【中美创新时报2025 年 3 月 17 日编译讯】（记者温友平编译）唐纳德·特朗普上任仅八周，就让美国顶尖研究型大学陷入了紧缩时期。《波士顿环球报》记者希拉里·伯恩斯、迈克·达米亚诺和迪蒂·科利对此作了下述报道。
哈佛大学、麻省理工学院、布朗大学和宾夕法尼亚大学等十多所学校已冻结招聘。约翰霍普金斯大学将裁员 2,000 多人。波士顿大学和耶鲁大学已指示管理人员减少支出。马萨诸塞大学医学院撤销了数十份博士生的录取通知，并表示裁员“将是必要的”。
各所学校对这些大规模削减的原因都是一样的：特朗普总统的威胁和削减数十亿美元联邦资金的早期举措导致学校财务前景不明朗，其中大部分资金都用于科学研究。联邦机构已经取消了大学实验室的研究经费，并从哥伦比亚大学撤走了 4 亿美元，以惩罚其在反犹太主义问题上不作为。
特朗普政府官员承诺将采取进一步行动，称他们将控制联邦在研究方面的支出，对涉嫌违反民权法的学校进行经济处罚，并威胁让国会将联邦捐赠基金税增加十倍或更多。
到目前为止，大多数行动通常针对的是顶尖大学的研究业务。但考虑到这些顶级学校对联邦资金的依赖程度，随着管理人员竞相填补预算漏洞，这些行动可能会在整个校园产生广泛影响。一些学校已经开始推迟聘请新教授或翻修宿舍和其他基本支出。
在马萨诸塞州，撤资可能会蔓延到校园之外，因为该州的经济与高等教育行业息息相关，尤其是高等教育的研究业务，这些业务多年来催生了许多新企业。
东北大学前校长理查德·弗里兰 (Richard Freeland) 表示，如果政府坚持到底，对整个高等教育系统的影响将是“灾难性的”。科学进步将放缓，低收入学生将难以负担大学学费，一些学校将关闭。
波士顿大学前校长鲍勃·布朗 (Bob Brown) 表示，资金削减和财务威胁是“美国研究型大学的恐怖统治”。
对于特朗普及其盟友来说，灌输恐惧是关键所在。
副总统 JD Vance 将大学视为左派思想的孵化器，并表示政府应该让它们“在生存和采取更少偏见的教学方式之间做出选择”。克里斯托弗·鲁福 (Christopher Rufo) 是一位活动人士，他曾协助埃隆·马斯克 (Elon Musk) 在教育部实施削减成本的举措。他在 3 月初告诉《纽约时报》，目标不仅仅是节省政府资金。这是为了让大学“陷入衰退”以“约束它们”。
特朗普任期带来的财务冲击是在大学预算经历了几年的艰难时期之后发生的。在许多学校，支出，尤其是人员配备，已经超过了收入。大学还在努力弥补新冠疫情时期的预算漏洞。
田纳西大学教授、高等教育财务专家罗伯特·凯尔钦 (Robert Kelchen) 表示，在全国数千所学院和大学中，“只有大约 200 所……在 1 月之前财务状况良好”。
3 月初，麻省理工学院校长 Sally Kornbluth 在宣布紧缩开支时表示，学校正面临“一系列不断变化的压力”，包括削减联邦研究经费、取消补助金、提高捐赠税的风险、经济处罚威胁，甚至还有政府关门的可能性。
现在，大学正在尽可能地削减成本，为最坏的情况做准备。
麻省理工学院表示，将把中央预算中提供给几乎所有部门的资金削减 5%，而该院系主任、生物学家 Amy Keating 在《波士顿环球报》获得的一封内部电子邮件中表示，“未来几个月或几年可能需要进一步削减开支。”
哈佛大学领导周一告诉教职员工，除了冻结招聘外，他们还必须仔细审查可自由支配的开支和建筑维护和翻新方面的缓慢开支。
许多学校，包括麻省理工学院、哈佛大学、达特茅斯学院和杜克大学，都在削减研究生招生和博士生名额。麻省大学陈曾熙医学院周三采取了严厉措施，撤销了数十份已经发出的博士生录取通知书。该决定是“由于与联邦资助生物医学研究相关的持续不确定性”，生物医学科学研究生院院长玛丽·埃伦·莱恩在《波士顿环球报》审阅的发给收到“临时”录取通知书的候选人的电子邮件中写道。
这些削减让有抱负的学者们感到不安。波士顿学院教授丽莎·古德曼告诉《波士顿环球报》，博士生在面试时要求保证他们的职位在毕业前能得到资助，但学校无法保证。
波士顿学院教授 Kristen Bottema-Beutel 于 11 月申请了一项联邦拨款，以支持几所地区学校的 12 名博士生研究特殊教育和残疾问题。她的申请尚未得到实质性回复，现在她担心这笔资金无法到位，因为特朗普政府的目标不仅是多样性、公平和包容性，还有 DEIA 首字母缩略词中有时较少提及的第四个词：可访问性。
“这不仅仅是削减成本。这是一场出于意识形态动机的清洗，”她说。
马萨诸塞大学阿默斯特分校结构工程专业博士生 Aidan Provost 表示，他担心资金和招聘冻结会扰乱有抱负的科学家和研究人员的渠道。
“人们从世界各地来到马萨诸塞州做研究”，Provost 说。“限制资金和限制访问会限制可以这样做的人。”
学生们在马萨诸塞大学阿默斯特分校工程学院研究生研究研讨会上分享他们的研究。 Erin Clark/Globe Staff
为了遵守特朗普的行政命令，政府取消了与 DEI 和跨性别身份相关的研究补助。美国国立卫生研究院表示，将削减为研究机构提供的管理费用，削减幅度高达 75%，尽管法院暂时阻止了这一举措。
与此同时，国会正在考虑一项提案，将大额捐赠基金的回报税从 1.4% 提高到 14%。
此外，鲁福和马斯克提出了将学生经济援助私有化的想法。
资金削减也出于明显的惩罚性原因。在缅因州州长珍妮特·米尔斯与特朗普就跨性别运动员发生争执后，美国农业部冻结了对缅因大学的资金，包括研究补助金。
一些保守派认为，削减是必要的纠正措施，因为联邦资金允许大学肆意挥霍，而几乎不考虑纳税人或学生的利益。一些顶尖学校的学费和食宿费在扣除经济援助前超过 8 万美元，近几十年来一直超过通货膨胀率，受到两大党政客的批评。
“我认为应该允许一些大学关闭而不进行救助吗？是的，”传统基金会教育政策研究员、特朗普政府执政计划“2025 项目”撰稿人乔纳森·布彻 (Jonathan Butcher) 说。
但其他人认为，这对美国经济、军事和文化的支柱构成了生存威胁。
前东北大学校长、前马萨诸塞州高等教育专员弗里兰说，自第二次世界大战以来，政府每年向研究型大学投入数十亿美元，帮助美国成为世界科学强国。政府还通过向学生提供助学金和贷款来补贴学费。此外，许多大学与包括国防部在内的联邦机构签订了合同，以提供技术专长和研究。
“大学现在依赖联邦资金，”弗里兰说。 “政府和高等教育之间一直存在这样的合作关系……但现在还悬而未决。”
前波士顿大学校长布朗表示，联邦政府对大学研究的支持随着时间的推移而减少，促使学校使用更多内部资金来支持研究项目。但他表示，大学无法承受 NIH 间接成本上限变化带来的巨额收入损失。
“你不能在停车场做研究，”布朗说。“你必须有一栋建筑，运营这些建筑需要花钱，管理……研究也需要花钱。”
机构将被迫做出艰难的决定，决定削减哪些项目和研究计划，布朗担心这会迫使美国研究人员出国留学，并打消最优秀的外国人才就读美国大学的积极性。他说，问题是，一所学校自己能负担得起多少博士课程和研究工作？
“这些正在进行的攻击最终会削弱或摧毁这个系统，”布朗说。“联邦政府正在做的要么是完全取消支持，要么是改变我们与联邦政府的契约，这将破坏这个系统。”
特朗普和他的盟友一再质疑联邦政府为何资助富裕的大学。
“哈佛有 500 亿美元的捐赠基金，我们为什么要给他们钱？”特朗普最近在被记者问及削减研究经费时说道。
哈佛大学前校长拉里·巴考表示，绝大多数美国大学没有巨额捐赠基金来缓解研究经费削减带来的痛苦，即便是哈佛大学 530 亿美元的捐赠基金也无法让该机构免受影响。大多数捐赠基金都受到与捐赠者达成的协议的限制。
“你不能拿着受限制的资金说，‘现在我们要用它来支持失去研究经费的教职员工’，”曾任塔夫茨大学校长的巴考说道。“事情不是这样的。”
高等教育顾问、哈佛大学前预算官拉里·拉德表示，处于金融危机中的大学可以在极端情况下动用捐赠基金，但这是最后的手段。拉德说，每年花费超过 4% 至 6% 的捐赠基金收益，就如同动用退休储蓄一样。
“你是在抵押你的未来，”拉德说道。 “你希望捐赠基金能够永远支持学校，永远为你的使命服务。”
巴考说，感受到这些削减之痛的不仅仅是自由派精英。进行科学研究的研究实验室和建筑需要“大量蓝领劳动力”来支持和维护这些设施。
“世界上每一家大型制药公司都在波士顿和剑桥建立了研究实验室，这并非偶然，”巴考说。“微软、亚马逊和谷歌在这里设立研究实验室也并非偶然。这都是因为大学。”
题图：马萨诸塞大学阿默斯特分校四年级博士生艾丹·普罗沃斯特担心，联邦资金削减和大学招聘冻结将扰乱未来科学家和研究人员的渠道。Erin Clark/Globe 员工
附原英文报道：
‘Reign of terror.’ Universities freeze hiring, rescind offers, start layoffs amid Trump cuts
By Hilary Burns, Mike Damiano and Diti Kohli Globe Staff,Updated March 14, 2025
Aidan Provost, a fourth-year PhD candidate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, worries federal funding cuts and university hiring freezes will disrupt the pipeline of future scientists and researchers.Erin Clark/Globe Staff
Just eight weeks into his term, Donald Trump has plunged the nation’s top research universities into a period of austerity.
More than a dozen schools, including Harvard, MIT, Brown, and the University of Pennsylvania, have frozen hiring. Johns Hopkins University will lay off more than 2,000 workers. Boston University and Yale have directed administrators to slow spending. The University of Massachusetts’ medical school rescinded dozens of admissions offers to Ph.D. candidates and said layoffs are “going to be necessary.”
Schools cited the same reason for these sweeping cuts: uncertainty about their financial futures driven by President Trump’s threats and early moves to slash billions of dollars of federal funding, much of it tied to scientific research. Already, federal agencies canceled research grants for university labs and yanked $400 million from Columbia University as punishment for alleged inaction on antisemitism.
Trump officials have promised to go further, saying they will rein in federal spending on research, punish schools financially for allegedly violating civil rights law, and threaten to have Congress increase the federal tax on endowment returns by ten-fold or more.
Most of the actions so far have generally targeted the research operations at leading universities. But given how much these top-tier schools have come to rely on federal funding, they could broadly ripple across campus as administrators race to plug holes in their budgets. Already some schools are holding off hiring new professors or renovating dormitories and other basic spending.
And in Massachusetts, the pullbacks could spill beyond campus, since the state’s economy is so intertwined with its higher ed industry, particularly their research operations that have led to so many new businesses over the years.
If the administration follows through, the effects would be “catastrophic” to the entire higher education system, said Richard Freeland, a former president of Northeastern University. Scientific advances would slow, low-income students would struggle to afford college, and some schools would close.
The funding cuts and financial threats are a “reign of terror on American research universities,” said Bob Brown, a former president of Boston University.
For Trump and his allies, instilling fear is part of the point.
Vice President JD Vance sees universities as incubators of leftist thought and says the government should give them “a choice between survival or taking a much less biased approach to teaching.” Christopher Rufo, an activist who has assisted Elon Musk’s cost-cutting initiative at the Department of Education, told the New York Times in early March that the goal is not merely to save the government money. It is to put universities “into a recession” to “discipline them.”
The financial shock of the Trump term follows several difficult years for university budgets. At many schools, expenses, especially for staffing, have outrun revenues. Universities were also still digging out of budgetary holes from the Covid era.
Of the thousands of colleges and universities in the country, “only about 200…were in good financial shape prior to January,” said Robert Kelchen, a professor at the University of Tennessee and expert on higher education finances.
In her announcement of MIT’s belt-tightening earlier in March, President Sally Kornbluth said the school is facing “an evolving set of pressures” from cuts to federal research, cancellations of grants, the risk of a higher tax on endowments, threats of financial penalties, and even the possibility of a government shutdown.
Now, universities are cutting costs wherever they can to prepare for the worst.
MIT said it will cut by 5 percent the funding it provides from its central budget to almost all departments, and one department head, biologist Amy Keating, said in an internal email obtained by the Globe that “deeper reductions may be required in coming months or years.”
Harvard leaders told faculty and staff on Monday that in addition to freezing hiring, they must also scrutinize discretionary spending and slow spending on building maintenance and renovation.
Many schools, including MIT, Harvard, Dartmouth, and Duke, are cutting back graduate admissions and PhD slots. The UMass Chan Medical School took the drastic step Wednesday of rescinding dozens of PhD admissions offers that had already been sent. The decision was made “[d]ue to ongoing uncertainties related to federal funding of biomedical research,” Dean Mary Ellen Lane of the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences wrote in emails reviewed by the Globe to candidates who had received “provisional” offers.
The cutbacks have left aspiring academics jittery. Boston College professor Lisa Goodman told the Globe that doctoral candidates have asked during interviews for guarantees their positions will be funded until their graduation, which the schools cannot ensure.
Kristen Bottema-Beutel, a Boston College professor, applied for a federal grant in November to support 12 doctoral students at several area schools to research special education and disability. She hasn’t received a substantive response to her application and now fears the funding will not come through, as the Trump administration targets not only diversity, equity, and inclusion, but also the less-mentioned fourth word sometimes included in the DEIA acronym: accessibility.
“It’s not just cost-cutting. It’s an ideologically motivated purge,” she said.
Aidan Provost, a PhD candidate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst studying structural engineering, said he worries the freezes on funding and hiring will disrupt the pipeline of aspiring scientists and researchers.
“People come from all over the world to do research” in Massachusetts, Provost said. “Limiting funding and limiting access limits the people who can do that.”
Students share about their research during a College of Engineering Graduate Research Symposium event at UMass Amherst. Erin Clark/Globe Staff
To comply with Trump’s executive orders, the government is canceling grants for research related to DEI and transgender identity. The National Institutes of Health said it would cut the amount it provides research institutions for overhead costs by as much as 75 percent, although that has been temporarily blocked by the courts.
Meanwhile, Congress is considering a proposal to increase the tax on the returns of large endowments from 1.4 percent to 14 percent.
Moreover, Rufo and Musk have floated the idea of privatizing student financial aid.
Funding has also been cut for apparently punitive reasons. After Maine governor Janet Mills had a spat with Trump over transgender athletes, the US Department of Agriculture froze funding, including research grants, to the University of Maine.
Some conservatives see the cuts as a necessary corrective after federal funding allowed universities to spend profligately with little regard for the interests of the taxpayer or students. Tuition and board rates, which exceed $80,000 at some top schools before financial aid, have outpaced inflation in recent decades and have been criticized by politicians from both major parties.
“Do I think some colleges should be allowed to close and not be bailed out? Yes,” said Jonathan Butcher, an education policy fellow at The Heritage Foundation and contributor to Project 2025, a governing playbook for the Trump administration.
But, others see an existential threat to a pillar of the American economy, military, and culture.
Since the Second World War, the government has pumped billions of dollars a year into research universities, which helped make the United States the world’s scientific powerhouse, said Freeland, the former Northeastern president and a former Massachusetts higher education commissioner. The government has also subsidized tuition by providing grants and loans to students. Additionally, many universities have contracts with federal agencies, including the Department of Defense, to provide technical expertise and research.
“Universities are now dependent on federal money,” Freeland said. “There’s been such a partnership between the government and higher education … but that’s now up in the air.”
Brown, the former BU president, said federal support for research at universities has declined over time, prompting schools to use more internal funding to support research projects. But universities, he said, cannot absorb the massive loss of revenue from changes to NIH indirect cost caps.
“You can’t do research out in the parking lot,” Brown said. “You have to have a building and running those buildings costs money, as does administering … the research.”
Institutions will be forced to make difficult decisions about which programs and research projects to cut, which Brown worries will push American researchers to study abroad and disincentivize the best foreign talent from enrolling at US universities. The question becomes, he said, how many doctoral programs and research efforts can a school afford on its own?
“These attacks that are underway will eventually either cripple or demolish the system,” Brown said. “What the federal government is doing is either removing support entirely, or changing the compact we’ve had with the federal government, which will break the system.”
Trump and his allies have repeatedly questioned why the federal government funds wealthy universities.
”Why are we giving money to Harvard when they have a $50 billion endowment?” Trump recently said when asked by a reporter about research funding cuts.
The vast majority of US universities do not have massive endowments to ease the pain of research funding cuts, and even Harvard’s $53 billion endowment does not insulate the institution, its former president, Larry Bacow, said. Most endowment funds are restricted by agreements with the donors who gifted the funds to a university.
“You can’t take money that is restricted and say, ‘Now we are going to use it to support a faculty member who lost their research grants,’” said Bacow, who was also previously president of Tufts University. “It doesn’t work that way.”
Universities in the midst of financial crises can tap endowments under extreme circumstances, but that is a last resort, said Larry Ladd, a higher education consultant and former budget officer at Harvard. Spending more than 4 percent to 6 percent of endowment returns annually is similar to dipping into one’s retirement savings, Ladd said.
“You are mortgaging your future,” Ladd said. “You want the endowment to continue to support the school in perpetuity, to continue to serve your mission in perpetuity.”
And, Bacow said, it won’t just be liberal elites who feel the pain of these cuts, Bacow said. Research labs and buildings where scientific research takes place require “huge amounts of blue-collar labor” to support and maintain the facilities.
“It is no accident that every major pharmaceutical company in the world has built a research lab in Boston and Cambridge,” Bacow said. “It’s no accident that Microsoft, Amazon, and Google have research labs here. It’s because of the universities.”
