Columbia and White House Enter Final Stage of Talks to End Standoff

Officials from Columbia University and the Trump administration on Thursday inched closer to ending a monthslong standoff over the college’s ability to protect Jewish students from harassment, meeting for about an hour in Washington, where they agreed on the main terms of a deal but left without finalizing all of the details.

There was optimism from some of those involved in the negotiations that an agreement would be announced next week, but they were hesitant to discuss specifics and risk upsetting the delicate negotiations. The deal is expected to include about $200 million in payments by Columbia to settle the matter, while the administration would restore most of more than $400 million in canceled federal research funding, according to a recent draft of the deal.

The account of the White House meeting and information about a potential deal was provided by three individuals with direct knowledge of the continuing negotiations who spoke on the condition of anonymity so that they could describe sensitive talks.

Claire Shipman, the acting president of Columbia, was among roughly 10 officials from Columbia and the Trump administration who met at the White House on Thursday to review the deal. President Trump has been fully briefed on the negotiations, a White House spokesman said.

Columbia declined to comment on the details of the talks. “The university remains engaged in productive discussions with the federal government,” Virginia Lam Abrams, a spokeswoman, said.

Talks between the White House and Columbia have gained momentum in recent weeks.

The two sides have discussed some kind of monitoring system that would track compliance by Columbia with the government’s demands. At one point, the deal included a judge-approved consent decree, which is a legally binding performance-improvement plan.

Any deal would also probably mean settling more than a half-dozen open civil rights investigations into the university.

Though the deal is intended to help Jewish students on campus, several organizations of pro-Israel students, alumni and faculty members have been sharply critical of the proposed terms. Even though Columbia would be required to pay a steep fine, the critics say the deal appears to let Columbia off too easily by not forcing deep structural changes that they think would improve the climate on campus.

They particularly want an overhaul of the university senate, a faculty-dominated policymaking body that is responsible for setting rules governing campus protests. The critics find the current rules too lenient. Outside the context of the Trump negotiations, the university is drafting a plan to reform the university senate.

“I think it’s a terrible deal,” said Elisha Baker, a rising senior and the co-chair of Aryeh, a pro-Israel student organization. “My hope is that we can get out of this with a win for Columbia, Jewish students and the U.S., and my biggest worry is that it ignores the structural, institutional reforms that would get us to that win.”

The Trump administration started the year with a series of high-profile assaults on academia, including freezing billions of dollars in research funding and embarking on costly investigations into alleged civil rights abuses and improper reporting of foreign funding. The moves were widely interpreted as an attempt by the White House to impose its political agenda on the nation’s elite institutions of higher education. Now, the government has spent much of the past month trying to settle the disputes.

On July 1, the University of Pennsylvania struck a deal that limited how transgender people may participate in its athletic programs, with the Trump administration saying it planned to restore $175 million in research funding that it had suspended in March. The White House has also held extensive talks with officials from Harvard University, after freezing billions of dollars in federal research money to the school.

Still, Columbia has remained one of the government’s top targets.

The Trump administration announced on March 7 that it was canceling hundreds of millions of dollars in grants and contracts to Columbia, an extraordinary step that made the university the first to be punished by the administration for what it said was the school’s failure to prevent harassment of Jewish students after the start of the Israel-Hamas war. Punishment for other universities, including Cornell, Harvard and Northwestern, soon followed.

As weeks passed, it became evident that the damage to Columbia’s research enterprise went deeper than the original cut. The National Institutes of Health, the government’s premier medical research funder, froze nearly all research money flowing to Columbia, including for reimbursement of grants that were still active.

Grant Watch, a project run by research scientists who compiled information on the grants pulled by the Trump administration, estimated this week that about $1.2 billion in unspent funding to Columbia from the N.I.H. had been terminated or frozen. Other federal agencies, including the National Science Foundation, also pulled grants.