A remarkable speech delivered last month by President Trump at an antisemitism conference in Washington is making the rounds on X. It shows the president-elect pledging to “inform every educational institution in our land that, if they permit violence, harassment, or threats against Jewish students, the schools will be held accountable for violations of the civil rights law.” That message will be relayed, according to Trump, within his first week of returning to the Oval.

Bravo, we say. It’s the first time since leaders of the Ivy League flunked their testimony before Congress that we’ve heard a person in authority put the hay down where us mules can get to it. It instills further confidence that the 47th president will, in his own words, put an end to the government’s subsidizing, via federal funding, of “the creation of terrorist sympathizers” on “American soil or anywhere else.”

Columbia University, just to mark the point, could lose upwards of $3.5 billion — 55 percent of its operating budget — should President Trump make good on that promise, as our Novi Zhukovsky reports. That’s the estimate from a group of Columbia faculty, staff, students and alumni, who urge the New York City Ivy not to “play chicken” in the face of significant financial risk that could very well tip the school into an “existential crisis.” 

The government is granted such authority under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which bars recipients of federal funding from discriminating based on race, color, or national origin. In 2004, it was later clarified, via an official letter written by the then-assistant secretary for the Department of Education, Kenneth Marcus, that Title VI also protected the rights of groups that share a religious faith, such as Jews. 

Trump took the policy one step further by issuing in 2019 an executive order that called on federal agencies to “consider” the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition for antisemitism. It identifies denying Jews the right to self-determination as a potentially antisemitic act. The statute has since become a crucial legal foothold for Jewish students to fight antisemitism on their college campuses. 

Title VI lies at the center of at least 14 lawsuits filed by Jewish students over their university’s handling of antisemitism post October 7, including Harvard, Columbia, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, New York University, and the University of Pennsylvania. “Keep fighting” is what Trump told one of the plaintiffs behind the Harvard suit, Shabbos Kestenbaum. It’s nice to have a president who understands this issue.