On Thursday night, a White House official confirmed to The Herald that the Trump administration plans to cut $510 million in federal funding to Brown, making the University the fifth Ivy League institution to have its funding threatened in recent weeks. This development represents another volley in President Trump’s war on civil society, science and the truth — a barrage of attacks that are deeply misguided and will have tangible effects on the lives of every single American.
What we are seeing today appears to be the end of an 85-year collaboration between America’s research universities and the American people, one of the most successful in human history. Together, we sequenced the human genome, created the internet and traveled to the moon and back. That is why we watch with profound sadness as a century of American progress comes to a close for no good reason at all.
In cutting federal research funding, Trump sacrifices long-term prosperity for short-term grievances. Not only will we miss out on a generation of future scientists as universities across the country slash PhD slots, but we risk losing top talent to other countries. According to a recent survey in Nature, 75% of responding scientists said that they were considering leaving the country over Trump’s attacks.
The Trump administration disingenuously justifies these cuts in the name of protecting Jewish students. This is a facade designed to distract from Trump’s attempt to dismantle dissent. While antisemitism is undoubtedly a problem on college campuses and perhaps even here at Brown, the University has acted judiciously to address these concerns. The indiscriminate nature of these funding cuts will harm the very Jewish students and faculty Trump claims to be protecting.
Across the country, we are witnessing a dangerous expansion of political power into the academic sphere — not to foster debate but to end it. Student protests and protected political expression are being met not with dialogue but with discipline, deportation and defunding. For Trump to successfully consolidate his power over America, speech must be silenced.
History offers a cautionary tale: Inaction in the face of creeping authoritarianism leads only to worse outcomes. In the 1950s, during the McCarthy era, academics and students alike were blacklisted and careers were destroyed for perceived disloyalty or dissenting views. We cannot allow ourselves to follow a similar path.
We call on every university and broader civil society to mobilize in opposition to this administration’s illegal actions. This includes exercising our full legal rights to sue, not buckling to demands and standing in solidarity — both in sentiment and financially through our collective endowments, as suggested by our peers at the Harvard Crimson.
These are troubling times, but Brown will survive. We have been here for 260 years, longer than the very country we live in. However, a diminished Brown, Columbia, Penn, Princeton and Harvard cannot serve the world without research. If Trump succeeds in decimating the University, he will kill not only lifesaving research but the American dream.
Editorials are written by The Herald’s editorial page board, and its views are separate from those of The Herald’s newsroom and the 135th Editorial Board, which leads the paper. This editorial was written by the editorial page board’s members, Ben Aizenberg ’26, Tas Rahman ’26, Paul Hudes ’27, Evan Tao ’27, Rchin Bari ’28 and Ethan Canfield ’28.
