The End of the University as We Know It
The rumors had been building for months: The Trump administration was coming for the universities. In the weeks after the president issued the first executive orders of this term, the effects rippled through my academic world: A Rutgers conference on H.B.C.U.s was canceled; graduate students on visas asked a professor I know if it was safe for them to travel; a colleague at a public university texted about an undergraduate crying in his office, worried about the job landscape. There was news of endangered climate projects, grant pages disappearing (and sometimes later reappearing) as people were applying to them and forestalled scientific programs of all kinds, including one at Columbia’s maternal health center studying how to reduce America’s maternal mortality rate.
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