Title: Trump Admin's Cuts Hit Universities Hard

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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. Coming up later this hour, we will talk to our own Michael Hill, who got up early this morning for his Morning Edition shift, even though he was out last night co-moderating the New Jersey Republican gubernatorial hopefuls' debate. Michael plus David Cruz from NJ Spotlight News. They'll both be here with excerpts from the debate and their analysis, and to take your New Jersey voter calls. That's coming up later in the show.

We'll continue our 100 Years of 100 Things centennial series, and we'll have some fun today with 100 Years of Celia Cruz. Stay tuned for those things, but here's where we start. Columbia University remains under pressure on multiple fronts. Last night, as the AP reports it, pro-Palestinian demonstrators clashed with security guards. AP says video shared on social media show a long line of NYPD officers entering the university's main library hours after dozens of protesters pushed their way past campus security officers, raced into the building, and then hung Palestinian flags and other banners on bookshelves in an ornate reading room that was in Butler Library, the main library there.

"Some protesters also appear to have scrawled, "Columbia will burn," across framed pictures," says the AP. It continues, "Columbia's acting president, Claire Shipman, said two university public safety officers sustained injuries as protesters forced their way into the building. She said these actions are outrageous, adding that the disruption came as students were studying and preparing for final exams. Shipman said the protesters who would hold up inside a library reading room were asked repeatedly to show identification and to leave, but they refused.

The school then requested the NYPD come in "to assist in securing the building and the safety of our community." The article continues, "Police said at least 80 people had been taken into custody, though it wasn't clear how many came from the demonstration inside the library and how many were outside the building. Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a pro-Palestinian student group, said it had occupied part of Butler Library because it believed the university profited from imperialist violence."

The AP reminds us that in March, Columbia announced sweeping policy changes related to protests following Trump administration threats to revoke its federal funding. Most of you know about that. Nevertheless, the pressure on the school is still coming from Washington, too. The other big Columbia news this week was its announcement of around 180 layoffs of people who are being paid through research grants from the federal government. Those grants were canceled as part of the $400 million in cuts the administration imposed because, they say, of failure to protect Jewish students. Those federal cuts were imposed despite those policy changes that Columbia made that aligned with what Trump demanded.

Looking more closely at the cuts, The New York Times reports that, "300 multi-year research grants, 300, have been cut significantly, many of them in medical research." I guess the punishment for allegedly being soft on antisemitism is not being able to do life-saving medical research. For someone in Washington, that's the punishment that fits the alleged crime. Columbia remains under pressure on multiple fronts.

The news keeps coming at Harvard, too. On Monday, the Trump administration announced that that school would get no more federal grants of any kind for the foreseeable future. As The New York Times describes that, that decision was relayed in a contentious letter to Alan M. Garber, the president of Harvard, from Linda McMahon, the education secretary, who blasted the school for "disastrous mismanagement." Quoting from the letter, "This letter is to inform you that Harvard should no longer seek grants from the federal government, since none will be provided."

The Times says an education department official told them that Harvard's eligibility for research grants depended on its ability to first address concerns about antisemitism on campus, policies that consider a student's race, and complaints from the administration that the university was employing relatively few conservative faculty members. That quote of an administration official in The Times. Of course, Harvard, for its part, asserts that it does follow the law, it is fighting antisemitism, and it does respect viewpoint diversity. The school also says there is no legal basis for Trump's threat to revoke its tax-exempt status.

There's a little bit about Columbia and Harvard, but let's pull back one more step. It's not just the elite private universities that are getting slammed, even though they get so many of the headlines. According to a count by The Times, the National Institutes of Health under Trump have canceled 669 different grants, in whole or in part, and that nearly half of them related to LGBTQ health, specifically. The Times notes how broad the list of universities facing those cuts is, giving us red-state public college examples, Ohio State, Florida State, and the University of Alabama.

We're not done yet. Also, KMO TV in Seattle says the University of Washington reported pro-Palestinian protesters caused more than $1 million in damage to the university's interdisciplinary engineering building during a violent demonstration Monday night. KUOW, public radio in Seattle, quotes the University of Washington president saying that school is facing a budget crisis, in part because of federal funding cuts there. The Chronicle of Higher Education says the University of Washington is also facing a broader federal review. Let's discuss some of this with Rick Seltzer from The Chronicle of Higher Education. He writes their daily briefing newsletter. Rick, thanks for joining us. Welcome back to WNYC.

Rick: Thank you so much for having me.

Brian: Let's start out at the University of Washington, because you covered that in your latest newsletter. What's this broader federal review that you referred to?

Rick: The review came in response to the protests earlier this week, in which I think it was about 30 pro-Palestinian students were arrested on Monday night after allegedly occupying this engineering building that was partly funded by Boeing. The activists targeted it because they alleged that Boeing has done problematic defense work with Israel. I think it was just within the last few hours we've seen counts that 21 students were, in fact, suspended and banned from all of the university's campuses.

In response to that initial protest action, that initial occupation of the building, the Trump administration's antisemitism task force that goes across several government agencies, announced a review of those events, that it did not explicitly say that federal funding was on the line. I believe there was a quote from RFK Jr. saying that the taxpayer dollars should not go to institutions that can't prevent this type of activity from happening.

Brian: Monday's protest with the reported million dollars in damage prompted all of what you just described, or was some of that going to happen anyway or being considered for the University of Washington?

Rick: I do not believe the University of Washington was on the list of institutions that the administration had been investigating previously. There are a lot of lists floating around, but there is one batch of 10 institutions that was announced back in February that the joint antisemitism task force was said to be looking at. I don't believe the University of Washington was among those 10.

Brian: Nevertheless, is this new news regarding University of Washington and the Trump administration an indication of how much all this pressure is not just being applied to Columbia and Harvard or a few other elite blue state private schools, but in a much more systemic campaign to reshape curriculum and campus culture nationwide?

Rick: We at The Chronicle very much have been talking about this as an expansion. If you look at what the Trump administration started doing is they picked the wealthiest private institutions in the country. The Ivy League's institutions, a couple of Ivy Plus institutions to make the big splash. Now you're seeing it expand to a public flagship institution, which is not necessarily as accessible as other institutions.

Most students in this country still go to regional publics, community colleges that are much less exclusive than even a University of Washington, which is a state flagship university. However, it is still a public institution. It is still broadly more accessible than private Ivy League institutions that, to this point, have been the focus of the administration.

Brian: Listeners, help us report this story. Is anyone in the Columbia community listening right now? Maybe you're one of the 180 or so people who just got laid off. Tell us about yourself or maybe your medical research that's getting canceled or scaled back or anyone in the Columbia community on last night's protest or enforcement actions against it. Welcome to call in 212-433-WNYC, call or text, 212-433-9692. You're invited to call in with your observations or experiences or opinions related to the Harvard community as well. Same thing, call in and help us report the developments and points of view there.

The Boston Globe has a story saying among the threatened research grants, there is one for studying near-fatal food allergies. The Globe has another story called stand and fight? Or cut a deal? Wealthy donors have mixed feelings. How about anybody connected to the University of Washington or Florida State or the Ohio State University, red state public colleges under the control of Republicans, facing cuts as cited in that story in The Times? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, with Rick Seltzer from The Chronicle of Higher Education.

As we talk about the scope of the changes that the Trump administration is trying to bring about, should we say something similar about the scope of protests, given the University of Washington story in addition to Columbia this week? Is there an end-of-semester escalation of the pro-Palestinian, pro-divestment movement, set of actions taking place around the country, maybe the most since the spring of last year?

Rick: Yes, I think that's fair to say. Go back to the spring of last year, and the activity we were seeing on campuses was far and away larger. As we approached this year's end of spring semester, the question was would we see a one-year surge? The answer is we've seen an uptick if you look at what we were seeing really for the rest of this year. We're seeing more high-profile building occupations, a few protest encampments set up. I don't think anyone would argue that it amounts to what we saw last year at this time.

I also think it's important to point out that colleges are responding very differently. They are reacting much more quickly. I think many institutions have put in place firmer policies about when protesters are allowed to assemble, what they must do to be able to assemble under the college policies, and how quickly the institution will move in to either call police or tell protesters to disperse. In some cases, we've seen colleges be much more transparent about what happens in these protests.

Swarthmore outside of Philadelphia comes to mind here, which in the last few days had an encampment and really published an almost after-action report, a blow-by-blow of the talks with protesters, the administration's feeling that they were not willing to engage in productive conversation, and why they ultimately had to clear that encampment. You're seeing more institutions do this. Columbia actually did this pretty quickly after last night's activity.

That is a level of information that was not always available quickly and was not always available with the detail that we saw it last year. Now, the question always is, we always hear from activists that that's not the full story, or they have key details wrong. It's a really important development as colleges try to get their arms around this while they are under all this federal pressure.

Brian: Going back to the University of Washington story for just a second, and then I want to talk more about Columbia. Did the Trump administration make a quick assessment that the university did not respond in the way Trump wanted them to, to the protest on Monday night, and say, "That's it, now we're going to investigate you?" [unintelligible 00:14:29] you don't know?

Rick: Washington is interesting in this case because there is another dynamic that's unfolding here, and it's a very subtle one. You have to read a lot of Trump administration statements to pick up on it. The administration actually, in their initial statement, said that they "appreciates the university's strong statement condemning last night's violence and applauds the quick action by law enforcement officers." It called them good first steps and then pivoted to say the university needs to do more to deter future violence and guarantee Jewish students have a safe learning environment.

What you saw there was something that we're seeing in a couple of cases, which is the administration isn't always coming out with just the stick. Now, do not get me wrong. It is very clearly coming out and saying you need to change, you need to do more. The implication being you need to be more stringent. They are also, in certain cases, acknowledging institutions that have done things that they want to see. I think that is largely a change from what we saw over the first few months of the Trump administration. They had not been doing that as much. It had been much more fire and brimstone without any of this good cop business that they're starting now.

Brian: Let's take a phone call. David in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi, David.

David: Thank you for having me. I'd just like to say that I think we're missing the forest for the trees here. This has nothing to do with antisemitism, in my opinion. I think that we're--

Brian: Wait, can I ask you, though, if you have the story that you told our screener that you have, and then you can say anything you want. Were you just accepted to a master's program, but some of your friends are having their acceptances rescinded because of the cuts?

David: Yes.

Brian: Tell us about that. What do you say?

David: Sure, yes. I had a few friends accepted to Princeton for their PhD program in physics, and they were told by their PIs that they lost their grants already. We haven't been talking about the fact that this is already going into effect for the fall semester, which is really unfortunate, and now these students have to resort to going to master's program, which we know are not fully funded.

Brian: David, hang on. I'm definitely going to let you get to your larger thought. Rick, for you, as a journalist at The Chronicle of Higher Education, I haven't heard this yet, that even as people are being laid off and research is being canceled at all kinds of places, that students who've had admissions for the fall accepted are now being told we don't have a place for you after all, that the students are being affected, the students' acceptances are being affected in that way. Is that the first time you've heard that?

Rick: I have heard some rumblings of that. The other thing that we heard, even a few weeks ago, was that some acceptances to some of these programs were actually being made contingent on funding or on the budget situation not changing. While I think it is profound, and I don't mean to understate how serious it is, I think this is something that if you're reading the tea leaves or I reading the tea leaves, unfortunately, I'm not shocked to hear it.

Brian: David, now you can go to your larger point. Thank you for bearing with us. Forest for the trees.

David: I think this is just a part of Trump's larger, as I like to say, China-first policy, because we should all start learning, especially people in research, Mandarin, because that's going to be the new language of research. I think that this has nothing to do with antisemitism. I'm really just trying to figure out. I'd love to know from your guests why. I really just don't think this is antisemitism. I think they just want to defund schools. I'm not sure the reason. I'm trying to figure that out for myself, but I'm not buying that this is just antisemitism. I think that they're just using this as an excuse to defund institutions or punish them for whatever reason for being "liberal."

Brian: I don't even think that they would dispute that. We talk about that a lot in that context. I'll read another comment from a listener, but this is just consistent with things we've discussed many times in a text. "Antisemitism is being weaponized to justify authoritarian attacks on protesting and universities." I don't even think that they would really dispute what the caller just said, Rick. Do you think? You probably know the JD Vance clip. I'm looking for the quote. I have it here somewhere.

Rick: The professors of the enemy clip. Is that the one you're thinking of?

Brian: I don't know that one, but where he says on viewpoint diversity, unless they attack the universities in a big way, there's no way that they're going to get conservative viewpoints to have a shot on campus.

Rick: I think one of the things that makes this such a hard story to cover is that it's not just one line of inquiry. You have the antisemitism investigations and the Trump administration's argument. There is federal taxpayer dollars should not go to subsidize institutions that practice discrimination or do not protect groups of students. Now, that is an expansion of the way that federal funding has been used as a piece of leverage over colleges. There have long been ways that it's been used as leverage to make colleges change. This is a much more aggressive effort to do it.

The sector is increasingly pushing back on this under this idea that this is not about actually about antisemitism. This is an attack on us. Then there are all of these other things that I know we'll be talking about a little later that the administration is doing that also affect research. They're cutting grants or they're withholding grants or they're freezing grants or capping overhead, under which is money that is built into grants to pay for things like building upkeep and equipment and administration, trying to cap that funding under the auspices of efficiency.

It makes it really hard to talk about any one of these kind of prongs in their inquiries or in the changes they're pushing because it is so large. It's really a whole-of-government effort to either cut back on what higher ed is getting, force institutions to change, and in some cases, force institutions that are private institutions that have traditionally been governed independently of the federal government, force them to change and do what the feds want.

Brian: Another listener texts, "The misuse of antisemitism is much like Netanyahu's war." I think we should say, or at least raise some context with respect to the surge in protests that is taking place to some degree right now. Can you say, as a reporter for The Chronicle of Higher Education, if that's tied to the escalation by Israel of its seizure of Gaza? A headline in The New York Times today, for example, "Israel plans to seize control of Gaza's aid." It says the United Nations and its partners have condemned the proposals by Israel, which has been barring deliveries of food and medicine for months. We've had a lot about that on the station in the NPR reporting.

A story from three days ago in The Times, "Netanyahu warns of intensive escalation in Gaza campaign." That one has Netanyahu describing plans for what he called an intensive, use that word, escalation of the 18-month war. I guess the question is, can you say if the new round of campus protests is a reaction to these recent developments, or if this was going to happen anyway?

Rick: I'm glad you asked the question. I will say in my particular role, I tend to go a mile wider than an inch deep. I have not seen specific protest demands or ties made to this escalation or to recent events in Gaza. That does not mean that it has not contributed to some of the activity. It doesn't mean it hasn't made emotions more intense or made actions more intense. I had been wondering the same thing. I think, in some cases, it was probably these were activity protests that were going to take place anyway. Maybe in other cases, it contributed.

The demands, generally, that I have seen from protesters are still about divesting from companies, listen to our divestment demands, have a vote on them, that kind of thing. Again, this doesn't mean it doesn't exist because I have to cover the breadth of the sector. I have not seen specific demands tied to the recent announcements that Israel has made.

Brian: I want to ask you one kind of big picture question about the Columbia layoffs. I guess my question there is the news cycle mostly moved on after Columbia appeared to give Trump what he wanted in March with respect to new antisemitism policies that covered protests in various ways and even installing an academic overseer from outside their Middle East Studies Department. On that department, there was some pushback from students and faculty who saw the school as capitulating. Many listeners probably assumed Columbia would get its $400 million in grant money back after that, but that hasn't happened, correct?

Rick: Yes. I think that was one of the really important turning points in this whole story, actually. That happened shortly before Harvard rejected the administration's demands. Columbia puts forward these things that it wants to do, and it gets blowback from really across the sector for capitulating. Although you talk to some sources and some of the things that they said they would do, maybe any institution would have looked at after it had the kind of protests it had a year ago.

Regardless of how you feel about the offer it made, it makes this offer, and the administration said, "That's a good start. What else can we get out of you effectively?" I think that you have to read that and read that in light of then Harvard very shortly afterward saying, "We will not do the things you want us to do." Now, the list of demands that Harvard presented from the Trump administration looked much more wide-ranging than the list of demands that Columbia seemed to be giving into or seemed to be trying to appease.

We have seen since then the administration loading trial balloons about Columbia going further. I think there was a report just in the last few days that the administration had given Columbia a consent decree with terms that included viewpoint diversity among faculty. That was one of the poison pills that made Harvard walk away was changing the composition, the government dictating who you hire, who you fire. This continues. This kind of very public, even if the news cycle has, as you rightly said, moved on in some cases, this attempt at public negotiation and public leverage over a university, it still continues with Columbia to this day. To your point, there are real ramifications with layoffs. The money is withheld.

Folks who work in research are losing their jobs. Even in cases where it's not tied to antisemitism, maybe we tie this to the caller earlier who talked about grad students' positions not being funded. We're seeing layoffs at other institutions tied to withheld grants under a number of different reasons. This really is something where, whether it's at Columbia because of the antisemitism allegations or the antisemitism investigation, or whether it is at institutions like Duke University or the University of Michigan, we increasingly see leaders talking about either freezing spending, drawing down spending, laying off folks, downsizing because the cash flows they counted on from the federal government are just not arriving.

Brian: After a break, we'll bring in a reporter from the science journal Nature on some of his reporting on the specific effects on medical research so far of the many cuts and some evidence that the administration is trying to stop some kinds of research more than others. That evidence is becoming pretty compelling. I see some more Columbia people are calling in. Faculty member Tom, we see you. We're going to take your call. PhD student Thomas, we see you. We're going to take your call. Stay with us.

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Brian: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. We're talking about the latest on Trump versus colleges and universities. Also, some of the new round of pro-Palestinian protests taking place with Rick Seltzer from The Chronicle of Higher Education and your calls to help us report this story, 212-433-WNYC. Medical researchers laid off from Columbia this week and anyone else, welcome to call in. Also joining us is Max Kozlov, science reporter for the science journal Nature. Max, thanks for coming on. Welcome to WNYC.

Max: Thanks for having me.

Brian: In a minute, we'll get to the story you wrote called The Science Fields and States Hit Hardest by Trump NIH Cuts, in 4 Charts. Let me go first to a couple of callers who are personally affected here. Here's Tom in Manhattan, who says he's a Columbia faculty member. Tom, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling.

Tom: Hi, Brian. Thanks for taking my call. I called you before, but I'm going by Tom today. I am a faculty member at Columbia. I am associated with the medical school. What I wanted to report about funding cuts, first, just a reminder for everyone listening. When federal grants are approved, almost as a rule, universities are spending from their coffers and they are reimbursed from the grants. These grants have been approved already. What the Trump administration is doing is saying that they are going to stop reimbursing these grants, which, of course, puts the university in a difficult position.

I think recent developments are that at divisional and departmental meetings, some of which were planned long, long ago, where individual researchers share updates about what they're doing and perhaps invite people to collaborate as a rule. Every single person who presented reported that some or all of their funding was no longer going to be reimbursed. This is not a small impact. This is impacting virtually all researchers in a major division and department of the university.

Something that I personally feel, and I am hardly alone in this, is that we feel a bit betrayed by the administration that they capitulated. Many people express they wish that we had behaved in the way that Harvard did or reacted in the way that Harvard did. I personally feel, "Hey, we've really got the bully pulpit here." If only we would fare widely, publicly, loudly, that, "Hey, you're cutting funding that is intended to improve outcomes in hypertension, reduce strokes, heart attacks, autism research, on and on and on." I hardly think these things are controversial, and I think it's really craven that the administration is trying to tie this funding to demands which the target shifts day by day by day.

Incidentally to this, I'm aware of what happened last night at Butler Library, honestly only because I was getting emails about it, but it's challenged my own politics. I will just say that I begin to worry that with the Trump administration really weaponizing the idea of antisemitism on campuses, that the ongoing conflicts that probably will continue here at Columbia are going to detract from this other very big and very relevant issue of funding being cut, which I think is an obvious strategy to rein in institutions that for now have the power to challenge the Trump administration.

Brian: Tom, one follow-up. If the university had done something more like what Harvard has done and been defiant in that way, arguably, you would lose even more grant funding. Are you arguing that that would have been worth it for the longer-term prospects for higher ed generally and the funding generally and just academic freedom?

Tom: I'm happy I'm not in a position where I have to make those decisions, but I personally think it would have been worth it. The reason I say that is because, initially, it was $400 million here. Numbers I've heard quoted for Harvard were maybe $9 billion. Now, we could have fought it. I also don't think things would have really been any different. I think that whether Columbia had stood up or not, there were going to be research cuts. It was going to lead to unfortunately layoffs or furloughs. I think that if it's going to end poorly regardless, stand on principle, but we've lost that moral authority here.

Brian: Tom, we appreciate your call. Thank you very much. I see that Harvard professor, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, who's been a guest here a number of times, is calling in, and I'm going to take that call next. Khalil, in South Orange.

Khalil: Yes. Hi, Brian.

Brian: Hi. Thank you for calling. How do you want to add to the conversation?

Khalil: I just wanted to say that much of the media framing about how Columbia and Harvard have responded to these authoritarian demands by the Trump administration, I think, missed something important, and it's revealing now in the Harvard Post lawsuit response, which is that we call it appeasement or capitulation. It seems certainly in Harvard's case, where I remain associated with the university after almost a decade, that the Harvard administration largely agrees in the main with many of the concerns expressed by people like Elise Stefanik about antisemitism and, of course, the Trump administration more broadly.

It looks more like an abusive relationship for the administration of Harvard, where they are essentially saying, "Look, we agree with you. We are making changes. We are censoring faculty. We have punished protesters in ways that compromise our commitment to academic freedom and free speech. Now, we are even dismantling DEI. We are changing the name of our core values. We are sharing disciplinary records with HHS." In other words, Columbia did it first without filing a lawsuit. Harvard did it after the lawsuit, but the results remain the same.

Brian: Can both things be true to some degree? Can there actually be a problem of antisemitism on campus that needs to be addressed, and pressure from the Trump administration that they're capitulating to that extends to academic freedom, but both things can be true?

Khalil: Yes, but the problem is that, as a Black faculty member in higher education, and I've been doing this job for 25 years. I've worked at essentially four universities. Anti-Black racism and anti-Black racism are in many ways low-grade problems that are baked into the curriculum. They aren't vandalized posters. They aren't global chance against a state actor like Israel. You literally are trained to believe at some fundamental level that something's wrong with Black people, that their RQs are lower, they're more likely to commit crimes, that they are culturally irresponsible.

I'm not saying anything that isn't part of what conservatives call their own version of truth when it comes to academia. This is precisely what conservatives have been calling for more of. My point is this. At no point in the past 25 years of my career has there ever been a relationship between anti-Black racism and the federal government on the terms of Title 6 discrimination, on the terms of changing disciplinary policies, admissions policies, security policies, mask policies. We've got a problem where we've taken what are particularly individual cases of antisemitism. That's the other problem.

Every instance of investigating a problem of anti-Black racism on a campus turns on a specific incident and a specific alleged perpetrator. Here, we've just got blanket calls for antisemitism everywhere all at once. I'll just say this to finish. The antisemitism task force report that was released by Harvard last year actually points to academic material that situates settler colonialism, which is an academic theory that explains how Europeans came to certain places, like the Americas, like Australia, like New Zealand, and they stayed. They took land, they exploited people, they enslaved people. That's what settler colonialism is in the main.

They are identifying the university and its constituents that that's antisemitic. That's absurd. It's not absurd because people can't feel that it's antisemitic. It's absurd because the university is affirming it, and that's the problem here. That's why I think this is more about an abusive relationship between a university saying, "We agree with you, Trump administration. We're trying to change our campus. Antisemitism is on fire here," but it's not. It is a problem, but it is not the problem that they've made it out to be.

Brian: I'll give you one follow up on that because it touches on something that we've talked about a lot on this show, which is even if the problem of antisemitism is real to some degree, which I personally believe that it is, the administration seems to have no interest in fighting the otherisms in our society. It's as if racism no longer exists except anti-white racism and affirmative action as they see it. It's as if Islamophobia doesn't exist or bias against LGBTQ people or women. I don't know if that becomes the legal basis for anything in court, but they seem to be concerned, maybe legitimately, with one kind of bias, but they seem to have completely dismissed every other kind of bias that's still so real.

Khalil: I can certainly tell you that as someone who has taught about racism and colonialism for, again, nearly a quarter century and someone whose class was called out by the Chairwoman Virginia Foxx of the December 5th hearing that led to essentially the resignation of Liz Magill at Penn and Harvard's Claudine Gay, there is no question that the pathway to solving antisemitism, according to both the Trump administration and Harvard officials, is to do less focusing on everything else to discourage the notion that there is a racism problem in the world, that colonialism did happen and continues to happen in many forms.

This essentially is an argument for a trade-off. We have to do less of one in order to provide Jewish safety on our campuses. That's the argument made by MAGA Republicans in the Trump administration, and that is the argument that essentially the Harvard administration is going along with.

Brian: Professor Muhammad, thank you for calling in. We appreciate it.

Khalil: You're welcome.

Brian: Now we're going to go back to the funding cuts at Columbia. Thomas in Washington Heights, a PhD student in microbiology, I believe, who's been waiting very patiently on hold. Thomas, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in.

Thomas: Hi, Brian. Thank you so much for having me. I'm Tom Murphy. I am a first-year PhD student in Microbiology and Immunology here at Columbia Medical Campus. I'm also a proud new department organizer for student workers at Columbia. I just wanted to call attention to a very under-discussed aspect of the funding cuts here at Columbia. I think a lot of the conversation has focused around the pretextual character of the Trump administration's claims that these cuts are related to antisemitism. I think a lot of your guests have already commented on that.

I wanted to mention that of the recent 180 position terminations that came out Tuesday, so these are mostly postdocs and associate research scientists here at Columbia whose jobs were terminated. This overwhelmingly hit researchers working on HIV, working on LGBTQ mental health, working on the mental health for trans adolescents, as well as maternal care and other aspects of women's health. I think a lot of the conversation around this has been around academic freedom, and a lot of very abstract language about the Trump administration weaponizing the pretext of antisemitism against academic freedom.

I just wanted to call out that, of course, it's academic freedom, but it is also very, very concrete issue of homophobia and racism and the fact that these are all so-called DEI grants that are being canceled. They're coming specifically for these public health projects that, of course, have congressional-- These are congressionally appropriated funds for LGBTQ people, for people of color. Columbia hasn't said a damn thing about the fact that so many of these grants have been related to these communities in particular. That's what I needed to say.

Brian: Thomas, thank you very much for calling in. In fact, that's a perfect segue into what we were going to talk about next, precisely with our other guest, who's also been waiting very patiently as we've been juggling so many moving parts on this Trump administration and university story, and that is Max Kozlov, science reporter for the science journal Nature. I referenced the story that he wrote last month, called The Science Fields and State Hit Hardest by Trump NIH Cuts. Max, one of your charts, to the point of the caller, says nearly 29% of the grants terminated were for research that mentioned HIV aids. Use that as a starting point and take us further.

Max: Like you mentioned, so much of this research has focused on HIV and AIDS, on COVID-19, and it seems to be a growing list of research topics that the administration finds problematic. They've terminated grants about vaccine hesitancy. They've terminated grants researching misinformation. The HIV/AIDS grants, like I said, make up a huge proportion of all the hundreds of grants that they've been terminating so far.

It's especially problematic because these are some of the most vulnerable populations in our country that are now being left without answers as to how to prevent disease transmission, how to treat their condition. A lot of it might be collateral damage because the administration has come in full force for research about gender and sexual minorities, but you can't just separate these things out. These things intersect in so many different ways. That's why you're seeing so much of the research on HIV and AIDS being canceled right now.

Let me just say that this is absolutely unprecedented. The NIH does not terminate grants. I've talked with folks from the agency that have said that in the last 10, 15 years, they could count the number on one hand of the number of grants they've terminated. It's usually because there's some kind of research fraud, or they're making zero progress on the research. Not what's going on here. Here, they're just doing keyword searches and finding anything that has to do with LGBT+ communities and terminating it.

Brian: Looking a little further into the chart that reveals that, it says, "As we cited, nearly 29% of the grants terminated were for research that mentioned HIV/AIDS." Going on from there, "About a quarter of the grants terminated were related to the health of transgender people. Other topic areas that the Trump team has deemed no longer in the interests of the agency are COVID-19 and the effects of climate change on health."

This makes it sound, Max, like they're not just targeting universities based on alleged antisemitism or DEI or liberal versus conservative curriculum, which is the impression that people may get from following the news, but going after specific areas of research that target things that are not in their ideological wheelhouse. That's what the evidence seems to show you, huh?

Max: Exactly. Exactly. The agency is saying that this is because of the agency's priorities, that they have just changed what they want to fund. Some of the evidence shows that these are directly tied to Trump's executive orders. That's kind of problematic because the NIH, how it normally works, is you have two rounds of peer review from other scientists, and only the top of the top research gets funded. It is extremely competitive, and these are areas that scientists have deemed the most worthy of research.

Now you're seeing Trump administration officials cut left and right, and that's not how science is done. We reported a story about transgender health, where we reported in the chart story you mentioned that they've terminated about half of all of the work that's being done about transgender health. Then we got email correspondence from the acting director at the time, Matthew Memoli of NIH, and they said that they want to fund research on transgender health, but only as it relates to regret and detransition.

Not only have they cut all of the research in this field, they want to say, "Here are the topics that we want to fund, and they relate to the most negative parts of the trans experience." They're missing so much of what the trans community needs more research on. The reason that there are incredible disparities in lifespan and how healthy these populations are. For example, why the rates of HIV/AIDS are higher in those communities, but no, they're saying, "We want to fund research on regret after transitioning."

Brian: Research to help back up a political point, which is exactly what they accuse mainstream science of doing. To come full circle as the segment comes to an end, Rick Seltzer, back to you at The Chronicle of Higher Education. Where's this all headed? Is it only going to be the courts that settle these disputes?

Rick: I think yes, is the answer. Ultimately, the courts are going to dictate how all this goes. I think I increasingly have a tough time seeing this resolving itself within the next few years. There have been a lot of cases where the administration has lost a case on a funding freeze or been enjoined from certain things. It caps on overhead funding at one agency, they try, and it gets enjoined, and they announce a cap at another agency. I think increasingly we're just going to see them squeezing off the flow of funding for things they don't want, and they lose in court, and they'll try another tactic.

I do think this is going to be a story that repeats itself over the next few years. I think academics are probably going to see this wonderful thing we've always had, which is a government that keeps its promises to fund your research, even if priorities change, it upholds the contract. I think that's really going to be called into question again and again in the next few years, no matter what the courts say.

Brian: Rick and Max, thank you both for joining us today.

Max: Thank you.

 

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