Education

As Trump Targets Universities, Schools Plan Their Counteroffensive

Published

1 year ago

January 30, 2025

As Trump Targets Universities, Schools Plan Their Counteroffensive

With a now-rescinded White House directive that threw millions of federal dollars for education and research into uncertainty, President Trump and his allies tried to prove they were not bluffing with their campaign threats to target universities.

But before President Trump even returned to office, many of the nation’s well-known universities were already preparing to fight back.

While few college presidents are especially eager to spar with Mr. Trump and Vice President JD Vance in public, schools have been marshaling behind-the-scenes counteroffensives against promises of an onslaught of taxes, funding cuts and regulations.

Some universities have hired powerhouse Republican lobbying firms. Others are strengthening, or rebuilding, their presences in Washington.

Many are quietly tweaking their messaging and policies, hoping to deter policymakers who know it can be good politics to attack higher education — even when they themselves are products of the schools they castigate on cable television. Rutgers University, for example, announced last week that it would cancel a conference on diversity, equity and inclusion, a focus of the new administration.

A spokeswoman for the university said the decision, which prompted criticism, was made after many speakers from a federally funded program withdrew from the conference, citing an executive order that targets the topic.

“There’s a concern among a lot of campuses,” said Kenneth K. Wong, a professor of education policy at Brown.

Some efforts to rehabilitate higher education’s reputation were already in the works, a response to attacks leaders in Congress made after campus protests over the war in Gaza. But now university officials are confronting an administration whose leaders have made clear their contempt for some wings of higher education. Mr. Trump has said schools are dominated by “Marxists, maniacs and lunatics,” and Mr. Vance has called them “insane.”

The ominous saber rattling from Mr. Trump and his allies includes threats to endowments, federal research funding, student financial aid, diversity initiatives and the potential deportation of roughly 400,000 undocumented students enrolled in U.S. schools.

Several major universities have responded by hiring lobbyists whom Republican leaders might view favorably. Harvard University has turned to a Capitol Hill heavyweight, Ballard Partners, the former firm of both Mr. Trump’s attorney general-designate, Pam Bondi, and his chief of staff, Susie Wiles. Columbia University signed up with BGR Government Affairs, which counts Haley Barbour, a former Mississippi governor and Republican National Committee chairman, among its co-founders.

Duke University, which has an in-house government relations effort, brought in DLA Piper as an adviser. One of the firm’s executives is Richard Burr, a Republican who represented North Carolina (where Duke is located) in the Senate for 18 years.

The University of Notre Dame recently registered its own lobbyists for the first time since Mr. Trump’s previous term. And Yale University is beginning its own theater of operations in Washington.

“The university decided to open an office in Washington, D.C. after conducting benchmarking among peer institutions,” Karen Peart, a Yale spokeswoman, wrote in an email, citing upcoming higher education “issues” on Capitol Hill.

The latest activity in Washington came after some other schools ramped up lobbying efforts.

As recently as 2022, Washington University in St. Louis paid $50,000 for its lobbying in the capital. The next year, it raised that spending to $250,000. That exploded to $720,000 in 2024, federal records show. A university spokeswoman did not comment.

Across the country, university officials and their allies said that they were somewhat more prepared for what to expect under Mr. Trump than they were when he first ascended to power in 2017. Eight years later, they said, they had a better sense of Mr. Trump’s approach to the presidency and have also looked for insights into his administration’s ambitions in the “Project 2025” plan, which is closely linked to many of his appointees.

The administration wasted no time in launching those plans with a flurry of executive orders in its first week. One seeks to ban diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, including those run by contractors that receive federal student aid funding — a category that includes virtually every campus.

Mr. Trump also ordered federal agencies to compile lists of “nine potential civil compliance investigations” of organizations, including higher-education institutions with endowments over $1 billion.

In a public conference call on Monday sponsored by DLA Piper, Mr. Burr said that while the rest of the Trump administration’s higher education policy was not yet entirely clear, “we believe that endowments are a target of revenue, potentially, in a tax bill.”

Few topics are as alarming to the leaders of the country’s wealthiest universities.

Endowments were largely exempt from taxation for years. But in 2017, during Mr. Trump’s first term, Republicans led a charge to impose a 1.4 percent excise tax on the investment income of large private university endowments. Now there are discussions of raising it to 14 percent, or even 21 percent.

As a senator, Mr. Vance was a leading proponent of increasing the endowment tax, proposing an increase to 35 percent for endowments of $10 billion or more. Despite his Yale law degree, funded partly by the university, Mr. Vance has previously called for an “attack” on universities.

“Why is it that we allow these massive hedge funds pretending to be universities to enjoy lower tax rates than most of our citizens, people who are struggling to put food on the table?” he said when he was a senator, adding: “It’s insane. It’s unfair.”

At least 56 schools were forced to pay the 1.4 percent tax in 2023, totaling more than $380 million, according to an analysis by the National Association of College and University Business Officers. Records show that representatives of major universities were busy presenting their anti-endowment positions on Capitol Hill last year. In the fourth quarter, about 10 top schools, including Stanford and Cornell, lobbied on the tax.

They have often built their case around what they contend would be lost if universities had to pay more of the government’s bills: money that they use for research and tuition support, particularly for low-income students.

At Wesleyan University, for example, that amounted to $85 million last year that served 1,500 students, according to Michael S. Roth, Wesleyan’s president.

“So it’s real money,” Dr. Roth said, adding that a tax increase would make it harder for the university to support students. He added, “It means we will be serving fewer worthy applicants.” Dr. Roth said that Wesleyan would not be hiring outside lobbyists but, instead, would use that money to assist students.

Mr. Burr also said universities would be affected if the Trump administration targeted funds for research. He noted that the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had both recently issued directives to suspend public communications, research-grant reviews, travel and training for scientists.

On Monday evening, the administration also issued a sweeping pause on trillions in federal grant funding, which a federal judge blocked about 24 hours later — but only after a day of chaos and tumult for campus leaders.

Ted Mitchell, the president of the American Council on Education, which represents more than 1,600 campuses nationwide, called it the “most irresponsible public policy” he had ever witnessed. The organization called for the order’s reversal; the White House backed away from the order on Wednesday.

The pause had been designed to give the administration time to determine whether grants align with Mr. Trump’s priorities. In the 2023 fiscal year, universities received close to $60 billion in federal funding for research.

Barbara Snyder, the president of the Association of American Universities, which includes dozens of the most prominent schools in the country, noted that the explosion of anger in Washington toward universities was not necessarily new.

“It’s more challenging than it was 20 years ago,” she said, but added: “I don’t think this has all been an overnight change.”

Even as universities muster defenses, no consensus has emerged among them about how best to approach the second iteration of Mr. Trump’s Washington.

“Our institutions,” Ms. Snyder said, “have their own ways of doing these things.”

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Education

She Tried to Help Schools Build Healthier Playgrounds. Then Her E.P.A. Grant Was Canceled.

Published

2 days ago

May 8, 2026

Press Room

She Tried to Help Schools Build Healthier Playgrounds. Then Her E.P.A. Grant Was Canceled.

Lost Science is an ongoing series of accounts from scientists who have lost their jobs or funding after cuts by the Trump administration. The conversations have been edited for clarity and length. Here’s why we’re doing this.

Kirsten Beyer: We had a three-year study, funded by the Environmental Protection Agency, focused on environmental health among children. We had two main aims. The first was to develop a curriculum so that Milwaukee Public Schools teachers could teach about environmental health, environmental health disparities and climate change.

The second aim was to look at the impact of schoolyard greening on health and environmental outcomes. There’s this greening initiative in Milwaukee to redevelop schoolyards. Many of them were sheets of asphalt. A lot of them were in disrepair. The redevelopment plans included things like planting trees, adding outdoor classrooms, improving storm water drainage with green infrastructure and improving sports fields and natural play spaces.

We built a study to collect data before and after. There are lots of schools around the country that have similar situations, so we were excited about sharing our results and informing other jurisdictions about the impact of this redevelopment.

We had the kids complete surveys. We measured things like social and emotional health, environmental health literacy, attitudes toward outdoor play. We also had sensors that measured their physical activity levels, time spent outdoors and where they spent time in the schoolyard. We went out and observed recess. How are kids playing? How is conflict being resolved? How engaged are the teachers or monitors? We measured air pollution and how hot those schoolyards were before greening.

We were in the field in May 2025, collecting our final post-redevelopment data, when the grant was canceled. It was a shock. We had hired people as data collectors and had a month of data collection left.

I decided to rustle up some other resources just to get data collection done. But then we had no more money to support our community partners, staff or graduate students. We had to take people off this project.

Now we’re trying to do something with all of this data that we’ve collected: process it, analyze it and, importantly, share it.

We have just piles of data. There are papers that won’t get written and data that won’t be shared because this happened.

But I can’t just abandon this work. This is important to my community partners. This is important to other schools. And this is important to all of the kids who gave us their time, all the parents who allowed us to do research with their kids. There’s a moral imperative to continue the work, albeit slowly.

Kirsten Beyer is a health geographer at the Medical College of Wisconsin.

Education

Art Abounds on Campuses Outside of New York City

Published

2 days ago

May 8, 2026

Press Room

Art Abounds on Campuses Outside of New York City

The Princeton University Art Museum recently made Time magazine’s top 100 list of The World’s Greatest Places of 2026. James Steward, director of the museum that reopened on Halloween in an acclaimed new building designed by Adjaye Associates, said of the ranking, “It normalizes the idea that we are a world-class destination.”

In its first five months alone, the museum has received 250,000 visitors — more than half from outside campus (Princeton’s old museum averaged 200,000 annually).

The surge of public interest in the Princeton museum’s new home, spotlighting a global collection of more than 117,000 objects, is a timely reminder that university and college art museums are filled with unexpected treasures — often showcased in architecturally significant buildings — and are free and accessible to all. Here are several standout exhibitions at academic museums in range of New York City that are worth a visit this month, when campuses are looking their spring best for reunions and graduations.

The glorious modernist home of the Yale Center for British Art — Louis I. Kahn’s last design, completed in 1977 after his death — reopened in March 2025 after a two-year architectural conservation. In the year since, the museum has welcomed 100,000 visitors and almost 300 class visits to study its collection of more than 100,000 works from the 15th century to today that present an expansive understanding of British art and its imperial history.

“British art isn’t an island story, it’s a global story,” said Martina Droth, the center’s director. A contemporary installation by Rina Banerjee, a recent acquisition on view for the first time through Sept. 13 in the museum’s entrance court, and the exhibition “Painters, Ports, and Profits: Artists and the East India Company, 1750-1850,” up through June 21, both speak to a deep connection to India.

“If British art is shaped by movement and exchange, then in ‘Painters, Ports, and Profits’ you see British artists who traveled to India because of the East India Company and found themselves working alongside Indian artists,” Droth said. “New things happen in terms of the aesthetics of the work, and you can really see that in the exhibition.”

The 115 works are mostly drawn from the collection and almost half are by Indian artists and workshops, including “Lucknow from the Gomti,” a 37-foot panoramic scroll of life along the river in that city in Northern India and a star of the show.

Banerjee, who was born in Kolkata and lived in London before moving to New York, has remade the form of the Taj Mahal in hot-pink semi-translucent plastic. Visible from the street through the glass doors and dangling from the ceiling, her playful floating sculptural palace allows visitors to enter and discover all sorts of colonial relics and commercial baubles embedded within.

The Johnson Museum opened in 1973 in an I.M. Pei-designed building, which rises seven stories and frames spectacular views of the landscape with its expansive vertical and horizontal windows and fifth floor cantilevered over an open porch. The global collection numbers more than 40,000 objects, with particular strength in Asian art, and college classes made 335 visits in the last academic year.

Students from Cornell’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences have spent considerable time with the exhibition “Naples: Course of Empire,” a series of seven panoramic canvases by Alexis Rockman on view through June 7, according to the museum’s curator of modern and contemporary art, Andrea Inselmann. Over the last four decades, Rockman has been a leading voice in the art world raising awareness about climate change through his paintings focused on all forms of life on Earth.

The works in this show were “inspired by Thomas Cole’s 19th-century cycle ‘The Course of Empire’ about the rise and fall of civilizations,” said Inselmann, who organized the exhibition. Taking Naples as a case study of a port city vulnerable to rising waters, Rockman used his signature style of deeply researched and lyrically rendered history painting to reimagine this landscape over geologic time starting from the Mesozoic Era. Paintings depict animals fleeing the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D.; a rat flying over Naples spewing a noxious plume during the bubonic plague of the 1650s; and a whale breaching before the ruins of the city in a speculative post-human future.

“I thought this would be a very appropriate show for a college context,” Inselmann said. “Especially for younger generations, I think it provides a context and an environment to talk about climate change and to express their anxieties or their hopes for the future.”

On Skidmore’s campus in Saratoga Springs, famous for its horse racing and natural mineral springs, the Tang punches above its weight for a small liberal arts college museum with an ambitious exhibition program in a striking building designed by Antoine Predock. The museum generates about a dozen shows annually — often from its collection of nearly 20,000 objects, with strengths in contemporary art and photography — and drew more than 220 class visits from across disciplines this school year.

Anchoring the Tang’s 25th anniversary season this spring is “Kathy Butterly: Assume Yes,” a three-decade retrospective of the artist’s playful, inventive and sometimes jarring small-scale ceramic sculptures on view through July 26. “Kathy bridges the generation of Robert Arneson and Viola Frey, who were her teachers and innovators that moved ceramics from a purely craft environment to a museum and art conversation, and the world we’re in today where we see ceramics in lots of different ways all over gallery exhibitions,” said the Tang director Ian Berry, who organized the show. “Kathy is a real inspiration and key figure for this current moment.”

Forty-five of her eccentric vessels — miniature three-dimensional canvases for experimental glazes and textures, often crumpling expressively on their bases — are grouped chronologically across three huge platforms serving as the “rooms” of the show. Within the constraints of small shifts in scale, from four to eight inches say, “an entire universe changes,” Berry said. The title of the show comes from one of Butterly’s works. “‘Assume’ adds a little twist to the exclamation point of ‘Yes’,” he said. “It’s optimistic, it’s upbeat, but also it has a complexity to it.”

Alongside Princeton’s encyclopedic collections, displayed throughout the museum’s stunning complex of nine interlocking modernist pavilions, is “Willem de Kooning: The Breakthrough Years, 1945-50” — the first temporary loan exhibition in the new building — on view through July 26.

The show is built around Princeton’s own 1948 painting “Black Friday” — exhibited that year in de Kooning’s debut show at the Charles Egan Gallery in New York after he had struggled there in poverty for 15 years.

“It emerged as one of the essential pictures in de Kooning’s career,” said Steward, Princeton’s museum director, who agreed to loan “Black Friday” to the Museum of Modern Art for its major de Kooning retrospective in 2011 organized by the chief curator emeritus of painting and sculpture, John Elderfield.

Now, in turn, Elderfield has co-curated this exhibition of 18 paintings, drawn from more than a dozen museums and private collections and focused on the pivotal period when de Kooning found his artistic voice and helped to pioneer Abstract Expressionism.

“It is just such an incisive project that is physically modest in scope, but not modest at all intellectually or artistically,” Steward said. “That’s a sweet spot I really want us to occupy as a great academic museum.”

Education

Today, In Short

Published

3 days ago

May 7, 2026

Press Room

One of my favorite podcasts is “So True With Caleb Hearon,” hosted by Hearon, a comedian. He recently appeared in “The Devil Wears Prada 2” as Miranda Priestly’s assistant. Having grown up, as Hearon put it, “fat, gay and poor” in rural Missouri, he never dreamed of booking the role “a million girls would kill for.”

Here’s what you need to know

Middle East: Iran said yesterday that it was reviewing an American proposal to end the war. Washington is still awaiting Tehran’s response.
California: Last night was the final televised debate before the primary for the state’s governor. The face-off between seven candidates was tame at first, but they eventually furiously attacked one another. See what went down.
Hantavirus: Should you worry? Public health officials say the threat to the general public remains low based on what we know. Read more about the hantavirus.
Jeffrey Epstein: A federal judge released a suicide note believed to be written by the convicted sex offender that had been sealed for years.
Ted Turner: Turner, the media mogul, yachtsman and creator of CNN, died yesterday at his home in Florida. He was 87.

On an online note …

A few things you didn’t really need to know but now do:

It’s been nearly 20 years since Guy Goma’s BBC appearance became an early viral internet moment. Goma thought he was interviewing for a job when he suddenly he found himself on air. He pulled it off much better than I could have.
How are people getting their information about health and wellness? For at least half of U.S. adults under 50, it’s through influencers or podcasters, according to a new analysis.
Clavicular, the looksmaxxing influencer, has been charged with shooting at an alligator during a livestream.

The New York Knicks hung on to the series lead in a 108-102 thriller against the Philadelphia 76ers. Game 3 is set for tomorrow in Philadelphia.