By Susan Svrluga, Carolyn Y. Johnson · The Washington Post (c) 2025
In a scene that is becoming familiar, two powerful universities were rocked this week by rumors that the Trump administration would pull hundreds of millions in funding, with little to do but wait to learn the details.
On Tuesday afternoon, an internal National Institutes of Healthemail reviewed by The Washington Post showed that agency leadership had ordered funding to be frozen at Northwestern University, Cornell University and Weill Cornell Medicine. That evening, Cornell’s president and provost emailed the Cornell community saying the university had received stop-work orders on 75 research grants from the Defense Department, but without any formal notification detailing the reasons or path forward.
Wednesday morning – 24 hours after a Fox News reporter posted on social media that more than $1 billion in federal funding to Cornell and about $790 million to Northwestern had been frozen Monday in connection with federal civil rights law investigations – university officials were still trying to get answers.
For Columbia University, which has been reeling from losing $400 million in federal funding, including the termination of several hundred grants, internal emails at NIH showed that the agency was now moving to freeze all funding. That meant that no new grants would be awarded and that the university would be blocked from receiving funds from existing grants.
In recent weeks, some of the nation’s most prestigious universities have found out by social media or emails that federal funding totaling billions was threatened. In some cases, they don’t know why.
The Trump administration has been clear about some of its concerns with higher education. The multiagency Joint Task Force to Combat Antisemitism has moved swiftly to investigate whether schools have done enough to protect Jewish students on campus, with concerns heightened by protests over the Israel-Gaza war last year.
On Thursday, the House Education Committee announced that it would call another group of college presidents to testify next month about what it says was the mishandling of violent, antisemitic campus protests.
Some of the high-profile announcements about funding freezes have been brief and not sent directly to school officials.
Education Department and White House officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment Thursday.
With billions in funding threatened and a long-standing close partnership with the federal government at stake, university leaders scrambled to consider options. Some considered whether they could bridge some costs for research or scale back ambitious projects. Other options included finding ways to reach consensus with the government or to challenge it in court.
The fundingfreezes to Cornell and Northwestern, confirmed by a White House official, followed similar threats to five Ivy League universities in recent weeks as the Trump administration weaponizes federal funding in a high-stakes battle with elite private schools to force cultural changes.
At Cornell, the affected grants include research into new materials for jet engines, propulsion systems, large-scale information networks, robotics, superconductors, space and satellite communications, and cancer research, Cornell President Michael I. Kotlikoff, the school’s provost and the provost for medical affairs announced to the campus community Tuesday night. “We are actively seeking information from federal officials to learn more about the basis for these decisions,” they wrote.
Harold Varmus, former director of the National Institutes of Health and a Nobel laureate who is currently a professor at Weill Cornell Medical College, said: “This is unprecedented, outrageous, irrational, and probably illegal. Not the way to Make America Great. Just the opposite.”
A growing number of academics have called for universities to fight back. But some schools – including the University of Pennsylvania and Brown University – have not received any notification or explanation from the government about funding freezes announced in short posts on social media.
In Penn’s case, an administration account on X shared a Fox News storythat said $175 million in funding had been paused over the school’s policies “forcing women to compete with men in sports.” The Daily Caller posted on X that the administration was planning to freeze $510 million to Brown as it reviewed the school’s DEI policies and response to antisemitism.
Northwestern has not received any official notification from the government about its funding freeze after learning about it from members of the media, according to a spokesman for the university.
Columbia and Harvard universities have received letters spelling out demands.
For Columbia, those government directives were similar to requests made by a faculty group in February seeking changes to combat antisemitism on campus. Columbia’s acting president said they are working with the administration to try to restore funding.
For Harvard, a letter from federal agencies received last week includes requirements both vague and concrete, such as “governance reform” and ending diversity, equity and inclusion programs at the university. At stake: nearly $9 billion in contracts and multiyear research grant funding to the school and its affiliates, including nearby research hospitals whose doctors teach at Harvard Medical School.
Harvard officials have not indicated whether they have responded to the government.
With more schools now threatened with freezes – and scores more being investigated for potential violations of federal civil rights law protecting Jewish students on campus, and warned of potential enforcement – any responses will be closely watched.
There are some signs of resistance. The president of Princeton, which received notifications from government agencies that dozens of research grants would be suspended, has said university leaders need to fight to protect academic freedom. (He also said the university would cooperate with the government in combating antisemitism.)
A coalition of 40 prominent former university presidents wrote Tuesday in Fortunemagazinethat the federal government’s “aggressive threats to withdraw funding and the ideological conditions it has named for reinstating withdrawn funds – before formal investigation, hearing, or reporting – are illegal under Title VI the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and unconstitutional under the First Amendment.”
They called on the Trump administration to stop attacking higher education, on college presidents to speak out and on boards of trustees to avoid concessions to core principles.
Jay Greene, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, said the Trump administration believes that the universities have run afoul of their obligation to protect civil rights, and that it is trying to compel compliance by putting some federal funding under review. He said he thinks the effort is working: It’s getting universities’ attention.
“If their understanding of academic freedom is inconsistent with receiving federal money,” he said, “they don’t have to take the money.”
Universities have responded in ways that take into account the uncertainty of what’s to come.Johns Hopkins University cut 2,000 jobs after Trump administration cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development resulted in a loss of $800 million. Harvard and Princeton announced in recent days that they would sell bonds. And schools across the country dependent on federal research funding have frozen hiring, scaled back graduate-school admissions and found other ways to curtail spending.
Some have urged legal action. Lee Bollinger, president emeritus of Columbia, said, “I’m in the camp of, you need to go to court and assert your rights.” Those rights depend upon what reason the government gives, he said.
He said there is a strong First Amendment case to be made showing that these types of actions are inconsistent with that principle. “I think it’s a constitutional principle at stake,” Bollinger said. Rather than direct censorship, the administration is using unconstitutional conditions for funding, he said.
Last month, the American Association of University Professors and the American Federation of Teachers filed a lawsuit alleging that the unilateral cancellation of Columbia’s funds violated the First Amendment and civil rights law.
Multiple cases have challenged changes to NIH funding.
“Many of my colleaguesfelt like the early grant terminations were just happening on particular topics, and they described it as being cuts just ‘around the edges,’ but those edges are my entire career, and are entire fields of study – including things as broad as the field of public health,” said Brittany Charlton, an associate professor at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Charlton has had five NIH grants terminated, interrupting a funding stream of more than $15 million. Charlton is the founding director of the LGBTQ Health Center of Excellence and is a plaintiff in a lawsuit in federal court challenging the Trump administration’s grant terminations.
Amy Gutmann, a former president of Penn who joined the essay arguing that the action was illegal and unconstitutional, said she was proud that the group of leaders from disparate schools have united. People, especially students, need to know that “we’re not afraid,” she said. “We may be very worried, very troubled, but we’re not afraid.”
Gutmann added: “I happen to be the former president of the university that Benjamin Franklin founded, and he famously said, ‘We must all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.’ And I think we need to hang together on this.”