In its first month, President Trump’s administration has taken direct aim at academic research, ordering a freeze on federal grant funding — including from the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health, among other agencies — followed by a drastic shrinking of the indirect-cost reimbursements the NIH provides institutions. Both measures met with swift backlash and have been halted by federal judges, but some administrators have taken precautionary measures, imposing hiring freezes and pausing or reducing graduate admissions.
The Chronicle spoke to Dean R. Madden, Dartmouth College’s vice provost for research, to better understand how those who manage universities’ research operations are navigating the uncertainty. Madden, also a professor of biochemistry and cell biology, described the tumult of his job in recent weeks and how he’s balancing his concerns about the effect of the administration’s actions on early-career scientists with his desire not to engage in unhelpful speculation. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
So, what have the last few weeks been like for you?
I’m sure this is a shared experience: There are so many changes that are happening simultaneously that it’s challenging to stay on top of them. So there’s just a lot of time parsing the latest information that’s coming in on executive orders, court decisions, notices that are coming in from funders — trying to synthesize all of that information and cross-check it.
Meanwhile, everyone in the university is desperate to hear about what’s going on. Everyone’s hearing various rumors and anecdotes from colleagues at other institutions. So we are getting a steady stream of queries of, “My colleague at this university said that their project has been put on hold. Will mine be put on hold?” There’s a tremendous amount of secondary uncertainty that’s coming from the informal networks that people are having. And so that creates some urgency for us to be able to stay on top of it and give people good information.
It’s part of the job, but it’s gotten really challenging. To be honest, it’s a very substantial distraction from all the regular work that we’re supposed to be doing.
What does your work look like, say, after an executive order comes out?
We have by now set up a number of rapid-response teams that are specialized in different areas. I’m part of a couple of groups. One is focused on looking at financial implications; another is in the grant space and communication with faculty and students and staff.
When new information pops up on one of our radar screens, we rapidly share it to the group, have a quick round of discussions by email to try to understand what it really means. Sometimes we loop in additional colleagues if there’s some expertise that we don’t have.
Then there’s the process of trying to figure out how to message back out into the community about what it means and what the impact is. We are trying to keep people informed, but also not to be hyper-reactive so that every single thing generates a campuswide email. Because frankly, we’re having trouble keeping track of it.
Our professional networks are turning out to be really important resources for this. So whether it’s the Council on Governmental Relations or the Association of American Universities or the Association of American Medical Colleges and others, being able to plug into our groups, find out what our peers are thinking about it — that’s been a real source of important additional information.
Have these rapid-response teams been formed in the last month or so?
Pretty much. We have each other on speed dial and speed email, and that was all set up within a few days of the inauguration.
How much of what we’ve seen in recent weeks did you anticipate?
I don’t know, honestly. There was a sense that things would change. Personally, I didn’t anticipate that it would be as intense and rapid as it has been.
What are your primary concerns right now?
I think the biggest worry from my perspective is the impact on rising scientists, graduate students, postdocs, and junior faculty. They’re reading stories about graduate programs reducing admissions and hiring freezes and changing grant-funding landscapes. I think it’s creating both actual challenges for their work and an atmosphere in which people are asking, Does it make sense to go into a scientific career if this is going to be the landscape that lies ahead?
I’m sure you’re asked that question as the vice provost of research, but you also supervise students in your own lab. How do you advise them in a moment like this?
Right now it’s still early days. Dartmouth’s taken the position — and I think many of our peer institutions have also taken a similar stance — which is, Let’s not overreact. There’s a lot that’s up in the air. Many of the initiatives that emerged over the last few weeks are now subject to litigation. We want to be careful not to actually create harm in responding to things where we don’t know yet what their real shape is. So that requires a certain amount of patience.
I tell my colleagues to hang in there and to wait until we have a clearer view of what’s really going on. And then we can deal with the specific issues that actually are going to happen, rather than the whole universe of hypotheticals that’s out there right now.
You don’t want to minimize the risk, particularly of the more aggressive cuts that have been proposed. At Dartmouth, we’ve had a lot of discussions about what we’re comfortable continuing with. And the answer is, we are continuing to work on all of our projects. Our graduate programs are reviewing and admitting students. We are staying the course and keeping our eyes wide open, of course, so that we’re able to respond appropriately.
We tell people, If you have a specific problem, if you have a looming lapse of funding, come and talk to us one on one. It doesn’t all have to be through a mass campus email or a formal program. We always have had to deal with issues of funding lapses for certain labs or for graduate students who find themselves in a difficult position with a thesis project. The strategies that we’ve developed for the one-off cases are more important than ever today.
Have you all begun gaming out what adjustments might need to be made if, say, the indirect-cost rate is capped at 15 percent?
We have about $97-million worth of NIH funding a year right now. If the indirect-rate cut were imposed with a cap of 15 percent, that would cost us about $24 million a year.
You don’t have any plans about how you would recoup that $24 million if the cap, which is currently frozen, were to go into effect?
Not specifically. People do ask, What are we going to do in this case and what are we going to do in that case? We don’t know whether the indirect-reimbursement rate might be imposed at some point. How we respond to that would depend on whether, in addition to that, there’s an overall cut in the NIH budget and a shifting of pay lines. It’s really hard to make a good prediction of how to respond until we get more granularity on what things are happening and what things aren’t happening.
