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Only two months after his inauguration, it’s happening: Universities are caving to the Trump administration. On Friday, Columbia University, which was hit with $400 million in cuts to its federal funding as punishment for its pro-Palestine student protests, acquiesced to the administration’s demands—to ban masks, hire security officers authorized to arrest students, and cede control of the school’s department of Middle East, South Asian, and African studies, among other politically charged requests—in a deal to have its funding reinstated. The Wall Street Journal reported over the weekend that more than 50 institutions have hired new lobbyists since Trump was elected, with many of those hires being Trump-friendly Republicans. The University of California, which has similarly come under criticism for “antisemitism” on campus, has said it will stop using diversity statements in hiring.
And we can expect the Trump administration’s ideological war on higher education to continue. Last Wednesday, the administration said it would suspend $175 million in funding to the University of Pennsylvania because it allowed transgender athletes to compete in sports. The next day, Sen. Bill Cassidy announced that the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee would hold a hearing this coming Thursday about “antisemitic disruptions on campus.”
One would be forgiven for wondering why the schools haven’t put up more of a fight: Harvard University, for example, has instituted a hiring freeze in preparation for cuts from the Trump administration—even as it has an endowment of more than $50 billion. If the major elite universities, operating in Democratic-governed states with the support of vastly wealthy donors, cannot stand up for their own intellectual autonomy, state schools and smaller colleges surely stand no chance. To understand why these institutions haven’t taken more of a stand, Slate spoke with Robert Kelchen, a professor of higher education at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Kelchen, an academic department head himself, researches higher-education finance. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Slate: Can you explain to me what power a presidential administration has over universities, both public and private?
Robert Kelchen: The power is essentially the same for every college in the country that gets federal funding, and it does not make a difference whether it’s public or private. If the federal government is giving money to students for research, all that money can be taken away. And that’s the leverage that the federal government has over the vast majority of higher ed. Some large universities can get well over $1 billion a year in total revenue from the federal government.
For the largest universities, most of the money is going toward research and hospitals. We typically think of colleges as being for teaching students, and that’s a substantial part of what many smaller colleges get in federal funding [through student financial aid]. But for the cases that are most up in the air right now, research and medical funding is most substantial.
Where does that research funding come from?
The National Institutes of Health, Department of Defense, Department of Energy, Department of Agriculture—basically any federal agency that gives out money has some kind of leverage, and it’s all being coordinated in a way that we haven’t seen previously.
We saw an attempt to go after the University of Maine after the state’s governor stood up to Trump over a couple of transgender high school students. The USDA then tried to cut $100 million in funding to the university. [The University of Maine’s funding was later reinstated, after Sen. Susan Collins intervened.] I think it shows that the administration is looking at trying to find every lever possible to go after funding from across the federal government.
Is this the first time we’ve seen something like this?
Yes. There’s never been an administration that has gone after grant funding for universities to try and exert some sort of ideological influence over the university. Previously, if a college did something bad, the Department of Education would come after it and potentially do a fine or a sanction of some kind. But we didn’t see the coordinated action across multiple agencies.
There have been much smaller things. An example is Title IX for sexual assault and gender equity, which institutions have to comply with in order to get federal financial aid for their students. But I’m not aware of any institution that’s actually lost money as a result of that. Sometimes there have been investigations, but no one has lost all their funding. Sometimes colleges can get some fines for not following procedures—think of what happened at Michigan State and at Penn State following athletic scandals related to sexual assaults. But no one has faced hundreds of millions of dollars of sanctions across the board because of one policy, [like UPenn currently is].
How do these sanctions work? For these cuts, does the government go through and pull specific grants and contracts, or is it a situation in which it’s just naming a large numerical amount and the university has to figure out where to specifically make cuts to be able to meet demands?
Both. When the Trump administration came in, their first target was any research grants broadly tied to diversity, equity, and inclusion, using a set of keywords that sometimes caught studies that had nothing to do with those topics—like those using the word bias, which is a common statistical term. So that was a more targeted look at things. And then, in the last couple of weeks, we’ve seen several universities get large amounts of their federal funding targeted, and that was more of We’re going to take away a large amount of your money.
It seems to me that it would be pretty unpopular to defund a university hospital and that both the administration and a university would want to avoid cuts there. What exactly is putting that medical funding under threat?
There are three things. The first is anything broadly related to DEI. All those grants designed for things like health equity—those are all targeted. The second is indirect costs, an amount put on top of grants to help cover things like keeping the lights on, making sure that you’re keeping patients safe, having adequate facilities. The Trump administration tried to severely cut that rate, even though Congress, in this current budget bill, said they couldn’t do that. And then the third is what’s happening at this moment at Columbia and Penn, where the administration is putting large chunks of federal funding at risk.
And the number is so large that the university would probably be forced to cut some medical research?
Yes. The way that big grants work, especially in the medical field, is you have people hired full time to work on them. And where a lot of those savings would happen is if the grant goes away and the scientists and researchers lose their jobs. This has the possibility of shutting down medical trials that are doing some really promising work, because the funding is cut in the middle of the grant, and there’s no other realistic source of money.
Does the presidential administration have any additional levers in terms of exerting its own priorities over public universities?
They’re really the same as for privates, with the exception that if you’re in a conservative state, you can try to double the pressure by also getting the state government involved. But for a lot of the key issues out there—campus protests, transgender students—the Republican states have already done much of what the Trump administration’s trying to do, like getting rid of anything tied to DEI, doing everything possible to shut down campus protests. I’m in Tennessee, and these sorts of actions have been happening for about a decade.
Did any leaders in higher education recognize ahead of this the vulnerabilities that came with this dependence on the federal government? Were there warning signs for this attack on the universities?
Project 2025 mentioned efforts to clamp down on any DEI-related issues and trying to cut the indirect cost rate. But I don’t think people thought that the administration would go after existing grants in this way. And I think, just more broadly speaking, the first Trump administration said a lot of things about just how they wanted to change higher education, but their actions were more limited in part because they lost court cases and in part because a lot of the key people were inexperienced. But the Trump team did a good job organizing over the last four years.
Were there any efforts that you are aware of to prepare universities for what the Trump administration might aim to do?
Really, the only thing that college leaders can do is try to explain why the work is valuable and important. And that’s a difficult point to make with the public and an impossible point to make with an administration that has made removing any mention of DEI a policy. It’s just a battle that colleges have absolutely no chance of winning.
That’s really the only thing they can do? Just messaging?
They could try lobbying their members of Congress, but if their member of Congress is a Democrat, the administration’s not likely to listen. And if the member of Congress is a Republican, it’s hard to change the administration’s priorities when Congress has in many cases ceded to the power of the administration.
I imagine that everyone’s probably working on putting out the fire happening now, but do you think there will be any conversations about insulating universities in the future, to protect their academic integrity? I’m curious if this is going to force universities into broader discussions about how they can protect themselves from a politically motivated administration.
I think this is happening behind the scenes, with lobbyists and institutional leaders meeting. The challenge is, very few leaders want to be the public face of an effort like this, because they fear that their institution is going to become a target.
There are a couple of Christian institutions that do not accept federal funding, so they don’t have to comply with civil rights guidance. A big one there is Hillsdale College, in Michigan, which has been one of the intellectual thought leaders for the administration.
How are those religious schools able to forgo federal funding?
They’re small enough. They get enough money from tuition, and they raise a lot from like-minded donors. So with those things put together, they can afford not to offer federal financial aid. And they don’t do research, so they’re not worried about grants.
So that route is available only for small liberal arts colleges that have no interest in research?
Yes.
I have to ask: What is the point of an endowment if it can’t help a university in crises like this?
Well, an endowment can potentially help, but it’s important to realize that an endowment is not just a giant piggy bank you can tap into for whatever you want. It’s a series of often thousands or tens of thousands of separate accounts. And most of them have criteria about how they can be used. For example, quite a few individual endowment funds are so explicit that they can be used only for a scholarship for a student from a certain high school and with a certain major. That’s not something you can use to plug a general budget deficit. There are some funds that are unrestricted, but it’s a relatively small amount [of them].
These elite schools are under attack in part because they are really enticing targets for a conservative administration. But would you consider smaller liberal arts colleges that don’t have these large research programs to be at any risk right now?
They are at risk. Given how successful the pressure campaigns have been against the elite colleges, other colleges, from your regional public university to a community college, [will likely] face the same pressures. But at this point, I’m not as worried about that.
I am more and more worried about what happens when students start in the fall. The Trump administration has said that none of their cuts will affect financial aid, that you’ll still be able to get your Pell Grants and student loans. But with the vast majority of people at the Department of Education fired, and potentially even functions at the department moving elsewhere across government, if something breaks, I don’t know if there will be anyone there to fix it. The federal financial aid system was already held together by contractors and duct tape and chewing gum, and now we’ve lost the contractors. If students can’t get their funding in time to go to college, are they going to end up going? I’m worried about some of these small colleges even being able to make payroll, because they’re running such tight budgets and they’re dependent enough on student financial aid that even getting money two weeks later than they were expecting could cause some serious issues.
But I think the most inviting targets right now are still the elite privates—and then the big blue-state public universities: UC–Berkeley, UCLA, Michigan, Rutgers. I think they’re next in line.
