Northwestern professor Luis Amaral said President Donald J. Trump’s decision to slash hundreds of millions in federal funding from his institution is reminiscent of the 48-year-long dictatorship that gripped his home country, Portugal.
“People were attacked, they were tortured, they tried to travel away from the country. They were arrested. I’m seeing all of this happening once again here in the U.S.,” said the engineering and applied math researcher.
In a statement to the Tribune Wednesday morning, White House officials confirmed Trump’s plans to freeze $790 million in federal funding to Northwestern. A White House spokesman pointed to a social media post by Pat Ward, senior White House editorial producer at Fox News Channel, explaining the cuts.
“The money was frozen in connection with several ongoing, credible, and concerning Title VI investigations,” Ward wrote in his post on X, formerly known as Twitter.
The news coincided with a New York Times report that the Trump administration had frozen $1 billion in federal dollars to Cornell University. Once the funding cuts were confirmed Wednesday morning, Northwestern did not respond to a request for further comment on which specific programs and departments would be impacted.
Federal dollars fund “innovative and life saving research” at Northwestern and the school has “fully cooperated” with federal investigators, Jon Yates, the university’s spokesman said in a statement Tuesday evening.
The federal government has been zeroing in on Northwestern for months as part of a recent crackdown on alleged antisemitic action on campuses across the country, with a particular focus on how schools handled pro-Palestinian protests that swept campuses across the country last spring. Title VI requires that an educational institution respond to racial or national origin harassment.
Amaral, who has been conducting research at Northwestern for over two decades, said the federal government is “making up excuses of anti-semitism for actually attacking higher education.”
He described the actions as “incredibly scary and worrisome.” But almost more worrisome, he said, has been the university’s lack of a plan to protect students.
The Evanston-based research institution sent an email to members of the community Tuesday evening that it “would continue to keep both affected individuals and the broader community informed as the implications of these actions become clearer.”
“I want to know what the university is going to do if the grants that I have that pay my students get canceled? How are those salaries going to be paid?” Amaral asked.
Hundreds of professors attended a regularly scheduled faculty meeting Wednesday afternoon to urge the university’s trustees to take a stand against what Northwestern history professor Helen Tilley described as “lawlessness” exhibited by the federal government. Over 280 faculty members wrote a letter to the university saying that not doing so would “exacerbate or re-entrench inequalities.”
“My university has not made any kind of positive statement about academic freedom, about the bullying and lawlessness that the attacks on higher education represent,” said Tilley, who delivered the letter to Northwestern’s Board of Trustees on March 18.
Tilley said leaders at universities “are trying to decide right now whether their bottom lines are more important than democratic principles.” She said the university should take legal avenues.
Last spring’s encampments at colleges across Chicago were eventually dismantled by police. Northwestern’s encampment, in Deering Meadow, was taken down in an agreement with students and faculty. It was believed to be the first between a major U.S. university and pro-Palestinian protesters.
In early February, Northwestern was put under investigation by the U.S. Department of Education through a newly created multiagency task force for what the federal agency called “widespread antisemitic harassment.”
The school was one of 60 institutions to receive a warning in March that it could lose money if it did not fulfill its obligations to Jewish students. The university is also on a U.S. Department of Justice list of 10 institutions accused of not protecting their Jewish students and faculty.
Northwestern’s president, Michael Schill, has testified before Congress about his commitment to making Jewish students, faculty and staff feel comfortable around Northwestern’s campus.
Last week, the university released a “progress report” detailing several steps the school has taken to secure its campus for Jewish students, faculty and staff. The school has seen a dip in instances of antisemitic conduct over the last year, that report stated.
Researcher Igor Efimov, a Northwestern experimental cardiologist, said Tuesday evening he was “flabbergasted” by news of the funding freeze at Northwestern.
He already has federal grant funding in limbo – money that was supposed to fund research to develop a new implantable device to treat atrial fibrillation, he said. An advisory council meeting of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, where the funding was to be approved, was canceled in February, and the next meeting isn’t until later this month, Efimov said. The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute is at the National Institutes of Health, which is part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
“Now I don’t know what is going to happen,” Efimov said. “We are developing life-saving therapies for patients with heart disease, which is the No. 1 cause of death in the United States. If we don’t support this science, who’s going to support that?”
Please check back for more details, as this story is developing.
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