The Media Research Center hates it when the transactive nature of the Trump administration is called out — which means it was annoyed that the administration’s settlement with Columbia University over alleged civil rights violations looked a lot like extortion. Intern Ashley Taylor huffed in a July 25 post:
If you watched Wednesday’s broadcast of CNN NewsNight, Ana Navarro and Keith Boykin would have you believe Donald Trump was “extorting” Columbia University and running a “fascist” operation from the White House. But let’s get serious. What actually happened at Columbia was not a criminal shakedown, it’s accountability. Luckily, there were some conservatives at the table to call them out.
When a university accepts billions in federal funding, it has a responsibility to uphold federal law to keep those funds, including the duty to protect students from discrimination. Columbia University failed to do just that.
The Trump administration froze over $400 million in grants earlier this year after Jewish students and faculty reported a surge in harassment amid chaotic, often violent, anti-Israel encampments; so-called “protests” that resembled more closely an attempted coup. After facing the reality of losing that much money, Columbia decided to settle, and in doing so, effectively admitted it had lost control of its campus to rioters masquerading as activists. The university agreed to pay $200 million in direct restitution and an additional $21 million to resolve civil rights investigations into employment discrimination after the Trump administration’s probe into DEI hiring practices, finding it in violation of the Civil Rights Act.
Taylor was not going to concede that the settlement resembled more closely a shakedown — but would be mad that this resemblance was pointed out. Instead, she cited the MRC’s favorite right-winger on CNN:
Scott Jennings summed up the situation perfectly: “You don’t pay $200 million just to make something go away. You pay because you got caught red-handed, systematically discriminating against Jewish students.” That’s not spin, that’s simple math. Columbia didn’t cough up that kind of money just to make an issue disappear– if they weren’t obviously in the wrong, they could have proved their innocence in court. Columbia paid because it had a problem and wanted to avoid a deeper reckoning.
Neither Jennings nor Taylor offered any evidence that such a “deeper reckoning” was actually lurking, or that the Trump administration genuinely cares about civil rights. Taylor further ranted that the students were the ones engaging in extortion and coercion:
For months, we watched mobs on elite campuses set up tent cities, shut down Jewish students, and threaten disruption unless universities divested from Israel. In any other context, that would be called coercion. Yet Boykin and Navarro want to act like the real tyrant here was the federal government, all for asking schools not to discriminate.
Alex Christy similarly grumbled in a July 26 post:
Even by its own standards, the weekly Friday news recap featuring PBS News Hour host Geoff Bennett, Washington Post associate editor Jonathan Capehart, and New York Times columnist David Brooks was especially tone-deaf and unintelligent. The trio would have you believe that Columbia University settling with the Trump administration is both a threat to universities through “institutional capture” and democracy itself. Nobody at the table thought that concerns about anti-Semitism on campus were worth discussing.
After recalling how Columbia will pay a $200 million fine to get its $1.3 billion in funding back, Bennett asked, “Jonathan, what’s your take on Columbia’s decision to settle? And what message does it send to other universities? I didn’t know until I was talking with our team there’s some 60 universities right now in active conversations with the Trump administration about protests and discrimination complaints. You see the list there. What do you make of it?”
Capehart declared, “It’s terrible. I think we were talking about this months ago, when Columbia University did something, and I think David put his finger on it. It was like, on the one hand, you feel for the universities because the money that’s taken away is money that goes to research, that goes to fund really important things that are not just important to the university, but important for all of us, in terms of advancing knowledge and advancing science.”
[…]Columbia’s own internal investigation was incredibly damning, so Columbia probably settled because it didn’t want to open itself up to federal investigators to see just how bad things were.
Like Taylor, Christy is offering only speculation. Clay Waters then pushed his own pro-Trump spin on the settlement:
The taxpayer-defunded PBS News Hour Wednesday retained its hostility (as documented in a Media Research Center study) against the Trump administration protecting Jewish students and faculty from the Hamasniks marauding elite liberal campuses in protest of Israel’s defensive war in Gaza. Wesleyan University president Michael Roth made another News Hour appearance ridiculously claiming that efforts to protect Jews from anti-semitism on campus is akin to a kidnapping for ransom.
Waters then played whataboutism:
No mention was made of the Obama Administration’s notorious 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter, which, in the words of K.C. Johnson, was “Obama administration guidance on Title IX that sought to crack down on campus sexual assault by requiring universities to adjust their procedures to make it more likely that accused students would be found responsible.” What was that about the White House telling universities how to discipline students?
Waters didn’t disclose that Johnson’s opinion is from the right-wing Federalist Society, which was hostile to anything the Obama administration did, nor did he explain why it was a bad thing that students guilty of sexual assault could be held responsible for that behavior.