Northwestern U. Settles With Feds, Abandons Encampment Deal Challenged By Equal Protection Project

Northwestern U. Settles With Feds, Abandons Encampment Deal Challenged By Equal Protection Project

Northwestern University has settled with the federal government regarding a variety of investigations, many of which focused on the hostile campus environment for Jewish students.

The Department of Justice issued this Press Release on November 28, 2025:

Today, the U.S. Department of Justice, the U.S. Department of Education, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reached an agreement with Northwestern University (Northwestern) to safeguard its students, employees, and faculty from unlawful discrimination based on race, religion, sex, or national origin, including race-based admissions practices and a hostile educational environment directed toward Jewish students.

As part of the agreement, Northwestern University will pay $75 million to the United States through 2028. Northwestern agrees to adhere to federal anti-discrimination laws, ensuring that the university does not preference individuals based on race, color, or national origin in admissions, scholarships, hiring, or promotion. Northwestern shall maintain clear policies and procedures relating to demonstrations, protests, displays, and other expressive activities, as well as implement mandatory antisemitism training for all students, faculty, and staff.

Northwestern’s President and Chair of the Board of Trustees shall each certify under penalty of perjury each quarter the university’s full compliance with the agreement. The United States shall close pending investigations and treat Northwestern as eligible for future grants, contracts, and awards.

“Today’s settlement marks another victory in the Trump Administration’s fight to ensure that American educational institutions protect Jewish students and put merit first,” said Attorney General Pamela Bondi. “Institutions that accept federal funds are obligated to follow civil rights law — we are grateful to Northwestern for negotiating this historic deal.”

“Universities that receive federal funding have a responsibility to comply with the law, including protecting against racial discrimination and antisemitism,” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “We appreciate the significant improvements Northwestern has made and are gratified to reach an agreement that safeguards of rights of all the university’s applicants, students, and employees.”

“The Northwestern agreement is a huge win for current and future Northwestern students, alumni, faculty, and for the future of American higher education,” U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon. “The deal cements policy changes that ‘will protect students and other members of the campus from harassment and discrimination,’ and it recommits the school to merit-based hiring and admissions. The reforms reflect bold leadership at Northwestern, and they are a roadmap for institutional leaders around the country that will help rebuild public trust in our colleges and universities. Congrats to Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon and all those involved in negotiating this landmark deal!”

Northwestern issued its own statement, which included a link to the agreement. As with all the schools that have announced deals, Northwestern touts that it has preserved its independence. Here’s Northwestern’s statement in part:

Dear members of the Northwestern community,

Earlier today, the University reached an agreement with the federal government to restore hundreds of millions of dollars in critical research funding.

The agreement, which you can read here, resolves investigations by the U.S. Departments of Justice, Education, and Health and Human Services; allows Northwestern to resume drawing down funds for existing and approved grants; and ensures our researchers remain eligible for future grants. It also ends a deeply painful and disruptive period in our university’s history….

We expect federal funds to resume flowing within days and be fully restored within 30 days.

This is not an agreement the University enters into lightly, but one that was made based on institutional values. As an imperative to the negotiation of this agreement, we had several hard red lines we refused to cross: We would not relinquish any control over whom we hire, whom we admit as students, what our faculty teach or how our faculty teach. I would not have signed this agreement without provisions ensuring that is the case.

As the agreement states, “no provision of this agreement, individually or taken together, shall be construed as giving the United States authority to dictate faculty hiring, University hiring, admission decisions, Northwestern’s curriculum, or the content of academic speech and research.”

Northwestern runs Northwestern. Period….

Among the provisions the University agrees to:

• • Pay the U.S. Treasury $75 million, over the course of three years. As stated in the agreement, the payment is not an admission of guilt, but simply a condition of the agreement.
  • Establish a special committee of the Board of Trustees to ensure compliance with the agreement and have the President and the Chair of the Board certify quarterly the University’s compliance with the agreement.
  • Continue compliance with federal anti-discrimination laws. The University already complies with the U.S. Supreme Court decision prohibiting the consideration of race in admissions decisions and has agreed to provide anonymized statistical admissions data to the government, demonstrating our ongoing compliance.
  • Adhere to federal Title IX “by providing safe and fair opportunities for women, including single-sex housing for any woman, defined on the basis of sex, who requests such accommodations and all-female sports, locker rooms and showering facilities.”
  • Review our international admissions practices and policies and develop training material to socialize international students to the norms of a campus dedicated to inquiry and open debate. The University also will continue to comply with all legal requirements related to the Student and Exchange Visitor (SEVIS) program.
  • Terminate the 2024 Deering Meadow agreement.
  • Finally, we reaffirm our commitment to the steps the University has taken to protect Jewish members of our community. As outlined in our most recent progress report, reports of discrimination or harassment based on antisemitism have declined since Northwestern rolled out and enforced significant policy changes. We will continue to do whatever we can to ensure that our campuses are safe for every member of the Northwestern community.

The agreement contained a provision not mentioned in either of the press releases:

10. Northwestern shall terminate the “Deering Meadow Agreement” of April 29, 2024, and reverse all policies that have been implemented or are being implemented in adherence to it.

You may recall that the Deering Meadow Agreement was the subject of a Civil Rights Complaint filed by the Equal Protection Project on May 1, 2024:

We bring this civil rights complaint against Northwestern University (“Northwestern”) located at 633 Clark St, Evanston, IL 60208, for its publicly stated announcement that it plans to discriminate based on ethnicity and national origin in violation of Title VI’s prohibition of such discrimination. Specifically, three members of the University’s top administration (President Michael Schill, Provost Kathleen Hagerty, and Vice-President for Student Affairs Susan Davis) on April 29, 2024, issued a formal “Agreement on Deering Meadow” (the “Encampment Agreement”) with a group of students and faculty who had staged an unauthorized 5-day antiIsrael protest and encampment on a Northwestern property called Deering Meadow. In the Encampment Agreement (press release1, full agreement2 attached, archived version3) Northwestern publicly committed, among other things, as follows (emphasis added):

• The University will support visiting Palestinian faculty and students at risk (funding two faculty per year for two years; and providing full cost of attendance for five Palestinian undergraduates to attend Northwestern for the duration of their undergraduate careers). The University commits to fundraise to sustain this program beyond this current commitment.

• The University will provide immediate temporary space for MENA/Muslim students.

• The University will provide and renovate a house for MENA/Muslim students that is conductive to community building as soon as practicably possible upon completion of the Jacobs renovation (Expected 2026).

… In violation of Title VI, the stated commitment of the University to provide five scholarships exclusively to “Palestinian” students illegally excludes and discriminates against non-Palestinian students based on their ethnicity, national origin, and shared ancestry.5 Additionally, the reservation of space and housing for “MENA/Muslim” students appears to be segregationist in nature, excluding at least in part students on the basis of ethnicity, national origin, and shared ancestry.

Our complaint received substantial media coverage.

The Biden Department of Educucation later placed a hold on our case subject to renewal because it took the position that our claims were covered by a pending class action (it wrong about this, the class action didn’t cover our claims), and as a matter of internal policy they would not process claims already covered by a class action until that lawsuit was over. (See our case page.)

The issue is now moot because Northwestern has abandoned the Deering Meadow Agreement and committed to unwind efforts already undertaken.

.@NorthwesternU , which shamefully capitulated to the anti-Israel tentifadas though a much-criticized "Deering Meadow" agreement in 2024, has terminated the agreement as part of its deal to get back on the government dole.

So says an otherwise unrepentant and defiant email to… https://t.co/M4xcawF1oX pic.twitter.com/qyM46v7Fwn

— Gary Weiss (@gary_weiss) November 29, 2025

I think we deserve some of the credit for putting the discriminatory ‘pro-Palestinian’ agreement on the federal radar and keeping it there so that it ultimately became part of a much larger deal.

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