In their fund-raising appeals, some schools are citing the vast sums in federal funding that they stand to lose. Others appear to be keeping mum to avoid angering the White House.
The T.H. Chan School of Public Health at Harvard has not been disguising its plight.
“With Harvard’s federal funding frozen, we are relying on philanthropy to power our research and support our educational programs,” the school’s donation website says. “Your ongoing engagement is vital to keeping our mission on track.”
The Trump administration’s decision to block billions of dollars in research money to certain colleges is forcing administrators and their fund-raising teams to scrounge for cash. As schools across the country contemplate layoffs, lab shutdowns and other drastic steps, they are weighing how much the gaps can be plugged by private philanthropy — and how pointedly political their pleas for donations ought to be.
A handful are wagering that the financial rewards of trying to leverage donors’ concerns about the federal cuts will outweigh the risk of antagonizing the White House.
In an April 30 note to alumni, Christina H. Paxson, the president of Brown University, said about three dozen of its grants and contracts had already been canceled, and that the government had stopped funding many research grants. She said news reports stated that the Trump administration had threatened an additional $510 million in grants and contracts to the university.
The moves, she wrote, represented “a significant threat to Brown’s financial sustainability.”
She urged alumni to lobby lawmakers about the issue, and included links for making donations to the university, including to support research whose federal funding was canceled or delayed. (Brown said data was not yet available for release about whether giving had increased as a result.)
Many other institutions have opted for more caution.
Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education and a former leader of Occidental College, suggested that some schools may be worried about turning off right-leaning donors who may agree with President Trump’s opinion that academia has tilted too far to the left.
