Columbia University has enlisted a Trump transition alumnus to lobby for the institution on “issues related to higher education and appropriation” as Republicans threaten to tax the Ivy League institution’s $15 billion endowment.
Columbia tapped BGR Government Affairs to “provide strategic counsel and advocate on issues related to higher education and appropriations,” according to lobbying disclosures filed with Congress.
The hiring comes as Columbia continues to deal with rampant campus anti-Semitism. On Wednesday, for example, the school posted a security guard outside at least one of its Jewish studies courses a day after pro-Hamas students stormed an Israeli history class and targeted Jewish students with anti-Semitic flyers.
Dan Murphy, who will lobby on behalf of Columbia, worked on President Donald Trump’s first transition team and was chief of staff to former Housing and Urban Development secretary Mel Martinez.
Columbia is not the only one scrambling to avoid Trump’s wrath as he lays waste to DEI programs and targets Hamas supporters on elite college campuses. On Tuesday, Trump issued an executive order requiring all government agencies and federally funded universities to terminate all race- or gender-based diversity programs. He ordered the agencies to identify up to nine organizations, including universities, with endowments of over $1 billion with diversity policies that violate civil rights laws.
Earlier this month, Harvard University made a similar move, hiring the MAGA-linked lobbying firm Ballard Partners to lobby on “education and educational research.” The firm’s founder, Brian Ballard, will lobby on Harvard’s behalf. He has close ties to Trump chief of staff Susie Wiles and Trump attorney general nominee Pam Bondi, both of whom served as partners at Ballard.
A Columbia spokeswoman told the Washington Free Beacon that “Columbia is a world-class institution of higher education and research, and we regularly advocate alongside our partners nationally, state-wide, and locally to advance this work and our expansive impact and contributions.”
