Hello friends,
Between the holiday and travel, this is a very short week for me, and in some ways, a very hard one. My feeds are full of awful news: the blistering heat dome in Europe, the intensifying danger of Ebola to people in Central Africa, the humanitarian crisis in Cuba, the appalling conditions and hunger strikes at ICE facilities, and so much more.

It makes me reach for a facilitation technique I love. Years ago, as I was venting about a terrible meeting, an important mentor¹ asked me to rate it, numerically. I waffled for a few moments before I scored it at a 3 out of 10. He followed up with, “And what kept it from being a 2?” It blew my mind: I had never been prompted to think like that before. This wasn’t a throwaway it-could-have-been-worse consolation either. There were small but concrete factors that kept it from being an unmitigated disaster, and identifying them helped me think about how to design events when I had the power to. It was essential groundwork for his next, even more important, question. “How could you have made it closer to a 4?”

This was Year 2, Week 22. Let’s put it in perspective.

What happened in science & higher ed

• Last month, the NSF suspended 18 grants to UC Berkeley researchers, including two that had already been terminated and ordered restored by a judge². Yesterday, we learned that the agency also put a blanket hold on grants to Duke, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. Despite government shutdowns and other challenges, most new grants are finalized by the NSF’s Office of Award Management (OAM) in 10 days: the 33 grants in question have been on hold for an average of more than 90 days, using what staff describe as an extremely rare mechanism for halting funding. Delays are just as devastating as clawbacks and cancellations: Colin Carlson’s essential VERENA project³ has been waiting on more than $2 million the NSF owes them since last year, and is on the verge of shutting down. After Nature broke the story, OAM removed the note from Duke, Harvard, and Yale and released funds to Duke and Harvard. Separately, Grant Witness announced that they’ve detected the first outright NSF grant termination since last year.⁴ As they learn from all the cases they’re losing in court, the administration’s research funding disruptions are becoming more sophisticated, harder to track, and harder to explain. If you know of any specific abnormalities, please share that information in addition to all the legal and institutional measures you may pursue.
• Speaking of making government decisions harder to track, one newly proposed rule would force federal employees to sign non-disclosure agreements (NDAs). The wording describes forbidding them to disclose, for example, “pre-decisional or deliberative material that is not currently publicly available”--which is so vague as to cover just about anything at all. And as Don Moynihan points out, if these NDAs merely codify current legal guidance, there is no need for them to exist. The proposed rule is open for public comment through the end of June: read up on federal employees union perspectives and then tell the government what you think of the proposal. For me, this attempt to further suppress and control information feels even more sinister when we know that the administration is also proposing to further supplant “advisory” peer review of research proposals with mandatory review by senior appointees and their chosen designees.⁵ The Stand Up for Science team is already on top of the policy analysis and will be hosting an emergency meeting about it next week. Jeremy Berg has even more nauseating details of another potential policy change under which NIH grant impact scores and rank percentiles would no longer be shared with applicants. Program officers would still receive those scores, but would be forbidden from sharing them if I understand the intention of the NDA rule correctly. Derek Lowe describes it succinctly (and gets a great citation in), writing, “The whole thing is incompatible with US science as the world has come to know it, and for some of these people, that's by design.”
• Finally, I just wanted to share some recent faculty surveys and encourage you to send me any more you know about. Yale’s AAUP just released their spring 2026 report on the state of academic freedom on campus. Nearly half of respondents report stepping away from their public engagement efforts because they are worried about retaliation and suppression.⁶ In a much larger survey last fall, twenty percent of respondents reported that they were avoiding certain research topics because of state law and policies. Academic freedom is a critical issue in the Department of Education’s negotiated rulemaking around accreditation. The Alliance for Higher Education sent out an alert when sessions wrapped this week, anticipating “many problematic elements in the draft proposal that will impact colleges’ and universities' ability to self-govern, free from partisan influence.” The AAUP has also identified this as a major threat, and Tressie McMillian Cottom clocked it months ago.

And what’s next

I’m starting to work on ways to support departments, labs, and researchers in the wake of looming funding cliffs. I am intimidated by the logistical and pragmatic challenges ahead of us, and struggling to even begin imagining how much grief and rage we will need to process. We are in the very early stages on this project, mostly reaching out to those who have done similar work already, like Beth Duckles’ participatory project Leaving the Academy, Greg Wilson’s Closing Time workshop, and Camille Acey’s consulting project The Wind Down.

If you’re hungry for this and/or have ideas about how to approach it, please reach out. There are a few of you I’ll be emailing about this directly next week.

For all our pain and loss. For all we could have done. For all we can still do.
How might we make this a 2?
Liz

As ever, thanks for reading & thinking with me. Meeting the Moment will always be free, but if you want to contribute, you can ⤵️

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