Brown University Reportedly to Be Hit With Withholding of Federal Funding

The Trump administration is reportedly going to halt federal grants to Brown University, a private Ivy League university in Rhode Island. The reasons are complaints of anti-Semitism on campus and Brown's DEI policies. The amount in question is reportedly 510 million dollars.

The University is steadfastly denying that the campus is hostile to Jews, instead arguing that Jewish life is "thriving" on campus (hat tip JNS).

Here is how the campus newspaper, the Brown Daily Herald, is reporting the news.

Setting aside the DEI issue, I would like to focus on the anti-Semitism part of this story. Contrary to what Brown administrators and the Chabad chapter at Brwon are claiming, Brown has been a problem for years when it comes to anti-Semitism on campus, so much so that I dubbed it "the Brown University", for reasons I explained in 2021 here. (I urge the reader to click the link to the Amcha Initiative database entry for Brown.) Three years after that posting, in 2024, Brown came under investigation  by the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights for complaints of anti-Semitism.

"From the river to the sea....."

The idea that Jewish life is thriving at Brown strikes me as absurd, given what has been going on there for years. It brings to mind the years I spent at UC Irvine (1998-2016) when certain Jewish leaders and organizations that should have known better were telling the public that Jewish life was "thriving" at UC Irvine. It was not then, and it is not now.

It is my hope that the Trump administration will follow through on the withholding of federal funds to Brown and make the decision final. As with Columbia and other universities that have been hit with this measure, it should not be settled by negotiations that would restore the funding. Any negotiations should be centered around future funding in exchange for real, not cosmetic reform. If the withheld funding is restored, the university will just go back to its old practices while instituting cosmetic changes that do not solve the problem. 

Taking away the money is the only message the universities will understand. For them, it is all about the money. There is no obligation for the American taxpayers to pay for these out-of-control; institutions, especially those, like Brown, which are private.

In addition, the administration must take a hard look at the funding universities are receiving from countries like Qatar and Saudi Arabia and for what purposes those funds are spent.

The answer to campus anti-Semitism is not to be found in educational training programs, proclamations by university presidents,  or sensitivity training. Those are examples of what I mean by cosmetic changes. The problem will be solved when the perpetrators of campus anti-Semitism and unruly behavior are removed permanently from campus. It will only be found in banning organizations like Students for Justice in Palestine from campus-not suspended, but permanently banned. And this is not for their opinions about the Middle East conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. It is about violence, illegal encampments, occupations, and most of all, harassment and intimidation of Jewish students and disruptions of their events. 

Changing the culture of our universities is a mammoth task. Doing it by government fiat is a dangerous proposition in a democracy. But being a democracy does not require that corrupt universities that discriminate and refuse to protect their Jewish students be provided with hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars.