Ending the Early Winter Freeze

On Friday, it was announced that the beloved Northwestern University agreed to pay a $75 million settlement to government for the Trump administration freezing research funds and demanding concessions in relation to supposed accusations of the university not providing enough protections against anti-Semitic actions on the campus.
 
My immediate reaction was that I was disappointed by NU settling for anything.  What little I know of the situation there, this was just Trump administration posturing over their faux-concern of Jews on college campuses, all in an effort to undermine education.  I happened to be visiting Chicago – and staying in Evanston, walking over to campus – during some of the Gaza-related protests and what I saw there (which, in fairness, was hardly definitive of the full period) was just normal protests of government policies.  It is certainly possible that some of the protesting got anti-Semitic (and possible it didn’t), but also from what I read, nothing was related to the school administration’s inaction.
 
I even wrote an article here about it and posted a photo of the Big Protest on campus.  Granted, it was a Saturday at the time, but most Big Protests don’t take the weekend off.  And have more than one big tent.

As I said, it’s a shame that Northwestern made any settlement, because any settlement risks being encouragement to the bully.
 
But –
 
The more I read about what the settle was, it seems like more a “take the money and run” deal for the Trump administration to get out of there with as little damage to itself, and hurting Northwestern.  And as much as A.G. Pam Bondi praised it as a huge win for Trump team over anti-Semitism (a subject he has never cared about, unless it was on the anti-Semite side), it was grasping at straws.
 
For starters, by settling the deal, the Trump administration immediately unfroze $790 million in research funds.  And Northwestern had to pay only $75 million, just under 10% to get back $715 million.  (Or less than 10-cents on the dollar, as they say.)  Moreover, Northwestern gets to pay this back over three years.  So, they will only be paying $25 million a year.  They’ll make more than that on interest for the $790 million alone that they’re getting back.  (A few years ago, when Morton Schapiro was the school’s president, he ended a fund-raising drive in 2021 that brought in $6.1 billion!  They can handle the $25 million a year.  That’s .004% of what they raised in that one campaign.  And for all I know, it’s tax deductible.)
 
Still, the university had to agree to certain government terms – but the terms seem paltry, indeed ones the school is likely happy to do.  Northwestern agreed to review its international admissions policies, develop training for international students to learn the "norms of the campus," and reaffirm steps to protect Jewish members of the community.
 
That’s it.  Pay $25 million a year for three years, review admission policies, develop a training program, and commit to protecting Jews.  And get back $790 million.
 
Northwestern currently has a interim president, Henry Bienen, who had been the university president for 14 years beginning in 1995 (a period that overlapped with my dad being a professor at the NU Medical School – I remember us getting a holiday card from him every year).  He defended the agreement for allowing the school to keep complete control of the areas that were non-negotiable to Northwestern – hiring, admissions and curriculum – as part of their settlement. 
 
In a statement, he said:
 
"As an imperative to the negotiation of this agreement, we had several hard red lines we refused to cross: We would not relinquish any control over whom we hire, whom we admit as students, what our faculty teach or how our faculty teach. I would not have signed this agreement without provisions ensuring that is the case. Northwestern runs Northwestern. Period."
 
I’m sorry that Northwestern felt it had to settle.  I’m overwhelmingly more furious that they were put in a Mafia-like stranglehold by the Trump administration – in its attacks on many universities – where they felt it was necessary.  Holding up $790 million in research funds that not only benefitted the school, but whose medical research benefitted world society.
 
(That’s not hyperbole.  Back in April of last year, I wrote here  about how just two weeks before Trump froze that $790 in research funding, scientist developed the world’s smallest pacemaker – that actually dissolves after it’s no longer needed!)

As I said, a settlement with a bully risks given them encouragement to bully others.
 
But – "risks" is the operative term.  If this is the settlement the Trump administration got, it is close to no encouragement to them.  This was them raising the white flag far more than Northwestern in its settlement.  Yes, Northwestern settled.  But they paid the Trump DOJ chump change, gave them zero control to hiring and curriculum (which the Trump administration has long wanted across the country), and Trump got next to nothing that it can use to try to use against other.

There is, however, one particular shame in all of this.  The new president of the university, Michael Schill, who was a good guy from what I could tell in all I'd read about him (and heard, having gone to an alumni event when he came to Los Angeles to speak), resigned.  Not because he did anything wrong, but because he felt that as long as he was there – as the head of the school when the protests occurred – he was being a hurdle the school getting a settlement.  Basically, it seemed that Trump's DOJ just wanted to force him out to show how tough on anti-Semitism they were.  Of course, not only is Trump and his administration not remotely concerned with anti-Semitism (and Trump himself has long shown himself to be blatantly anti-Semitic), but Michael Schill, who resigned for the good of the university, is Jewish.
 
I wish Northwestern didn’t settle.  But I think they made a tremendous settlement, and left Trump stumbling around in the dark.