Columbia Grapples With Federal Scrutiny After Trump Deal Begins

On the last Friday of summer, nearly 200 Columbia University professors joined a packed lecture hall and video call where speakers blasted the Ivy League school’s $221 million settlement with the Trump administration and threatened work stoppages.

Just outside, it was a different scene: Students soaked up a sunny afternoon on the quad where demonstrations once raged and filled the library where a sit-in prompted arrests and expulsions in May.

It’s a startling shift for a campus that just over a year ago was the epicenter of a raucous protest movement that swept the country over Israel’s response to Hamas’ attack on Oct. 7, 2023. Yet ahead of the two-year mark of that conflict on Tuesday, the calm is tenuous, the guardhouses built at key campus entrances just one sign of the tensions still looming over the 271-year-old New York university.