Brown University has reached an agreement with President Donald Trump’s administration to restore $50 million in research funding, becoming the latest elite university to strike a deal in the White House’s campaign to remake higher education.
Brown said it will pay $50 million over the next decade to support workforce development programs in its home state of Rhode Island in exchange for the Trump administration agreeing to unfreeze research grants and drop investigations into the university’s compliance with anti-discrimination laws with no finding of wrongdoing.
The move comes after Columbia University agreed to $221 million in settlement payments in a landmark deal with the Trump administration. Columbia also made a series of commitments including sharing more information with federal agencies about hiring and admissions decisions, restructuring how it oversees student protests and tightening rules against disruptive or masked demonstrations.
A key distinction in the Brown agreement is that the university won’t be paying the federal government directly.
“We stand solidly behind commitments we repeatedly have affirmed to protect all members of our community from harassment and discrimination, and we protect the ability of our faculty and students to study and learn academic subjects of their choosing, free from censorship,” Brown President Christina Paxson said in a statement. “We applaud the agreement’s unequivocal assertion that the agreement does not give the government the ‘authority to dictate Brown’s curriculum or the content of academic speech.’”
The pressure from the Trump administration has put financial stress on schools like Brown, which had been under budget duress even before federal research funding had been cut.
A White House official has previously said other schools are also close to deals, including Cornell and Northwestern universities.
“The Trump Administration is successfully reversing the decades-long woke-capture of our nation’s higher education institutions,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a statement. “Restoring our nation’s higher education institutions to places dedicated to truth-seeking, academic merit, and civil debate — where all students can learn free from discrimination and harassment — will be a lasting legacy of the Trump administration, one that will benefit students and American society for generations to come.”
The Trump administration for months has been hammering universities, especially Ivy League schools, over issues including antisemitism on campus, discrimination in admissions and hiring, academic rigor and a lack of viewpoint diversity. The government cut scientific funding across universities, and froze grants from various federal agencies to specific schools such as Harvard University, Columbia and Northwestern. Trump has also tried to curb international students from attending Harvard.
Brown, based in Providence, Rhode Island, is the least wealthy of the eight Ivy League schools, with an endowment of $7.2 billion. It announced a series of financial moves to save money, such as a hiring freeze, and has taken out two separate loans, one for $500 million in July and another for $300 million in April.
The earlier loan will help manage finances and priorities “as we plan for a wide range of scenarios, and we are currently assessing other debt options to increase our liquidity even further, Paxson said in June.
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Brown said last year it was spending some of its endowment to counter increases in financial aid and staff salaries.
The school joined a lawsuit in June with other schools to challenge a directive from the Department of Defense to limit indirect cost reimbursements to a 15% rate for its research grants to higher education institutions.