Days after Columbia University yielded to a list of demands from the Trump administration, the American Association of University Professors and the American Federation of Teachers filed a lawsuit on behalf of members at Columbia over $400 million in frozen federal research funding.
The lawsuit names multiple government agencies, including the Departments of Justice, Education and Health and Human Services and the General Services Administration.
Columbia had been in a standoff with the Trump administration over the decision to freeze federal research funding due to alleged antisemitism stemming from pro-Palestinian student protests last year. Ultimately, university leaders decided to avoid a legal fight, even as legal scholars at Columbia and in conservative circles questioned whether the demands were lawful.
In a news release Tuesday, the same day they filed the lawsuit, the AAUP and AFT alleged that the Trump administration used “cuts as a cudgel to coerce a private institution to adopt restrictive speech codes and allow government control over teaching and learning.”
The 87-page lawsuit was filed in the Southern District of New York.
The AAUP and AFT have cast Trump’s demands and the freezing of $400 million in grants and contracts as a “coercive tactic” that undermines institutional autonomy and harms scientific research. Plaintiffs are asking the court to order the Trump administration to lift its freeze on Columbia’s research funding and declare the government’s demands for reform unlawful. They have also requested unspecified damages.
“We’re seeing university leadership across the country failing to take any action to counter the Trump administration’s unlawful assault on academic freedom,” Reinhold Martin, president of Columbia-AAUP and a professor of architecture, said in the statement announcing the lawsuit. “As faculty, we don’t have the luxury of inaction. The integrity of civic discourse and the freedoms that form the basis of a democratic society are under attack. We have to stand up.”
The Department of Education did not respond to a request for comment from Inside Higher Ed.
