UNC deal with Trump administration took a year to negotiate. How it came together

Jane Winik Sartwell, The News & Observer (Raleigh) on Oct 20, 2026

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UNC-Chapel Hill’s new deal with the Trump administration — which resolves 18 federal investigations into the university, preserves research funding, and requires UNC commit to certain federal priorities — didn’t get ironed out overnight.

In fact, it took a full year to negotiate, UNC’s general counsel Paul Newton told The News & Observer in an interview Tuesday.

There were times over those many months that the government “proposed terms or conditions that we were not willing to live with,” Newton said, “but ultimately we got to a meeting of the minds.”

The deal was announced on Monday evening.

UNC negotiated primarily with Harmeet Dhillon, U.S. assistant attorney general for the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division.

Where those negotiations landed “is a really reasonable place,” said Newton, a Republican former state lawmaker. UNC admits no wrongdoing and doesn’t have to pay a dime. Many other schools that made similar agreements had to pay tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars. The commitments UNC has to make — including to combating antisemitism and pursuing race-blind admissions — are already stated priorities for the school.

That’s what makes it such a “great deal,” in the view of Holden Thorp, who served as UNC’s chancellor from 2008 to 2013. Current chancellor Lee Roberts ran the deal past Thorp a week before it was signed.

“It’s a deal any research university president would take right now,” Thorp told The N&O. “It’s a much better deal than what most of UNC’s peers took.”

What the deal requires from UNC

The terms include mandatory training on antisemitism, tough sanctions on student groups accused of antisemitic conduct, a promise to use adequate police force to protect Jewish and Israeli students, and other related commitments. The deal also has a number of requirements tied to race-blind admissions, scholarships, and other programming. The full agreement is available online.

Those terms reflect the corrective actions UNC likely would have taken to resolve the open federal investigations had they run their course, Newton said. He is not yet clear, however, on whether these terms require UNC to change its existing policies on discrimination and antisemitism.

“Compliance with the federal agreement is hand-in-glove with where we are already,” Newton said. “We’ve got a little more to do, but directionally, it’s exactly the same.”

Newton points out that the deal also reaffirms two major priorities for the school: its commitment to academic freedom for its faculty and its access to federal grants, contracts and awards.

Some on UNC’s faculty, such as anthropology professor emeritus Donald Nonini, argue the deal amounts to “extortion” by the federal government.

UNC, as Nonini sees it, was forced to accept terms under threat of funding revocation.

But the only real concession for UNC, in Newton’s view, is the addition of new “administrative burdens.”

That includes the creation of a Merit and Civil Rights Administrator who reports to the Department of Justice on UNC’s compliance with the agreement every quarter. The school has already filled that position by appointing Elizabeth Hall, a current compliance officer. She will be dedicated in part to combating antisemitism on campus.

“As far as I know,” Newton said, “we’re the only university that was allowed to choose someone internally. I believe everyone else so far has had to go through the expense of hiring an independent third-party monitor.”

It will be Hall’s job to determine whether the agreement requires UNC to update or introduce new policies in order to comply with the deal’s terms, Newton said.

What investigations are closed?

The investigations and reviews closed as a result of the deal went as far back as 10 years and crossed multiple presidential administrations, according to Dean Stoyer, UNC’s vice chancellor for communications. The case numbers for each are listed in the agreement, but it isn’t immediately clear from the Justice Department’s website how to find out more about their contents.

The closed federal investigations don’t include any related to Ralph Baric, according to Newton. Baric is a retired coronavirus research at Carolina who has been the target of unproven accusations that his research helped cause the COVID-19 pandemic.

Some of the investigations stemmed from complaints about antisemitism on campus, as well as complaints from groups like Students for Justice in Palestine. The many investigations, Newton said, were “noise to the signal of the mission of the university.”

“Getting those resolved is really beneficial to maintaining our focus,” he continued.

The federal government is responsible for determining whether UNC is compliant with the deal. That provision, Newton said, “is not perfect from our perspective.” But the school does have the ability to sue for injunctive relief, if, for example, the government asks UNC to do something they don’t feel is “in the four corners of that document.”

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