Brown University has reached an agreement with President Donald Trump’s administration to restore research fund
ing, 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 ho
me state of Rhode Island, take steps to improve campus climate for Jewish students, and revise its policies on gender identity in line with new White House guidelines.
In exchange, the Trump administration agreed to unfreeze research funding and drop all open investigations into the university’s compliance with anti-discrimina
tion laws with no finding of wrongdoing. Brown will also regain the ability to compete for future grants and the government agreed to reimburse $50 million in unpaid federal grant costs.
The move comes after Columbia University last week agreed to $221 million in settlement payments in a landmark deal with the Trump administration. Colum
bia also made a series of commitments including sharing more information with federal agencies about hiring and admissions decisions, restructuring how it over
sees 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 direc
tly. It did agree, however, to a three-year monitoring period — though a White House statement didn’t specify whether that included an independent monitor,
as in Columbia’s case — and to allowing a third party to conduct a survey on the campus climate for Jewish students.
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“We stand solidly behind commitments we repeatedly have affirmed to protect all members of our community from harassment and discrimination, an
d we protect the ability of our faculty and students to study and learn academic subjects of their choosing, free from censorship,” Brown President Christina Pa
xson said in a statement. “We applaud the agreement’s unequivocal assertion that the agreement does not
ive the government the ‘authority to dictate Brown’s curriculum or the content of academic speech.'”
Brown’s deal includes a number of capitulations on gender identity issues.
The government agreed to restore funding for medical and health sciences research. Brown promised not to perform gender reassignment surgeries on minors or prescribe them puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones.
Brown, which operates a medical school, will also adopt the federal definition of male and female as defined by biological sex for all university practices and policies, in accordance with a Trump executive order. That means transgender athletes will not be allowed to participate in sports or live in single-sex campus housing according to their claimed gender identity. The university also pledged to keep locker rooms strictly separated based on the newly adopted definition of sex.