In another major blow to the progressive orthodoxy gripping elite universities, President Donald J. Trump on Thursday reportedly celebrated a sweeping settlement with Brown University that will dismantle large portions of the school’s diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) infrastructure and affirm biological definitions of sex aligned with Trump-era policy.
“Congratulations to Brown University on the settlement made with the United States Government,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “There will be no more Anti-Semitism, or Anti-Christian, or Anti-Anything Else! Woke is officially DEAD at Brown.”
The agreement, which was finalized this week, marks the latest in a series of high-profile reversals at Ivy League institutions facing scrutiny over their political culture, administrative bias, and, increasingly, their handling of antisemitism on campus.
Under the terms of the deal, Brown will eliminate many DEI programs, commit not to “engage in unlawful racial discrimination in admissions or university programming,” and adopt definitions of “male” and “female” based on biological sex — the same framework employed by the Trump administration.
As part of the settlement, Brown will also pay $50 million toward workforce development grants in Rhode Island. In return, the Trump administration will reinstate previously frozen Department of Health and Human Services grants and restore the university’s eligibility for future federal funding.
The Brown settlement follows a similarly hard-hitting agreement last week with Columbia University, whose campus protests and administrative failures have drawn national attention.
Columbia agreed to pay $200 million to the federal government and an additional $21 million to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Unlike Brown’s more reform-oriented settlement, Columbia’s deal focused heavily on financial penalties.
Trump, in typical fashion, used the moment to signal broader changes coming to the nation’s education landscape. “Numerous other Higher Education Institutions that have hurt so many, and been so unfair and unjust, and have wrongly spent federal money, much of it from our government, are upcoming,” he wrote.
While critics of the president may characterize these moves as political retaliation, conservatives view them as long-overdue corrections to what they see as a deeply broken system — one where ideological conformity and identity politics have been allowed to flourish at the taxpayer’s expense.
Education Secretary Linda McMahon, who has taken a prominent role in reshaping federal education policy under Trump’s leadership, praised the Columbia settlement as a “roadmap for elite universities that wish to regain the confidence of the American public by renewing their commitment to truth-seeking, merit, and civil debate.”
With these settlements, the Trump administration appears determined to leverage the federal purse strings to force structural change in higher education — a sharp pivot from decades of hands-off deference to academia. For many conservative Americans, that change is not only welcome, but long overdue.
