Gagging Academia
The right to teach, debate and protest faces a high-stakes challenge in Pittsburgh’s universities and beyond.
Shortly after his inauguration, President Donald Trump disrupted the country’s research landscape with a series of executive orders and administrative actions aimed at slashing key funding sources and limiting the subjects of federally backed study.
His administration terminated hundreds of grants that were previously awarded and reduced staff at funding agencies, leaving universities that depend on federal research dollars scrambling. In Pittsburgh, that meant paused Ph.D. admissions, hiring freezes and layoffs.
To date, research cuts have resulted in the loss of 104 jobs and $24 million in Allegheny County, according to the Science and Community Impacts Mapping Project (SCIMaP). And more money would be lost if the reduced budgets proposed for agencies such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) are approved by lawmakers early next year.
Beyond financial impacts, local researchers say Trump’s research funding cuts have been a vehicle to attack academic freedom, and while university leaders proclaim a commitment to the educational concept, faculty members still have their doubts.
What is academic freedom?
There’s no universally agreed-upon definition of the term. Many academics point to a 1940 American Association of University Professors’ statement in which the concept is defined through three pillars:
- Teachers’ freedom to research and publish findings
- Teachers’ freedom to discuss relevant issues in the classroom
- Teachers’ freedom to express views as private citizens without censorship or discipline from their employer
Students are notably absent from this evaluation. Academic freedom, as it relates to students, is generally thought to involve the freedom to learn, but that is open to interpretation.
“Academic freedom is an ideal that people have fought hard for, and it’s still elusive,” University of Georgia higher education professor Timothy Cain said.
They point to settlements between the federal government and universities such as Columbia, Cornell and Northwestern, that have — in their view — compromised the core mission of higher education in exchange for the restoration of research funding.
The Trump administration, though, has defended its actions as necessary to rebuild trust in American higher education by reversing “left-wing ideological capture” and eliminating discrimination disguised as diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies.
Public Source reached out to faculty members at the University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University and Duquesne University to understand how this year’s funding challenges affected their ability to research — a core tenet of academic freedom. Only Pitt researchers were available by deadline, and those willing to go on record noted they were not speaking as university representatives.
Disparities studies get ‘no research support’
Miranda Yaver, an assistant public health professor at Pitt, was in the process of applying for grants from the NSF and Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality when Trump returned to office. She said as soon as he signed an executive order declaring DEI illegal and ordered agencies to root out all traces of it, she knew she couldn’t submit her applications.
Her research looks at health insurance disparities.
“There is some research that can be camouflaged, and a lot of my colleagues are finding ways to [not] use certain buzzwords in their applications,” she said, “but my research is pretty hard to camouflage.”
Pivoting, she turned to private foundations for assistance, but nothing panned out. “Starting next year, I will have no research support,” she said.
Yaver wondered whether she didn’t receive a grant because of the quality of her projects, or increased competition for foundation grants in light of the federal challenges.
While she has enough projects to continue working on next year to satisfy “internal and external pressures” to be productive, Yaver also said there are a lot of ideas in her head — concepts that would be beneficial for the health care industry — that she can’t pursue.
“To say that we can’t do research that intersects with equity is mind-boggling,” she said.
This year’s federal actions have even been disorienting for a former NIH institute director.
Jeremy Berg, who ran the National Institute of General Medical Sciences from 2003 to 2011 and now works at Pitt, questions if agency shifts are real or just language changes.
“If you’re working on health disparities research, even if they won’t let you say ‘underrepresented group,’ or ‘Black’ or ‘Latina,’ can you still go to the Hill District and recruit people?”
He believes researchers are continuing to do what they consider to be important work, but are talking about it differently. Others feel the act of removing language can be a deterrent from conducting research at all.
Language rules have real impact
Pitt neurobiology professor Michael Gold was involved in a grant that helped trainees from marginalized groups attend an annual pain research conference. The grant would’ve been in its third year (out of five) of funding, but the NIH sent a modification request asking for the grant to be rewritten to better align with the agency’s funding priorities.
These priorities include training programs for future doctors and scientists that are “based on merit,” research into the causes of autism, and disparities research that is “scientifically justified.”
The NIH says, “research based on ideologies that promote differential treatment of people based on race or ethnicity, rely on poorly defined concepts or on unfalsifiable theories, does not follow the principles of gold-standard science.” An example given of a poorly defined concept is systemic racism.
“We certainly couldn’t talk about diversity, equity and inclusion,” said Gold about the resubmission. The NIH hadn’t reviewed the new application as of publication time.
Gold called out the Trump administration’s efforts to deny the existence of concepts like systemic racism and gender identity differences, saying that “not only does it impact academic freedom, but it impacts the ability to do valuable and important research that has an impact on people’s lives.”
He said the loss of momentum on important topics has generational impact, which is “something that you just don’t come back from.”
Federal agencies have sent modification requests for 212 of the Pitt’s research awards. A CMU spokesperson said that university does not track modification requests.
A Public Source analysis of NIH grant funding revealed that, in line with nationwide data, the number of grants awarded this year that included keywords such as “racial,” “gender,” “diversity,” “equity” and “inclusion” declined by 20% across universities in Pittsburgh. Pitt saw the largest total reduction.
We used 13 terms for this analysis, and calculated the number of grants for each fiscal year over the last decade. This is a snapshot — not a definitive explanation of the change in all research funding related to diversity, equity and inclusion topics.
Researchers have expressed frustration about how local universities that receive significant federal funding have addressed this year’s issues. Berg said their strategy has been “basically keeping their heads down and not calling any attention to themselves.”
Since January, the leaders of these universities have issued few public statements about the upheaval — and none of those have outright condemned the federal administration’s moves. They have, however, joined lawsuits against proposed research cuts or co-signed broad statements with other college presidents around the country.
But, as the challenges facing higher education continue to mount, researchers urge school leaders to change their strategies heading into the new year.
“I think universities are running the risk of losing the faith and trust of their faculty, staff and students who feel that they don’t really have any principles that aren’t kind of negotiable, [like], ‘We absolutely agree in academic freedom as long as we don’t get a really good offer, we’re not going to give it away,’” Berg said.
Maddy Franklin reports on higher ed for Pittsburgh’s Public Source, in partnership with Open Campus, and can be reached at madison@publicsource.org.
This story was fact-checked by Rich Lord.
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