Donald Trump said it louder, but Zohran Mamdani said it first — Columbia needs to pay up.
President Trump has made Columbia University a centerpiece of his war on elite schools, accusing it of fostering antisemitism and threatening to revoke its federal funding, accreditation and tax-exempt status.
To the left, Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor, has long called for taxing Columbia and New York University’s sweeping property portfolios to fund the city’s struggling public university system.
But as the right escalated its fight — and Columbia struck an uneasy deal with the White House — Mamdani backed off.
“On one hand, there is a progressive history behind the policy. On the other hand you’d have to explain why you’re going after an institution of higher education in the same way that Trump is,” said Basil Smikle, a Democratic political strategist and former executive director of the New York State Democratic Party who teaches at Columbia. “You don’t want to have these parallel narratives existing at the same time.”
Mamdani’s retreat from the issue comes at a fraught time for pedigree schools like Columbia and as voters mull who to elect as the city’s next mayor. Since his surprise victory in the Democratic primary, Mamdani has grasped any opportunity to cast himself as “Trump’s worst nightmare” and tie his rivals Eric Adams and Andrew Cuomo to the GOP president.
In the same stroke, Mamdani has revised some of his more leftist policy stances. The democratic socialist state assemblymember has walked back his defense of the term “globalize the intifada.” He reversed himself on calls to “defund” and “dismantle” the police. And he hasn’t had very much to say of late about Columbia and NYU’s tax-exempt status.
Of the 21 bills Mamdani introduced during his four-and-a-half years in the Assembly, two, known as the REPAIR Act, focused on retracting property tax exemptions for private universities that save more than $100 million annually — namely Columbia and NYU.
The bill package died in committee during the 2023-24 legislative session. It was reintroduced in January 2025, as Mamdani publicly pushed the legislation at rallies, media spots and panel appearances, arguing that the universities are reaping more benefits as tax exempt landlords than they are investing in the public good.
But as Trump made Columbia a target in his battle against universities, Mamdani’s advocacy faded. The proposal has disappeared from his public remarks and has been relegated to a brief mention on his campaign’s education platform, which still promises to explore taxing Columbia and NYU as a way to fund a tuition-free City University of New York system.
“In a choice between NYU and Columbia losing tax exemption and giving Trump a raised middle finger, Mamdani chose the latter,” said author and retired Baruch College political science professor Doug Muzzio.
Columbia’s deal with the Trump administration has become a national flashpoint. After months of pressure — including the suspension of pro-Palestinian student protesters and administrative shakeups — the university agreed last month to a $221 million settlement. In return, the White House restored $400 million in frozen research grants.
Critics have called the settlement a political shakedown. But for the Trump administration, it served as a successful first draft of a new playbook: use financial leverage to force universities into public accountability on its terms. The president is not stopping at Columbia — similar threats now loom over Harvard, Cornell and Northwestern, among others.
The fallout also shifted the political rubric for local Democrats, especially in a mayoral race where candidates are pushing to prove their distance from the White House.
A Mamdani spokesperson said the candidate still supports “the notion of repealing” the universities’ property tax exemptions and “fully funding CUNY, while being laser-focused on his main campaign agenda.” The spokesperson did not respond to questions about whether Trump’s feud with Columbia affected Mamdani’s approach to the tax policy.
“Zohran condemns Trump’s attacks on universities unequivocally and believes the Administration is playing games with college students and their futures,” Mamdani spokesperson Dora Pekec said in a statement.
Not everyone on the left sees the overlap as a liability. New York Sen. John Liu, who sponsored the REPAIR Act in the state Senate, said the White House’s involvement hasn’t changed the fundamentals. Columbia saves more than $180 million annually through property tax exemptions, and he wants to see that money invested in CUNY.
“If the GOP succeeded, which I hope they don’t, they would simply take away that tax-exempt status, and anybody losing their tax exempt status would then resume paying property taxes to New York City. So this doesn’t muddy this issue,” Liu told POLITICO.
“I’m not rooting for Republican success in their attempt to demonize some of our universities,” he added. “Rather, we’re looking at things from the perspective of these universities have just become mega land owners and landlords, and probably don’t need that $100 million-plus [in] tax breaks that could be better used to fund public education for far more New Yorkers.”
Mamdani likes to quip that Columbia was his first landlord. The 33-year-old grew up in a university-owned apartment complex reserved for staff and faculty, like his father, Columbia professor Mahmood Mamdani. That early proximity gave him a front-row view of the school’s outsized presence in upper Manhattan — and, later, its polarizing role in city politics.
Columbia’s property holdings, which straddle multiple neighborhoods uptown, have long been a lightning rod in New York. In West Harlem, memories still linger from the bruising battle over its Manhattanville expansion, when residents accused the university of abusing eminent domain and wielding its political clout to push out longtime tenants and acquire large swaths of the neighborhood for cheap.
The resulting Community Benefits Agreement promised $170 million for housing, education and job training over 36 years, commitments to local investment that the state says Columbia is making good on. But critics say it failed to slow displacement or curb the university’s appetite for real estate.
Those scars have made Columbia’s tax breaks especially galling for some lawmakers. Over 15 years, Columbia’s annual property tax exemptions skyrocketed from $38 million to over $180 million — spurring Mamdani and Liu to draft the REPAIR Act, which would redirect that money into CUNY.
After introducing the bill in 2023, Mamdani launched a campaign to sell the idea. He and City Comptroller Brad Lander even hired a campaign director to advocate for the tax policy. Mamdani pitched it at rallies, in interviews and most recently during a Columbia Law School panel on the university’s “social responsibility” on Feb. 27.
“There is a growing appetite across New York City, across New York City politics, for some kind of accountability,” Mamdani told the audience. “Because what has passed for them for so long has just been institutions like these running roughshod over the neighborhoods that they’re supposed to call homes.”
The next week, the Trump administration froze $400 million in federal research grants to the university. Mamdani’s gone quiet on the issue since.
“Columbia and other top tier institutions are a good foil for progressive policy making, but there are a lot of bigger issues that affect people’s literal safety and security,” Smikle said. “There’s going to be ample time to talk about all of these issues related to higher ed down the road, but voters want to see their candidates fighting for them, and the biggest threat to a lot of democratic and progressive voters is what’s coming out of Washington.”
The settlement that followed was the product of months of high-profile negotiations between the White House and Columbia. The Trump administration had frozen hundreds of millions of dollars in research grants and signaled it was prepared to keep much of Columbia’s federal funding on ice unless the university agreed to sweeping conditions.
Acting President Claire Shipman said the $221 million deal protected the school’s academic independence and spared it from protracted litigation that could jeopardize its standing as a leading research institution.
“We might have achieved short-term litigation victories, but not without incurring deeper long-term damage — the likely loss of future federal funding, the possibility of losing accreditation, and the potential revocation of visa status of thousands of international students,” Shipman wrote in a message to the Columbia community.
But to critics, it was a capitulation — one that risked opening the door for the White House to dictate campus policy and censor free speech. Education Secretary Linda McMahon praised the agreement as a “roadmap” for other schools, and with dozens of universities still under investigation, higher education leaders warned that the Columbia precedent could be a slippery slope.
“The Trump administration routinely enters into these kinds of agreements and then, the following day, demands concessions beyond the ones that were made in the agreements,” Jameel Jaffer, executive director of Columbia’s Knight First Amendment Institute, said. “I don’t think anyone can realistically expect that the fact that universities are entering into these settlements means that the Trump administration won’t make more demands of them tomorrow.”
Columbia’s expensive settlement — which also requires the university to turn over far-reaching data on students and faculty including reporting disciplinary action taken against international students — has drawn criticism from New York Democrats. Rep. Jerry Nadler called the deal “disgraceful,” claiming it weakened other universities’ ability to push back against the White House.
“Hear me out: if private universities can afford to pay ransom money to Trump, then they can certainly afford to pay property taxes in New York City,” New York City Councilmember Justin Brannan wrote in an X post.
A Columbia spokesperson declined to comment on the tax bill or criticism from local Democrats, pointing POLITICO to Shipman’s earlier statement on the deal.
Investing in CUNY has been a priority for Mamdani long before he launched his mayoral bid, a goal his platform promises to achieve by either taxing Columbia and NYU or passing the New Deal for CUNY — another ambitious funding overhaul that is struggling to get off the ground in Albany. His co-sponsor, state Sen. Liu told POLITICO he remains confident the tax measure will advance, already lining up new Assembly sponsors should Mamdani win the mayoralty.
“Rather than have that conversation now and get pulled into a narrative battle before the election, he might be thinking, ‘This isn’t a fight we need to take on today,’” Smikle said. “Anything else can come after the election.”
