Trump's funding ax throws colleges into an existential crisis

• Professors and administrators fear that the Trump administration's blunt approach — hitting the brakes on funding to target what it sees as longstanding culture problems on campuses — will set innovation back decades.

The money quote: "The United States is home to the best collection of research universities in the world. Those universities have contributed tremendously to America's prosperity, health, and security. They are magnets for outstanding talent from throughout the country and around the world," Princeton president Christopher Eisgruber wrote in the Atlantic this week.

• "The Trump administration's recent attack on Columbia University puts all of that at risk."

Driving the news: The Trump administration is pulling multiple levers to squeeze universities. Institutions across the country are watching the administration's moves closely — and wondering if they'll be the next one in the spotlight.

• President Trump's Department of Education is investigating dozens of colleges over their response to pro-Palestinian campus protests, their policies regarding trans athletes, DEI initiatives and more. Columbia and UPenn have lost hundreds of millions of dollars in funding over these issues. (UPenn says it hasn't received official notice of any cuts.)
• Johns Hopkins, the largest recipient of federal research funding, cut 2,200 jobs and lost $800 million in USAID grants when that agency was gutted.
• Changes to National Institutes of Health policies — which have been temporarily blocked by the courts — are poised to hit research programs at dozens of other schools.

Between the lines: The problems the Trump administration says it's trying to solve on campuses are typically related to student life, athletics or coursework in the humanities. But its moves are largely targeting the cutting-edge scientific and medical research that goes on at these institutions.

• "It feels like a blunt force spectacle and a punishment that’s going to have all these broader effects," says Meghan O’Rourke, an English professor at Yale who recently wrote an op-ed in The New York Times on the cuts.

"It will impact cancer research, it will impact maternal health centers, it will cause lots of people to lose their jobs in communities where universities prop up local economies," she says.

• "It's certainly not taking a scalpel to what they perceive as woke excesses."

The stakes: Funding pauses — and the fear of what's coming — is already roiling research and recruitment, Axios' Tina Reed reports.

• The termination of more than 400 NIH grants to Columbia will directly impact Alzheimer's and cancer research, Notus reported. It also likely tanked a landmark 30-year diabetes prevention study, according to Stat. Also canceled: one study looking at reducing maternal mortality in New York and another on treatments for long COVID, The New York Times reports.
• UMass' medical school rescinded offers to biomedical sciences Ph.D. students, and Stanford, Harvard and the University of California system have announced hiring freezes. Duke's medical school is shelving its expansion plans and preparing to admit fewer Ph.D. students.

• Several scientists researching cancer, infectious diseases and more tell Nature they're contemplating leaving America.
• Humanities are being hit too, including via cuts to federally funded programs at university libraries, Inside Higher Ed notes.

"In the face of uncertainty about exactly what funding will be available, institutions are grappling with, 'What choices do we have?'" says Elena Fuentes-Afflick, chief scientific officer at the Association of American Medical Colleges.

• "For decades, American prominence on the world stage in scientific research has been possible because of NIH funding," she says. "The disruption interrupts the ability to make discoveries, to make impactful findings."
• Plus, trouble in academia has implications for companies, which rely on the pipeline of scientists and technologists coming out of universities.

What to watch: The next step for universities who've lost money is to negotiate with the Trump administration.

• Up first is Columbia, which has until Friday to agree to nine far-reaching demands to get its funding back, The Wall Street Journal reports. The asks include reforming its admissions process, empowering campus police, and putting its Middle East, South Asian and African Studies department under "academic receivership," meaning it would be outside of faculty control.
• Columbia's response could set new standards for how much pressure the government can exert on universities over how they're run and what they can teach. "It is really a red line for the independence of universities," Joseph Howley, a classics professor at Columbia, told the Journal.