The Trump administration is blatantly coercing universities, especially targeting elite private universities such as Columbia University, Harvard University, and Yale University, and threatening to withhold federal funds for active research grants.

Broader coercive attacks by the Trump administration and its so-called DOGE team extend to state research universities, such as Northern Illinois University, and universities and colleges across the nation.

The coercive methods currently being employed by the Trump administration include: suspending and cancelling research grants (NIH, NSF, DoED, NEH, NEA, etc.), suspending grant and fellowship stipends (NEH, Fulbright, etc.), blocking applications on certain forms of research based on political preferences, cutting indirect funding rates (NIH, NSF), dismantling educational and public health institutions (NIH, USAID, etc.), dismantling research institutes (Woodrow Wilson Center, USIP, NIH, etc.), firing researchers and staff members, dismantling the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), dictating changes in curricular programs, intervening in museum programing (Smithsonian), threatening museum curators (Smithsonian) and librarians, removing books from libraries, disrupting the Department of Education, and harassing and detaining international students and researchers.

All of these actions are improper, violating federal procedures and labor law, as well as trampling on the principles of academic freedom, research integrity, peer review, scientific methods, faculty governance, and university autonomy.

Further, many of the unprecedented actions of the DOGE team and the broader Trump administration are are unlawful and unconstitutional.

M. Gessen has published an opinion essay in The New York Times on the coercion of universities, indicating that “the Trump administration has threatened universities — at this point, I hesitate to say how many high-profile universities — with pulling their federal funding, which in this case means pulling research grants. Some of them amount to more than $2 billion, as in the case of Harvard, unless they submit to various demands.”

“In effect,” Gessen observes, “these demands are to place the university under direct federal oversight.”

M. Gessen argues that “the pretexts that the administration is using have to do with D.E.I. and antisemitism. The real reasons, I think, are anti-intellectualism and greed, and the fact that Trump is building a mafia state.”

“Now, a mafia state is an absolutely centralized system in which one person, the patron, the don, distributes money and power. And so in order to build a mafia state, such an aspiring patron needs to strip other agents of their money and power. Some universities are actually quite wealthy, so they are to some extent independent financial centers and they are centers of independent, intellectual and political power. And that’s what Trump is really going after.”

Harvard University has openly resisted the Trump administration’s direct threats to its research and educational model.

Gessen discusses Harvard University’s resistance: “I hesitate to talk about how important it is that Harvard stood up to Trump because it really should be a no-brainer. Of course, these demands are blatantly illegal. It almost literally says: ‘Nice university you got there. Shame if something happened to it.'”

“There’s no way that a university could accede to those kinds of demands,” Gessen argues. “And yet we saw Columbia, which was the first university targeted, try to bend, apparently in the hope of preventing further attacks. It very quickly became obvious that it doesn’t work.”

Gessen goes on to discuss the coercive tools available to the Trump administration and its willingness to use them against universities.

“So this is not going to stop with Harvard, however the battle of Harvard ends. But resistance on the part of Harvard, I think, makes it more difficult for the administration to expect significant concessions from other universities that have the resources to fight.”

As a Russian and American journalist, Gessen points out that “I’ve lived through this before — not nearly at this rate. It took Vladimir Putin a year to take over Russian media and almost a decade to really bring universities to heel. To see sort of the same playbook — but vastly sped up — and to see Americans who don’t have the history of living under totalitarian rule, and who think of themselves as freedom-loving, as valuing their rights to free speech and freedom of movement and all sorts of other important things, to see them fold a lot of the time, as happened with Columbia, as happened with many law firms, is incredibly disheartening.”

Gessen concludes: “I think the broader lesson is that there’s no such thing as negotiating with this administration. It is always going to demand more concessions until nothing is left of the institution that Trump has targeted.”

Gessen, M. “Welcome to Trump’s Mafia State.” The New York Times (21 April 2025).