Princeton on Tuesday became the latest victim of President Donald Trump’s war on elite universities.
The Ivy League institution revealed Tuesday that the current administration froze several dozen federal research grants, just days after threatening similar funding cuts at Harvard and Columbia.
The Department of Energy, NASA, and the Defense Department are all pausing their funding for Princeton. The university’s President Christopher Eisgruber said that the administration’s rationale was not fully clear but that Princeton would comply with the law.
In a statement, he referenced the institution’s attempts to comply with the Trump administration’s probe into campus antisemitism.
“We are committed to fighting antisemitism and all forms of discrimination, and we will cooperate with the government in combating antisemitism,” he wrote. “Princeton will also vigorously defend academic freedom and the due process rights of this University.”
Princeton is not the first elite university facing Trump’s wrath. Earlier this month, Columbia agreed to the government’s demands after it cut $400 million in funds and threatened to slash billions more.
The New York City-based university agreed to overhaul its rules for protests and student discipline, and put its Middle East studies department under a federal receivership. In 2022-23, the university got a fifth of its revenue from federal sources and used the money for global AIDS programs, studies on aging, cancer biology, and drug abuse and addiction research, among other things.
The government is currently investigating over 100 universities for antisemitism, including Harvard, which is facing a review of almost $9 billion in federal grants and contracts. It’s all part of Trump’s plan to rid educational institutions of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives—and punish them for what he claims is a failure to stop antisemitism during a wave of pro-Palestine protests that broke out across the country last year.
Trump also went after his alma mater earlier this month when he suspended $175 million in funding to the University of Pennsylvania. Trump’s measure was provoked by the school’s policies on transgender athletes. The decision came weeks after Trump signed an executive order called “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,” with the president vowing to cut federal funding from universities that allow transgender women to compete in female sports.
Shortly after Trump clashed with Maine Gov. Janet Mills on his anti-transgender policies, the U.S. Department of Agriculture also suspended funding for the University of Maine. When the governor fought Trump on the ethics of the policy, he threatened: “You better do it because you’re not going to get federal funding.”
Dozens of other universities across the country are also affected by the aftershocks of Trump’s slashes. American educational institutions depend on the federal government, with some research institutions getting half their total revenue from grants.
Trump has gladly welcomed the universities’ willingness to quickly roll over and meet his requests, saying during a recent event for Women’s History Month: “You see what we’re doing with the colleges, and they’re all bending and saying, ‘Sir, thank you very much, we appreciate it.‘”
