(The Center Square) — Cornell University will pay $60 million to settle the Trump administration’s claims that the Ivy League school discriminated against students with its diversity, equity and inclusion policies.
The settlement will require Cornell, located in upstate New York, to pay the federal government $30 million and invest another $30 million by 2028 on research programs on agriculture, farming and other studies that the Department of Justice said will “support American farmers through lower costs of production and enhanced efficiency.”
The university has also agreed to provide the DOJ’s “Guidance for Recipients of Federal Funding Regarding Unlawful Discrimination” as a training resource to faculty and staff, and conduct annual surveys to evaluate the campus climate for Cornell students. The university will also be required to comply with future DOJ inquiries about foreign funding.
In exchange, the Trump administration will restore more than $250 million in federal grants and research funding it terminated or froze earlier this year, and drop federal anti-discrimination investigations against the elite school over its DEI policies, according to the U.S. Department of Education.
“The Trump Administration has secured another transformative commitment from an Ivy League institution to end divisive DEl policies,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a statement. “These reforms are a huge win in the fight to restore excellence to American higher education and make our schools the greatest in the world.”
Attorney General Pam Bondi called the deal a “positive outcome that illustrates the value of universities working with this administration” and said the DOJ is “grateful to Cornell for working towards this agreement.”
“Recipients of federal funding must fully adhere to federal civil rights laws and ensure that harmful DEI policies do not discriminate against students,” she said in a statement.
Cornell is the fourth Ivy League school — including University of Pennsylvania, Brown University and Columbia University — to strike a deal with the Trump administration to restore federal funding. The Trump administration launched an investigation of Cornell and other elite schools in February and froze hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants over the university’s “failure to protect Jewish students from antisemitic harassment.”
Cornell President Michael I. Kotlikoff said the settlement revives a “decades-long research partnership between Cornell and the federal government” while “affirming the university’s commitment to the principles of academic freedom, independence, and institutional autonomy that, from our founding, have been integral to our excellence.”
The months of stop-work orders, grant terminations, and funding freezes have stalled cutting-edge research, upended lives and careers, and threatened the future of academic programs at Cornell,” he said in a statement. “With this resolution, Cornell looks forward to resuming the long and fruitful partnership with the federal government that has yielded, for so many years, so much progress and well-being for our nation and our world.”
