TL;DR
- What if there’s no deal? Today’s post is a thought experiment: if federal funding collapses, what real options does Columbia have?
- The remnants of King’s College once fled to Canada—but we can’t do it again. Universities-in-exile make great romantic stories, but relocating a $6.6B research enterprise is logistically and financially impossible.
- Becoming a teaching-only liberal arts school won’t fix the math. Cutting research may sound bold (if nihilistic), but with 76% of net tuition tied to federal aid, austerity leads to collapse, not solvency.
- Private capital can’t replace public funding. Venture and philanthropy chase products—not basic research. Most of Columbia’s work simply isn’t fundable that way.
- Splitting research from teaching would hollow out both. Firewalls might shield grants, but they sever the vital link between learning and discovery.
- These are all terrible ideas. We considered them seriously—and rejected them. The only viable path is a negotiated deal that protects Columbia’s mission. Preferably soon.
Picture this: after a change of government that was decidedly hostile to their enterprise, Columbia’s acting president leads a small group of faculty to flee New York and set up a university-in-exile—in Canada.
Actually, that really happened. In 1783, during the British evacuation of New York, when Charles Inglis—then both rector of Trinity Church and acting president of King’s College—led a group of Loyalists to Halifax, Nova Scotia. Five years later, they founded a new King’s College, now the University of King’s College, which even has a Great Books-based First Year Foundation program. (The late—and legendary—Professor and Lit Hum chair Jim Mirollo recounted a good-natured debate in 1979 when Halifax King’s asserted that Columbia’s endowment properly belonged to them!)
But the point was not to tell an amusing historical anecdote. Following months of federal scrutiny, the Washington Post now reports that a deal may be imminent—for Harvard. We believe a compromise that protects Columbia’s research mission, academic freedom, and access to federal funding is within reach. But nothing is final. And the risks are real.
So we ask: What if there is no deal?
In this post, we’ll look at four alternative paths for Columbia. None of them are great, but rigor demands all four be investigated.
Option #1: Relocate to a friendlier locale.
There are celebrated examples in history. Here’s a few.
In 1933, The New School created a University in Exile in 1933 for scholars fleeing Nazism. During World War II, three top Chinese universities—Peking, Tsinghua, and Nankai—fled Japanese occupation and formed National Southwestern Associated University. One of its illustrious alumni was none other than Columbia’s own beloved, late University Professor Tsung-Dao Lee, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics at the age of 31.
After the Chinese Civil War ended, refugees to Taiwan set up in-exile versions of Tsinghua (formerly in Beijing), Chiao Tung (formerly in Shanghai), Sun Yat-sen (formerly in Canton), and Soochow (formerly in… you guessed it… Suzhou) University.
Professor Rajiv Sethi at Barnard College has posited that Norway, with its $1.7 trillion sovereign wealth fund, could seed a dozen campuses across Scandinavia, which could in turn attract leading American scholars. And if we didn’t want to go that far but didn’t mind cold weather, we could always decamp to Nova Scotia and reunite the two King’s Colleges.
To give encouragement to this idea, Harvard’s Kennedy School recently announced a “contingency plan” that would permit existing Kennedy School students to finish their degrees at the University of Toronto, where the students may be based if they’re unable to get visas for the United States.
Could we do it again? Could we partner, merge, or found a new Columbia North in a friendlier jurisdiction with research funding?
Sadly, no. For a simple reason, the cost and logistics are staggering. Saudi Arabia has invested $10 billion to stand up King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, which has not yet cracked the ranks of top universities. You cannot replicate a $6.6 billion research operation and move a critical mass of faculty, staff, and researchers with good intentions. That’s why many universities that set up branch campuses overseas ran into financial difficulties, and our Global Centers explicitly never took that route. Universities that have attempted overseas expansion—often prestige projects in the Middle East and East Asia—do so with massive subsidies from host governments. And if you think academic freedom is under threat in Morningside Heights, go ahead and try your luck setting up encampments in Qatar or Beijing.
(Scratch that. Actually, we know exactly what happens when students set up encampments in Beijing.)
Option #2: Shrink the enterprise
We have done it before. Columbia shuttered its School of Library Service (founded by Melvil Dewey of the Dewey Decimal System) in 1992, and closed its College of Pharmaceutical Sciences in 1976.
The Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons itself is the product of both a spin-out and a merger. Founded as King’s College’s medical department in 1767, it awarded the first M.D. in the Thirteen Colonies in 1770. But it struggled, and in 1814, Columbia spun it out and merged it with a newly chartered institution called the College of Physicians and Surgeons. After decades of separation, they reunited, first via affiliation in 1860, then full reintegration in 1891.
So yes, we’ve streamlined before. Some will ask: why not do it again? Why not let the core survive and shed the rest? Hillsdale College points the way, or so its president claims. He hand-wavingly suggests every university should refuse federal funding. That’s easy for him to say when his entire institution is smaller than 75 individual New York City public schools.
We disagree. “What’s so bad about becoming a teaching-only school without research?” is a question that ignores the core role research has played in America’s and Columbia’s history and is rooted in both intellectual nihilism and financial illiteracy.
No discipline gets to decide which others are expendable. We reject humanities scholars breezily suggesting we shut down medical research, in the same way that we oppose scientists sneering at our Center for Contemporary Critical Thought (which complains on its website “far too often we are confronted with claims to science… that… reveal themselves to be little more than historically situated products of our social and political relations, practices, and institutions.”)
That’s not how great universities work. And practically speaking, Columbia can’t cut its way to solvency when 76% of net tuition relies on the federal government. If federal funding evaporates, fixed costs simply don’t go away.
Option #3: Raise alternative funding
Hedge funds! Venture capital! Amazon! Bill Gates! Any of them could step in to rescue Columbia’s research enterprise, right? No. The numbers—and the incentives—don’t work.
The Gates Foundation gives away $9 billion per year. Impressive, until you realize Columbia alone receives roughly $1.3 billion annually in federal research support. If Gates liquidated his entire $77 billion foundation tomorrow, it would fund the NIH ($48 billion annually) for just over a year and a half.
But more importantly: private capital doesn’t fund knowledge. It funds products. If you’re developing a universal diagnostic device that could hit the market in a few years—like Dr. Ian Lipkin’s “box”—someone will take your call. If you’re studying Paleolithic migration or Euclidean twistor unification, they won’t. There’s no path to monetization, and without one, most private capital isn’t interested. You might find a one-off—say, a Turkish private equity firm funding a Turkish academic at Harvard out of national pride. But as a scalable model of institutional survival, it simply doesn’t pencil out.
Biotech is instructive. Over the past two decades, the industry has shifted: early-stage research and clinical trials are now outsourced to small venture-backed firms. Big pharma handles marketing and distribution. It’s a logic of comparative advantage and risk shifting: venture capital absorbs the binary risks of failure, big pharma buys the survivors and markets and scales them. Everyone specializes in what they are good at and stays in their lane.
And then there’s academic freedom. What happens when your lab isn’t just supported by outside capital, but effectively becomes a product pipeline for a Series C investor? Research priorities narrow. Inquiry flattens. Careers pivot toward fundable endpoints rather than open questions. You don’t get a university—you get a biotech and AI incubator. There’s nothing wrong with that, but that simply isn’t Columbia’s mission.
Option #4: Split research and teaching
Some propose quarantining the research enterprise from the rest of Columbia’s ecosystem. This might work… but at a cost.
In Germany, the Max Planck Institutes conduct advanced research independently, while degree-granting falls to traditional universities. In the U.S., Stanford spun off Stanford Research Institute as a for-profit research incubator. Harvard, notably, houses much of its federal grant activity on the books of its affiliated hospitals, which helped shield it from recent government action—hence $2.6 billion in terminations versus the $9 billion originally threatened.
National laboratories like Oak Ridge (University of Tennessee), Lincoln Laboratory (MIT), and SLAC (Stanford) are administered in collaboration with universities but maintain structural and operational distance.
A fun case of both a split and a relocation is the 15th century Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium. In 1968 (a year known for its good ideas), it split into a Dutch-speaking Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (which stayed in Leuven), and a French-speaking Université catholique de Louvain (which decamped to Louvain-la-Neuve, literally “New Leuven”). It infamously divided its library by keeping odd-numbered shelves in Leuven and sending even-numbered shelves to Louvain-la-Neuve. A half century later, both teach in English and neither caters exclusively to Catholics, leading for some to call for the universities to reunite.
Could Columbia do the same? Perhaps. One could imagine a scenario in which Columbia’s undergraduate and master’s programs continue to operate as tuition-funded, donor-supported teaching units—exposed to a more politically activist academic environment—while Columbia’s research enterprise is spun out into an independent entity like Rockefeller University.
That structure could still partner closely with the university but maintain formal distance from reputational and compliance risks. Neuroscience, materials science, genomics, and AI—all could be housed under an independent umbrella with its own governance, funding channels, and firewalls.
But something vital is lost in that world. Just as the two Leuven/Louvain universities split their libraries (and supposedly, individual encyclopedia volumes and journal issues within broader sets) by odd and even numbers, this sort of subdivision is counterproductive. The wall between knowledge generation and knowledge transmission grows taller. Students lose access to the labs where frontier science happens. Researchers lose proximity to classrooms filled with curious minds. The intellectual oxygen between teaching and discovery grows thinner. You get protection—but at the cost of partition.
These are terrible ideas
We did this as a thought experiment—and maybe as an excuse to retell some fun if obscure academic folklore. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: relocation is logistically and financially impossible. Shrinking the university would betray its mission and still fail to ensure solvency. Replace federal funding with venture capital? Good luck pitching “elucidating the neural computations underlying spatial learning, decision-making and generalization in virtually-navigating monkeys” (that is an actual grant Columbia received in fiscal 2024 for $132,541) to a venture capital investor. And while a formal separation of research and teaching might buy time, it risks severing the essential link between discovery and education.
These are all terrible ideas. But intellectually honest institutions don’t flinch from considering all options, even bad ones—they lay them out, hold them up to the light, and then put them down gently… and back away.
As Harvard found out after going a round or two with the federal government, the only realistic and serious path forward is a negotiated deal. It will not be perfect, but it will be possible. If given a reasonable option, Columbia should choose survival over performative doom.
Preferably soon.
News Roundup
– June 28, 2025. The NYT reports that as the Trump administration’s funding freezes hit elite universities, schools like Harvard and Brown are appealing to private donors to salvage their research engines. Some, like Carleton College, are threading the needle—acknowledging the political storm without provoking further retaliation. Others, like Harvard’s public health school, are more direct: philanthropy is now their lifeline. But the math doesn’t work, as President Emeritus Lee Bollinger admits in the article. Even Harvard’s most robust gift flows fall short of replacing federal research dollars. As Columbia faces similar risks, a lesson emerges: the donor class may buy time, but it cannot underwrite a mission of this scale. Strategy, not sentiment, will determine who survives intact.
– June 27, 2025. The NYT reports that UVA’s president has resigned amid pressure from the Trump administration. He had been planning to stay through the end of the next academic year, but will now end his time at UVA by August 15th, 2025 at the latest. His stepping down follows the demands of the Justice Department as they investigate the school’s “diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.” As one commentator and graduate noted, “But this also isn’t about one man. It would be a symbolic surrender of the university’s autonomy and commitment to free inquiry that, if allowed to stand by the Board of Visitors and Virginia’s elected officials, would send a chilling message: that public universities in Virginia serve political agendas, not the commonwealth.”
– June 27, 2025. The WSJ reports that Harvard is asking corporations if they would be willing to help bridge the gap left by federal funding cuts, specifically turning to pharmaceutical and big tech companies. The Chan School of Public Health in particular is left hanging due to getting over 70% of its annual research budget from the federal government, with most of their anticipated $200 million slashed for the fiscal year. The school’s managing director of academic strategy and research partnerships said, “The situation is far more dire at the Chan school than any other Harvard school. That has prompted immediate action out of sheer necessity.”
– June 26, 2025. In a provocative piece in the City Journal (a publication of the Manhattan Institute), Christopher Rufo and Ryan Thorpe detail how internal emails obtained by investigative reporters suggest that faculty hiring committees at Cornell University used diversity statements to pre-screen applicants, and in some cases conducted closed searches targeting candidates based explicitly on race. While the university has publicly denied race-based hiring, the documents show deliberate coordination among DEI officers and senior administrators to identify “diversity hires” (the search committee’s own terminology) in ways that may violate the Civil Rights Act. A legal complaint is now being prepared by the America First Policy Institute. The article posits that what were once abstract debates about ideological loyalty and identity politics in hiring are now becoming matters of federal scrutiny. Institutions that have long claimed to balance equity and excellence may soon be asked to show exactly how.
– June 26, 2025. The Spectator reports on the Department of Education formally determining that Columbia is out of compliance with federal accreditation standards, citing violations of Title VI. The Middle States Commission on Higher Education is now reviewing the federal finding under its own procedures. If accreditation is lost, the consequences would be immediate: students could lose access to Pell Grants and federal loans, and the University’s academic standing would suffer a structural shock. Experts disagree on how likely that outcome is, and the decision will take time to work through the system. This is exactly what we described more than three weeks ago.
– June 25, 2025. Fox News published an op-ed by Columbia Trustee Shoshana Shendelman where she underlines what she sees as society’s choice between “build or destroy.” She writes that, “Higher education is at a crossroads.” She believes that “as a nation of builders,” we must not let “destroyers” “tear down existing systems,” emphasizing that what takes generations to build can be destroyed in moments or minutes without anyone taking personal accountability. She remarks that the attention generated by destruction is transient, the effects of positive change are more permanent.
– June 25, 2025. The NYT reported that a potential cyberattack disrupted Columbia’s digital infrastructure this week, knocking out key systems across the Morningside campus, including email, course platforms, and library access. An image of President Trump briefly appeared on public screens in Lerner Hall. While no data compromise or ransomware has been reported, the event underscores growing vulnerabilities in higher education IT environments, now frequent targets in a volatile geopolitical landscape. As of this writing, Columbia’s systems are mostly restored.
– June 24, 2025. In a Substack blog post, the blogger Cremieux Recueil discloses that a self-described hacker has released internal admissions data from Columbia, claiming it shows continued race-based preferences in defiance of the Supreme Court’s SFFA v. Harvard ruling. The analysis—mirroring prior NYU leaks—alleges statistically significant disparities in test scores and academic metrics across racial groups, with rejected Asian and White applicants outperforming admitted Black and Hispanic students on average. We have no idea whether or not this leak or the data indicated is true, as the University has not made a statement on this matter. If it is not true, they should swiftly rebut it. If it is true, that would be awkward.
– June 24, 2025. In an op-ed in the Spectator titled “Defend Institutions” (#2 from Timothy Snyder’s well-known list), University Senate Executive Committee Chair Jeanine D’Armiento publishes an adaptation of remarks she gave at the Senate plenary on May 2, 2025. While she commendably states that the University Senate is not “perfect” and “has its challenges and flaws,” this piece conveniently leaves out the fact that Columbia is in this situation precisely because of the actions of the University Senate, notably by attempting to block, and then attempting to slow-walk discipline related to the encampments and Hamilton Hall occupation.
– June 24, 2025. The Washington Post reports that Harvard is now in high-stakes negotiations with the White House to resolve its legal standoff with the Trump administration. At issue: over $3 billion in blocked research grants, restrictions on international students, and whether the federal government can impose ideological oversight on private universities. While Harvard’s First Amendment claims have drawn broad institutional support—including from the ACLU, Cato Institute, and 24 research universities—16 Republican-led states have backed the administration’s argument that civil rights violations justify the funding cut. A settlement may come within days. Whether Harvard folds, prevails, or splits the difference, the result will likely serve as the template for other universities going forward.
– June 24, 2025. Harvard reports on some of the story of an international student whose lives have been upended by the recent travel ban on international students from the Trump administration. One young woman, Fatou Wurie, at the School of Public Health, focuses her research on fibroids in women, specifically in Africa. But she has had to transition her studies virtually and will be defending her thesis from abroad. In an op-ed she writes that the ban “sends a chilling message to thousands of international students who now face a similar fate: educational dreams suspended, futures uncertain, doors closed without warning or reason” and “disrupts academic communities, weakens critical international collaborations, and undermines global scholarship that profoundly benefits the U.S.”
– June 24, 2025. The NYT reported that Harvard is debating a “risky truce” with the Trump administration while hoping to avoid the optics of “appeasement,” which so far no other school has quite been able to pull off. Even though Harvard has seen success in its legal stand against the administration, it might not be enough for the school. Areas where the school is very reluctant to give in include hiring, admissions, and viewpoint diversity, which comprise the bedrock of a school’s ideology and constitute part of its speech. The faculty’s ire also hangs in the balance, should the school do anything appearing to appease Trump. Lawrence Summers, previous president of Harvard, said that a deal inherently should not be viewed as capitulation and added, “I don’t hear anyone at Harvard saying Harvard doesn’t need to work at diversity of perspective.”
– June 22, 2025. The NYT reports on a conversation between Larry Summers, Ross Douthat, and Frank Bruni discussing the state of higher education currently. Bruni, himself an expert on the cultural cache of the Ivy League, shares that, “There are definitely parents rethinking the Ivy League.” And Ross Douthat adds that, “Harvard and the Ivies can thrive as liberal-leaning schools in a more conservative-leaning country, but they are unlikely to thrive as institutions that are seen as intensely ideological, hyper-progressive, while depending so substantially on government funding and public-private partnerships.”