A lawyer for Columbia University said Tuesday that a demand from the Trump administration for dramatic changes in student discipline had merely sped up policies the university had already been planning to enforce.
In a March 13 letter, the Trump administration said the university had failed to stop “antisemitic violence and harassment,” adding that policy changes would have to be made before the government would discuss resuming $400 million in canceled grants and contracts. Last week, the school complied with most of the government’s requests, regulating masks on campus and empowering a team of security officers to make arrests.
The lawyer’s assertion that Columbia had been planning the changes all along came during a hearing in Federal District Court in Manhattan over a request by a group of anonymous Columbia and Barnard College students that a judge bar school officials from handing over confidential disciplinary records to a congressional committee that has asked for them.
Both Columbia and the committee have contended that the students have not shown a sufficient legal basis for such an order. The judge, Arun Subramanian, made no ruling Tuesday.
The arguments in court stemmed from a request by the House Committee on Education and Workforce for disciplinary records related to several incidents, including the occupation of a university hall last spring by pro-Palestinian demonstrators, a protest of a class taught by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and an art exhibition the committee said had “promoted terrorism.”
Seven anonymous students and Mahmoud Khalil, a former student and legal permanent resident who helped lead protests last year and whom the Trump administration is trying to deport, sued to keep the records private. The lawsuit said that to fully comply, Columbia would have to turn over private files of hundreds of students, faculty and staff members.
Their lawyers have argued that the House committee was trying to coerce the university into becoming the government’s proxy to chill speech critical of Israel and to suppress association, actions that the First Amendment would prohibit the government from taking.
Marshall Miller, a lawyer for Columbia, denied in court on Tuesday that the university was being coerced, saying that it was voluntarily responding to government requests.
At one point, Judge Subramanian asked Mr. Miller whether Columbia would have announced new rules last Friday without a suggestion from the executive branch that money was at stake.
“It’s a hypothetical,” Mr. Miller said.
“I don’t think it’s a hypothetical,” Judge Subramanian replied.
Mr. Miller then conferred briefly with colleagues before saying that although the new policies had been developed over many months, the Trump administration’s demand affected their “precise timing.”
Ester R. Fuchs, a Columbia professor who is the co-chair of the university’s antisemitism task force, said last week that “a lot of these are things we needed to get done and were getting done, but now we’ve gotten done more quickly.”
The provisions the school adopted were made public in an unsigned statement that many faculty members greeted with dismay, seeing an unprecedented level of deference to the Trump administration.
Among other things, Columbia banned face masks on campus for the purpose of concealing identity during disruptions and said it would adopt a formal definition of antisemitism.
The university also said it would appoint a senior vice provost to oversee the Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies Department, which the Trump administration had said should be placed into receivership.
Lawyers for the students said their clients could suffer harm if their disciplinary information was handed over to lawmakers allied with the Trump administration. The lawyers wrote in court papers that after Columbia provided such information to the government last year, “members of Congress or their staffers posted students’ private information on social media sites and identified students and faculty on the public record during congressional hearings,” resulting in harassment.
Mr. Miller said on Tuesday that Columbia had “anonymized” information provided to the committee.
A lawyer for the students, Amy Greer, said that students who had participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations were “some of the most surveilled people in our country right now,” adding that several private organizations had worked to target students for their speech.
Even if Columbia removed names from information it gave the committee, the inclusion of physical descriptions and details of activity at specific times and places meant “somebody is going to recognize them,” Ms. Greer added.
Earlier in the hearing Judge Subramanian had asked a lawyer for the House committee what lawmakers might do with the student disciplinary records.
The lawyer, Todd Tatelman, replied that the identities of students might in “certain circumstances” be relevant.
“There is no intent to publicize student names?” Judge Subramanian asked.
Mr. Tatelman replied that he knew of no such plans. The judge asked next whether the committee would turn over the names of students to any “administrative agency.”
Mr. Tatelman replied that it would not be “a typical action.”
“But you cannot rule it out?” the judge asked.
“At this point,” Mr. Tatelman replied, “I cannot rule anything out.”