For four days, Harvard University’s name had been in the headlines, heroic to some, villainous to others — after the nation’s oldest institution of higher learning stood up and said no to the demands of President Trump, and then suffered his wrath.
But when leaders of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health convened a town hall meeting on Thursday morning, resistance or acquiescence was not the question of the moment, nor was defiance the prevailing mood. The school’s leaders laid out their dire financial circumstances to a stunned and overwhelmed audience of about 1,000 students and faculty and staff members, near the end of a week of unprecedented federal aggression.
They had no good news to share.
“It’s like you’re hunkering down for the beginning of a war, where you think you’re going to be losing a lot of your freedoms and a lot of your resources,” said Steve Gortmaker, director of the school’s Prevention Research Center on Nutrition and Physical Activity, who attended the meeting.
With Harvard’s president, Alan Garber, standing toe-to-toe with the president of the United States, faculty members and students on the Cambridge campus on Thursday said they were struggling to make sense of the rapid escalation this week of Mr. Trump’s campaign to bend the university to his will. After Mr. Garber rejected Mr. Trump’s demands, the White House moved swiftly to inflict punishment, freezing $2.2 billion in grants to Harvard on Monday, suggesting on Wednesday it would revoke Harvard’s tax exemption, and then threatening to block the university from enrolling international students.
In Harvard Yard, students still hurried to class; tourists still lined up under flowering trees to take photos of a statue of John Harvard. But behind the scenes, professors and researchers acknowledged a rising tide of angst, anger and uncertainty, their pride in the university’s stand against federal intervention mingling with their dread of the painful consequences.
“Things are coming at us fast and furiously, on all fronts, and we have no idea what any of it is going to mean in terms of funding and job losses,” said Maya Jasanoff, a professor of history. “It’s a cascade of questions, and I don’t know that the administration has answers either.”
The most pressing question, in her view, is whether Harvard will intensify its resistance by taking legal action against the White House.
The public health school has been hit particularly hard, though it was by no means the only division reeling. Chan derives nearly half its budget, 46 percent, from federal funding, a larger proportion than any other school at Harvard. About 40 percent of its students are international, and that population is now at heightened risk. And much of its key research — in climate-related health, vaccines, L.G.B.T.Q. health equity — is in areas targeted squarely by the Trump administration.
School leaders, facing questions from those who attended the meeting, tried to signal the scale of the change that was in store. The school is likely to look very different after it weathers the losses ahead, they said. And those losses could go on for months or even years.
“I worry about all the staff I’ve worked with for years,” Dr. Gortmaker said. “I have just great researchers, data analysts, and I’m afraid we’ll just have to see what happens.”
On Thursday afternoon, hundreds of students and faculty members rallied on the steps of Memorial Church in Harvard Yard to condemn the Trump administration for demanding that Harvard turn over detailed information about the academic and disciplinary records of the international student body.
The protest was one of the most well-attended demonstrations on Harvard’s campus in several years, drawing some prominent faculty members, including the political theorist Danielle Allen and Orlando Patterson, a professor of sociology.
Matthew Ichihashi Potts, the minister of Memorial Church and a professor at the Harvard Divinity School, said that the university was engaged in an existential fight for its survival.
“We know that there’s plenty at risk, and there’s a lot to lose,” he said. “But this fight will be a winning fight, so long as what we don’t do is lose sight of our values.”
A town hall meeting attended by hundreds of Harvard Medical School staff and faculty members on Wednesday also painted a disheartening picture, as leaders prepared attendees for budget cuts to programs and staffing. Officials said a pre-existing financial gap was a factor; that gap is expected to widen significantly in the wake of diminished federal funding.
At the T.H. Chan School, administrators had already announced layoffs in recent weeks, after the termination of 19 federal research grants that it was told did not align with Trump administration priorities; other layoffs occurred because project funding was stuck in limbo after federal grant review processes were slowed or halted. The school has been winding down leases in off-campus buildings to cut costs, while department chairs identify strategic priorities to guide forthcoming budget cuts.
Before the dust settled on those disruptions, the school was hit with still more uncertainty this week. Amid the confusion over its rapidly changing fiscal realities, school leaders set up an email inbox where faculty researchers can forward email notices about grant terminations. Three such “stop-work” orders have been received at the school since Monday, including one halting a $60 million contract for tuberculosis research, a spokeswoman said.
Alice Goyer, a senior studying environmental science, said she was aware that some of her professors who study climate change had had, or were likely to have, their research funding cut. But they don’t speak about that in class, she added.
“I’m expected to go about business as usual,” she said, standing on the sidelines of the campus protest on Thursday.
For many international students, anxiety over deportation threats and visa revocations has made it increasingly difficult to focus on schoolwork. Abdullah Shahid Sial, 20, a sophomore from Pakistan, says he nervously checks his email first thing in the morning to ensure that his visa was not revoked overnight.
“If that’s how you’re starting your day,” he said, “you probably aren’t thinking about the lectures you have to go to.”
Jenna Russell is the lead reporter covering New England for The Times. She is based near Boston.
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