When History Department Chair and Prof. Kevin Boyle’s daughter texted, “I’m sorry to hear what happened” Tuesday night, he was immediately concerned.

The Trump administration froze $790 million in federal funding to Northwestern, first reported by The New York Times and confirmed to The Daily by a Department of Health and Human Services official early Wednesday morning.

In the aftermath, faculty have been left to grapple with what the move means for their research projects, academic freedom and the University as a whole.

“This is a very significant blow to the University,” Boyle said. “The nature of it is still really hard to understand.”

‘It still knocks the wind out of you’

Several faculty members said the freeze was not completely unexpected.

The Department of Education announced in January it would investigate NU, along with four other universities, for alleged antisemitism on campus. In March, NU was one of 60 universities that received a letter from the department warning of potential enforcement actions if it did not uphold Title VI of the Civil Rights Act to protect Jewish students on campus.

“I knew it to be coming and I knew our administrators to be preparing for the likelihood,” English and gender and sexuality studies Prof. Nick Davis said. “It still knocks the wind out of you.”

The lack of formal announcement about the funding freeze has prompted questions from some faculty members. The University was notified about the freeze by the media, not the White House, according to a University spokesperson.

Davis, who is the director of gender and sexuality studies and primarily researches queer and feminist cinema, said he empathizes with the University’s situation.

“I think people are understandably panicked,” Davis said. “We want to hear a really clear statement about what is going on, but I find it hard to expect that right now from the administration.”

The freeze comes after the University “fully cooperated” with federal investigations, according to a University spokesperson.

Without an official notice, several faculty said the University community doesn’t know exactly what the Trump administration might demand in exchange for the funds to be resumed and what areas of the University will be affected.

The federal government helps to fund research grants, stipends, Pell Grants and work study — all of which could be at risk under the freeze, they said.

“With a (funding freeze) number that big … nobody is in a good position to think, ‘This can’t possibly affect me,’” Davis said. “The more vulnerable or the less established you already are in your career — which graduate students and postdocs, almost by definition, are — the more it makes sense to worry about that.”

‘It’s very disruptive due to the uncertainty’

Chemistry Prof. SonBinh Nguyen said all of his lab’s research grants come from the federal government.

This funding is used to purchase lab equipment, chemicals and supplies, and to pay the salaries of graduate and postdoctoral workers in the lab, he said.

“(People in the lab) want to be able to come in every day and be able to do the job that they were hired to do,” Nguyen said. “If you don’t have the money to pay for that, or to buy the materials and equipment for them to work with, then there’s not much that they can do.”

Nguyen said it is crucial to ensure that there is enough funding at the onset of working with graduate students and postdoctoral fellows because the agreements often span multiple years.

Now, because the government has been unclear about its expectations, Nguyen said he doesn’t know when — or if — the funding will be returned. This is particularly important for students who might need to find new employment if the next grants never come, he said.

“I told my postdoctoral fellows that (with the University’s support) I have money to support them for the rest of their current-year contract, but beyond that I don’t know,” Nguyen said. “It’s very disruptive due to the uncertainty.”

‘A cudgel to bludgeon the University into submission’

Sociology Prof. Laura Beth Nielsen described the funding freeze’s impact on NU’s long-standing research projects as “troubling.”

She said essential research from across the University is in jeopardy. This is particularly concerning for the progression of research on HIV prevention and other life-saving techniques at the Feinberg School of Medicine, she said.

“I think it’s really ironic, because who are these people?” Nielsen said. “The idea that now the administration wants to pretend like universities don’t contribute to local, national and international quality of life just seems disingenuous.”

Spanish and Portuguese Prof. Jorge Coronado said NU’s strategy of appeasing the Trump administration “bore no fruit.”

Coronado also said he believes the government’s motives extend beyond combating antisemitism.

“I think it seems pretty clear … that the Trump administration is not concerned with antisemitism,” Coronado said. “It is concerned with using antisemitism as a cudgel to bludgeon the University into submission — and I have to say it’s working.”

Art and art history Prof. Rebecca Zorach concurred with Coronado, calling it “very cynical” for the Trump administration to use antisemitism as a “lever to get what they want.”

She said antisemitism is not the government’s chief objective — rather, it’s to “destroy” higher education.

“We need to recognize that the Title VI issue is kind of a smoke screen,” Zorach said. “It’s not to say there haven’t been legitimate complaints of antisemitism or other forms of discrimination on this campus, but the Trump administration is full of antisemites.”

‘In the making, an authoritarian regime’

Boyle, a specialist in modern American history, said NU is not the only institution plagued by uncertainty.

“The only other time … that there was a level of chaos that even comes close to approaching this was the first Trump administration,” Boyle said. “The level of administrative ability that seems to emanate from the Oval Office is stunningly low.”

Boyle said a primary factor in Trump’s election victory was the promise to bring a “business discipline” to the executive branch. However, businesses depend on smooth operations in order to maintain efficiency, he said.

The federal government, in contrast, is “wildly inefficient,” Boyle said.

“(Trump) is clearly a man motivated by a sense of aggrievement,” Boyle said. “He has decided, and people in his administration have decided, that elite universities are an enemy, and this is a very, very powerful tool that they’re using to attack what they see as enemy institutions.”

Boyle said the worst case scenario is an “erosion” of the United States’ “fundamental democratic promise.”

While Boyle acknowledged that promise is “imperfect,” he said if it is completely lost, it will be very difficult to rebuild.

“It’s just sort of terrifying,” Boyle said. “That’s the nature of an authoritarian regime — and that’s what the Trump administration is. It is, in the making, an authoritarian regime, and authoritarian regimes rely on building a sense of fear.”

‘To cut off a question before it’s even asked’

Aside from the funding freeze, the Trump administration has attacked DEI initiatives nationwide, leading NU to remove DEI websites and change at least a dozen personnel titles across undergraduate and graduate schools.

“If we can’t even say a sentence that has ‘women’ in it, or ‘slavery’ in it or ‘race’ in it — which I truly believe a lot of people have a lot of questions about, wherever they’re coming from — it just seems like a loss for everybody,” Davis said.

Boyle said the history department is “absolutely committed” to pursuing the same scholarly work, including questions of race, gender and class — which are “fundamental” to the discipline.

Even amid the current uncertainty, Boyle emphasized that the future remains unwritten.

“This is not an inevitable outcome,” Boyle said. “It’s up to those who do oppose — and I think many, many Americans do — this danger, to try to figure out where the levers of power are.”

Still, some faculty members said they hope to see more assertive action from University administration to preserve academic freedom.

Several faculty said NU should sue the government in response to the freeze, while others said the University should consider drawing from its $14.3 billion endowment to compensate for programs the federal government traditionally supports.

“We’re taking funding away so that an experiment not only can’t finish, but so it can never start,” Davis said. “To cut off a question before it’s even asked, and to never know what the answer might have been is, I think, one of the things people have the hardest time accepting.”

Isaiah Steinberg and Nineth Kanieski Koso contributed reporting.

Email: [email protected]

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