Brown political theorist Alex Gourevitch makes a couple of very good points that other schools (looking at you, Harvard!) should attend to:

These agreements do at least three things that change the legal environment for the universities. First, Brown agrees to provide new and detailed information on a range of campus activities to the government in the form of new reports and surveys, as well as rights to request more information at will. Officials can then data mine this new trove for anything that looks off color or that can be used as a pretense to claim Brown isn’t holding up its end. In addition, the agreement imposes a requirement to review “student course evaluations that are collected on an anonymous basis at the end of each semester” to “identify any reports of antisemitism,” effectively recruiting students to government monitoring…. 

The second problem is Brown incorporates the administration’s, rather than legally valid, standards on issues ranging from harassment to racial discrimination. For instance, Brown has agreed not to use “personal statements, diversity narratives or any applicant reference to racial identity” as a means to introduce preferences on the basis of race, color and national origin, even though the Supreme Court has said that these individualized criteria are perfectly constitutional . In the section on harassment and discrimination, there is no clear statement of what will count as antisemitism, nor of what counts as an adequate response to allegations of antisemitism. The government’s criteria rely on the incoherent, speech-suppressive International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition, which hopelessly confuses criticism of Israel with antisemitic expression. Application of IHRA would lead to unconstitutional and undesirable constraints, which is why even the IHRA’s own lead drafter has rejected it as suitable to guide law and policy. 

Third, since the agreement is essentially a private contract with the government, the new — often vaguely worded — standards and rules it has incorporated are effectively new legal liabilities. There are a host of potential ways Brown could violate its terms, without doing anything that the Constitution or Congress deems  illegal. If Brown does something that the government decides violates the agreement, the government has cause to pick one of its many guns back up. And if Brown then decides to challenge this in court, it must show not only that it was acting within ordinary constitutional or statutory limits but also complying with this agreement. 

The whole point of this settlement was, seemingly, to avoid the costly and slow route of litigation in order to restore funding and get the government off Brown’s back. Yet, the new reporting requirements, anonymous evaluations and campus surveys create avenues and incentives for disgruntled students, staff or faculty to back-channel information to the government. This then can be used as proof that the University is breaking its contract, even when it has otherwise done nothing wrong. 

So bottom line, Brown gets its funding back by creating loads of new, legally enforceable obligations, which it is easy for the government to plausibly claim Brown isn’t keeping to, and with no legally enforceable counter-commitments from the government going forward. Just one disruptive student protest, a few anonymous evaluations, some controversial social media posts or a negative campus survey and we are back in the line of fire. No university can exercise the necessary coercive control over its members to avoid those kinds of events — and no university ever should.

What Professor Gourevitch doesn't say, but is surely part of what's going on here, is that none of the universities are actually confident they can get timely relief from the courts, and that even if they do, they are not confident the Trump regime will obey the courts, which is one of the hallmarks of an authoritarian society without the rule of law.