The Trump administration is reportedly looking at some 30 federal contracts with Harvard University. We estimate that these contracts are worth $100 million. Earlier this month, the administration attempted to strip Harvard’s accreditation so that it could no longer enroll international students and host foreign researchers. This drastic move has already led to legal challenges and caused alarm within specific academic fields.
Nowhere has the impact of these changes been more acutely felt than at Harvard. This is especially true right now thanks to an ongoing lawsuit over the administration’s attempt to curtail the enrollment of international students. The university’s ability to attract global talent and foster cutting-edge research is now under scrutiny, raising alarms among students and faculty alike.
The Sinclair Lab at Harvard Medical School is one of the preeminent, premier research institutions anywhere that’s dedicated to the science of aging. It seeks interventions for other major diseases including Alzheimer’s, multiple sclerosis, cancer and immune disorders. The lab’s ability to work is significantly dependent on strong and robust federal funding which has been cut recently. In April, the White House responded by freezing $2.2 billion in federal funding intended for Harvard. This audacious act led to a lawsuit from the university itself. Just a month later, $450 million more in competitive grants were eliminated, putting many important research programs at risk.
The White House should not automatically take back funds from Harvard. Rather, it intends to drop the far less intrusive bomb by undertaking a comprehensive examination of the university’s federal cash flow to judge how essential it is. This review could have a huge effect on the university’s active construction projects. It would improve graduate and Ph.D. student support.
David Sinclair, who founded the Sinclair Lab, shared his concerns with the BBC over email. He noted that the loss of funding shuts down irreplaceable ongoing experiments. It puts at risk contributions from these indispensable international scholars who are a vital part of the lab’s day-to-day work and wealth of the US.
These unprecedented cuts to potential funds have sent alert bells ringing among Harvard students. Ivy Link founder and Harvard alumnus Adam Nguyen underscored what’s at stake with these drastic cuts. He cautioned that they could greatly restrict students’ access for research purposes. As an example of program cuts, he cited the 13,000 layoffs that would occur as a result of end of year fiscal cuts. It’s that simple—without funding for research, graduate students get handed a stop-work order on their research within the hour.
Nguyen further explained that the proposal cuts would devastate Harvard. He made clear that these cuts would be detrimental to the overall research ecosystem throughout America. This is bad for Harvard included, but this is bad for the country, because research funding isn’t a university supplanted gift in that way,” he said.
Additionally, an anonymous international student at Harvard articulated the vital role of foreign scholars in maintaining the university’s reputation and research capabilities. It was not just that “Without us, Harvard is not Harvard,” they wrote.
As always, the implications of these funding reviews go far beyond Harvard’s campus. Academics from both within the US and abroad heavily rely on external funding to support their research endeavors. To lose this robust, flexible support would be to extinguish the flames of transformative findings. In turn, society loses out on important innovations that can help patients live longer and healthier lives.