A lawyer for Columbia University said Tuesday that a demand from the Trump administration for dramatic changes in student discipline had merely sped up policies the university had already been planning to enforce.
In a March 13 letter, the Trump administration said the university had failed to stop “antisemitic violence and harassment,” adding that policy changes would have to be made before the government would discuss resuming $400 million in canceled grants and contracts. Last week, the school complied with most of the government’s requests, regulating masks on campus and empowering a team of security officers to make arrests.
The lawyer’s assertion that Columbia had been planning the changes all along came during a hearing in Federal District Court in Manhattan over a request by a group of anonymous Columbia and Barnard College students that a judge bar school officials from handing over confidential disciplinary records…
