Natalie Andrews, Douglas Belkin and Sara Randazzo:
The White House is seeking fines from several universities it says failed to stop antisemitism on campus, including hundreds of millions of dollars from Harvard University, in exchange for allowing the schools to access federal funding, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The deal that the Trump administration struck with Columbia University on Wednesday is now a blueprint for negotiations with other universities, a White House official said. Columbia agreed to pay $200 million to the federal government over three years to settle allegations it violated antidiscrimination law and to restore its federal grants.
The administration is in talks with several universities, including Cornell, Duke, Northwestern and Brown, the person familiar with the talks said, though it sees striking a deal with Harvard, America’s oldest university, as a key target.
The White House hopes to extract hundreds of millions of dollars from Harvard, in a deal that would make Columbia’s $200 million payment look like peanuts, the person said.