Good morning, and welcome to Thursday, March 20. Sarah Brown wrote the top of today’s Briefing. Kate Hidalgo Bellows wrote the rest. Julia Piper compiled Comings and Goings. Get in touch: dailybriefing@chronicle.com.
Another funding freeze
It’s the two-month mark of President Trump’s second term. On Wednesday, he took yet another swipe at higher ed.
The Trump administration announced that the feds will pause $175 million in federal grants to the University of Pennsylvania. Here’s what we know so far:
- The pause is connected to an investigation into transgender athletes’ participation in sports at Penn, according to a social-media post from the White House. (Or, as the Trump administration put it, the university’s “policies forcing women to compete with men in sports.”)
- The X post linked to a Fox News video reporting the pause. Fox quoted a Trump administration official as saying, “This is just a taste of what could be coming down the pipe for Penn.”
- As of Wednesday afternoon, a Penn spokesperson said the university had not received any formal notification of the pause or any communication from the federal government.
The government’s chief concern appears to be a three-year-old controversy. A senior White House official told The Daily Pennsylvanian that the pause was an “immediate proactive action” to review discretionary funding to Penn, which “infamously permitted a male to compete on its women’s swimming team.”
That’s likely a reference to Lia Thomas, a transgender woman who participated on the women’s swimming and diving team during the 2021-22 season and won a national title. Thomas’s success helped spark an activist movement opposing the policies that allowed her to compete. (Thomas had competed on the men’s team from 2017 to 2019.)
The Education Department had announced an investigation into Penn in early February. The case, which concerned potential Title IX infractions, came right after Trump signed an executive order barring transgender women from competing in women’s sports and using women’s locker rooms. The NCAA swiftly changed its policies to match Trump’s order.
Penn officials said Wednesday that they have always been in compliance with NCAA policies. From 2011 to 2021, transgender athletes were generally allowed to compete based on their gender identities in NCAA sports. In 2022, the NCAA voted to have each program follow the rules set by its sport’s national governing body.
Penn receives about $1 billion annually in federal funding. According to the White House, the pause applies to grants from the Departments of Defense and Health and Human Services, which oversees the National Institutes of Health.
Researchers at Penn were, as you might expect, on edge. “We are very worried and horrified,” one professor who works in an NIH-funded lab told The Chronicle.
They’re thinking about their colleagues at Columbia University, who have spent the past two weeks wondering whether they’re about to get an email telling them their federal funding is gone. The Trump administration announced on March 6 that it was canceling $400 million in grants and contracts over Columbia’s alleged failure to combat antisemitism.
So far, Penn is the fourth higher-education institution to be directly targeted by Trump’s funding threats. The University of Maine system had $100 million in grants from the U.S. Department of Agriculture paused, and then unpaused, also allegedly due to its approach to transgender athletes’ participation in sports. The Johns Hopkins University lost $800 million as part of sweeping cuts to the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, and laid off 2,000 employees, mostly overseas.
Columbia’s leaders are reportedly in negotiations with the Trump administration to try to restore the canceled funding. According to The Wall Street Journal, university officials are “getting close to yielding to President Trump’s demands.” In an unusually prescriptive letter sent last Friday, the government had given Columbia a Thursday deadline to take nine actions, including expelling students who’d protested the war in Gaza and putting the Middle East studies department under “academic receivership.”
The news added to a growing perception in some circles that higher ed is bowing to Trump.
But at least one college leader took a different tack on Wednesday. In an Atlantic essay, Princeton University’s president, Christopher L. Eisgruber, did not mince words, saying that Trump’s targeting of Columbia was “the greatest threat to American universities since the Red Scare of the 1950s.”
Eisgruber included a plea to — or, perhaps, a jab at — fellow college presidents. “Universities and their leaders should speak up and litigate forcefully to protect their rights,” he wrote. He added that “every citizen and officeholder” should also speak up for colleges, defending their right to pursue knowledge and research without government interference.
The bigger picture: Penn, like Columbia, could soon face an ultimatum from the Trump administration, with federal funding hanging in the balance. One difference for Penn, though, is that Trump’s scrutiny mostly concerns a controversy that played out years ago. It’s not clear how Penn officials could make changes to satisfy the government. Then again, maybe it’s not really possible for colleges to satisfy the Trump administration.
