The Trump Administration is Trying to Rewrite Colleges’ Code of Conduct

Days after President Donald Trump threatened on social media to halt funding to any college that allows “illegal protests,” his administration cancelled $400 million in federal grants to Columbia University, alleging it had failed to confront campus antisemitism. The move raises concerns about the legality of pulling federal funds without formally investigating whether the university is allowing antisemitism to fester, and about the legitimacy of those investigations given the recent significant cuts to the Department of Education’s office that investigates civil rights complaints such as claims of antisemitism.

Trump’s social media post and the administration’s subsequent actions signal they may intend to treat protest and speech as illegal when it suits their ideological goals, regardless of whether there's evidence of illegal activity. And they make clear the administration’s intent to use higher education institutions to enact an agenda that chills free speech, threatening to dismantle a pillar of a functioning democracy.

Upon reading Trump’s post, I thought about the pressures on campus staff whose job it is to respond to student misbehavior. Contrary to what politicians may believe, most of the people responding to student behavior are not university presidents. Instead, they’re student conduct staff who, day in and out, make students aware of their rights and run processes to adjudicate behavior ranging from alcohol misuse to academic dishonesty to violence on campus. In my several years working adjacent to student conduct teams as a case manager, I watched them navigate the political pressures that come with the job.

A viewpoint or speech itself generally can’t be adjudicated, but a student’s behavior can be, if it violates college policy. In the context of Trump threatening “all federal funding” to colleges, will student conduct teams be supported by their leadership and able to run their conduct processes with integrity?

College presidents and politicians are usually uninterested in low-level underage drinking cases or hiding a pet that’s not allowed in a dorm room. Things get dicier when a high-profile case involving athletes, Greek life, or sexual violence makes the news. Staff commonly get called into the offices of college presidents and other leadership, sometimes simply to explain how the conduct process works for senior leaders who don’t know all the details, and sometimes facing pressure to respond in a specific way.

When college staff respond to behavior related to a protest, they generally must do so with a viewpoint neutral approach. At public colleges and universities, students have constitutional free speech rights. Private institutions are not bound by the First Amendment, but typically have missions and policies that promise free expression and exchange of ideas. They are bound contractually to uphold their own policies; that is, institutions can’t say they allow free speech and expression on campus, then start adjudicating students for expressing a specific viewpoint they don’t like.

Colleges and universities have their own behavioral expectations, typically known as a code of conduct. Alleged infractions run through campus administrative procedures that are outlined to students in the code, and typically in a letter a student receives if they’re accused of violating policy. These administrative processes can happen alongside separate criminal proceedings when there’s an alleged violation of law. For example, a student could be charged criminally for public drunkenness, and their university may hold a separate student conduct hearing to address the impacts of behavior on campus that could result in administrative outcomes that are punitive, educational (like completing an alcohol education learning module), or both.

There are reasons for these separate processes: just as the criminal system can’t suspend or expel a student from their school, a school can’t impose criminal penalties. The criminal system responds to alleged criminal conduct, and a college or university responds to alleged violations of its own code of conduct.

Conduct staff are no strangers to being asked to justify their decisions or being challenged on them. The realm of responding to student behavior can be so contentious that some student conduct officers, deans of students, and other administrators carry professional liability insurance to cover legal costs if they are sued over their actions. One conduct officer told me that her institution said it would defend her if she’s sued as a result of her work, but she wasn’t willing to take the risk of being left to her own devices to secure legal representation if they didn’t follow through.

Presidents and politicians can’t force colleges and universities to expel students, but it’s not a new tactic for them to exert pressure on higher education institutions to do so.

In 1960, Alabama State College students protested segregation by staging a sit-in at a segregated lunch counter in the Montgomery County Courthouse. Alabama Governor John Patterson responded with threats to terminate the college’s funding if it didn’t expel organizers. Two days later, the college expelled nine student leaders of the sit-in without a hearing. Though a federal court upheld the expulsions, one student, St. John Dixon, appealed. An appeals court found the next year that a public college could not expel students without due process.

Dixon v. Alabama enshrined public colleges and universities’ legal responsibilities to provide students due process in addressing conduct, but it did not end political pressure on universities to crack down on protests. Less than a decade later, when students opposed the Vietnam war, several states passed bills to punish student demonstrators and federal lawmakers proposed legislation to revoke funding for universities that didn’t punish protestors*.

Nixon’s administration made a statement on campus disorder to presidents of higher education institutions, noting that “from time immemorial expulsion has been the primary instrument of university discipline.” The Trump administration may have taken a page from this book, demanding that Columbia use “meaningful discipline” defined as expulsion or multi-year suspension. Then the administration took things a few steps further and called for the university to abolish its judicial board, centralize conduct processes under Columbia University’s president, and empower the president’s office to suspend and expel students.

Conduct officers at colleges already have the tools to address student behavior. They know they need to follow their policies, and they know they need to protect students’ free speech rights and discipline behavior, not speech or protest itself. If higher-level administrators pressure them to overreact, institutions can find themselves in legal hot water when groups like the ACLU, FIRE, or students’ private attorneys help them sue.

Shortly before Trump’s inauguration, Max Eden published an op-ed arguing that Linda McMahon “should take a prize scalp. She should simply destroy Columbia University.” The piece argues that if Columbia doesn’t cooperate with providing the identities of every single foreign student who supported the protests, she could cut off its research grant funding. If they do cooperate, the piece argues, she’d surely find enough evidence to cut off its Title IV (federal student aid) funding.

In other words, damned if they do, damned if they don’t.

If this is the guidance the Trump administration is following, compliance with a President’s social media directives or his administration’s overreaching demands won’t save an institution or its access to federal dollars. The aim here is to bludgeon and control higher education, and some members of the Trump administration have not been subtle about this goal. What college leaders, their lawyers, and their teams need to do is fight back.

There are 60 colleges and universities on a list under investigation by what’s left of the Office of Civil Rights in the Department of Education for alleged Title VI violations related to antisemitism on their campuses. The 59 institutions that are not Columbia University (and perhaps higher education institutions more broadly) might read into the administration’s current actions and assume that they’re next on deck for punitive actions. If history is a guide, they may not be afforded a thorough investigation prior to federal actions.

Columbia’s interim president responded to the government pulling federal funds with little in the way of an investigation by saying the institution will “address their legitimate concerns.” Instead of placating the current administration, colleges would do well to take a page from Maine Governor Janet Mills’ book and simply tell this administration “see you in court.”

Colleges should demand a legitimate investigation when alleged to have run afoul of federal law and communicate with their Governors, legislators, their university communities, and the public when federal overreach puts their funds at risk. They need to take control of the narrative, be clear with the public when federal overreach is at play, fight back in court, and stand in solidarity with each other and their students.

When institutions have genuinely failed to protect Jewish students from antisemitic discrimination, they should correct this, just as they should correct failures to protect Muslim or Palestinian students from discrimination. They should do this alongside running conduct processes with integrity and protecting free speech.

Colleges should not allow themselves to be a tool of this administration in its attempts to chill free speech and start arbitrarily punishing students who voice particular viewpoints.

Protecting students’ speech and rights is core to academic missions. And if this administration can leverage universities to punish students for ideological reasons, they can leverage other institutions and squash free speech anywhere. Today it might be a protestor you agree or disagree with, but tomorrow it might be you, your neighbor, your child, your sibling. And you won’t care what they stood for, you’ll care that they are protected. We cannot work in solidarity to protect higher education if we are willing to discard students and their rights.

*Shepherd, Lauren Lassabe. Resistance from the right: Conservatives and the campus wars in Modern America. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2023.