1 week Ago By Lisa Kurian Philip
Northwestern University faculty say the Trump administration’s decision to freeze $790 million in federal funding to the school will disrupt research that benefits communities across the Chicago area and the country. Northwestern receives just over $1 billion in research funding each year, according to a 2024 audited financial report. The Trump funding freeze could wipe out nearly all of it.
“There are grants to help teachers develop better middle school math curricula. And those stop. There are grants to run medical tests in the medical school on a potential new drug — that test has to stop halfway through,” said Ian Hurd, a political science professor and president-elect of the Northwestern Faculty Senate.
“The research [projects] of the university ...
are really investments in the future that everybody benefits from — medicines and cellphone batteries and cleaning up coal plant emissions.” Northwestern spokesperson Jon Yates said university leaders were informed of the federal funding pause by members of the media — and as of Wednesday afternoon, they had still not received official notice from the Trump administration about what the pause entails. White House officials on Tuesday said the government is investigating Northwestern over alleged civil rights violations.
“Federal funds that Northwestern receives drive innovative and lifesaving research, like the recent development by Northwestern researchers of the world’s smallest pacemaker, and research fueling the fight against Alzheimer’s disease ,” Yates said in an email. “This type of research is now at jeopardy. The University has fully cooperated with investigations by both the Department of Education and Congress.
” Professor John Rogers, who helped develop the tiny pacemaker, said earlier this week he hopes the device will “eliminate the need for surgical extraction of temporary pacemakers and therefore reduce the risk of cardiac injury.” He said the pacemaker, which dissolves after a couple weeks, has been tested on animal models and human hearts from organ donors, but the team still needs FDA approval to test the device in a human patient. Rogers did not respond to calls asking how the funding pause might affect that work.
The world’s tiniest pacemaker is a temporary heartbeat regulator smaller than a grain of rice that can be injected, controlled by light, and eventually dissolves. Northwestern says the research that went into this pacemaker is the kind of work threatened by the Trump funding pause. JOHN A.
ROGERS/Getty Peter Barris, chairman of Northwestern’s Board of Trustees, told members of the university’s faculty senate at a Wednesday night meeting that “although we don’t know the scale of the financial impacts, we know that this will be a period of shared sacrifice.” Dozens of students and faculty at the meeting Wednesday wore purple shirts that read, “Don’t give in: It won’t stop here.” “We’ve heard suggestions from faculty and other stakeholders that Northwestern should resist the federal directives .
.. and we should stand up and fight,” Barris said.
“I can assure you that we’re exploring all possible ways to communicate the value of higher education and of what we’re doing here at Northwestern in particular, and to mitigate the risk to this great university. That said, we must comply with the law.” Northwestern joins a growing list of universities — including Columbia, Brown, the University of Pennsylvania and Cornell — that have been targeted by the Trump administration for what many allege are illegal federal funding cuts.
“It is clear that the federal government seems to have taken an antagonistic stance toward universities across the country,” Hurd said. “It seems to me that the U.S.
government is a little bit afraid, a little bit anxious about its own position, and so, it’s looking to undermine any institution that can stand up to it. Julius Lucks, a chemical and biological engineering professor at Northwestern, has been working on providing low-cost, at-home water-quality testing for communities that need it most in the Chicago area. Lucks’ research is funded in part by the National Science Foundation, but in February, his work was included on a list of projects that the U.
S. Senate Commerce Committee claimed promotes “neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda.” “It literally seems like a big win for society to support this stuff, and it was a little bit confusing why [my research] was on any list,” Lucks said.
He said his team is thinking through next steps, given the news about the funding freeze. Lucks said there needs to be a broader collective movement to “convince the administration that they need to reverse course on this.” “I think we’re starting to be pretty galvanized.
This is just important stuff, and it’s really important for the public to know that scientists are doing this work for them. We’re doing this for everybody, and we need to get the word out so the public starts to really value this type of work,” Lucks said. Northwestern sophomore Erika Ruiz-Yamamoto works for a lab researching glioblastoma, a rare form of brain cancer, and is pursuing individual research in understanding Hispanic perceptions of the American healthcare system.
She said the funding freeze could put both research projects at risk. “I definitely have a lot of plans looking forward to the future, and it just feels like they’ve been just taken away, especially with how abrupt all these changes were,” Ruiz-Yamamoto said. Biological studies senior Joshua Jenkins said he was most concerned with the Trump administration attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion, “When we see less diverse teams and less diverse research, we aren’t really serving the entire American population, but just a small section of it,” Jenkins said.
“And I hope that in the future, we’re able to somewhat get back on track, to make sure we’re helping everyone and not just one specific type of American.” Journalism senior Isabelle Butera said the funding freeze is connected to larger political issues on campuses and said she believes the Trump administration will “make up whatever reason it wants” to attack big-name universities. She called on the university’s leadership to stand up to Washington.
“If this university is willing to comply with an authoritarian regime that is intent on destroying all of academia, all of free speech, is intent on prosecuting our most marginalized communities, then I don’t know what Northwestern stands for,” Butera said. Before the funding freeze was announced, officials at Northwestern had taken multiple actions to demonstrate their compliance with Trump’s various executive orders, from scrubbing mentions of diversity, equity and inclusion from department webpages to removing the website for the campus women’s center altogether. On March 31, university leaders released a report detailing changes they have made in response to mounting pressure from conservative members of Congress and President Trump to do more to combat alleged antisemitism on campus.
Those changes included restricting where and when students can protest — and streamlining the disciplinary process for students and faculty. Many faculty members, including Jacqueline Stevens, president of Northwestern’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors, had advised Northwestern leaders against cooperating with Trump. “We gave them free advice early on that turned out to be accurate, which was to point out that this kind of anticipatory obedience was a terrible idea,” Stevens said.
“And they disregarded that, and they went along with the fancy, high-paid lobbyists they hired in Washington and hoped that that would save them. And it didn’t.” Higher education advocates say it is not too late for Northwestern and other universities to come together to fight what they say are illegal attempts by the Trump Administration to withhold federal funding as a means of controlling campus policies.
“This is really a case where institutions that are often rivals in normal times need to not be rivals now,” said Kevin Carey, vice president for education policy at the progressive think tank, New America. “They need to stand up, not only on their own behalf, but on behalf of all of higher education.” “If the richest universities in the world won’t stand up for themselves, then everyone else is in a pretty tough spot,” he said.
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