Columbia Students Deserve Their Money Back

An open call to ambitious lawyers...

(Photo by JEENAH MOON/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

A graduating senior named Ella Stapleton recently filed a formal complaint and a request for a partial tuition refund with Northeastern University after she noticed one of her professors had used ChatGPT to prepare course materials.

In raising the issue, she observed that the syllabus for the same course prohibited students from using artificial intelligence. If A.I. is indicative of shoddy work, how could Northeastern justify charging students thousands of dollars per class without imposing a similar prohibition on instructors?

The university denied Stapleton’s request, and there’s no indication she intends to escalate the matter by taking Northeastern to court. But the incident delivered Northeastern a black eye, starting with this viral New York Times article, which was aggregated or re-reported by countless rival outlets. Lawsuit or no lawsuit, there can be value in being a squeaky wheel.

I think there’s a lesson here for certain students at Columbia University.

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Imagine you’re a Columbia student. You pay at least partial tuition if not full freight. When you were applying to colleges a couple years ago, you received multiple acceptance letters, but chose Columbia because you were impressed by its commitments to diversity and autonomy—the way the university promoted and represented itself in its literature and other public relations.

Then over the summer you learn that Columbia has reached a settlement with the U.S. government, prohibiting the university from “preferenc[ing] applicants based on race, color, or national origin in admissions throughout its programs” or using “proxy for racial admission…. personal statements, diversity narratives, or any applicant reference to racial identity” in considering applicants.” As you work toward your degree, Columbia will have a minder called a “Resolution Monitor” who will look over its shoulder and police compliance with the settlement. The school will have to “provide the Resolution Monitor and the United States with admissions data… showing both rejected and admitted students broken down by race, color, grade point average, and performance on standardized tests, in a form permitting appropriate statistical analyses by October 1 of each year of the Agreement.”

Columbia isn’t becoming white enough for Donald Trump and Stephen Miller’s tastes? Back into the barrel.

Is this really the same autonomous and diverse institution you were led to believe you’d attend, so long as you forked over tens of thousands of dollars a year? If it’s enforced in a way that infringes on student and faculty speech, the settlement may ultimately give rise to first amendment claims. But simply by signing it, Columbia falsified representations it made to its students. It owed independence to every student who agreed to matriculate there, and—in a moral sense, if not a legal one—it owed those students its best effort to retain its reputation for excellence and integrity.

Not every Columbia student will feel swindled—but if I were an undergrad there I would! I’d want my money back. I might even want damages for the opportunity cost: I could have attended any number of prestigious universities that didn’t sign such an agreement; I’ll never get my lost time back, and my degree will now be tainted in the eyes of many prospective employers.

I’d want to sue. But I’d probably start by seeking a tuition refund on behalf of myself and similarly situated students.

MORNINGSIDE FIGHTS

It’s a weird time for institutions to be surrendering to Trump. He’s in the midst of a pedophilia coverup of some kind! He’s never been more beset by scandal, and powerful institutions have never had better reason not to tar themselves by association with him.

I don’t know why Columbia chose to strike this agreement now, or why Harvard is poised to follow suit (though perhaps with a less-noxious form of capitulation). I similarly don’t know why the E.U. chose to ink a highly injurious tariff “agreement” with Trump, submitting to Trump’s terms and giving him a paper-victory, if not a substantive one.

The good news is a moment of political weakness for Trump is a great time to take legal aim at him where he still feels strongest.

Making a stink about the Columbia settlement would be right on the merits, and righteous civically—a form of resistance against autocratic breakthrough. It would also rebalance incentives at least a bit: other universities contemplating surrender might think harder if they knew it could invite a mass student uprising, litigation, and lasting reputational damage.

But the hidden value of a mass complaint like this is the prospect of victory, however dim. Litigants could win some restitution, or cause a p.r. crisis that forces Columbia back to the table. Trump deserves to be fought simply for having initiated these hostilities, and Columbia for caving to them. In any case, the more damage Columbia does to itself, the more pain it experiences for capitulating, the better to deter copycats.

BRUSSELS DOUBTS

Now is likewise a prime moment for importers, trade groups, and other interested parties to join pending litigation challenging Trump’s claim to unilateral tariff authority.

The legal basis for Trump’s supposedly retaliatory tariffs was thin to begin with. The president lacks legal authority to impose tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, there’s no actual economic emergency to begin with, and even if there were, such a broad construction of the IEEPA (a new, semipermanent global tariff regime!) would violate the Constitution, which vests Congress with the tariff power. He’s already lost in court, though that ruling has been stayed on appeal.

Now, though, the tariffs are little more than trade deals in principle, impossible to construe as a rapid response to a sudden emergency.

They can’t be enforced without congressional approval. Congress has not codified them, and probably could not. So they must fall. An appeals court will hear oral arguments over Trump’s tariff authority this week, but there should be no doubt here that if he loses, his whole trade agenda collapses.

Trump should thus be fought by more and higher-profile litigants, and existing litigants should amend their complaints to cover these new deals. That would once again be right as a matter of policy, right as a matter of civics, and right as a karmic matter. These tariffs cause clear harm to tons of people and entities; they all have the right to operate under the rule of law; everyone who acts without fear of retaliation does the country a service; and Trump deserves to lose, because he’s bad.