Fear and Funding

The numbers are no longer abstract. The administration has terminated over $1.5 billion in existing federal research grants, targeting work it characterizes as "ideologically driven" or DEI-related. Simultaneously, the White House budget proposal calls for a 21% reduction in federal science funding for fiscal year 2026.

The retroactive cancellations are particularly devastating. These aren't hypothetical future grants—they're funded, active research programs with graduate students mid-dissertation, postdocs mid-contract, equipment already purchased. Labs are shutting down experiments that took years to design. Principal investigators are scrambling to place displaced researchers.

The 21% budget cut, if enacted, would return federal science funding to levels not seen since before the Obama administration. Combined with the terminations, it signals that the research university as Americans have known it since World War II—government-funded, globally competitive, driving innovation—may be entering a fundamentally different era.

California College of the Arts will close after the 2026-27 academic year. The 118-year-old art and design college—located in one of the world's most expensive cities—couldn't survive the enrollment cliff, declining arts enrollment, and San Francisco's brutal real estate economics. Vanderbilt University will acquire the campus.

CCA isn't a marginal institution. It's nationally accredited, well-regarded, with alumni working at every major design firm and tech company in the Bay Area. If CCA can't make it, the message to other small, tuition-dependent private colleges is grim: location, reputation, and history aren't enough.

The Vanderbilt acquisition is telling. A wealthy Southern research university buying a San Francisco art campus suggests the future may belong to institutions large enough to absorb others. The small, distinctive college—long celebrated as higher education's unique American contribution—increasingly looks like an endangered species.

The Department of Education's new Section 117 reporting portal is live, and universities are scrambling to comply. The system demands unprecedented granular detail on foreign gifts and contracts—every international partnership, every visiting scholar stipend, every research collaboration with a foreign institution.

The compliance burden alone is staggering. Research universities with hundreds of international partnerships must now document, categorize, and report funding relationships that were previously tracked informally. Small colleges with even modest international programs are hiring compliance staff they can't afford.

The stated goal—preventing foreign espionage and undue influence—isn't unreasonable. But the implementation assumes guilt. Every international dollar becomes suspect until proven innocent. The American research university's greatest competitive advantage—its openness to global talent and ideas—is being reframed as its greatest vulnerability.

The Chronicle Review devoted a special collection to the question nobody in the professoriate wants to ask out loud: is this profession dying? The essays identify a convergence of threats—political attacks on tenure, the enrollment crisis, AI's destabilizing advance—that together create something beyond normal career anxiety. It's existential dread.

What's new isn't any single threat—it's the simultaneity. Professors have survived political pressure before. They've adapted to technology before. They've weathered enrollment fluctuations before. But never all three at once, with each reinforcing the others. Political attacks weaken institutional protections. AI enables administrators to imagine a future with fewer faculty. Enrollment declines make every position vulnerable.

"I used to worry about getting tenure. Now I worry about whether tenure will exist when I'm eligible for it."
— Assistant professor, humanities

The morale crisis has practical consequences. Burned-out faculty teach worse. Anxious researchers produce less. The best graduate students look at the profession and choose industry. The death spiral isn't hypothetical—it's demographic, as fewer talented people enter a field that offers diminishing security and growing hostility.

The Department of Education formally ruled that San Jose State University violated Title IX by allowing a transgender woman to compete on its women's volleyball team. The finding—that participation "denied female athletes equal opportunity"—follows an executive order threatening to withhold federal funds from schools with inclusive transgender athletics policies.

The legal mechanism is significant. Title IX, the 1972 law designed to ensure women's equal access to education, is being reinterpreted to restrict transgender participation. The same statute that opened doors for women in athletics is now being used to close them for trans athletes.

For universities, the calculus is cold. Comply with the administration's interpretation and face lawsuits from excluded athletes. Resist and risk millions in federal funding. The Department has made clear that "non-compliance" carries financial consequences—a threat that hits public universities, which depend heavily on federal support, hardest.

In a week dominated by fear, one story offered a different frequency. UPenn launched a $26 million grant program to explore creative, human-centric AI applications in education. A widely circulated essay argued for "centering joy" in how universities approach the technology—not just policing its misuse but imagining what it makes possible.

The argument isn't naive. Its proponents acknowledge the integrity concerns and the labor displacement anxiety. But they contend that the academy's default posture—suspicion, restriction, fear—is itself a failure of imagination. What if AI freed faculty from grading drudgery so they could mentor more? What if it made personalized feedback scalable? What if the creative possibilities actually excited students?

$26 million is real money. It's enough to fund dozens of pilot programs, create new courses, and generate evidence about what works. Most importantly, it signals that at least some institutions are ready to move past the grief stage and into something more constructive.

Whether "joy" is the right frame remains debatable. For faculty watching their colleagues' grants get terminated and their departments eliminated, it may feel tone-deaf. But the alternative—letting fear be the only lens through which the academy encounters AI—guarantees a future where the technology is shaped by everyone except educators.