Week 7
Figuring out what to focus on now & what to focus on next in science and higher ed
This newsletter is my part of an ongoing conversation among colleagues who’ve had a rough week. I share two or three pieces of the puzzle that feel are most important, hazard a guess about what to expect next, and offer at least one useful thing to do.
MEETING THE MOMENT: 2025-03-07
Hi friends,
This felt like a big week. I hate discussing them in the same sentence, but between starting the week with the State of the Union address and ending it with the Stand Up For Science rallies1, I spent a lot of time thinking about the importance of spectacle - of photos, posters, and slogans - in shaping our understanding of historical moments.
The vast majority of people experience the vast majority of events second- and third-hand, at best, through hot takes and headlines, photos and video clips. We piece together our gist of what’s happened through a few fragments of content, in a process heavily shaped by our networks. Being a citizen in a digital era requires us to build new habits and skills to cope with exactly this sensemaking challenge, something I’ll come back to at the end of tonight’s debrief. But for me, at least, the overarching question of the week is what are the principled and proportionate responses to what we are seeing unfold? How do we tell the story of what’s happening to ourselves?
I’ll say this plainly - even the calmest, most straightforward recitation of the facts as we know them makes a person sound like a raving conspiracist. Constraining my list of “what’s happening” to just a few bullet points is getting harder each week. Mapping out the likely chains of consequence is even more daunting, and is something I tend to do only within my innermost circles of trust.
But I believe we must have these conversations, and prepare to frankly discuss moves and counter-moves. To do so, we have to stay focused and not flooded. But we can do it one step at a time.
This was week 7. Let’s get into it.
What’s happening now:
Today, multiple government agencies2 announced an immediate cancellation of $400 million dollars in research grants and contracts to Columbia University. In 2024, the university’s total operating revenues were $6.6 billion, and of that, 20% ($1.3 billion) were government grants - double the amount raised in private gifts from donors. Interim Columbia President Katrina Armstrong has told her community that this will “touch nearly every corner of the University,” including patient care at its hospitals. The stated purpose of this action is to force the university to combat antisemitism. Even if you are willing to accept that at face value, it’s hard to imagine how Columbia - with its unusually secretive disciplinary committees, student suspensions and expulsions, and activation of riot police - stands out for not having done enough. There is no way for us to talk about this without actually talking about it. Genocide is abhorrent. Witnessing a Nazi revival is abhorrent. Pretending that delighting white supremacists is accidental coincidence is abhorrent. And so is accepting the idea that stripping university funding this way is a rational, much less legal3, action to protect our Jewish community. The agencies specifically describe this as the “first round of action” with more to follow, and describe it as serving notice “to every school and university that receives federal dollars that this Administration will use all the tools at its disposal” to achieve its goal. Let’s be clear: the goal is to force universities to police and punish students and faculty to the President’s liking. The goal is to use our universities against us to obliterate political protest.
Similarly, the latest bad-news development for NIH funding is the mass termination of hundreds of active research grants that no longer meet “agency priorities” - yep, that means work focused on diversity, equity, inclusion, gender identity, climate justice, and more. I’m describing this as similar because again, it uses essential funding as the censorship mechanism and the orders seem well-engineered to weaponize the uncertainty of NIH staff who are required to implement them.4 Program officers are first directed to renegotiate work with PIs, which pits nebulous policy against the best possible science, and it’s not only their own jobs they risk, but also those of their grants management specialist colleagues. To understand how we got here, I really appreciate this comprehensive week-by-week summary of what’s happened at the NIH.
Like me, you might be worried for the safety of the judges handing them down, but we have several new court rulings to celebrate:
Good news: A preliminary nationwide injunction blocks the administration’s attempt to set all indirect rates on NIH grants at 15%. This replaces the temporary restraining orders that were granted almost immediately after filing. In her latest ruling, Federal Judge Angel Kelley wrote that “it is likely Plaintiffs will succeed on the merits, rendering the [NIH] notice unlawful.”
More good news: Additional rulings against the ”funding freeze” initiated by the OMB memo in January. Yesterday, Federal Judge John McConnell Jr. granted a preliminary injunction for the 22 states whose attorneys general brought the case to court. (This is in addition to the preliminary injunction extended last week by District Judge Loren L. AliKhan.) On Wednesday, the Supreme Court upheld a ruling by Federal Judge Amir Ali that ordered the government to pay contractors for foreign aid work that has already been completed.
What’s next:
Budget negotiations. The deadline is midnight on March 14. This was set when Congress failed to allocate funding to the federal agencies before the new fiscal year began on October 1st. This is important and more complicated than usual because our constitutional checks and balances hinge on Congressional authority over spending. If I understand the situation properly, we are looking at either an entirely partisan budget or another government shut down. For a full rundown on what that would mean, I think this Reuters reporting is solid.
What to do:
For one specific and useful action: check out this Community Air Sensor workshop on March 18 & 19. Despite the cancellation of the original EPA event, the organizers are committed to making sure people have accurate, accessible air quality data. I think it’s a brilliant example of what science for the common good can look like. Register yourself, forward it to folks who should attend, or use it as inspiration for what we can do together.
Finally, I want to go back to the ideas that I started tonight’s debrief with - understanding how we shape the narratives of our moment. Tonight I want to talk about the input side of that equation.
Back in January, I attended a National Press Club event about digital protections for journalists, who are currently facing record levels of violence and harassment. María Salazar Ferro, who is the Director of Newsroom Safety and Resilience at The New York Times, laid out a helpful distinction between physical, digital, and psychological safety and argued that online threats rarely5 translate into physical violence. The goal is to get inside your head. It’s an insidious tactic to intimidate and distract.
It strikes me that we are facing the same corrosive dynamics right now. I’ts just that the gleeful sadism is being delivered at scale and in places I never expected to see it, like press releases from the EPA. So I just wanted to wrap up by talking about how to think about protecting yourself and your networks from this specific kind of threat. For me, it helps to pause and say to myself, “This is propaganda and I’m the target.”
That focuses me on what I might actually need to do with a piece. Maybe I need to keep an eye on a specific actor, maybe I need to metabolize it to extract a new frame or watchword, or maybe I just need to avoid it entirely. Maybe you need to do that too. But what NONE of us should be doing is poisoning our information networks with this garbage.
I recognize that our morale and our attention is precious. As I plow through all the things I need to read to write this weekly debrief, the idea of “critical ignoring” helps get me through. I hope it helps you too.
Liz
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Congratulations and a huge thank you to everyone who got out there! Timothy Snyder includes “Practice corporeal politics” in his list of 20 lessons from the 20th century in Against Tyranny, “Power wants your body softening in your chair and your emotions dissipating on the screen. Get outside. Put your body in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people. Make new friends and march with them.” ↩
The decision comes from three agencies who created a task force earlier this week - The Departments of Education and Health and Human Services, and General Services Administration - plus the Department of Justice. ↩
I look to Sam Bagenstos for questions like this. He’s a law professor at University of Michigan law who also happens to have been past general counsel to HHS and OMB. Here’s his thread on why the action taken against Columbia is illegal and the relevant statute. ↩
Not that the specificity of “sensitive” keywords is good either. I really appreciate Alondra Nelson’s clarity on this point and follow her lead: “Don't legitimize this absurd list by selectively highlighting its most outrageous points. The entire document is flawed and deserves rejection in its entirety. ALL of this is ludicrous.” ↩
Not never and much more often for some of us than others, but I think I can accept the generalization “rarely” ↩