U.S. universities facing federal support withdrawal and potential fallout: Graphics

Protesters at Harvard protesting US President Donals Trump’s actions against the University.
| Photo Credit: AFP

Over the past few weeks, US President Donald Trump has issued executive orders cancelling federal support for several top U.S. universities.

Most recently, he ordered the withdrawal of over two billion dollars in federal support to Harvard after the university refused to make some administrative and policy changes sought by the Trump administration. Harvard President Alan Garber said the school would not “negotiate over its independence or its constitutional rights” even as Mr. Trump threatened to revoke its tax-exempt status.

Harvard University is the latest school to face Mr. Trump’s ire. High-ranking universities such as Cornell, Northwestern, Brown, and University of Pennsylvania were among others that were cut off from federal support earlier.

While Harvard University refused to accommodate Mr. Trump’s demands, Columbia University agreed to make changes after $400 million federal support was put at stake earlier. To put these figures in context, federal support makes up from around 6% to just over 23% of the operating revenue of these Universities.

Other sources of revenue include tuition fees, in-house clinical practice revenue, and endowment payouts. Federal support is used primarily for research programmes within these institutions in medicine-related research, including cancer.

While overall figures for the whole university’s revenues paint one picture, another is how the federal support has an outsized impact on some departments, like health. For instance, at Harvard University, 59% of the revenue for the Health department comes from sponsored support.

Action against antisemitism

The fund withdrawals come after last year’s widespread campus protests supporting Palestine in the middle of the war between Israel and Hamas. Mr. Trump’s list of required changes includes — in multiple cases — a stronger response against antisemitism from the Universities.

Last year’s protests, spread across the country in several universities, were against the U.S. supporting Israel in the war and demanded that Universities divest investments tied to Israeli companies. Protests happened at over 60 college campuses across the country.

Columbia University was one of the campuses where protesters were arrested and force was used. Here is a timeline of how the protests blew up.