Trump vs higher education: a report from March 21, 2025

Today I posted another vlog report on the latest Trump and higher education developments.  

If you’re new to this series, these videos are where I summarize what the Trump administration has been doing to higher education, and how colleges and universities have responded. It’s a little different from my usual video work, which focuses on the future of higher ed, and the future in general. 

Here’s I’ll share the video for you to watch (or, better, listen to) and also my notes for you to read:

1. At the Federal level

The Trump administration announced it was suspending $175 million in funding to the University of Pennsylvania, due to the institution not sufficiently complying with new antitrans policies.  There will be more such cuts in response to trans athletes, according to a Fox News report. It’s not clear at this time which federal agencies and departments are involved.  The University says it hasn’t “received any official notification or any details” so far. 

President Trump issued an executive order trying to abolish the Department of Education.  The order criticized the department, then called for this action:

The Secretary of Education shall, to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law, take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return authority over education to the States and local communities while ensuring the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely.

Note the hedging and qualifications there, due to the fact that by law the president cannot abolish the department.  Instead, it takes an act of Congress to do so.  What the order may cause is moving some departmental functions to other federal units. As of this recording, it looks like Trump is moving some student loans to the Small Business Administration, and some other functions to Health and Human Services. Also note that this move realizes one more Project 2025 action. (Here’s the relevant post from  our reading of that important document.)    

The Trump administration is also developing a plan to cut the Environmental Protection Agency, including its research wing.  The New York Times reported on documents it said Democratic officials examined: “The E.P.A.’s plan, which was presented to White House officials on Friday for review, calls for dissolving the agency’s largest department, the Office of Research and Development, and purging up to 75 percent of the people who work there.”  This is consistent with Project 2025, which called for ending the EPA’s climate change work. (Here’s our relevant post.)

Turning to the  National Institutes of Health (NIH), secretary brain wormKennedy is requesting researchers not work on mRNA vaccines.  According to one account, “National Institutes of Health officials have urged scientists to remove all references to mRNA vaccine technology from their grant applications.”  As per another, “A scientist at a biomedical research center in Philadelphia wrote to a colleague, in an email reviewed by KFF Health News, that a project officer at NIH had ‘flagged our pending grant as having an mRNA vaccine component.’ ‘It’s still unclear whether mRNA vaccine grants will be canceled,’ the scientist added.”  Furthermore,

A senior official at the NIH’s National Cancer Institute confirmed to KFF that NIH acting Director Matthew Memoli “sent an email across the NIH instructing that any grants, contracts, or collaborations involving mRNA vaccines be reported up the chain to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s office and the White House.

It’s unclear if Kennedy will seek to restrict or punish academic medical and public health research, not to mention teaching, but this is a possibility we should monitor.

Agents of The Department of Homeland Security arrested a Georgetown post-doctoral fellow for deportation.  Indian citizen Dr. Badar Khan Suri* was working on a student visa at the School of Foreign Service’s Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. An Assistant Secretary Dept. of Homeland Security said on X, formerly known as Twitter, that Suri was:

actively spreading Hamas propaganda and promoting antisemitism on social media. Suri has close connections to a known or suspected terrorist, who is a senior advisor to Hamas. The Secretary of State issued a determination on March 15, 2025 that Suri’s activities and presence in the United States rendered him deportable under INA section 237(a)(4)(C)(i).

Family connections may also have played a role. According to Georgetown’s student paper, “Khan Suri’s wife, Mapheze Saleh “is a first-year graduate student in the School of Foreign Service’s (SFS) Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. [additionally] Saleh’s father, Ahmed Yousef, served as “a former Hamas official who remains close to its leaders,” according to The New York Times.”    

Meanwhile, US Customs allegedly refused an unnamed French scientist entry to the US because he had anti-Trump commentary on his phone. 

The United States Department of Agriculture is cutting subscriptions to many scientific journals, which makes it harder for USDA researchers to do their work.  While this unsubscribing might not have much impact on those journals, it could signal a broader agenda for the government to cut subscriptions, and perhaps to inspire others to do the same. If this occurs at scale, it could certainly hurt those publishers, as Kent Anderson suggests at his The Geyser newsletter.  

At the state level, several Texan legislators proposed bills to survey college faculty for bias.  Some academics have spoken against these laws in hearings. 

2 Cuts

Within higher education, one response to Trump actions is cuts to programs and operations. 

• Some universities have announced hiring freezes, like the entire University of California system. 

3 DEI

One area of cuts involves DEI, a particular focus of this administration.   Campus anti-DEI moves have continued this week.  One example comes from the University of California system, which ended requiring job applicants to share diversity statements.  Elsewhere, academic publishers are concerned that purchases of materials – books, journal subscriptions, articles – about DEI topics will decline. 

4 Reactions

There is a lot of academic silence in response to the Trump’s administration’s actions, as well as silence from academically-adjacent people and enterprises. But there is also protest, resistance, and actions.  There are also other responses across American society.

Financial ratings agency Moody’s just downgraded its outlook for American colleges and universities to negative, in response to Trump administration actions.

Elsewhere, some faculty and staff are making public statements in response.   A friend forwarded me an email from librarians at one state, detailing the benefits IMLS provides, which will be lost if that agency’s new leader cuts services. 

Eighteen Constitutional Law Scholars published an article criticizing Trump actions against Columbia University as illegally restricting free speech. That university rescinded degrees it previously granted to several students who protested Israeli actions last year.  Columbia is also negotiating with the Trump administration, trying to restore federal research funding.  According to some press accounts, such as the Wall Street Journal (What’s News, March 19) and NBC, the university is “close to yielding” to Trump’s demands, although discussions are still fluid.     

One institution, Dartmouth College, retained a leading Republican lawyer to defend itself. 

A coalition is planning a day of academic labor action on April 17th.

There are also some international responses.  According to Science,

Universities around the world have reported seeing an uptick in applications from U.S.-based researchers, who face an increasingly uncertain climate under President Donald Trump’s administration. And some countries and their institutions are already looking to use the opportunity to attract new talent and reverse the steady migration of scientists to the U.S. in recent decades.   

There are also cases of student support for Trump.  A Brown University student, inspired by DOGE, analyzed that institution’s faculty and staff, emailed them all to ask them to justify their work, and published a web site documenting this. (one account) 

To summarize: the Trump administration is continuing to go after higher education through multiple government offices and in many ways, from funding cuts to deportations and an extraordinary interference in one university’s autonomy.  Members of the academic community are feeling impacts across the nation, from faculty and staff to scholarly publishers; some are speaking out against the administration. Columbia University remains a flashpoint, perhaps a test case for the new government to see how far it can go, how much punishment it can mete out.

I hope this video summary and blog post have been of use to you.  Please share your thoughts, additions, and other reactions in the comment box below.  If you don’t feel you can comment publicly, please reach out to me directly through the contact link.

This is a rough, dark time.  It seems likely to get worse.  Please take care, everyone.

PS: Intro and concluding sound by envirOmaniac2.  

*I tried to link to his Georgetown page, but it seems to be gone now.