If you don’t like Columbia University’s principles, it has others. For decades, Columbia rejected the evidence of its political extremism as a conservative smear job and said academic freedom was priceless. But when the Trump administration pressed the university to follow the law, its professors folded. The price of academic freedom turns out to be $200 million, the amount Columbia must repay to the federal government, plus $21 million in damages to staff. What is this country coming to? You can’t even riot against the Jews no more.

Columbia’s statement of surrender said the university “does not admit to wrongdoing.” Neither did Prince Andrew, and he paid $16.3 million to Virginia Giuffre to keep a sexual assault case out of court. There is no better way of proving your innocence than sending your accuser a few million dollars. Columbia will pay the fine back in student-loan style over three years. The payments unlock the $400 million in federal funding that the administration suspended. See what it did there?

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Getting Columbia to cough up is a win for Leo Terrell, who heads the Justice Department’s Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, and Linda McMahon, secretary at the Department formerly called Education. It shows that government can still work, providing it’s led by conscientious public servants who follow the law. And it’s always nice to see the vain and hateful humbled and hit right where it hurts, in the endowments. But we have not, to paraphrase Trump, D.J. (University of Pennsylvania, class of 1968), won so much that we should be tired of winning.

The problem with the universities is structural. They are essential to research and development in the sciences, including innovations in medicine as well as technology in its military and civilian aspects. They are also essential to credentialing the halfwits who will soon be running the country. Their professors abuse this responsibility in four ways: soaking up taxpayer cash, teaching poisonously anti-American ideas, filling the universities with foreign students whose parents pay top dollar, and taking three months’ vacation in Vermont in the summer. It’s completely unacceptable.

Still, just as it would defeat the national interest for the Trump administration to avenge itself and us for the partisan corruption and paralytic productivity of the federal bureaucracy, it is against the national interest for us to torch the universities, even if they are full of arsonists who hate us. Like Columbia said in its nonadmission of not-guilt about the thing it didn’t do to the Jews, “reform was and is needed.” 

The Trump administration began the battle by forcing institutions to comply with the law. But that’s only the first of four ways the universities abuse their privileges. And there’s not much we can do about the three months in Vermont.

That leaves the ideas in the classroom and who gets to hear them. The universities’ business model is predicated on milking donations from elderly graduates and fees from foreign kleptocrats buying an MBA for their children. The first group has finally awoken from its sentimental slumbers. The second is now realizing that America is no longer for sale.

The Trump administration’s tough love for Columbia’s campus fits its foreign and economic policies. If you want to compete, you need to grow your people skills and knowledge. It’s madness to give foreigners places that Americans might use, especially when, as in the case of China, there’s evidence to suggest widespread espionage in campus labs.

There’s a quick fix for universities’ addiction to foreign cash. Set ceilings on the number of foreigners in undergraduate and graduate programs, and link them to federal funding. The more a university breaks the ceiling, the more federal cash it loses. That way, universities can still work against the national interest if they really want to, but they won’t be double-dipping.

That leaves the classroom content. In a survey of Harvard University’s class of 2024, 45% of students asked graduates if they were “reluctant to share their views about charged topics in class.” Thirty-two percent were uncomfortable discussing such matters outside of the classroom because of concerns about “peers’ judgment, worries about criticism on social media, unease about reputational damage, and fear about potential bullying and harassment complaints.”

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These figures are a disgrace. If Harvard were serious, all students would be afraid to speak freely. There would be 0% conservatives on the faculty. From this, we conclude that the universities are so bloated that they can’t even do the things they want to do, let alone do the things we would like them to do. 

Harvard is richer than Columbia and, it appears, smarter. It reckons it can wait it out, and it may be right. One of its gambits is to “mull” creating a “conservative studies center,” presumably funded by sentimental graduates and staffed by libertarians. It would be cheaper and more productive to fund a crop of new universities. And now I’m off to Vermont to work on my monograph.

Dominic Green is a Washington Examiner columnist and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Find him on X @drdominicgreen.