New York Times: “Columbia Agrees to $200 Million Fine to Settle Fight With Trump”.
The rich university will have to write a check to the U.S. Treasury for $200 million?
The university will pay the $200 million in three installments over three years.
Columbia receives about $1.3 billion in federal research grants annually, and the university said it would have all been at risk if it had remained on the White House’s blacklist.
Grant Watch, a project run by research scientists who compiled information on the grants pulled by the Trump administration, estimated that about $1.2 billion in unspent funding from the N.I.H. to Columbia had been terminated or frozen. Other federal agencies, including the National Science Foundation, also pulled grants.
If I’m reading this correctly, over the next three years the university will get $billions in funding, every dollar of which will generate a profit for the nonprofit, but the profit might be a little less than it would have been in some ideal world of profitability from the nonprofit organization’s perspective.
Where can I sign up to be fined $200 million?
How profitable is the nonprofit? From the research grunts:
That’s interesting since all you ever hear from these places about why they can’t use their huge endowments is that all the money has restricted uses. How credible is that source given its agenda?
From Columbia University’s perspective, this is a relatively small concession, they are not actually paying anything, just receiving $200 million less than they might have otherwise. In exchange, they get Trump off their back. The bigger question is: what happens when a new Democratic administration takes over? Will Columbia revert to its old practices, perhaps doubling down on them, become even more woke and demand even more money?
Perhaps another way to look at this is that for the relative price of $200 million, Columbia was able to, for a quite some time, drive Jewish students out of their dorm rooms, chase them off campus, compel such students to to hide their Jewish identity, and ostracize such students by their peers and denigrate them by the faculty. This is Columbia’s own task force assessment of what occurred on campus. See, https://www.timesofisrael.com/columbia-task-force-reports-crushing-discrimination-against-jews-and-israelis/.%5D
One issue will be the amount of funding in the future. The funding that was at issue in connection with the fine was presumably according to past contracts. I don’t know that I have seen a legal analysis of the federal government’s right to renege on contracts given the conduct alleged. Presumably the risks of either side losing in court was what produced the $200m figure, that there was ambiguity over the government’s right to renege.