For Immediate Release
December 8, 2025
Download this document as a PDF here
Northwestern Pritzker School of Law Professors Heidi Kitrosser and Paul Gowder explain that the Trump Administration violated federal law when it withheld federal funds from Northwestern and that portions of the Nov. 28, 2025, Agreement between Northwestern and the U.S. Government violate both the First Amendment and federal antidiscrimination law. The analysis lays bare the government’s illegal actions and suggests potential avenues for litigation.
Contacts:
Paul Gowder, paul.gowder@law.northwestern.edu
Heidi Kitrosser, heidi.kitrosser@law.northwestern.edu
Freezing Federal Funds Violated Federal Law
In April 2025, the Trump Administration froze $790 million allocated to Northwestern researchers. The administration provided no official explanation for the freeze. (1) Based on the larger context, however, one could surmise that the funds were being withheld in light of the government’s purported belief that the university had a problem with antisemitism. (2) In legal terms, the presumption was that the government had frozen the funds because the university allegedly had failed to enforce federal civil rights law, specifically Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which is associated with discrimination based on race, sex, religion, and national origin.
The government’s action in withholding the funds violated federal law. Federal law provides mechanisms for addressing concerns about universities' compliance with civil rights laws. The relevant federal statute, 42 U.S. Code § 2000d-1, requires the government to provide notice of a suspected violation and an opportunity for the university to voluntarily comply. (3) The statute also requires the government to file a notice with the relevant committees of Congress, and provides that the withholding of funding will not be effective until thirty days after that report was filed. Ignoring these legal requirements, the Trump administration simply froze the funds without explanation and without following the requisite procedures.
The government’s actions, both in freezing the funds and in conditioning their return on the implementation of intrusive speech-based restrictions, also violate the First Amendment. Although the government may place certain viewpoint-neutral conditions on projects that it chooses to fund, it may not use its funds as leverage to micromanage recipients’ speech, nor the speech of their colleagues or institutions, more broadly. And it certainly may not hold funded speech and research hostage until recipients pay ransom by settling unrelated civil rights law claims. (4)
Thus, from the start, the Trump Administration violated federal law when it withheld federal funds from Northwestern. The university would have been on a strong footing if it had sued the administration; others who have sued in similar circumstances– including Harvard University and faculty members at both Harvard and the University of California – have been successful in the lower courts. Northwestern did not sue.
The Agreement between the Trump Administration and Northwestern Violates Federal Law
1. The Agreement Violates the First Amendment
The Agreement itself is the product of federal government coercion. The government froze $790 million in federal funds with neither warning, nor process, nor official explanation. It then dangled the possibility of restoring those funds on the condition that Northwestern agree to cut a deal. The ongoing threats, of course, were that the money would never be restored and that further retribution could be on the horizon.
Because the agreement was the product of government coercion, its terms are subject to First Amendment scrutiny, and they cannot withstand that scrutiny. (5)
First, the Agreement uses federal funding illegally, as leverage to control the speech of Northwestern community members. The Trump administration is fond of suggesting that it has carte blanche to impose whatever conditions it likes on universities that receive federal funding. (6) Contrary to these assertions, however, the Constitution limits the government’s ability to use funding as leverage to force recipients to speak, or to refrain from speaking, as it commands. The caselaw is crystal clear: While the government may attach certain limits on funded projects themselves, it may not condition funds on its approval of grantees’ speech outside of the scope of a funded project, and it certainly may not condition funds on its approval of speech by a grantee’s institution or colleagues. (7)
The Agreement seeks to impose government control well beyond the scope of any funded projects. It places sweeping controls over many aspects of student and academic life, including admissions, hiring, student protest management, and definitions of male and female that academic biologists and psychologists may employ. (8)
These government impositions present an additional First Amendment violation: Vague and overbroad government regulations that affect speech are not permissible under the First Amendment. When a regulation sweeps in substantial amounts of constitutionally protected speech, or leaves reasonable people unable to tell what they can and cannot say legally, the cost to free speech is too high. The Agreement’s restrictions are vague and overbroad in many respects. For instance, the agreement layers government policy and enforcement controls on top of vague terminology in Northwestern’s anti-harassment policy. The Northwestern policy prohibits “demeaning . . . behavior,” including behavior that constitutes part of a protest or demonstration, “that substantially affects the ability of the person or group to learn, work, or live in the University environment.” (9) As a private institution, Northwestern was within its rights to adopt this standard on its own initiative. However, the agreement converts it into a government mandate by prohibiting Northwestern from “revis[ing] or modify[ingits anti-harassment] policies and procedures without the consent of the Assistant Attorney General.” (10)
This new government requirement, combined with the Agreement’s various monitoring and reporting requirements and the Trump administration’s well-known positions on acceptable campus speech, has significant potential to chill speech on campus. The Agreement obligates Northwestern to “engage an external party” to conduct a campus climate survey that asks students “whether they feel welcome at Northwestern,” and the survey results must be reported to the federal government. (11) Members of the campus community have good reason to fear that the Trump administration will use its role as roving anti-harassment monitor to punish – or demand that Northwestern punish – students or faculty for conveying disfavored viewpoints. After all, the administration has tried, with great fanfare and publicity, to convince universities to sign its “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” which among other things requires signatories to “transform[] or abolish[] institutional units that purposefully. . . belittle . . . conservative ideas.” (12) It is hardly a stretch to envision the Trump administration using its role as agreement enforcer to achieve the same end – for example, by deeming speech that harshly criticizes conservative views to constitute harassment.
These features of the agreement thus convert a sympathetic idea – a university choosing to adopt and enforce anti-harassment standards within its community – into a government mandate that uses vaguely worded standards to punish protected speech and to produce a pervasive, viewpoint-based chilling effect on the entire Northwestern community – students, staff, and faculty alike.
2. The Agreement Violates Antidiscrimination Law
The university agreed to several provisions that explicitly contradict current Supreme Court interpretation of antidiscrimination law and executive power. Paragraph 28 (definition k) of the Agreement requires Northwestern to define “men” and “women” consistent with an executive order that purports to reject transgender identity. But the President does not have the authority to directly carry out regulation of private entities under Title VI or Title IX by executive order. Thus, this provision exceeds the authority of the executive branch over a private institution. (13)
The most glaring examples of violations of discrimination law concern admissions and hiring. The Agreement provides that “Northwestern may not use personal statements, diversity narratives, or any applicant reference to racial identity as a means to introduce or justify discrimination.” Even without the agreement, of course, Northwestern was not permitted to engage in illegal forms of discrimination. But the bar on use of “personal statements, diversity narratives, or any applicant reference to racial identity” appears intended to rule out all admissions decisions that take into account applicant references to their racial identity. If so, it goes well beyond the Supreme Court’s recent interpretation of Title VI in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. That decision significantly limited the use of race in college admissions, but the Court held that “nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant's discussion of how race affected his orher life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.” (14) By prohibiting uses of race that the Supreme Court explicitly permitted, the Agreement imposes obligations on Northwestern that are not required by Title VI or any other provision of federal antidiscrimination law.
Imagine a student writes a personal statement that talks about how growing up in a segregated community affected their high school grades or how being a victim of race-based police misconduct inspired them to engage in activism or found a nonprofit. That would constitute an “applicant reference to racial identity,” but it would be an individualized reference to how the applicant’s racial identity affected the non-racial considerations that universities have always taken into account in admissions. The Supreme Court approved of that kind of reference to race. The Trump Administration has no business demanding that Northwestern avoid it.
The same is true of faculty hiring. The Agreement purports to ban the use of references to race in faculty hiring in similar terms, and while the Supreme Court has not extended its Students for Fair Admissions ruling to Title VII (the statute prohibiting discrimination in hiring), there’s no reason to believe that its “personal statement exception” wouldn’t similarly apply in that context.
The most dangerous abuse of federal antidiscrimination law lies in the Agreement’s requirement that Northwestern provide the federal government with “applicants, admitted students, and enrolled students broken down by race, ethnicity, grade point average, and performance on standardized tests, in a form permitting appropriate statistical analyses.” It is impossible to determine whether a university has engaged in race-based admissions solely from statistical data about students’ races, their grades, and their test scores. As the Supreme Court emphasized in Students for Fair Admissions, college admissions is an inherently individualized inquiry, and the fundamental wrong that the Court identified in race-basedadmissions was treating a student as reducible to their group identity. (15) In the context of the Trump Administration's enforcement strategy, the requirement to turn over statistical admissions data appears nothing more than an invitation for the government to conclude that Northwestern is admitting “too many” students of color and to once again unilaterally cut off research funds.
The legal violations enumerated above suggest potential avenues for litigation for people associated with Northwestern. And these are only a few examples; we could have selected many others. Our analysis lays bare that the government's extortion ofNorthwestern – unlawfully freezing funds to force the university to make a “deal” – has nothing to do with actual legal violations at Northwestern (which, if they existed, could and should have been addressed through established legal channels), and everything to do with a campaign to encroach on the autonomy of Northwestern and other institutions of higher education, and to impose on them the Trump Administration’s reactionary political agenda.
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Notes
(1) As President Henry Bienen told the Northwestern community in late October, Northwestern had not, by that point, received any official “demands or requests from the Trump administration, including the Justice Department, the Education Department and the White House.” Nineth Kanieski Koso, “President Henry Bienen Talks Federal Funding Freeze, Bias Training, Qatar Campus,” Daily Northwestern, Oct. 24, 2025.
(2) This conclusion would have been based partly on the Trump administration’s announced investigations into alleged Title VIviolations by Northwestern. More so, when the funding freeze was first reported in the media, student reporters from the Daily Northwestern reached out to the White House. The White House referred the reporters “to a tweet by Fox News senior producer Patrick Ward. Senior administration officials told Ward the funding freeze was a result of “ongoing, credible and concerning Title VI investigations,’ according to the tweet.’” Jerry Wu, Leah Schroeder, Isaiah Steinberg, David Samson & Lily Ogburn, “Federal Government Freezes $790 million in funding for Northwestern,” Daily Northwestern, Apr. 8, 2025.
(3) In the words of the statute: “no such action shall be taken until the department or agency concerned has advised th eappropriate person or persons of the failure to comply with the requirement and has determined that compliance cannot be secured by voluntary means.”
(4) The statute (42 U.S. Code § 2000d-1) requires that research funds be withheld only from “the particular program, or part thereof” that is found to be out of compliance with antidiscrimination law. The Trump Administration made no allegation that Northwestern researchers whose funding was withheld were out of compliance with federal law. Meanwhile, the Agreement – with its many provisions associated with undergraduates – suggests that the administration withheld funds from, inter alia, researchers at Northwestern’s medical school under the pretext that the institution was violating laws associated with undergraduate student discipline ten miles away.
(5) Although the First Amendment ordinarily applies only to public institutions, the case law contains an important exception for what is sometimes called “jawboning” – that is, for circumstances in which the government coerces a private actor to abridge the speech of another private party. In such cases, the government is considered the true source of the speech restriction, making the first amendment applicable. See, e.g., What is Jawboning? And Does it Violate the FirstAmendment?, Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, https://www.thefire.org/research-learn/what-jawboning-and-does-it-violate-first-amendment, Nov. 8, 2024 (discussing the concept of jawboning in first amendment law). As the Supreme Court unanimously explained in the 2024 case of NRA v. Vullo, “a government official cannot do indirectly what she is barred from doing directly. A government official cannot coerce a private party to punish or suppress disfavored speech onher behalf.” NRA v. Vullo, 602 U.S. 175, 190 (2024).
(6) See, e.g., the Trump administration’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” Introduction (“Institutions of higher education are free to develop models and values other than those below, if the institution elects to forego federal benefits.”).
(7) See, e.g., Agency for International Development v. Alliance for Open Society International, Inc., 570 U.S. 205, 214-15 (2013) (“the relevant distinction that has emerged from our cases is between conditions that define the limits of the government spending program – those that specify the activities Congress wants to subsidize – and conditions that seek to leverage funding to regulate speech outside the contours of the program itself.”).
(8) Although the Agreement does not explicitly require particular gender definitions across academic departments, it is very likely to have that effect for several reasons. First, the Agreement itself imports sex and gender definitions from Executive Order 14168, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” (Resolution Agreement Between the United States of America and Northwestern University, (U.S. / Northwestern agreement) Nov. 28, 2025, Part 1.k. Second, Executive Order 14168 defines “gender ideology” as including the idea that gender is not a simple binary and declares that “Federal funds shall not be used to promote gender ideology.” (See EO 14168 at §§ 2(f), 3(g). Third, the Agreement imposes several specific restrictions on medical and campus programs to ensure that they do not deviate from the administration’s preferred definitions of sex and gender. See, e.g., U.S. / Northwestern agreement at III.B. ¶¶ 28-30 Fourth, given the ongoing federal monitoring that the Agreement imposes on Northwestern, see, e.g., U.S. / Northwestern agreement at ¶¶ 30, 46, 48, and the scope of authority that the Trump administration repeatedly asserts over schools that receive any federal funding, a chilling effect is inevitable.
(9) U.S. / Northwestern agreement at Part III.A.¶¶ 11a, 13h.
(10) U.S. / Northwestern agreement at Part III.A., ¶¶ 11a,13.
(11) U.S. / Northwestern agreement at Part III.A., ¶ 16.
(12) Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, Part II: Marketplace of Ideas & Civil Discourse.
(13) The President has authority to dictate executive agency regulatory choices within the bounds of the Administrative Procedure Act, which requires agencies to conduct notice and comment processes that give reasons for their regulatory choices and listen to feedback from affected persons. Moreover, any agency regulations interpreting statutory prohibitions on sex discrimination must take into account the Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, which interpreted Title VII’s prohibition of discrimination on the basis of sex to include a but-for element entailing that a person could be a victim of unlawful discrimination if they were punished for behavior that they would not have been punished for had their sex (assigned at birth) been different. While Bostock does not directly apply to Titles VI or IX, its reasoning is sufficiently instructive that Northwestern could be liable for discriminating against a student on the basis oftheir gender identity, notwithstanding the President’s effort to define away that identity via executive order.
(14) Here’s a fuller quote from Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, lightly edited to remove internal citations:
At the same time, as all parties agree, nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant's discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise. But, despite the dissent's assertion to the contrary, universities may not simply establish throughapplication essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today. (A dissenting opinion is generally not the bestsource of legal advice on how to comply with the majority opinion.) “[W]hat cannot be done directly cannot bedone indirectly. The Constitution deals with substance, not shadows,” and the prohibition against racialdiscrimination is “levelled at the thing, not the name.” A benefit to a student who overcame racial discrimination, for example, must be tied to that student's courage and determination. Or a benefit to a student whose heritage orculture motivated him or her to assume a leadership role or attain a particular goal must be tied to that student'sunique ability to contribute to the university. In other words, the student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual – not on the basis of race.
If the provision in the Agreement restates the general prohibition against making admissions decisions solely on the basis of race, it is already covered by the rest of that paragraph (and by Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, as interpreted by the Supreme Court in Students for Fair Admissions).
(15) In Students for Fair Admissions, the Court recognized that admissions is meant to be an individualized process in which a university considers not only the numerical inputs to an admissions file (grades, test scores, etc.), but also a variety of holistic considerations, such as the extent to which they’ve demonstrated valuable personal qualities (including by overcoming adversity, such as race-based adversity) or can contribute to the makeup of the class in other ways. Plaintiffs in antidiscrimination lawsuits of various kinds routinely lose their cases if the only evidence they have that they were discriminated against is a statistical breakdown. For example, in McCleskey v. Kemp, 481 U.S. 279 (1987), the Supreme Court rejected a challenge to the death penalty in Georgia based on evidence showing that juries imposed that penalty in a racially disproportionate way. While in other contexts, such in Title VII litigation, some plaintiffs have been permitted to use statistical evidence to support an inference of discrimination, such evidence has always been in support of their individualized claims—not as a tool for the government to police the aggregate racial distribution of a population of selected applicants against some external standard.
For Immediate Release
October 20, 2025
Contact for More Information:
Laura Beth Nielsen l-nielsen@northwestern.edu
Rebecca Zorach rebecca.zorach@northwestern.edu
Melissa Simon m-simon2@northwestern.edu
Paul Gowder paul.gowder@law.northwestern.edu
Northwestern University’s faculty voted resoundingly to reject capitulation to the Trump administration’s higher education “compact,” which would severely threaten academic freedom, according to results released today.
The university’s Faculty Assembly, its highest legislative body, voted 595 to 4 on Wednesday in favor of a resolution demanding that the school’s administration refuse to join the compact. Eight people abstained. It was the largest turnout ever for the Faculty Assembly.
“The 99 % vote in favor of the resolution shows that faculty understand the threats the Trump administration poses to higher education,” said Helen Tilley, an associate professor of history. “We are saying to Northwestern, ‘do not trade away our rights by making a deal with a government that is trying to dictate what we teach and what we research.’ We have a First Amendment for a reason. When the government censors the people, it poses a grave danger to democratic principles.”
The resolution, submitted by The University Under Threat faculty group, states:
WHEREAS the Trump Administration, on October 1, 2025, presented ten conditions on federal funding to nine of our peer universities, conditions that among other things: threaten interference in admission decisions; entail the surveillance of community members’ personal views; demand changes in universities’ governance structures and the closure of units deemed ideologically suspect; require that institutions commit to the use of force against campus protest and to the enforcement of specific definitions of gender; create unacceptable constraints on students’ programs of study; limit international student enrollments; and essentially commit to an annual performance of loyalty in order to receive federal funding,
BE IT RESOLVED that this Faculty Assembly opposes any capitulation on the part of Northwestern University to these or similar demands that undermine constitutional rights, democratic principles, faculty governance, institutional autonomy, and academic freedom.
The compact was offered initially to nine universities, and the proposed deal has since been extended to all US colleges and universities. Since then, MIT, Brown, Dartmouth, the University of Virginia, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Southern California have all refused to join the compact.
“Beyond being plainly unlawful and unconstitutional, homophobic, transphobic, it asks us to disavow science, learning and knowledge,” Laura Beth Nielsen, a professor of sociology, told the Assembly.
For most of its history, the Faculty Assembly has been sparsely attended. That has changed as faculty have responded to the Trump administration's attacks against Northwestern and other universities. After organizing and advocacy by two faculty organizations – the University Under Threat group and Northwestern’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors – more than 600 faculty attended Wednesday, reaching quorum for only the second time in Assembly history.
The Trump administration’s cuts to university research funding and its censorship of scientific information severely endanger the health of every American, said Dr. Melissa Simon, vice chair for research in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine.
“The administration is distributing untruths and disinformation in health and medicine, including about vaccines and important medications like acetaminophen/Tylenol. Their policies prevent Americans from accessing accurate, scientifically sound medical information,” Simon said. “The Trump administration is putting Americans at risk for preventable and devastating illnesses such as measles and the RSV virus.”
Last night, President Bienen stated that he personally would not sign anything that impacted the university’s right to academic freedom, the freedom of faculty and students to study, and our right to enroll any students we want. There was no daylight, he said, between his beliefs on these issues and the Board of Trustees.
But last spring, the chair of our Board of Trustees met with faculty and blamed those of us who supported protests against the genocide in Gaza for drawing the attention of the Trump administration to us. In addition, the university’s adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, inclusive of criticism of the use of the word “genocide” to describe Israel’s war against Gaza, in fact infringes on all of these norms. It impacts how scholars of the Middle East and of genocide discuss and debate its historical and contemporary meaning. It provides grounds to silence those who are aligned with the Palestinian struggle for peace and freedom, including potential students, faculty and staff who are actually Palestinian and who have a different view of the conflict from supporters of Israel.
You may wonder why this matters to me, a scholar of United States slavery and African American history. It matters because my university is not standing up for our First Amendment rights, much less the norms of academic freedom. Blaming faculty, students and staff who spoke out against the war in Gaza and those who believed it was a genocide for the attacks by the Trump administration does not provide protection or support to us.
But just as troubling, if not more so, is my belief that unfortunately, our university leadership is terribly misreading the fight at hand. The goals of the Trump administration and Project 2025 are the destruction of academic freedom and of higher education as we know it. No less than our latest Nobel Laureate in economics, Joel Mokyr, has argued in his body of work that academic freedom—the ability of scholars to explore the world broadly and without restriction—is an essential part of what has underpinned the incredible expansion of human possibility in the last 150 years: from the doubling of global life expectancy, down to the incredible wealth that is currently being hoarded by a global one percent.
I am concerned that our university leadership has already infringed on our academic freedom by quelling free speech; by forcing the entire student body to watch an anti-bias training film that erases Palestine from the history of the Middle East; by sowing division between scientists and non-scientists on this campus.
And I remain deeply concerned that the leadership and some faculty have bitten the hook promised by the engineers of Project 2025, as reported in the New York Times: the architects of Project 2025 knew that if they attacked the science funding in the name of fighting anti-semitism and diversity, equity and inclusion programs—we would begin fighting amongst ourselves. So far, too many leading institutions have supported this Project 2025 plan of bribery and extortion: Columbia and Harvard have closed or severely limited their centers of Middle East Studies; they have renamed offices of diversity, equity and inclusion; they have hidden services to LGBTQ students. Like fish, they have reached for the dangling worm and latched onto the hook, and now they struggle and choke as academic freedom and First Amendment freedoms are squeezed out of their institutions.
Faculty and students must stand united and lead from below. Don’t imagine that you are safe because your work is allegedly non-political. The leaders of Project 2025 and the Trump administration are people who don’t respect hard-won research expertise. As they take away the rights of the most vulnerable—undocumented immigrants who support our economy; trans young people; the incarcerated; nations around the globe seeking food and medical care—they are also attacking the Centers for Disease Control, the Smithsonian, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and yes, even the norms of the U.S. military and the fragile democracy embodied in the United Nations and the International Court of Justice. Higher education institutions must stand together to fight this authoritarian fascist takeover. Don’t bite the hook! As my colleague Luis Amaral has written, “Anything that we do to delay, deflect and confront their actions will make it harder for them. Indeed, while the rule of law stands, many of the financial concerns are addressable. If the rule of law is lost — and the government can do whatever it wants, whenever it wants, to whomever it wants — then we have much more serious things to worry about.” There can be no negotiation with the non-negotiable!
Dear Editor,
The Daily recently reported that Northwestern’s administration is threatening to cut students off from financial aid, on-campus housing and affiliation with the University unless they complete a training module presenting a distorted and partisan version of the history of Israel and Palestine. Created by the Jewish United Fund specifically for NU, the antisemitism module advances as fact a deeply contested political narrative.
As faculty charged with the education of our students, we denounce this requirement as a violation of the University’s professed commitment to free expression and the free exchange of ideas. By imposing a politicized curriculum, the administration has overstepped its role and usurped faculty authority over teaching. The module amounts to propaganda, conveying that certain actions of the state of Israel cannot be opposed, delegitimizing dissent and chilling debate.
Faculty were offered a different anti-bias curriculum and only learned of the student training through alarmed students. The student module contains serious errors of commission and omission that faculty with relevant expertise reject. Presenting such partisan material without space for questioning is antithetical to the critical inquiry we cultivate.
Two examples illustrate the problems. The claim that “Jews are from Israel” erases centuries of Jewish life around the world and plays into antisemitic stereotypes that diaspora Jews are disloyal, while the accompanying map erases Palestinians. Equally disturbing, the module conflates criticism of Israel with antisemitism, equating “anti-Israel activists” with a former Ku Klux Klan leader and suggesting that criticism of Israel will not be tolerated.
NU should not outsource education to a partisan political organization, nor threaten students with loss of aid or housing to enforce it. The administration must withdraw the module and replace it with accurate and unbiased education about antisemitism.
To our students: your resistance matters. You are right to refuse this training, and we stand with you in demanding a university worthy of your commitment to truth and justice.
Sincerely,
Michael Peshkin, Professor, Mechanical Engineering
Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Professor, Religious Studies and Political Science
Michael Peshkin is a professor of mechanical engineering at the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He can be reached at peshkin@northwestern.edu. Elizabeth Shakman Hurd is a professor of religious studies and political science at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. She can be contacted at eshurd@northwestern.edu. If you would like to respond publicly to this op-ed, send a Letter to the Editor to opinion@dailynorthwestern.com. The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect the views of all staff members of The Daily Northwestern.
For Immediate Release:
July 28, 2025
As recently reported, Northwestern will likely be pressured to reach a “deal” with the Trump administration to release the approximately $790 million in federal funds currently withheld from the university, allegedly because it has fostered antisemitism. Last week Columbia University agreed to pay the administration more than $200 million and consented to various forms of surveillance in exchange for the government restarting research funding it had frozen. The Trump administration has made clear that it expects to follow a similar course with other universities.
We call on Northwestern’s leadership to resist the administration’s attack on fundamental democratic principles by refusing to “make a deal” with the administration. Acquiescence to the administration’s tactics would make Northwestern complicit in an assault on institutions of higher education, which are an essential bulwark of civil society. The administration is skirting legal processes and demanding what amounts to ransom from universities; such actions continue its well-documented and dangerous abuse of executive power. The funds withheld by the executive branch were appropriated by Congress. In withholding them, the Trump administration is defying the constitutional separation of powers, federal statutes, First Amendment protections of free speech, and longstanding principles of academic freedom.
These laws and norms are essential to democracy, and we implore Northwestern to defend them.
American colleges and universities are world-renowned as champions of free inquiry. They generate new knowledge, jobs, wealth, and upward mobility. They are places where people debate ideas and take risks that are often rewarded by advances in science, medicine, public policy, history, literature, and the arts that enhance our collective well being. They train future generations to navigate a complex world. We must now fight to preserve the autonomy and integrity of these vital institutions against an administration that seeks to force them into conformity with its own preferred political views.
We know that some university leaders hope to protect the future of higher education by negotiating agreements with the Trump administration. We too wish to protect the important work of colleges and universities – where faculty teach students, conduct and publish ground-breaking research, and produce music, art, and literature.
But consenting to an agreement like Columbia’s will weaken Northwestern and not stop future interference in our mission. In short, it will violate the fiduciary responsibility of Northwestern’s leadership. The way forward is to not give in to the lawlessness of the Trump administration. It is to stand up for American institutions of higher education.
The Trump administration justifies its attacks on Northwestern with allegations that the university has violated antidiscrimination laws by fostering antisemitism. We oppose antisemitism in all its forms. We also join with more than one hundred Jewish faculty and staff at Northwestern in rejecting the notion that there is a widespread crisis of antisemitism on our campus. Antisemitism, like other forms of racism and exclusion, exists and must be addressed. But the federal government’s current campaign – withholding research funds; interfering with academic programming, personnel decisions, and student services; and imposing congressional hearings, surveillance, detention, and censorship – is not aimed at protecting Jewish students or faculty. Rather, the administration aims to silence speech that is critical of the actions of the state of Israel or critical of US support for the destruction and dispossession of the Palestinian people. More generally the administration aims to use its power, unjustly and illegally, to attack people and organizations it perceives as political opponents.
The Trump administration has already shown that it cannot be trusted to act in good faith. It will not stop with Northwestern, just as it did not stop with Columbia. Conceding to its demands may not stop its attacks on Northwestern’s independence and will certainly embolden further attacks on colleges and universities.
We urge President Schill, members of the Board of Trustees, and others in positions of leadership at Northwestern to refuse the Trump administration’s call to “make a deal.” Instead, principled leadership must defend academic freedom, protect political dissent, and resist participating in federal efforts to chill speech, punish protest, and weaponize antisemitism for political ends.
About Us: Northwestern’s Concerned Faculty group consists of faculty from the schools of arts and sciences, education and social policy, engineering, law, and medicine. The group, formed during the 2024-25 school year, works to oppose attacks on universities by the Trump administration and its allies in Congress and to demand that Northwestern University leadership stand up for fundamental democratic principles. Our group has organized several teach-ins (including one on March 6 that drew hundreds of people); written open letters expressing our concerns and calling for action (including one that drew 287 faculty signatures); and participated in a variety of other activities.
Media Contacts:
Professor Paul Gowder, Pritzker School of Law, paul.gowder@law.northwestern.edu
Professor Leslie Harris, Department of History, Leslie.Harris@northwestern.edu
Professor Laura Beth Nielsen, Department of Sociology l-nielsen@law.northwestern.edu
Professor Melissa Simon, Feinberg School of Medicine, m-simon2@northwestern.edu
A reply to President Schill:
June 12, 2025
We are a group of 51 Northwestern faculty who write to express concern and provide counterpoints to select statements made by President Schill in a recent interview with the Daily Northwestern. As student and faculty attention understandably drifts away from campus affairs over the Summer, we fear that consequential decisions will be taken without adequate consultation with the relevant stakeholders. It is imperative that President Schill work with the NU community to establish clear processes for dialogue to involve faculty and other community members in those decisions.
Our concerns are as follows:
Listen to the Faculty Assembly
The Faculty Assembly is, according to its by-laws, “the ultimate legislative body of the faculty at Northwestern University,” and the University President, as Chair of the Faculty Assembly, is explicitly called upon to represent the resolutions of the Faculty Assembly to the Board of Trustees. At its Spring meeting, the Assembly achieved a quorum, which it had never done before. Yet President Schill declined to preside over the Assembly and has disregarded its authority — asserting the Assembly’s resolutions simply “go into the mix” with the “90% of faculty that didn’t take the time to go to the meeting.” This is a frontal assault on shared governance. The resolutions that President Schill casually dismissed are designed to protect the rights of many NU constituencies and to ensure more transparent procedures relating to the future of faculty governance and other issues that matter to NU. We call on President Schill to respond to the Resolution passed by the Assembly this Spring and to take his role as Chair of the Assembly more seriously in the future.
More police is not the answer
NU’s leaders — including faculty, students and staff — facilitated a peaceful and commendable resolution to a historic anti-war encampment on Deering Meadow in the Spring of 2024. Students have held events and activities on Deering freely and without punishment for years. At the time, NU was praised as a model among universities and colleges nationwide for its nonviolent handling of the encampment. Would President Schill have preferred a greater show of police violence, such as occurred at some of our peer institutions? Campus police were present at the earliest stages of the Deering encampment, and it is unclear to us what additional security would have accomplished other than perhaps generate more violence. At this moment in our nation’s history, as we watch masked ICE agents engaging in rampant kidnappings, police firing tear gas and rubber bullets at peaceful protesters and the U.S. Marines lawlessly deployed against them, we counter that more policing of students, staff and faculty is not the answer.
Acknowledge that federal law is being weaponized
We understand that President Schill has to follow federal law. We would like to caution him, however, that in the present circumstances it is often unclear what is legal and what isn’t. The law has now been weaponized to punish institutions and groups the federal government wishes to target. This is a political and constitutional crisis. The U.S. administration has wielded the law to punish universities and “bring them to heel” with the administration’s far-right ideology. In such circumstances of democratic backsliding, the law becomes an instrument of the powerful and may remain uncertain and in flux as the courts work to adjudicate disputes. There may come a time when President Schill’s statement that “we’re going to comply with the federal law” is insufficient to meet the moment. It may be the case that like other universities, such as Harvard, NU will be forced to take legal action against the government to protect our interests and values, and to ascertain what is and is not “legal.” In these extraordinarily trying circumstances, let us not preemptively comply with federal attempts to dismantle American democracy. Rather, we urge President Schill to be a standard bearer in the face of this administration’s repeated authoritarian attempts to flout the rule of law.
Ensure transparency in decision-making and policy changes
Over the past year, President Schill’s administration, working with the Board of Trustees and the Office of General Counsel, has quietly and with very little consultation with faculty, students and staff, put into place policies that limit and shape possibilities for teaching, learning and research at NU. In addition to the “scrubbing” of websites, these policies include the discrete institutional adoption of the widely contested IHRA definition of antisemitism, new policies and practices involving required anti-bias training for students and faculty, and new guidance addressing purported “illegal DEI” in research, which affects researchers regardless of whether they receive federal grants. These steps represent a major blow to academic freedom.
We remind readers of The Daily that the U.S. President and his party have threatened to declare any organized dissent from U.S. policies on university campuses as “illegal protests.” All our constitutional rights are on the line, including free speech, due process, assembly, legal representation and the right to dissent.
We call on President Schill to stand by his claim that he will advocate “against policies that shut us off from the rest of the world.” We too aspire to always act in a way “consistent with our values.” We are committed to the values of free speech and open debate and insist that President Schill and the administration foster greater transparency and work together for a stronger and more democratic NU.
Signed by 51 faculty members
April 9, 2025
We are an ad hoc group of concerned Northwestern faculty and we write to request that the Board of Trustees add consultations with faculty, students, and staff to your deliberations during this emergency. We would like an opportunity to brief members of the Board about how the current threats to higher education, civil liberties, and democratic institutions in the United States and beyond are affecting our campus community. The stakes of this moment are high for us all and we need to pull together.
Many of you have invested deeply in Northwestern over the years. We have too. Many of us began our careers here and have spent decades building programs, directing departments, chairing committees, and doing our part to make Northwestern a premier institution in STEM fields, education, medical research, humanities and the arts, the social sciences, journalism, and law, among other fields. We are deliberately working to bridge schools and disciplines because we know Northwestern is greater than the sum of its parts.
In advance of briefings, we want to share our diagnosis of the current situation.
1. There is no time to lose:
The new administration is taking steps that are intended to radically destabilize the foundations of higher education in this country. It takes decades to build first-rate programs of the kind Northwestern has in abundance. When crucial funding and staff are cut on so many fronts simultaneously – as this administration is doing – it can serve only one purpose: to destroy precious repositories of knowledge, expertise, and public goods. Historically, we know that when autocratic leaders have targeted their own universities, it has only weakened democracies and exacerbated or re-entrenched inequalities. We see this happening already.
2. Young people need us:
We teach our students to wrestle with big questions and societal challenges, placing these in historical context and tying them to debates at the cutting edge of different fields. We have a responsibility as educators to support critical inquiry, engage with multiple perspectives, and explore different knowledge systems, past and present. Given our role in training teachers, doctors, psychologists, counselors, coaches and many others, disruptions to universities have immediate and widespread effects on our society, including K-12 systems.
3. We must speak with one voice in defense of our freedoms:
The Trump administration is breaking laws and trampling on governing norms as fast as possible because they know legal challenges and court proceedings move slowly. On February 4th, Georgetown law professor David Super made this point to a Washington Post reporter: “So many of these [administrative actions] are so wildly illegal that I think they’re playing a quantity game and assuming the system can’t react to all this illegality all at once.” Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian of fascism at New York University, stated that “We’re in a real emergency situation for our democracy.”
Northwestern is one of several thousand universities and colleges in the United States. Our collective goal should be to defend our freedoms and call out illegalities as if our lives, and so many others, depend on it, because they do. Malicious and bad faith attacks – on faculty, students, staff, our president, our provost, our research, and our curriculum – should not go unchallenged. Nothing less than free speech, academic freedom, rights of assembly, rights of due process, and rights to dissent are on the line.
4. We must not repeat myths or falsehoods:
US universities have an unparalleled breadth of intellectual opinion and are home to diverse constituencies. Yet, as most of us know, things were once much more homogeneous. It took decades of effort and social struggle to make universities more representative of and responsive to the needs of our society. In doing so, universities have played a crucial role in building more tolerant and equitable communities. What we are seeing now is a backlash of intolerance and exclusion, designed to intimidate and silence a plurality of perspectives and debate itself. Universities provide a necessary antidote to false claims because we endorse debate.
5. We must protect those who stand for human rights and peace:
We would never expect members of the Board of Trustees to have uniform opinions since we ourselves disagree on points of substance. We do expect Board members to share our concern when constitutional and human rights are objectively under attack. Students, staff, and faculty at Northwestern have mobilized on various social, environmental, and geopolitical issues for decades. These campaigns have sought to extend human rights, redress past and ongoing wrongs, and ensure viable futures for all. Serious problems on all fronts will only get worse if US universities comply with draconian directives to arrest, expel, deport, or fire those who dissent from government policies. These directives are anathema to the values and mission of our University.
We hope that in this moment of crisis, you will make the time to hear from representative delegations and begin to exchange strategies on what we can do to sustain the vibrant intellectual community at Northwestern.
Signed by 287 faculty members
The breakdown by school is: Weinberg College: 145 faculty; Feinberg School of Medicine: 50 faculty; McCormick School of Engineering: 27 faculty; School of Communications: 24 faculty; Pritzker School of Law: 15 faculty; Medill School of Journalism: 14 faculty; School of Education and Social Policy: 9 faculty; and Kellogg School of Business: 3 faculty.
March 17, 2025
As faculty members, we are alarmed by the assault on Northwestern University’s diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
The mission statement of our University states, “Northwestern is committed to excellent teaching, innovative research and the personal and intellectual growth of its students in a diverse academic community.” DEI efforts encourage excellence among students, faculty and staff and make the University stronger.
We urge NU’s leadership to stand up to the Trump administration’s censorship campaign by working with other universities to preserve DEI initiatives and academic freedom.
Signed by 55 faculty members