The Unmaking of the American University

"For Johns Hopkins, the first shot from the Trump Administration came on February 28, 2025. That day, a press release from the Department of Justice arrived, saying that the Federal Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism would be visiting ten campuses, including Hopkins, to investigate potential violations of federal law. Nobody ever visited the university, but subsequent shots had far more severe consequences. The federal government terminated eight hundred million dollars in grants from the U.S. Agency for International Development, which Hopkins had been administering; this led the university to lay off more than two thousand employees."

"At Brown, administrators learned that their grant funding was ending from an April 3rd article in the Daily Caller, the conservative paper co-founded by Tucker Carlson. 'EXCLUSIVE,' the headline read. 'Trump Admin Freezes Hundreds of Millions of Dollars to Another Ivy League School.' Later that day, the government stopped payment on all of its research grants to Brown, amounting to five hundred and ten million dollars."

"The Trump Administration was simultaneously sending a series of letters to almost every college and university in the country, beginning on February 14th. The first one ordered all schools to end their D.E.I. programs. 'It said you can't discriminate,' the president of Vassar, Elizabeth H. Bradley, told me. 'We don't. We didn't use the term D.E.I.'"

Research universities dependent on federal funding face unprecedented pressure from the Trump Administration through targeted funding cuts and compliance mandates. Johns Hopkins lost $1.3 billion in grants, resulting in over 2,000 layoffs. Brown discovered its $510 million grant freeze through a news article rather than official notification. Princeton lost $200 million in suspended research grants. Simultaneously, the administration issued letters to nearly every college and university demanding elimination of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. Universities struggle to comply with vague directives while maintaining their educational missions and institutional integrity. The pattern suggests federal funding has become conditional on political compliance rather than merit-based research evaluation.

Read at The New Yorker