Federal grant cuts at Harvard illegal, judge rules; Harvard Chan faculty express relief, concern
After a federal judge in Boston ruled that the Trump administration’s cancellation of nearly $3 billion worth of grants to Harvard University was unlawful, several faculty members from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health expressed relief as well as concern about Harvard’s future.
“It has been a roller coaster for quite some time,” said Francesca Dominici, Clarence James Gamble Professor of Biostatistics, Population, and Data Science, and director of the Harvard Data Science Initiative, in a Sept. 4 WBUR interview.
Harvard’s grants remain frozen, and the Trump administration has said it will appeal the ruling. Even if the University ultimately prevails in court, the financial environment for higher education has shifted significantly. Factors including changes in federal research priorities, cuts to research funding and facilities reimbursement, and new approaches to the grant review process will likely have a major impact on Harvard Chan School’s budget, Dean Andrea Baccarelli said in a note to the community following the judge’s ruling.
“In response, we must make far-reaching, structural changes to the School,” he wrote.
The grant cancellations came after the University rejected Trump administration demands—including changes in Harvard’s governance, hiring, and admissions—made supposedly because of the University’s failure to address antisemitism on campus. But in a Sept. 3 decision, federal district court judge Allison Burroughs wrote that the administration’s demands occurred well after Harvard had begun addressing campus antisemitism, and that the funding cuts “jeopardized decades of research and the welfare of all those who could stand to benefit from that research, as well as reflect a disregard for the rights protected by the Constitution and federal statutes.”
In a Sept. 3 Boston Globe article, Scott Delaney—research scientist in the Department of Environmental Health and cofounder of Grant Witness, a website that catalogs all of the grants terminated by the Trump administration—said that the judge’s decision shows that Harvard was right to challenge the administration’s cancellation of research grants.
In a Sept. 3 Mass Live article, Rita Hamad called the court ruling a positive step toward restoring Harvard’s federal grants, noting that the University’s lawsuit can serve as a model for other colleges and universities facing federal funding cuts.
“I’m relieved by the court’s decision, since my team lost millions of dollars in NIH [National Institutes of Health] funding that we were awarded through a rigorous review process,” said Hamad, associate professor of social and behavioral sciences. “This money supports our vital research on how social policies affect mental health, heart disease, and dementia risk.”
In the WBUR interview, Dominici spoke about the pain of losing millions of dollars in grant funding, and said the ruling gives her hope that she and her team will be able to resume their work developing an artificial intelligence model to prevent disease and death from exposure to environmental contaminants and extreme weather events. She also hopes to provide more certainty about stipends for the postdoctoral fellows and research assistants in her lab.
John Quackenbush, professor of computational biology and bioinformatics, was also quoted in the Mass Live article. He said he was thankful for the judge’s decision but said the Trump administration cuts to Harvard have taken a big toll. “A lot of the damage has already been done, and that damage is going to take a long time to repair,” he said. “Just to have this ruling handed down doesn’t mean that the situation is going to go back to what it was like before.”
He added, “This is long-term damage to the scientific and research infrastructure in the United States.”
Listen to the WBUR interview: Harvard researcher describes cautious optimism after judge restores federal funds
Read the Boston Globe article: Federal judge rules that Trump administration unlawfully cut nearly $3 billion of Harvard’s research funding
Read the Mass Live article: As a federal judge rules in Harvard’s favor, the campus community is warily optimistic
