EVANSTON, Ill. – The Trump administration has frozen about $790 million in funding for Northwestern University amid civil rights investigations.
The administration has also frozen more than $1 billion earmarked for Cornell University in New York. The White House confirmed the funding pauses late Tuesday, according to The Associated Press. The New York Times was the first to report the news.
In a statement, Northwestern spokesperson Jon Yates said the school was “informed by members of the media that the federal government plans to freeze a significant portion of our federal funding. The university has not received any official notification from the federal government.”
The funding freeze apparently involves grants and contracts with the departments of Agriculture, Defense, Education, and Health and Human Services, according to the officials, who spoke to The New York Times on the condition of anonymity to discuss the decision before it was announced.
Yates said that federal funds “drive innovative and lifesaving research.” As examples, he cited “the recent development by Northwestern researchers of the world’s smallest pacemaker and research fueling the fight against Alzheimer’s disease.
“This type of research is now at jeopardy,” Yates wrote.
The federal action to withhold funds doesn’t surprise Jacqueline Stevens, president of Northwestern’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors, which advised university leaders against cooperating with the government on antisemitism, anti-diversity and anti-LGBTQ policies: “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. 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.”
Stevens said of the Trump administration’s endgame and its attacks on higher education: “They do have a general goal of trying to eviscerate universities, because they are places of sustained, thoughtful criticism of insanity. And this has been an objective of the [political] right for a really long time. … The big picture is to take the oxygen out of the university and hope that it just goes away.”
Northwestern is being investigated by the Department of Education for “widespread antisemitic harassment,” the department announced this year. Yates insisted that the university “has fully cooperated with investigations by both the Department of Education and Congress.”
The legal clinics at Northwestern’s law school are also being investigated by a congressional committee. The Committee on Education and the Workforce sent a letter to the Evanston school in late March, saying “there are indications that Northwestern has used its taxpayer-supported institutional resources” to “engage in progressive-left political advocacy.”
The Trump administration has been on a campaign of canceling or suspending funds at the country’s elite schools, including $400 million in cuts to Columbia University.
On March 31, Northwestern officials released a report outlining their various efforts to combat alleged antisemitism, including restricting when and where students can protest, as well as streamlining investigations against students and staff. Students are also now required to watch an anti-bias training video that some faculty and students say includes elements that characterize criticism of Israel as antisemitic.
Lisa Kurian Philip covers higher education for WBEZ, in partnership with Open Campus. Follow her on Twitter @LAPhilip.