"...T]he agreement grows out of the executive branch’s first-ever cutoff of congressionally appropriated funds to a university, so as to punish that university and impel it to adopt sweeping reforms, without any pretense of following the congressionally mandated procedures. Lawyers have been debating the exact circumstances under which the executive branch may freeze particular grants and contracts to particular schools. Yet as far as I’m aware, no lawyer outside the government has even attempted to defend the legality of the initial cutoff that brought Columbia to its knees and, thereafter, to the 'negotiating' table.
"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.
"There is another unprecedented feature of the situation that is so obvious it is easy to overlook, and that might ultimately prove the most consequential of all: the way in which the federal government is seeking to reshape the internal operations of universities not through generally applicable directives, but rather through a series of bilateral 'deals.' The Trump administration has made clear that while Columbia is first in line, it intends to reach comparable agreements with other schools—to scale the Columbia shakedown into a broader model of managing universities deemed too woke. As has already occurred with law firms, tariffs, and trade policy, regulation by deal is coming to higher education..." --David Pozen, in Balkinization, on Columbia University's shameful $200 million capitulation to the Malignant Fascist's extortion. That the tactic the Malignant Fascist has applied to Columbia and other educational institutions, law firms and foreign nations closely resembles that of a gangster is no coincidence, of course. And as far as the university is concerned, if they ever wondered what they would have done in 1930's Germany, they're doing it now.
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