¡®Eyes opened wide. Voices cracked. Fear and confusion were palpable¡¯

Anyone who has spent time at a medium-sized private university knows the weight of bureaucratic faculty meetings. An administrator tells you finances are bad, urges you to do more outreach/admissions work and emphasises that student success is the most important thing in the world. Then you learn that your student success budget is being slashed. After that, the administrator elucidates on the endless minutiae of curriculum, future meetings and meeting-minute-syntax.

But a faculty meeting at Adelphi¡¯s College of Arts and Sciences last month was heavier still. When the dean asked if anyone was experiencing issues or uncertainty because of the executive orders of the Trump administration, eyes opened wide. Voices cracked. Fear and confusion were palpable as junior faculty, in particular, complained about grant proposals that were frozen, calling into question the viability of important, long-planned research programmes ¨C not to mention their own careers.

Getting things done is already a struggle just with the normal bureaucracy. But, luckily, there are dedicated civil servants at government labs and funding agencies, such as the National Science Foundation, whose job is to help us make amazing things happen. Thanks to their efforts, we can help struggling students find their home in a study group or undertake original research for the first time ¨C one of the most gratifying experiences for a professor.

These so-called bureaucrats are, however, having their own careers terminated by the activities of Elon Musk¡¯s ¡°Department of Government Efficiency¡± (Doge). Our support system is being closed off. Not only that, rapid changes to the conditions around already committed grants from these organisations have created perilous uncertainty.

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For example, one team of dedicated professors devised a new type of conference, connecting students with industry to improve the pipeline of students from high school to college to high-tech jobs. After much work, the team was awarded their grant. Being on a tight deadline, they began to build the conference, arranging for vendors to participate and incurring personal expenses on the expectation that they would be refunded out of the grant.

With registration open and hundreds of people signing up, the team suddenly found that their grant was in question. Not only was the team dealing with all the usual last-minute changes to the conference, they were now forced to consider drastically changing its scope,?only weeks before the event. Thousands of dollars were spent on personal credit cards in the hope things would work out. Luckily, the grant funds were finally released a week before the conference. But we do not know how many other amazing opportunities will never come to be because of this chaos.

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Other uncertainties also grip us. What should we do if an Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) ? What should we tell students who say they have the DACA status that allows undocumented immigrants who arrived as children to work and study ¨C a status whose future is ? What about our foreign students on student visas? What documents should they bring with them to class?

Finally, one of our colleagues, a Chicana social scientist, shared her concerns: immigrant communities are and worry for themselves, their families and friends. There have been , who shouldn¡¯t be at risk, getting caught in the ICE net. Social scientists like her spend months studying immigration processes and experiences by interacting with immigrant communities. When possible, they train undergraduate students to do field research by watching, listening and talking to individuals from communities often invisible to most Americans. Students have been changed by the opportunity to interact with migrants whose survival depends on their ability to live in the US. But how will professors ensure that students are safe conducting such research now? What do we tell parents when a surprise raid occurs in public spaces and a student is swept up? This question silenced the room.

The American academy is a diverse home to intellectual talent from all over the world. When vice-president J. D. Vance says that ¡°¡±, we remember other times and other places. We think of our philosophy colleague who escaped the Khmer Rouge¡¯s in Cambodia¡¯s killing fields. My own grandfather came to the US during Argentina¡¯s dirty war, forced into exile by fascists for teaching leftist history. Our fear for our students¡¯ well-being mirrors a fear for our own place and survival.

Our dean made a heroic attempt to calm the emotions evoked by these and other impossible concerns but qualified his comments with ¡°I¡¯m just a mid-level manager.¡±

Two days after our meeting, the Department of Education¡¯s infamous?on DEI was issued. Our campus mood descended further as uncertainty regarding DEI work engulfed us. Is our longstanding centre for African, Black and Caribbean studies now illegal? What about our STEM summer research camp for high-school students? Will it become a target of the Trump administration?

Adelphi is an institution with deep roots and stability. It has survived over a century: through the great depression and recessions, world wars, political instability and demographic shifts. It survived McCarthyism, and it will survive Trump¡¯s war on the academy. Young people will continue to be educated here.

The real question is: how many of us in that 12 February meeting will be around to see it? And what will be the final cost of institutional survival?

is associate professor of mathematics and computer science at Adelphi University, where is chair of the department of sociology and is chair of the department of physics.

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¡®Trump has begun what amounts to a Reign of Terror on American research universities¡¯

Only four years ago in April 2021, I queued with faculty and staff at Boston University to receive my first Moderna vaccination against Covid-19, what people who believe in science knew would be the beginning of the end of the pandemic. Our academic community had existed since?March 2020 in a state of siege held together by public health protocols and over a million PCR tests administered to students and staff. The vaccine was our and the world¡¯s way out of the global crisis.?

The irony of this story is that the mRNA vaccines were possible only because of continuous government support of basic science research for decades, followed by the development of the Covid vaccine by a company founded by an Armenian/Canadian immigrant with an MIT PhD. The story is a poster child for why the American system of research universities is the most heralded in the world. Will we have the know-how to stop the next global pandemic?

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Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images

The Trump administration has begun what amounts to a Reign of Terror on American research universities, with the executive order playing the role of the guillotine. Dramatic cuts have been proposed in the funding from the National Institutes of Health, and the system of grant making at the National Science Foundation has come to a halt, with the threat of budget cuts to follow. Funding for college students from low-income families also is in peril.

How did we get to the horrible state where the president of the United States believes destroying research universities is in the best interest of the country? The goal appears to be a misguided attempt to ¡°win¡± a culture war. American universities have been contending for decades with society¡¯s evolving view of what a college education should be and cost ¨C and even whether it has value ¨C as gaps in income and opportunity widen in our society. Coupled with growing American nationalism, this debate has degenerated, breeding mistrust in science and truth, a rebellion against diversity, and attacks on institutions that support free speech and inclusion as fundamental pieces of the American dream.

Even if the present university funding crisis is resolved, the divide in our society will persist. Our best hope is that expanding educational and economic opportunity will mend it, as education is still the route to economic prosperity and to instilling trust in facts over ideologies. Without this hope, what is the use?

It was 75 years ago ¨C 10 May 1950, to be exact ¨C when the modern American research university was born, with the creation of the National Science Foundation. From this beginning resulted the largest system of research universities in the world, moving back the frontiers of science, engineering and medicine, fuelling a massive knowledge-based economy and improving the lives of everyone.

Our government¡¯s research support has been based on peer review for awarding funding and on paying a share of the true costs of research. It has allowed all public and private universities to participate, while supporting the development of world-leading universities. Although I am not a fan of rankings, it is justified that 38 of the top 100 universities in ߣߣÊÓƵ¡¯s latest World University Rankings are in the US, including 13 of the top 20.?

How big is the enterprise? In 2022, university research spending was $97 billion, with $54 billion coming from the federal government; the 20 largest universities were awarded over one-third of this support. Universities themselves were the second-largest contributor at almost $25 billion, through a combination of direct support of research, cost sharing and internal support for the facilities and people that make research possible.

The universities are true partners in the research enterprise, supporting 45 cents for every dollar of federal money. The partnership seems a bargain, with the government leveraging less than 20 per cent of its R&D spending, amounting to only 0.2 per cent of GDP, to fuel new science, medicines and technologies.

The draconian cuts that are raining down will lead universities to retreat from research, potentially leaving only pockets of research-active faculty. Worse yet, it may lead to a total breakdown of the system. The result could well be that only the wealthiest universities are able to sustain research and the others will wither.?

The toppling of the US from its global scientific leadership will destroy the research careers of at least a generation of talented scientists, engineers and doctors. Who knows what discoveries will never happen as a result. Who knows what innovations will be lost to society. And who know how much damage will be done to our democracy by the Faustian coupling of federal funding to definitions of free speech and diversity.

There is still time to step back from this precipice and find a rational future for research universities. But it will only be possible through thoughtful discussions, not hyperbolic accusations and pronouncements.

Robert A. Brown is president emeritus of?Boston University.

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¡®Biomedicine may actually be the place where skin colour matters the least¡¯

Scientific and biomedical research is a point of pride for the US. But recent faculty meetings have been tense cauldrons of anger, fear and uncertainty about the longitudinal effects of President Trump¡¯s recent decisions for science and scientists. Those measures could derail discoveries for decades to come.

First, Trump has reduced indirect or overhead costs for research grants to 15 per cent. This is merely a halving of funds for most US research universities, but for schools?that have negotiated indirect costs as high as 78 per cent, this is a substantial blow.

Indirect funds pay for everything from research support staff to keeping the lights on in a laboratory, and they are baked into the overall grant award based on prior negotiation with that funding agency.

Even though this 15 per cent threshold for ¡°indirects¡± has been temporarily blocked by a federal judge, research institutions are being terrifyingly proactive. Immediate effects across academia include stoppages on ordering reagents, equipment and research animals and drastically cutting admissions into biomedical research programmes. These events have, for many schools, immediately reduced the number of accepted graduate students and postdoctoral fellows by as much as one-third, leaving hundreds of men and women suddenly with no path forward.

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Then, the future of the traditional research stipend to pay students is in doubt. That stipend is crucial because unlike students on professional training programmes, graduate students and postdocs are forbidden from working?outside of school; research is their job. Students who are still committed to scientific research are already jumping into lower-tier programmes (for instance, taking a master¡¯s degree with less research associated with it and no stipend) and postdocs are scrambling to find ¡°real¡± jobs because their extended training opportunities have evaporated. These abrupt changes will stunt their individual progress toward success and jeopardise science in general.

Next, yanking university DEI programmes may have far-reaching effects on incoming graduate students and their demographics. Research training programmes have always been rich with students across many nationalities, reflecting the inherent diversity of science as a global effort that we have always encouraged and embraced. Hence, we never relied on DEI initiatives to populate classes and laboratories. But if visas are blocked and scholarships or fellowships can no longer be directed to students who are in need but are ¡°of colour¡±, that natural diversity could be curtailed. And if you narrow the range of faces in the scientific workforce, you limit the talent pool and potentially narrow the range and pace of discoveries.

Once again, universities have responded rapidly to Trump¡¯s directives to quash DEI, dismantling diversity efforts and removing DEI language from webpages almost overnight. Land-grant universities have even removed their acknowledgements of the fact that they were built on land taken from indigenous people. Previously, many acknowledged this status at all public events, usually by reading a statement aloud, thanking the tribes or indigenous nations for that land and their contributions to it. And their removal from university websites has not only outraged students from these tribal nations who are enrolled in these very schools.

But it isn¡¯t just them who are upset. Faculty and students in general have demonstrated much less enthusiasm for compliance than administrators have, circulating open letters of resistance and increasing their social media presence to encourage participation in ¡°defy DEI removal¡± movements. Interestingly, those most vocal about keeping DEI are, at many schools, the often vilified ¡°white males¡±. They are leading these gestures of resistance and speaking passionately about the communities DEI was established to protect and serve.

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President Trump¡¯s treatment of science as a government programme that requires intervention shows a lack of understanding of the business of science. Biomedicine has flourished under our grant systems, and it may actually be the place where skin colour matters the least, as we have always rewarded ideas, not identities.

What we may need most from our government is trust in our enterprise of inquiry. Significantly reducing the funds that simply keep the lights on is not the best path forward. Nor is reducing the number of training scientists and postdoctoral fellows, who have dedicated their lives and livelihoods to pursuing science.

The men and women who are crushing science with ideology and politics also blithely enjoy the fruits of our collective imagination and intelligence. After all, without science, there is no medicine. If they don¡¯t live to regret stunting the fruit trees, their children surely will.

Jennifer Schnellmann is professor of medical pharmacology at the College of Medicine at University of Arizona.

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¡®Are we being freed from the need to consult our own consciences?¡¯

¡°A low dishonest decade/Waves of anger and fear/Circulate over the bright/And darkened lands of the earth/Obsessing our private lives.¡±

The poet W. H. Auden¡¯s description of Europe in the 1930s, one darkened by a ¡°psychopathic god¡±, seems all too relevant for America in the 2020s. It is a decade?that began and, after a short interregnum, will end under a different kind of psychopathic god. Moreover, it is a decade in which, as a professor at a public university, I realise that such comparisons might carry professional consequences.

Nonetheless, for all the torrent of executive orders and provocations, what is now taking place is yesterday¡¯s news for the 100 or so public universities in the great state of Texas. From an ever-tightening vice of state funding to an ever-spiralling assault by Republican governors and legislators on the teaching of inconvenient historical and social facts, we were already against the ropes when Trump re-entered the White House.

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As Molly Ivins, the late columnist of the Dallas Times-Herald, once noted, ¡°Texas has always been the national laboratory for bad government. If you want to see a bad idea tried, we¡¯ve tried it.¡± Thus, two years before Trump signed an executive order to dismantle the federal government¡¯s DEI programmes, Governor Greg Abbott signed a legislative bill that banned DEI offices at state universities.

While I found the mandatory training sessions?mostly obvious, recent actions?by Abbott verge on the obsessional. Last month, he of Texas A&M University when he learned that a few PhD students had attended a conference limited to Black, Hispanic and Native Americans. The president, predictably, reassured the governor that A&M would do a better job in vetting the thousands of conferences attended by their faculty and students.

If university presidents feel they are in the cross hairs of the Texas GOP, it is hardly surprising that professors have become increasingly furtive and fearful. But, once again, these fears preceded Trump¡¯s most recent inauguration. According to a 2024 survey by the First Amendment advocacy group Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), increasing numbers of faculty, out of a sense of self-preservation, were . Based on responses from more than 6,000 professors across the country, FIRE found that 35 per cent of respondents have toned down their writing, while 27 per cent feel they cannot speak freely with students or administrators.

Tellingly, though, these percentages were significantly higher among Texas faculty. At the University of Texas?at Austin, the state¡¯s flagship institution, more than half of about 200 respondents now police their language from fear of losing their jobs.

That this ¡°wave of fear¡± is washing over public universities, where senior faculty have lifetime tenure and enjoy the full protection of the First Amendment, is alarming. Suddenly, the of UT ¨C ¡°What starts here changes the world¡± ¨C takes on a meaning never intended by its PR mad men.

Of course, academic tenure is a hotly debated subject in the US ¨C and rightly so. Half a century ago, then Yale president Kingman Brewster declared that ¡°If a university is alive and productive, it is a place where colleagues are in constant dispute; defending their latest intellectual enthusiasm, attacking the contrary views of others.¡± That ideal hardly matches the often crabbed and conformist reality of academic discussions. But while I understand the urge to force greater ideological diversity on universities, I nevertheless believe that granting tenure, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, is the worst way to run a university except for all the others that have been tried.

As to the actual subject of Churchill¡¯s phrase, democracy, Trump is indeed trying something different from what Americans long thought the word meant. Just ask the 1.6 million or so undocumented people who live and work in Texas. The vast majority, described by our president as ¡°animals¡± who are ¡°poisoning the blood of our country¡±, fled countries plagued by endemic gang violence and gnawing poverty. Do I need to state that most of these men, women and children are law-abiding and hard-working? That they are arrested for violent or drug-related crimes at of native-born Texans? Or that they paid in state and local taxes in Texas in 2022?

Facts are the first casualty in an age awash with anger. Yet the human costs to ignoring these facts are beyond measure. ¡°Some of our kids,¡± one Texas school district superintendent, ¡°may be nervous because they may be afraid of what might happen to them.¡± This dazzling understatement applies not?only to the 110,000 undocumented children in our public schools, but to the 60,000 or so undocumented students in our public universities.

Until now, I had never really thought about whether I have undocumented students in my classes. Now, I have no choice: Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) agents can now enter ¡°sensitive places¡± that had previously been strictly off-limits to them: schools, hospitals, churches and schools. The University of Houston administration posted what it described not as ¡°legal advice¡± but instead as ¡°guiding principles¡­when interacting with immigration enforcement officers, while protecting the rights and privacy of our campus community¡±.

I only have the right to refuse entry to a federal immigration officer, it seems, if they do not have a warrant. (No mention is made, however, of ¡°probable cause¡±.) Then comes the fine print: ¡°Ask the officer for their name, identification number and agency affiliation¡± and ¡°inform the officer that you are not obstructing their process but must consult the University Police Department¡­They will help determine the appropriate next steps.¡± (Italics mine.)

Beyond the many hypotheticals, such as what to do if the agents enter the classroom while I fumble for my smartphone, there is a larger problem. In being guided to defer to the UH police department, are we being guided way from the exercise not just of our rights but of our moral imaginations? Are we being freed from the need to consult our own consciences? Overnight, these and similar questions are no longer academic.

Robert Zaretsky is professor in the Honors College at University of Houston.

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¡®Then along came the second Trump administration¡¯

There was little direct federal support for US scientific research until the National Defense Research Committee was convened in 1940. But on the back of the committee¡¯s key role in developing radar, sonar and the nuclear bomb, its instigator, former MIT vice-president Vannevar Bush, wrote a report, The Endless Frontier, laying out a vision for the creation of a post-war National Science Foundation.?

Established in 1950, the NSF provided unprecedented funding for fundamental research, conducted principally in America¡¯s universities by faculty researchers whose projects were evaluated by scientific peers. The National Institutes of Health (NIH), which dates back to the late 19th?century, also grew dramatically in the post-war years. And, together, the two agencies turned institutions that had previously struggled to support science into the gold standard for research universities globally.

Science may still be the ¡°endless frontier¡±, but the federal funding that came as a result of Bush¡¯s influential report may not be.

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By 1964, government funding for research and development hit 1.9 per cent of US GDP, amid bipartisan support. But in recent decades it has fallen back to 0.7 per cent. The real growth in support over that period has come from the private sector, but, important though that is, it is too often confined to applied and proprietary research. Real progress, by contrast, is critically dependent on the open, global scientific ecosystem of fundamental research.?

The 2023 report by the Science and Technology Action Committee (a non-partisan alliance of non-profit, academic, foundation and business leaders) strongly endorsed the importance of dramatically increasing federal support for science. The justifications voiced in surveys conducted across multiple sectors, including as many self-identified Republicans as Democrats, included a belief that science powers both the economy and national security and a concern that China was spending a much higher percentage of its GDP on research.?

But then along came the second Trump administration.

While the effort to dismantle DEI in government offices, corporations and universities was announced in advance, the abrupt halt of NIH and NSF funding took universities by surprise. And even as some funding resumed, programmes presumed to have any connection to DEI ¡°policies¡± or ¡°preferences¡± (a far broader interpretation of DEI than had been expected) were peremptorily cancelled, along with other research programmes connected to concerns about climate change.?

At the same time, a new ¨C extremely low ¨C cap on overhead rates was set at 15 per cent, abruptly withdrawing support for necessary scientific equipment, infrastructure and other real costs of research. Meanwhile, programme officers and other administrators have been fired, and elaborate protocols for granting and administering funding have been disrupted in ways no one seems yet able to grasp fully.?

The consequences of all this are likely to be dire. Scientific research not only helps to drive the economy: it is the core reason why US technological innovation has exceeded that of any other nation. And while it may be commonly overlooked, federally funded research really is the bedrock of that dynamic.?

For example, there is a popular myth that Steve Jobs and his team at Apple invented the iPhone. They did package an array of technologies in a single device with nifty design features, to be sure. But, as Mariana Mazzucato has shown in her 2011 book The Entrepreneurial State, those technologies ¨C including the internet, GPS, touchscreen displays and voice-activated Siri ¨C derived from federally supported research.

There are many reasons for the populist scepticism, distrust and downright dislike of science and research universities. Some of these reasons are doubtless our own fault. But it should not only be those directly affected who are upset by the prospect of dismantling the research apparatus of ¡°elite¡± universities ¨C where the bulk of non-profit scientific research in the US is conducted.?

It will also do irreparable harm to the world¡¯s entire scientific, technological and biomedical enterprise, not to mention US prosperity, security and health. University leaders may be correct to be cautious in voicing their alarm, but they would not be wrong to panic. Along with all the rest of us.

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Nicholas B. Dirks is president and CEO of the New York Academy of Sciences and author of the recent book, City of Intellect: The Uses and Abuses of the University (Cambridge: 2023).