Cornell University said on Friday that it reached a deal with the Trump administration to restore hundreds of millions of dollars worth of research funds the government cut earlier this year.
The university will directly pay the federal government $30 million over three years “as a condition for ending pending claims that have been brought against the university,” the university’s president Michael I. Kotlikoff, said in a letter to students and faculty. Cornell will also invest $30 million over three years in “research to strengthen U.S. agriculture,” and benefit U.S. farmers, he said.
In April, the Trump administration withheld $250 million in federal research funding from the university, accusing Cornell of committing civil rights violations.
“The decades-long research partnership between Cornell and the federal government is critical to advancing the university’s core mission and to our continuing contributions to the nation’s health, welfare, and economic and military strength,” Kotlikoff said. “This agreement revives that partnership, while affirming the university’s commitment to the principles of academic freedom, independence, and institutional autonomy that, from our founding, have been integral to our excellence.”
The six-page agreement states that the deal is not an admission of wrongdoing on behalf of Cornell and acknowledges that the university denies ever violating civil rights law.
Cornell also agreed to hand over a trove of admissions data to the federal government “broken down by Cornell’s individual colleges and schools, race, grade point average, and performance on standardized tests,” it states. The university also reaffirmed its commitment to train its staff on a Department of Justice memo that instructs universities to disavow DEI programs.
The university’s president must certify that the agreement is being met each quarter. It expires at the end of 2028.
White House Assistant Press Secretary Liz Huston called the agreement a win for the Trump administration.
“President Trump has once again delivered a major win for American students with this Cornell University deal,” Huston said in an email. “Under the President’s commonsense leadership, academic excellence, merit, and accountability will continue to be restored across America’s universities.”
Education Secretary Linda McMahon lauded the agreement as “another transformative commitment from an Ivy League institution to end divisive DEI policies” in a post on X.
“These reforms are a huge win in the fight to restore excellence to American higher education and make our schools the greatest in the world,” she wrote.
Cornell is the latest Ivy League school to announce a settlement with the federal government in recent months.
In July, Columbia University said it would pay $200 million to the federal government to restore $400 million of federal research grants the Trump administration cut from the university earlier this year.
Brown University reached a similar deal with the administration days later, promising to pay $50 million in grants over 10 years to workforce development organizations in Rhode Island.
In all three cases, the Ivy League schools — whose staffs include some of the best legal minds in the world — chose to settle the dispute rather than challenge the Trump administration in court.
The Trump administration had stripped funding from elite U.S. universities, arguing that they did not do enough to quell antisemitism at campus protests against the war in Gaza last year.
Simultaneously, the administration had tried to get universities to rid themselves of diversity programs and what it has described as liberal bias.
In addition to issuing a payment, Columbia University agreed to a long list of demands by the Trump administration, which included changes to its admissions process, staffing and efforts to promote diversity. And in July, the University of Pennsylvania agreed to ban transgender women from competing on its women’s sports teams after facing pressure from the administration to do so.
