University of North Carolina Tried to Stay Out of Trump's Way, but Research Funding Was Cut Anyway

Professors at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill worried about how the Trump administration's anger towards universities would affect them. But the school's leaders thought they had a plan to protect the institution from that wrath.

In the event, the plan did not work. The Trump administration cut off the money that made much of the work possible for one professor who had joined the university to research race and environmental disasters. University leaders had few ideas for keeping that work going.

During a video meeting in May 2025, administrators told a handful of professors directly that fighting back in the courts was not an option. Instead, the officials suggested, researchers could rewrite their proposals to avoid mentioning topics the Trump administration might find objectionable, such as race.

The New York Times obtained a recording of the meeting. In it, the professor describes the suggestion as 'whitewashing.' She was anguished, because the funding for her research had already been cut off.

One of the university's top research officials, Andy Johns, fought tears himself during the meeting. 'There's no part of this that feels right,' he told the group. 'But right now, we have to navigate it as best we can.'

However careful the university's leaders were, the funding cuts reached the campus in the end. Work on cancer, suicide, AIDS and coronaviruses was hit anyway.

The Trump administration set out to slash funding at private universities it depicted as hotbeds of intolerance and left-leaning ideology. But the campaign was so indiscriminate that it reached far beyond the Ivy League to include many of the nation's large public research universities, among them Chapel Hill. The campaign has been described as the most consequential reshaping of American scientific research in generations.