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Katherine Knott
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: If colleges and universities want to receive funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), they’ll have to certify that they don’t operate any diversity, equity, inclusion or accessibility programs that violate federal antidiscrimination laws, under a new NIH policy announced Monday.
The change appears to codify parts of President Donald Trump’s executive orders that banned funding for DEI programs and builds on the strategy to leverage colleges’ research funding to compel certain behaviors. But the new policy goes even further than the president’s directives, barring colleges from boycotting Israel or Israeli businesses if they want to receive NIH grants.
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Students returned to campus this fall after a tumultuous summer for Yale’s relations with the federal government. Since the start of the second Trump administration, universities have faced heightened pressure through threats to federal research funds, criticism of diversity policies and scrutiny into alleged antisemitism on campuses, and many of them have reached settlements. Yale seemed to be an exception. But not anymore.
As the academic year begins, the status and details of the federal negotiations remain unclear, although University President Maurie McInnis has released several comments about Yale’s talks with the federal government as pressure mounts against any settlement with the Trump administration. The ongoing period of uncertainty in the negotiations “may well continue, and we do not know for how long,” McInnis wrote in an Aug. 21 message to the Yale community.
Earlier this month, the Pentagon ordered 30 universities to audit their ties with certain overseas institutions of concern, or else risk future federal funding. Few details have emerged about the universities’ responses as of Monday, the deadline to comply. One, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has confirmed publicly that it’s ending a study-abroad program in China.
The list of concerning foreign partners, often called the “1286 List” for the relevant section of the National Defense Authorization Act, is maintained by the Department of Defense. It was most recently updated in July. “These institutions have been confirmed to engage in activities that increase the likelihood of U.S. government-funded research and development efforts being misappropriated,” according to a news release from the Pentagon.
On Friday, U.S. District Judge Noël Wise ruled that immigration provisions that allowed Secretary of State Marco Rubio to revoke student visas had a chilling effect on noncitizen student journalists at the Stanford Daily. Wise wrote that portions of two federal immigration provisions are unconstitutional when used against noncitizens for speech protected by the First Amendment.
The Stanford Daily Publishing Corporation brought the lawsuit alongside two anonymous students unaffiliated with Stanford, though one student was later dismissed from the case. The plaintiffs were represented pro bono by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE.
