Lay of the Land
The first in a two-part introduction.
By Michael Shapiro
Eight months have elapsed since the Trump Administration launched its assault on higher education. Now, at the start of the first full academic year in which universities and colleges across the country find themselves ever more under siege, we are launching CollegeWatch. It will be a weekly newsletter whose mission is to report on what this campaign has unleashed, what it means, why it began, and where it might lead.
This assault extends well past the Ivy League and elite research universities. It has reached private colleges, public universities and community colleges, in red states and blue. Its cost is measured in the billions of dollars in federal funding gone or frozen, jobs lost, visas cancelled, and the termination of hundreds of medical research projects on an array of diseases. It has hit campuses that were in the forefront of protests against the war in Gaza, along with schools that were far from those demonstrations but which nonetheless have seen millions of dollars in federal funds evaporate.
Seldom has a week, let alone a day, passed since late January that has not brought news of another threatened cut in federal research funding; an announcement from the State Department barring entry for international students whose country of origin or whose social media posts are deemed unacceptable; a notification from the Department of Education of a potential investigation for allowing antisemitism to fester on campus; penalties for allowing the relative handful of transgender intercollegiate athletes to compete; and legal steps to eradicate Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs.
The attacks have come fast and relentlessly. The Administration was only in its first week when the Office of Management and Budget announced a pause in federal funding "that may be implicated by the executive orders, including, but not limited to, financial assistance for foreign aid, nongovernmental organizations, DEI, woke gender ideology, and the green new deal."
“We all anticipated disruption and the flurry of executive orders,” Charles L. Welch, president of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, told the Chronicle of Higher Education. “The challenge was we weren’t sure what they would say."
It took no time at all to find out.
In late January, Science reported that the National Science Foundation, a top source of funding for scientific research at institutions of higher education, was taking the unprecedented step of searching through billions of dollars in grants in conflict with Trump’s agenda.
In March, Johns Hopkins announced the loss of $800 million in funding from USAID – which has been decimated under this Administration – and more than 2,000 layoffs in the United States and for programs around the world. That same month, the administration said it would cut $400 million in funding to Columbia for its failure to protect its Jewish students and told Penn it stood to lose $175 million for allowing an already graduated transgender swimmer to compete on the women's team.
Those schools announced they were prepared to find ways to comply with the Administration's demands. But Harvard, which was hit with $2.2 billion in threatened cuts to multi-year grants, sued. Hundreds of college and university presidents signed an open letter of support. But no other school took the Administration to court.
Beginning in the 1950s, the federal government began to see universities as a valuable tool in its Cold War against the Soviet Union and the spread of global Communism. Federal funding, in particular for research and development, grew exponentially – from $2 billion in 1955, to $48 billion in 1985 to $119 billion in 2005 and, by 2023, $187 billion, according to the NSF. By 2023, the University of Washington-Seattle's $1.4 billion in federal funding represented 15 percent of its revenue, the highest percentage of any public university, but smaller in comparison to Hopkins, 40 percent of whose revenue came from $4 billion in federal funding.
Yet even as the flow of federal funds continued, the public's view of higher education sank. In 2015, Gallup reported that 57 percent of Americans surveyed held favorable views of higher education. By 2023 that support had dropped to 36 percent, with an even greater drop to 20 percent among Republicans.
College presidents and administrators, already confronting a public that increasingly saw their schools dominated by liberal faculties, have struggled to respond to this moment in ways that protect their schools from the harshest sanctions. At the same time, they are buffeted between faculty admonishing them for failing to defend free speech, and donors and trustees who advise cooperation with the Administration to spare their schools from damaging cuts.
By July, the number of grants terminated by the NIH, which sends more money for research to universities than any other federal entity, had swelled to 1,500 with a combined value of $7.5 billion according to an analysis by Grant Witness.
The cuts hit not only the scientists conducting the research and the graduate students working with them, but also the men and women who perform the essential administrative and support tasks that make universities among the biggest employers in communities across the country. The NIH is also pushing to cap what are known as "indirect costs," which go toward the utilities and facilities that support research. These jobs are so vital to local economies that, according to Axios, half of all American counties would be hit with economic losses of at least $250,000 from cuts of people paid from indirect costs.
Those are the obvious losses. But just as potentially devastating are losses for what might have been – clinical trials and experimental treatments for patients and families who may have had no connection to institutions of higher education other than as the places they went in the hope of a cure.
There is a growing sense of puzzlement as America, arguably the global center for scientific research – and the beneficiary of the technologies that emerge from that research – surrenders that position and the profits that come with it. It's a phenomenon that competitors in Europe and China have quickly seized upon.
In May, the Times reported, Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, announced an investment of 500 million euros, or $566 million, to “make Europe a magnet for researchers” over the next two years. The money came on top of the $105 billion international research program called Horizon Europe that supports such fields as genome sequencing and mRNA vaccines. As the Times noted, while von der Leyen refrained from naming the United States she nonetheless described a global environment where “fundamental, free and open research is questioned.”
“What a gigantic miscalculation,” she said.
The first settlement came in July when Penn announced that it would adapt the Administration's language and guidelines in limiting the participation of transgender athletes. Three weeks later, Columbia agreed to pay a $200 million fine to settle allegations that it had failed to protect Jewish students from harassment. Columbia admitted no guilt or liability but did pledge to follow laws that preclude using race as a factor in hiring and admissions. The Administration, in turn, promised that it would not otherwise be involved in hiring, admissions or "the content of academic speech.” The university – which stood to lose not only the frozen $400 million but a total of $1.2 billion in terminated or frozen research funding – also agreed to allow an independent monitor to oversee its compliance. Days later, Brown agreed to pay $50 million over ten years to state workforce training programs in return for freeing up $500 million in research funding.
Both Columbia and Brown insisted that the agreements did not undermine their independence. Still, both agreed to give the Administration access to admissions data on all applicants, including grades, test scores and race.
Trump, meanwhile, took a victory lap on Truth Social: “Woke is officially DEAD at Brown."
Even as the universities framed the settlements as pathways to recover their funding, the deals, regarded by many as inevitable given decades of reliance on the federal government, were nonetheless looked upon with dismay and fear of what they portended.
"This is simple extortion and deal-making," Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, told the Times, "which has no place in a democracy.”
A week later the Times reported that Trump was demanding that UCLA pay $1 billion to have its research funding restored.
In the weeks and months to come, CollegeWatch will appear on Tuesday mornings with what we hope is a fresh perspective on a story that feels almost impossible to keep track of – and vital to document.
Rather than trying to cover everything, we will instead offer one story a week, one that will give readers both granular detail and essential context – as well as what this assault feels like to those most deeply affected.
None of what is happening now to higher education should have come as a surprise. The attack on higher education had long been in the planning and, while its scale is unprecedented, its mission is, at its core, 75 years old.
How and why it began, what led to this moment, is a story for the next newsletter – which will appear on Thursday.
As to where and how this will end – that is unknowable. But it is hard to imagine American higher education ever being quite the same.
Where is the money from these settlements (Trump's gangster operation) going?