Trump administration threatens Princeton, Cornell, and Northwestern with funding reviews over campus speech

The Trump administration notified Princeton University, Cornell University, and Northwestern University that their federal funding was under review pending compliance investigations into campus climate and responses to pro-Palestinian protests. The threats came after the administration had already frozen Harvard's grants and extracted compliance concessions from Columbia. Northwestern reached a preliminary agreement with federal officials, and Cornell began reviewing its campus protest policies. Princeton's leadership publicly stated it would not comply with demands that infringed on academic freedom or constitutional rights. The simultaneous targeting of multiple elite research universities — which together receive billions of dollars annually in federal grants — signaled that the funding-freeze strategy was becoming a systematic tool for restructuring university governance rather than a case-by-case enforcement action.