Over the sickeningly brief past weeks, the United States has suffered an outrageous assault on countless institutions integral to its progress. Research and scholarship at Vanderbilt were sadly not immune.
Nearly $5 million in Vanderbilt’s National Science Foundation-funded research were flagged for “scrutiny.” Proposed cuts to National Institutes of Health grants would endanger a projected $19 million in research funding. Certain departments were forced to reduce graduate admissions, and criteria for undergraduate admissions risk again being upended. Even student support resources, from STEM learning assistants to identity-based programming, may be impacted.
On the federal level, staffing cuts ravaged Health and Human Services, which houses the National Institutes of Health and the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention. Over 80,000 similar terminations are planned for Veteran Affairs, whose Nashville hospital is supported by VUMC research to improve the quality of veterans’ care. A sudden federal hiring freeze at the VA and all other departments interrupted the latest recruitment cycle for prospective employees, including one Vanderbilt senior with aspirations in public health — jeopardizing the future of the civil service.
These are not cost-saving measures. Compensation for every single civilian federal employee was only 4.3% of total spending in 2022. Funds for university research made up merely 6.5% of non-defense discretionary spending in 2022, a category which is only 14% of total federal spending. Besides, it is painfully obvious the ledger sheet has two halves: research spending pays back not only monetarily but also in benefit to society. Life-saving medical interventions, game-changing scientific innovations and, yes, sustained economic growth are all possible thanks to federally funded research.
If the latest push to break America’s researchers isn’t a financial qualm, it is certainly an ideological attack. It was claims of “neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda” that led Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) to target National Science Foundation grants to universities nationwide, including Vanderbilt. Caught up in his crusade? Devices to help diagnose traumatic brain injury and a study of mint plants that mentioned “biodiversity.”
Cruz and his ilk, however, don’t care about verifying their claims if it provides a flimsy premise to cripple academia itself. In a 2023 interview with Fox News promoting his new book, Cruz claimed elite universities had been “captured by the radical left.” In other words, he views the success of universities as a blow to his political power.
“There is a profound sickness at our universities,” Cruz said. “The very first chapter starts front and center with the universities. I call the universities the Wuhan lab of the woke virus. It’s where it started. It’s where it mutated. It’s where it spread.”
Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation-authored guide serving as this administration’s playbook, has similar language. Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts called for Trump to emphasize options “outside the woke-dominated system of public schools and universities, including trade schools, apprenticeship programs and student-loan alternatives that fund students’ dreams instead of Marxist academics.”
One author, Lindsey Burke, accused universities of using NIH indirect cost reimbursement to “subsidize leftist agendas” and advocated for capping these funds. Vanderbilt is currently fighting almost this exact same policy in court — which, if enacted, would create an annual funding gap of as much as $50 million.
The current administration holds overwhelming, politically charged contempt for academic research and education. This is an existential threat to life at Vanderbilt as we know it. Undoubtedly, Vanderbilt’s administration will fight limits on research funding tooth and nail. As Chancellor Daniel Diermeier and Provost C. Cybele Raver correctly pointed out in their recent email, “every cent of research funding counts.”
But the anti-academic threat is deeper and should be treated as such. Against the ideological assault on an open and robust higher education system, I fear we are woefully unarmed. We have yet to demonstrate the resistance needed to stand up to authoritarian encroachments on universities’ freedoms.
Shortly after Trump signed his executive order restricting federal diversity, equity and inclusion policies, Vanderbilt renamed its Student Center for Social Justice and Identity to the comfortably vague Student Center for Belonging and Communities. Despite the absence of any binding requirement from the federal government, university administrators assumed at least the appearance of abandoning marginalized students for non-existent rewards.
The federal government’s authoritarian demands won’t end at DEI or vague dictates against “woke ideology.” The tactics of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a close collaborator with the Heritage Foundation, could be replicated on a national scale. The governor initiated hostile takeovers of public college boards with conservative activists opposed to the prevalence of women in higher education. He also oversaw the eradication of the New College of Florida’s gender studies program.
Though Vanderbilt is a private institution, it receives federal funding, a lever which President Donald Trump has no trouble abusing. On March 4, Trump wrote a post on Truth Social threatening funding to universities that allow “illegal protests” on campus, promising incarceration for protesters — with no specification of what constitutes an “illegal protest.” With ongoing efforts to censor research, I have little faith that the government will shy away from yet another attack on the First Amendment.
Diermeier has been eager to market the distinction between Vanderbilt and other universities. It’s effective: one need only look at Town & Country’s glowing 2023 review of Vanderbilt’s “rigorous but chill education” — including a description of Diermeier as a “brazen Berliner” — to see that. Breathless features extolling the merits of sunny southern schools over draconian northern institutions have only fueled this approach. The Chancellor had much to gain from playing up our “principled neutrality” policy while right-wing media skewered the likes of Harvard during campus anti-war protests. But the gravy train won’t chug along forever.
In an October 2024 interview with Inside Higher Ed, Diermeier defined the line where institutional neutrality permits a clear and firm position.
“Institutional neutrality means [asking], ‘Am I taking a position that goes beyond that core purpose of the university?’” Diermeier said. “It’s not about being silent all the time. You can and you should talk about the important value that universities bring to society, forcefully. That’s not a problem with institutional neutrality because it’s your core purpose.”
There is no issue more central to a university’s mission than the resistance of top-down repression. I can understand the allure of trying to game the moment, in the hopes of being deemed “one of the good universities.” But with a federal administration hell-bent on crushing higher education, appeasement will never be a winning strategy. Vanderbilt’s staff, students and administration must become comfortable with the sentence: “No.” Quickly.
