The Boston Globe, March 2025
Just eight weeks into his term, Donald Trump has plunged the nation’s top research universities into a period of austerity. More than a dozen schools, including Harvard, MIT, Brown, and the University of Pennsylvania, have frozen hiring. Johns Hopkins University will lay off more than 2,000 workers. Boston University and Yale have directed administrators to slow spending. The University of Massachusetts’ medical school rescinded dozens of admissions offers to Ph.D. candidates and said layoffs are “going to be necessary.”
Schools cited the same reason for these sweeping cuts: uncertainty about their financial futures driven by President Trump’s threats and early moves to slash billions of dollars of federal funding, much of it tied to scientific research. Already, federal agencies canceled research grants for university labs and yanked $400 million from Columbia University as punishment for alleged inaction on antisemitism.
