Primer: Federal Funding Freeze
On Tuesday, April 8, two officials from the Trump Administration said that $790 million dollars of Northwestern’s federal funding would be frozen. This announcement follows similar funding freezes occurring at Columbia University, University of Pennsylvania, Brown University, Cornell University, Harvard University, and many more, supposedly over allegations of untamed antisemitism on campus.
This turmoil began formally on March 10, when the Department of Education’s Civil Rights Office sent a letter to 60 universities, including Northwestern, notifying the colleges of investigations into potential violations of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act in regards to antisemitism. The letter warned of future enforcement actions if they refused to comply with Title VI, which asserts that institutions discriminating on the basis of race, color, and national origin will not receive federal funding.
On March 8, the Trump Administration pulled $400 million of federal funding from Columbia due to a failure to protect Jewish students on campus, initiating a landslide of federal funding freezes all over the country. In an attempt to avoid similar repercussions, on March 31 NU published a “Progress Report On Northwestern University Efforts to Combat Antisemitism” outlining a slew of policy changes regarding protests and demonstrations, mandatory antisemitism training, and plans for taking accountability. Despite these efforts, Northwestern was still hit by a massive funding freeze, larger than those threatened to Columbia, Brown, and Penn.
On March 21, Columbia announced a severe concession to the administration’s demands in a four-page letter. The letter includes a general prohibition of protesting in academic spaces and wearing masks to conceal identity, the instatement of a new Senior Vice Provost to oversee the Middle East, South Asia, and African Studies department, and hiring of 36 “special officers” to enforce these new rules. These changes can be some of what we’d expect to occur at Northwestern if the university were to immediately surrender to the Trump Administration’s demands.
The demands by the Trump administration pose a threat to freedom of speech and expression at Northwestern, and silence diverse voices that have only just started to gain recognition after a long history of discrimination and inequity. However, loss of this federal funding severely impacts the “innovating and life-changing research” by students and faculty on this campus.
"Views of Northwestern University - May 9th-11th, 2023 (Evanston, Illinois)" by cseeman is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.