Northwestern University has agreed to pay $75 million as part of a deal with the Trump administration that restores previously frozen federal funding and ends a months-long investigation into government allegations of “unlawful discrimination,” including “race-based admissions” and a “hostile” environment for Jewish students, the Justice Department announced Friday.
The agreement requires Northwestern to comply with federal anti-discrimination laws, revise its policies on campus demonstrations, and implement mandatory anti-Semitism training for students, faculty and staff, conditions similar to those imposed on other campuses. The university will pay the settlement until 2028.
The university’s $790 million in federal funding was suspended earlier this year amid a Title VI civil rights investigation, part of a broader administration effort to scrutinize university policies and campus speech. The freeze was one of the largest and most disruptive imposed on any campus during the administration’s crackdown on elite US universities.
Under the settlement, the government “will close pending investigations and treat Northwestern as eligible for future grants, contracts and awards,” the DOJ said.
The university said it expects payments to resume within days and full funding to be restored within 30 days, according to a statement to the school’s newspaper The Daily Northwestern. This includes late payments on all pending federally funded grants and contracts, the document said.
CNN has reached out to Northwestern and the White House for more information.
Northwestern is among the few universities that make direct payments to the federal government under these settlements. The agreement with Brown University, in contrast, determined that its payment will fund Rhode Island workforce development groups. And unlike Columbia University, which is subject to external monitoring, Northwestern will oversee its own compliance.
The agreement puts Northwestern among several universities facing federal scrutiny, including Columbia, Brown and Cornell, which made multimillion-dollar payments, and the University of Virginia, which accepted strict multi-year reporting requirements until 2028 to regain federal funding.
The federal funding freeze and related investigation brought significant upheaval in Northwestern, including the resignation of president Michael Schill in September, who cited “serious and often dire challenges” and warned that “difficult problems remain, particularly at the federal level.”
This story has been updated with additional details.
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