Dr. Katrina ArmstrongColumbia University is grappling with significant financial challenges after the Federal Task Force to Combat Antisemitism announced $400 million in cuts to federal funding, a development that Interim University President Dr. Katrina Armstrong says will “touch nearly every corner of the University.”
The task force described the cuts as a consequence of Columbia’s “continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students” and warned that this represents only the “first round of action,” with “additional cancellations” to follow.
This announcement comes just four days after the task force revealed it would consider stop work orders for $51.4 million in contracts between Columbia and the federal government and conduct a “comprehensive review” of more than $5 billion in federal grant commitments to the institution.
In her communication to the Columbia community, Armstrong acknowledged that the cuts would have an immediate impact on research and critical university functions, affecting “students, faculty, staff, research, and patient care.” Federal funding constituted approximately $1.3 billion of Columbia’s annual operating revenue in the 2024 fiscal year.
“There is no question that the cancellation of these funds will immediately impact research and other critical functions of the University,” Armstrong wrote in en email to the campus community, while emphasizing that Columbia’s mission as “a great research university does not waver.”
The situation at Columbia highlights the increasing tensions between academic institutions and the Trump administration, particularly regarding how universities respond to claims of antisemitism on campus. Since October 2023, Columbia has been at the center of pro-Palestinian student protests, drawing federal scrutiny, especially from the Trump administration.
President Trump recently stated on Truth Social that “All Federal Funding will STOP for any College, School, or University that allows illegal protests.”
Armstrong, who assumed her interim position following former University President Minouche Shafik’s resignation in August 2024, described Columbia as needing a “reset” from the “chaos of encampments and protests.” She emphasized that the university “needed to acknowledge and repair the damage to our Jewish students.”
Armstrong affirmed the university’s commitment to working with the federal government on addressing antisemitism concerns, stating: “Columbia can, and will, continue to take serious action toward combatting antisemitism on our campus. This is our number one priority.”
Armstrong, however, did not outline specific plans for how Columbia would adapt to the significant loss of federal funding, instead focusing on the university’s broader mission and values.
“Antisemitism, violence, discrimination, harassment, and other behaviors that violate our values or disrupt teaching, learning, or research are antithetical to our mission,” Armstrong noted. “We must continue to work to address any instances of these unacceptable behaviors on our campus. We must work every day to do better.”
The situation at Columbia raises important questions for higher education institutions nationwide about balancing free speech, campus safety, and federal compliance in the age of the Trump presidency. As universities increasingly face scrutiny over their handling of contentious social and political issues, the consequences—both financial and reputational—can be severe.
Armstrong called unity within the Columbia community to maintain the university’s standing and continue its contributions to society.
“A unified Columbia, one that remains focused on our mission and our values, will succeed in making the uncommonly valuable contributions to society that have distinguished this great university from its peers over the last 270 years,” she said.
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Dive Brief:
An Arizona bill that would cut all state funding for public colleges offering classroom instruction related to diversity, equity and inclusion cleared a key legislative hurdle Thursday. State Senate lawmakers advanced the bill in a preliminary vote, and a final Senate vote on the measure could come as soon as Monday.
If enacted, the legislation would prohibit faculty at the state’s public universities and community colleges fromrelating “contemporary American society” to a wide range of social and economic topics, including whiteness, antiracism, unconscious bias and gender-based equity.
It would also ban colleges from teaching that racially neutral or color-blind policies or institutions “perpetuate oppression, injustice, race-based privilege, including white supremacy and white privilege, or inequity.”
Dive Insight:
State Sen. David Farnsworth introduced the bill earlier this month, saying in a recent press release that he was motivated to do so after taking a class at a nearby community college.
“The course provided by the local community college represents the very ideology that is dividing America, teaching students to view white American men through a lens of privilege and oppression,” he said.
Farnsworth further described education about gender fluidity as “indoctrination” and said his proposal puts “students’ academic futures over political agendas.”
If the bill is enacted, faculty would not be allowed to “relate contemporary American society to”:
Critical theory.
Whiteness.
Systemic racism.
Institutional racism.
Antiracism.
Microaggressions.
Systemic bias.
Implicit bias.
Unconscious bias.
Intersectionality.
Gender identity.
Social justice.
Cultural competence.
Allyship.
Race-based reparations.
Race-based privilege.
Race-based diversity.
Gender-based diversity.
Race-based equity.
Gender-based equity.
Race-based inclusion.
Gender-based inclusion.
The bill would allow colleges to teach about subjects related to racial hatred or race-based discrimination, like slavery and Japanese-American internment in World War II — but only if instructors do not include any of the above subjects.
The proposal faces an uncertain fate, as control of Arizona’s executive and legislative branches is split between parties, with a Democratic governor but Republican control of the House and Senate.
Despite growing more conservative through the 2024 election, the Republican party doesn’t have a veto-proof supermajority. And Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs, who has voiced support for and spearheaded DEI initiatives, is unlikely to sign the bill.
Even so, the bill threatens large pools of funding for Arizona’s higher education institutions, especially its three public universities.
Arizona’s public four-year institutions receive 74% of their funding from state support,according to a 2024 report from theState Higher Education Executive Officers Association.
For example, the University of Arizona’s main campus got almost $303 million in state general funds in fiscal 2024.
Farnsworth’s bill comes as Arizona colleges are already facing two powerful headwinds — a $96.9 million reduction in overall state funding for fiscal year 2025 and a wave of federal DEI restrictions.
Since taking office Jan. 20, President Donald Trump has signed executive orders attempting to eliminate DEI in higher education and elsewhere, though a court order recently blocked major portions of two of those orders.And the U.S. Department of Education recently issued guidance giving colleges until the end of February to cut all DEI or risk losing federal funding.
The University of Arizona recently took down the webpage for its Office of Diversity and Inclusion. The flagship also removed references to “diversity” and “inclusion” from its land acknowledgement — a statement recognizing the Indigenous tribal land the campus sits on — though the original version remains available on at least one department webpage.
Protesters on the University of Arizona’s main campus called on the institution’s leaders Thursday to continue its DEI initiatives.
As of Thursday evening, almost 2,500 University of Arizona students, employees, affiliates and others signed a letter calling for the institution to reverse the changes it made to its web presence.
“We view your actions as preemptive and harmful over-compliance,” the letter reads, referencing the university’s response to the Education Department’s guidance and Trump’s executive orders. “Faculty, staff, and students should not have to fear political retaliation for upholding academic freedom, engaging in free speech, or advocating for their rights.”
New research suggests that the Department of Government Efficiency has been making inaccurate claims about the extent of its savings from cuts to the Department of Education.
DOGE previously posted on X that it ended 89 contracts from the Education Department’s research arm, the Institute of Education Sciences, worth $881 million. But an analysis released Wednesday by the left-wing think tank New America found that these contracts were worth about $676 million—roughly $200 million less than DOGE claimed. DOGE’s “Wall of Receipts” website, where it tracks its cuts, later suggested the savings from 104 Education Department contracts came out to a more modest $500 million.
New America also asserted that DOGE is losing money, given that the government had already spent almost $400 million on the now-terminated Institute of Education Sciences contracts, meaning those funds have gone to waste.
“Research cannot be undone, and statistics cannot be uncollected. Instead, they will likely sit on a computer somewhere untouched,” New America researchers wrote in a blog post about their findings.
In a separate analysis shared last week, the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank, also called into question DOGE’s claims about its Education Department cuts.
Nat Malkus, senior fellow and deputy director of education policy studies at AEI, compared DOGE’s contract values with the department’s listed values and found they “seldom matched” and DOGE’s values were “always higher,” among other problems with DOGE’s data.
“DOGE has an unprecedented opportunity to cut waste and bloat,” Malkus said in a post about his research. “However, the sloppy work shown so far should give pause to even its most sympathetic defenders.”
In a move that sparked swift outrage from the higher education sector, the National Institutes of Health announced late Friday that it is dramatically cutting funding for grant recipients’ “indirect costs” of conducting medical research at universities, including hazardous waste disposal, utilities and patient safety.
“It is difficult to overstate what a catastrophe this will be for the US research and education systems, (particularly) in biomedical fields,” Carl Bergstrom, a biology professor at the University of Washington, posted on Bluesky. “It is deliberate and wanton devastation entirely out of scale with any concern about DEI activities on campuses. The goal is destroy US universities.”
Effective Monday, the NIH is planning to cap funding of indirect costs at 15 percent of all grants, down from the average of 27 to 28 percent. The change means that colleges and universities are on the hook for millions of dollars. They’ll likely have to cut their budgets or reduce research activities to make up the difference.
Republicans and President Trump have long sought to limit funding for indirect costs. The latest proposal is similar to a recommendation included in Project 2025, a conservative playbook for the second Trump administration that the president has disavowed. Project 2025 authors said the cap would “reduce federal taxpayer subsidization of leftist agendas.”
Last year, $9B of the $35B that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) granted for research was used for administrative overhead, what is known as “indirect costs.” Today, NIH lowered the maximum indirect cost rate research institutions can charge the government to 15%, above… pic.twitter.com/FSUYpEGKsr
Historically, universities have been able to negotiate reimbursement rates for those indirect costs, with institutional reimbursements averaging nearly 28 percent. Some of the nation’s leading research institutions, including Harvard, Yale and Johns Hopkins Universities, receive reimbursements of more than 60 percent. NIH said in a social media post that it expects to save $4 billion from the change; an Inside Higher Ed analysis of fiscal year 2024 grant data shows that colleges would lose about $4.3 billion in NIH reimbursements if indirect costs were capped at 15 percent.
Previously, if a college or university received a $5 million grant, they could also be reimbursed up to $1.4 million to pay for related costs, such as renting space for a lab. Under this new policy, that will be capped at $750,000.
“The United States should have the best medical research in the world,” the NIH said in its announcement. “It is accordingly vital to ensure that as many funds as possible go towards direct scientific research costs rather than administrative overhead.”
While the NIH said it has the authority to cap indirect costs, Senator Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington, said on social media Friday that the proposal is illegal.
“It will mean shuttering labs across the country, layoffs in red & blue states, & derailing lifesaving research on everything from cancer to opioid addiction,” Murray wrote.
Cuts to ‘Life-Saving’ Research
While the NIH is casting indirect costs as a burden, Association of American Universities President Barbara R. Snyder said in a statement that they are “real and necessary costs of conducting the groundbreaking research that has led to countless breakthroughs in the past decades.”
A $4 billion cut to reimbursements for NIH grants, she added, “is quite simply a cut to the life-saving medical research that helps countless American families.”
NIH has worked feverishly in recent weeks to comply with President Trump’s executive orders to eliminate all support for diversity, equity and inclusion and “gender ideology.” Grant reviews stopped for two weeks, alarming researchers who rely on federal funding, and some scientists worried about the future of their funding under the agency.
But researchers and their advocates say an abrupt $4 billion cut to NIH funding—which has not been approved by Congress—has dire implications for the future of the United State’s scientific research enterprise and will undermine the NIH’s stated goal of producing superior medical research.
“Cuts to reimbursement of these costs are cuts to medical research and represent the federal government stepping back from commitments it has made to world-leading researchers,” Mark Becker, president of the Association of Public Land Grant Universities, said in a statement. “This action will slow advances for millions of patients who desperately need critical breakthroughs and imperil the U.S.’s position as the world leader in biomedical innovation.”
The NIH is the largest federal funding source for research universities, and has supported breakthroughs in medical technology and treatments for diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s.
Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, said the decision was “short-sighted, naive, and dangerous.”
“It will be celebrated wildly by our competitors, who will see this for what it is—a surrender of U.S. supremacy in medical research,” Mitchell said. “It is a self-inflicted wound that, if not reversed, will have dire consequences on U.S. jobs, global competitiveness, and the future growth of a skilled workforce.”
University of Wollongong interim vice-chancellor John Dewar said ‘support arrangements are in place to ensure continuity in [students’] studies’. Picture: NCA Newswire
The University of Wollongong (UOW) has confirmed 91.6 full-time equivalent positions will be cut in a financial restructure, after revealing it offered redundancies to 137 staff in November 2024.
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