Executive Orders, Federal Money, and the Compact

The Trump administration’s Executive Orders provide the legal basis for the rest of its reform program. Of the 200+ Executive Orders promulgated by Fall 2025, about 50 concern higher education, including EO 14168 [Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government]; EO 14151 [Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing]; and EO 14173 [Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity].¹ These Executive Orders act as statements of principle and declarations of intent to be accomplished in detail by further administration actions.

The Trump administration first gave effect to these Executive Orders by using federal money as a lever in its confrontation with institutions of higher education (IHEs).² The federal government—the Education Department (ED), as well as the National Institutes of Health and other components of the federal government—ceased the disbursement of increasing numbers of funds, particularly for research grants, not least as a means of exerting financial pressure on the universities. While several federal judges have enjoined the federal government’s action,³ these financial actions had an immediate effect, and the ultimate resolution of the legal challenges to the government’s actions remained uncertain. Certainly this financial lever has proven to be a useful tool in the Trump administration’s campaign to reform higher education, although it may have a greater short-term effect than long-term.

More recently, in September and October 2025, the Trump administration has followed up on this financial pressure by offering first nine elite IHEs, and then every college and university, the opportunity to sign the Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, in return for enhanced access to federal money.⁴ The substance of the Compact largely duplicates the items in the case resolution with Columbia University, which we will explore at greater length below. It is unclear whether the Trump administration has the legal authority to facilitate access to federal money on signing the Compact—but, in any case, none of the original nine universities as yet has accepted the Trump administration’s offer. Most other IHEs seem unlikely to accept the Trump administration’s broader offer. The Compact is a useful means to appeal to public opinion, but it does not seem likely to produce concrete administrative reforms at most IHEs.

The Case Resolution Strategy

The case resolution strategy, by contrast, already has produced victories for the Trump administration. Several universities, presumably responding in good measure to the combination of Executive Orders and financial non-disbursements, agreed to resolution agreements with the federal government during the summer and fall of 2025, including the University of Pennsylvania,⁵ Brown University,⁶ the University of Virginia (UVA),⁷ Cornell University,⁸ and Columbia University.⁹

Trump Administration Case Resolution Agreements,
as of November 10, 2025

University of Pennsylvania	June 30, 2025	No fine
Columbia University	July 23, 2025	$200 million fine
Brown University	July 30, 2025	$50 million fine
University of Virginia	October 22, 2025	No fine
Cornell University	November 7, 2025	$30 million fine

The University of Pennsylvania’s agreement focused on ceasing its sex discrimination in the name of “transgenderism.” Brown, UVa’s, Cornell’s, and Columbia’s agreements provided more general resolutions of outstanding issues. These resolution agreements broadly followed this model:

• The federal government dropped its outstanding charges against the universities, while the universities paid hefty fines (formal or informal)—no fines in UVa’s case, but $50 million in the case of Brown, $30 million for Cornell, and $200 million in the case of Columbia.
• The federal government dropped its bolder initiatives, including the ambition to intervene directly in the self-government of the universities.
• The universities promised extensive self-reforms, sometimes with the oversight of external monitors mutually agreed to by the federal government and the universities.

The ED’s decision to use a strategy of case resolution agreements—and the success of that strategy to date—suggest that this is how the ED will put the Trump administration’s higher education reform strategy into effect.

The Trump administration has been effective in using case resolutions, not least because previous administrations also used them to great effect. The case resolution agreement has been an effective but extra-statutory means the ED used to impose policy on IHEs during the last generation. A resolution agreement, because it is technically voluntary, does not require authorizing a Congressional statute—or even a regulation submitted for public comment. Progressive bureaucrats have used legal challenges and resolution agreements to pressure IHEs to adopt progressive policies—and, as importantly, to pressure them to establish new progressive bureaucracies that would maintain pressure for progressive priorities, especially the identity politics agenda, from within the IHEs. A resolution agreement, moreover, provided a powerful signal to every other IHE about what they needed to do to avoid the ED’s legal attentions: one resolution agreement provided a means to change policies at a host of IHEs. NAS has written extensively about the power and the pernicious consequences of ED resolution agreements.¹⁰

The Trump administration ED apparently has decided that resolution agreements provide a useful tool, despite their dangers—and despite its simultaneous campaign to eliminate much of the real size and authority of the ED. A resolution agreement with Brown or Columbia offers the promise that a host of other IHEs will voluntarily reform their policies to match the requirements of the resolution agreement. On the other hand, it is of necessity a compromise that withdraws the Trump administration from some of the bolder proposed initiatives to reform IHEs.

This strategy implies several characteristics of the ED:

• Education Department Weakness. The ED has behaved boldly in its confrontation with the universities. But it does ultimately consist of a relatively small number of political appointees and a larger permanent staff yet to be fully transformed by firing and rehiring into a corps infused with a new reform commitment, while it possesses a relatively small budget. Furthermore, the ED probably would require the support of statutory reform to make good on some of its bolder aspirations for higher education reform. In any case, it must confront thousands of IHEs, who collectively possess vast staff and resources—and elite institutions that individually are quite wealthy. The ED probably is not prepared for a full-scale war of attrition against the entire higher education sector. The ED’s decision to pursue a case resolution agreement strategy likely registers an intelligent appreciation of the limits of its own strength.
• Desire for Political Victory. The ED surely has a desire to proclaim a victory. This is a natural feature of the political world. A case resolution agreement provides a natural headline, and something to use as bragging rights going forward. The ED probably would be willing to compromise on some long-term reform so as to claim a short-term victory. The ED’s motivations possess some justification, including in the campaign for long-term reform: energy for sustained reform frequently derives from loudly proclaimed early successes. Nevertheless, the desire for a favorable headline can come at the expense of enduring change.

As the American public evaluates the case resolution strategy, it should keep these factors in mind:

• Importance of Fines. The Brown University Resolution Agreement secured $50 million from Brown University¹¹and $221 million from Columbia University.¹² These are not trivial amounts of money. Brown University has an endowment of $6.7 billion and Columbia an endowment of $14.8 billion,¹³ but university portfolios are relatively inflexible compared to those of actual investment funds. These fines are significant punishments and incentives not to engage in further misconduct. On the other hand, they are survivable fines—and there is no guarantee that the universities will be fined again. If the fines are one-and-done, university administrators may think it is reasonable to continue their old policies, albeit with more camouflage. The fines provide an incentive against further misconduct, but they are not large enough, by themselves, to ensure that outcome.
• Reliance on Internal Reform. The ED’s bolder proposals suggested external administration of large portions of university governance—to put much of the university into receivership, formally or informally.¹⁴ The case resolution strategy relinquishes that tactic, uses case resolutions to provide stated goals that the university administrations are supposed to achieve, and relies on universities to cooperate by engaging in sufficient internally-administered reform to achieve the stated ends. In theory, it should be easy for universities to undertake these reforms, since they largely involve putting existing law into force. In practice, that is precisely why education reformers should doubt that universities actually will live up to their case resolution agreements: the universities should have been following these laws in the first place, and the ED’s case resolution strategy relies on provenly unreliable intermediaries for its execution.
• Case Resolution Strategy Has Depended on Acquiescent Bureaucracies: Progressive administrators achieved such great success with the case resolution strategy in good measure because ED personnel were enforcing policy change on bureaucrats who generally welcomed the ED’s initiatives. Case resolution agreements were a means for interlocking bureaucracies that largely wished to accomplish the same progressive goals to avoid accountability to the public for its actions. Federal administrators could pretend they had imposed nothing, local administrators could tell policymakers and citizens that they had no choice but to make these reforms, but both could proceed with the goals they already intended. In this case, however, IHE bureaucracies strongly dislike the Trump administration reforms they have agreed to undertake. Americans must expect them to perform as little as possible, and to sabotage the case resolutions if they can get away with it. The ED’s case resolution strategy will not be self-executing.
• Monitoring Essential. The July 2025 Columbia resolution provides for an independent monitor to ensure that the university administration complies with the resolution agreement.¹⁵ An independent monitor in theory can provide sufficient oversight to ensure that universities follow through on their commitments. Whether independent monitors will achieve success in practice is less certain. A monitor, even a monitor with a staff, will face a formidable challenge to exert proper oversight on a massive university bureaucracy.

The case resolution strategy, in other words, might produce large-scale change in IHEs, with relatively little investment of political capital and administrative time by the ED and a great deal of internally administered reform by college and university administrations. But university administrators might instead fail to deliver on promised reforms—and the ED might decide to take the fines and the headlines as a sufficient victory. A great deal turns on how well the universities fulfill the promised changes they have made in their case resolutions.

The Role of Education Reformers: Auxiliary Oversight to Ensure Compliance

The ED and officially appointed independent monitors will have limited resources to ensure university compliance. Independent education reformers can make up that shortfall by conducting investigations into how well IHEs have fulfilled their case resolutions and by organizing publicity and political pressure to ensure the IHEs comply with their commitments. Information gathered by independent education reformers also can give the ED the information they need to return to the IHEs and, with relatively little investment of time on ED’s part, detail what precisely the colleges and universities need to do to fulfill their case resolution obligations. Education reformers acting as truly independent monitors can strengthen university compliance with case resolutions—and thereby make the ED’s case resolution strategy effective.

Education reformers should focus first on Columbia University (and Harvard University, should Harvard enter into an equally thorough case resolution agreement with the ED), as its case resolution provides the framework for comprehensive reform of IHEs across America. Education reformers should publicly and repeatedly call on Columbia to provide public information confirming that it has made progress toward, and/or completed, satisfying its case resolution agreement. Columbia’s case resolution agreement also will provide a convenient basis for education reformers to focus their work—at Columbia and elsewhere. The same list of items that Columbia has agreed to should, after all, be best practices for all IHEs. Education reformers can use the same list as a template to present to IHEs around the nation.

We suggest that education reformers use the following ten-point template, drawn from the resolution agreement with Columbia University, to focus efforts on ensuring that Columbia (and other IHEs) fulfill the case resolution agreement. This template includes headline points and concrete metrics for evaluating compliance.

CASE RESOLUTION COMPLIANCE

1. Demonstrated nondiscrimination for race, sex, and national origin in student admissions.16 Metric: Annual publication on a publicly accessible university webpage of de-identified admission statistics, showing both rejected and admitted students, dis-aggregated by race, color, grade point average, and performance on standardized tests, in a form permitting appropriate statistical analyses. 2. Demonstrated nondiscrimination for race, sex, and national origin in hiring of faculty and staff.17 Metric: Annual publication on a publicly accessible university webpage of de-identified statistics on faculty hiring, tenuring, and salary statistics, dis-aggregated by race and sex, correlated with professional attainment, for hired and tenured faculty, in a form permitting appropriate statistical analyses. 3. Demonstrated removal of programs that promote unlawful efforts to achieve race-based outcomes, quotas, diversity targets, or similar efforts.18 Metric: Annual publication on a publicly accessible university webpage of de-identified grants, awards, and other financial disbursements for students and faculty, disaggregated by race and sex, correlated with professional attainment, in a form permitting appropriate statistical analyses. 4. Demonstrated removal of sex-discrimination policies regarding so-called “transgenderism.”19 Metric: No so-called “transgender” individuals present in single-sex university housing or sports that does not correspond with these individuals’ biological sex. 5. Demonstrated effectiveness of student and faculty discipline.20 Metric: University functions normally (no “encampments”) without special security measures. Student, faculty, and staff lawbreaking punished by suspensions, expulsions, and termination of employment. 6. Demonstrated effectiveness of face mask prohibitions.21 Metric: No face masks on campus, save for religious or medical reasons. 7. Demonstrated removal of tolerance for anti-Semitism.22 Metric: The university hires new professors in academic units particularly marred by anti-Semitism to ensure intellectual diversity; the university appoints a responsible individual to ensure there is no antisemitic harassment or policy on campus. 8. Demonstrated reform of admissions of international students.23 Metric: Annual publication on a publicly accessible university webpage of procedures instituted to screen for commitment to American values, along with de-identified statistics on the numbers of applicants from each country who pass and fail these procedures. 9. Demonstrated decrease of financial dependence on international student enrollment.24 Metric: Annual publication on a publicly accessible university webpage of university total revenues and tuition revenues, and international student tuition revenues as a proportion of both figures. University financial dependence on international student tuition revenues should decline by 20% in both proportionate and absolute terms from 2020-2021 fiscal year. 10. Demonstrated compliance with all federal foreign gift and contract reporting obligations.25 Metric: Publication on a publicly accessible university webpage of a database registering all foreign gifts and contracts, updated at least weekly.

These reforms are by no means everything that must be done to reform our colleges and universities. Yet they would remove a great deal of the worst lawlessness and discrimination committed by IHEs. The Columbia case resolution agreement provides an excellent basis for a major and achievable program of education reform. The ED may not have the manpower to execute that case resolution agreement itself, either at Columbia or nationwide. But independent education reformers can use that framework to give substance to that case resolution agreement.

Conclusion

The Trump administration’s higher education reform campaign to terminate discrimination, lawlessness, and foreign dependence encompasses Executive Orders, non-disbursement of federal funds, the Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, and case resolution agreements with individual universities. The ED’s case resolution strategy can make this broader campaign succeed—if education reformers take up the challenge to monitor how well our colleges and universities have followed through on their promises. Reformers should focus first on Columbia and on other universities that have entered into case resolution agreements with the ED. The same to-do list, however, can and should be applied to IHEs around the country. The principles and the metrics that can be used to assess Columbia can be used everywhere. They articulate lucidly the laws of the land and what colleges and universities should do to assure the public that they are obeying the law. The ED’s case resolution strategy’s greatest promise lies in its duplicability. Education reformers acting independently can make good the ED’s manpower limitations and provide the oversight and accountability that will make the case resolution strategy a success. Thereby they also will ensure the success of the Trump administration’s entire higher education reform campaign.

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Photo by Leon Seibert on Unsplash