Editor’s Note: The following excerpt was originally published by the National Association of Scholars on April 15, 2025. It has been edited to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines and is cross-posted here with permission.
The news this morning is, as one headline puts it, “Federal Government Freezes $2.26 Billion Funding to Harvard after It Refuses to Comply.” These are fast changing times. By next week, Harvard may have clawed back that money, or President Trump may have doubled the cut.
Numerous American colleges and universities find themselves in peril of losing some or all of their federal research funding. Harvard has leaped to the front of the line. Until now, Columbia University, because it was named first, attracted the most attention. The other Ivy League universities are not far behind, and the Chronicle of Higher Education has published a list of 77 colleges that are in peril of such cuts.
The prospect has unleashed a torrent of words from worried and defensive college presidents and faculty members and rather terse responses from members of the Trump administration. The National Association of Scholars has published commentary from both supporters and critics of the potential cuts…
Read the full statement here.
Image by Xiangkun ZHU on Unsplash
“The U.S. Department of Education (ED), for example, has opened an investigation into 45 universities that were part of “The Ph.D. Project,” a racially-exclusionary initiative to advance the education of minority students in various fields. ED alleges that these universities violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.”
UMass Amherst did one better: It got a series of NSF grants to partially fund Black-only PhD fellowships in STEM fields. The deal was UMass put up 50% of the funding and NSF put up the other 50% — I always thought that this had to be a Title VI violation but the NSF funded it.
This was nearly 20 years ago now, so the statutes of limitations has probably expired, but UMass is still doing this, just not as explicitly.. I can only imagine what a stem-to-stern audit of that place would find.