Cornell inks $60m deal with Trump administration to resolve antisemitism claims

JTA – Cornell University will pay $60 million (R1 trillion) to the Trump administration to resolve ongoing antisemitism investigations and unfreeze $250 million in federal funds, becoming the fourth Ivy League school and fifth overall to strike such a deal.

The deal came weeks after another agreement signed by the University of Virginia, and also followed the resolution of an ongoing controversy at Cornell involving a Jewish professor’s course on Gaza.

“With this resolution, Cornell looks forward to resuming the long and fruitful partnership with the federal government that has yielded, for so many years, so much progress and well-being for our nation and our world,” Michael Kotlikoff, the school’s Jewish president, said in a statement on Friday, 7 November, announcing the deal.

In a virtual campus town hall after the deal was announced, Kotlikoff linked the university’s negotiation of the settlement to the broader campus climate in the two-plus years since the Hamas attack on Israel and war in Gaza.

“Universities across the country have made significant progress since disruptions on campus on 7 October in articulating our rules, appropriately enforcing our rules and making sure that everybody’s rights are protected,” he said, as reported by the Cornell student newspaper.

As part of the deal, Cornell will pay the federal government $20 million per year for the next three years in exchange for the unfreezing of several grants to the university, many of which are connected to the Department of Defense. Half of the money will be directed to investments in agriculture programmes.

The school also promises to “conduct annual campus climate surveys to ensure that Jewish students are safe and that antisemitism is being addressed”, according to a White House release about the deal. In the aftermath of 7 October Cornell’s campus dealt with violent threats against Jewish students as well as a faculty member who had praised the Hamas attacks.

The government, in turn, promises to drop its ongoing Title VI investigations into allegations of discrimination based on shared Jewish ancestry or national origin at the school. Kotlikoff further insisted that Cornell would preserve its academic freedom, and wouldn’t be forced to abide by White House guidelines on other campus concerns such as diversity-based hiring and transgender athletes.

Cornell’s agreement follows earlier ones struck by Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, Brown and the University of Virginia (UVA). UVA, the first public university to strike an antisemitism-related deal with Trump, was not required to make any payments to the federal government, according to the deal it announced last month.

Instead, UVA agreed to end certain diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, known as DEI, and eliminate language referring to transgender people, among other provisions. None of the public terms of its settlement involved addressing antisemitism.

One prominent on-campus critic of Cornell’s handling of antisemitism issues praised the school’s settlement as “pragmatic” in an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA).

“The fact that all Title VI investigations have been closed is a tremendously important reassurance to students and parents that the university, in fact, is doing all it can to protect Jewish students from any kind of antisemitic discrimination or incident,” said Menachem Rosensaft, an adjunct law professor at Cornell.

Rosensaft said the agreement “also sends a very clear signal to anyone who is inclined to engage in antisemitic discrimination or violence that they will suffer the consequences”.

Rosensaft had been at the middle of a more recent Israel-related controversy at Cornell after he complained to Kotlikoff about a pro-Palestinian Jewish professor’s plan to teach a class on Gaza. Kotlikoff’s criticisms of the class, in emails published by JTA, prompted campus advocacy groups to admonish what they said were his threats to academic freedom.

That professor, Eric Cheyfitz, prompted an internal investigation after he tried to remove an Israeli graduate student from his Gaza class. Last month, Cheyfitz opted to retire from teaching in order to end the investigation.

The university pressure on Cheyfitz, Rosensaft said, was further evidence, along with the settlement, that Cornell has started to take threats of antisemitism seriously.

“He will no longer be able to propagate his extreme anti-Zionism in the classroom,” Rosensaft said.

Trump negotiations with universities are continuing, even as more and more Jews say they think such deals are using antisemitism as an excuse to attack higher education.

The terms of a proposed $1 billion payout from the University of California system, recently made public by a court order, include specific reference to antisemitic incidents that took place on UCLA’s campus. In addition, a closely watched negotiation with Harvard is ongoing.