Inside the Impending Trump - Columbia Deal That Has the White House Happy and Critics Worried
Plus, Stanford faces fresh discrimination suit from Israeli chemist
Ivy League update: Columbia University is nearing a deal with the Trump administration that would "require the school to compensate the victims of unlawful discrimination and increase the transparency of its hiring and admissions process" and in turn see it recoup most of the $400 million in federal funding the White House froze in March, the Free Beacon's Eliana Johnson and Aaron Sibarium report. Even with the agreement unfinished, opinions on its merits are split.
What's clear is that the deal, "does not include some of the more onerous provisions initially demanded by the White House, such as a consent decree and reforms to Columbia's governance structure." The White House is nonetheless characterizing it as a "historic" victory and noting that any consent decree "would have left enforcement in the hands of the Southern District of New York, a left-leaning district court that employs a disproportionate number of Columbia graduates as judges and clerks," Johnson and Sibarium write. Instead, the deal would see Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon supervise compliance.
On the other side is Columbia's Jewish community, which "wants a deal," according to a source close to the community, but isn't sure this one is it. The source pressed the administration to secure "demonstrable reform on discipline, governance, and leadership that puts rigorous scholarship first instead of the woke DEI culture that leads to antisemitism and civil rights violations." One source within the administration agrees, saying Columbia "is unlikely to be able to uphold even the quite lenient terms of the agreement because Columbia doesn’t actually want to change."
Title IX'ing the intifada: Israeli chemist Dr. Shay Laps arrived on campus at Stanford in April 2024, months after Hamas's Oct. 7 attack. He did not find it welcoming.
Laps, according to a fresh federal lawsuit filed on Thursday, "alleges his colleagues at Stanford’s Danny Chou Lab created a hostile work environment in the months after Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror spree over his Jewish and Israeli origins," our Adam Kredo reports. "Lab assistants allegedly sabotaged Laps’s diabetes research, prevented him from accessing necessary equipment, and socially ostracized the doctor for being an Israeli Jew, according to a copy of the complaint the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law filed in the Northern District of California."
Things came to a head four months into Laps's time at Stanford. At that point, the head of the lab, Dr. Danny Chou, allegedly called Laps into his office for an "urgent" meeting and told Laps he was "under investigation" by Stanford's Title IX office for sexual harassment. Chou fabricated that investigation by filing a bogus Title IX "report" that included no complaining victim, according to the suit, leaving Laps with "no choice but to resign."
'Women will be pulverized': Last year, the NYPD responded to tens of thousands of domestic violence incidents. Socialist New York City mayoral hopeful Zohran Mamdani wants that number to fall to zero—or at least he did in 2020.
At that time, our Jon Levine reports, Mamdani appeared on the Immigrantly podcast, where he argued that it's inappropriate to send cops to respond to domestic violence incidents. "If somebody is jaywalking, if somebody is surviving, going through domestic violence—there are so many different, different situations that would be far better handled by people trained to deal with those specific situations, as opposed to an individual with a gun," he said.
Former NYPD homicide detective Pete Panuccio called that position "absolutely insane," saying, "Homicide rates will increase, women will be pulverized." It's not entirely clear whether Mamdani stands by it. His mayoral platform calls to replace police with "crisis responders" in "mental health" cases, though it does not define such cases, and the Mamdani campaign "did not respond to repeated requests for comment on whether he would prevent the police from responding to reports of domestic violence."
READ MORE: Zohran Mamdani Called To Stop Sending Cops to People 'Going Through Domestic Violence'
In other news:
Beleaguered DNC chair Ken Martin had this to say about Zohran Mamdani's refusal to condemn calls to "globalize the intifada": "At the end of the day, I always believe … that you win through addition, you win by bringing people into your coalition. … We are a big tent party." Are Jews allowed in the tent, Ken?
No laughing matter: The Washington Post on Thursday published an op-ed from a literal clown, who urged readers to stop lumping Donald Trump in with his kind because real clowns bring "joy to the world, not chaos to Washington."
Iran did not remove its stockpile of enriched uranium from its top three nuclear sites before the United States struck them last month, a senior Israeli official said.
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I can understand the desire to settle. Columbia is an important institution but not as important as Harvard. The judges in NY lean left and they would be the ones deciding on the verdict and the penalties and there is no guarantee the judgement would go even as far as this settlement.
I would take it, set a low bar, minimum acceptable penalty and then go after more with each new target.