Isa Cruz

In the month since President Donald Trump’s inauguration on January 20, a flurry of executive orders with implications for higher education have left the campus community wondering about potential impacts to the College.

These orders include sudden freezes on federal grants that support collegiate research and programming, changes to U.S. immigration policy, potential tax increases on college endowments and efforts to dismantle Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programming in both the federal government and schools. While it is not fully clear how these policies could affect the College specifically, faculty and administrators provide insights into potential outcomes and effects they have already experienced.

In a statement to the Orient, President Safa Zaki confirmed that the College is monitoring the Trump administration’s mounting actions and working actively on how to proceed.

“In the past few weeks, the federal government has issued a series of executive orders, memos and agency guidances that are unprecedented in their scope and pace. These measures have introduced significant uncertainty across institutions of higher education and, as written, could impact our access to federal grants and other funding that benefit our community,” Zaki wrote.

Zaki said the College’s institutional response will be heavily dependent on the application of these executive orders, which remains uncertain.

“Because the full implications of many of these measures are unclear, and will depend upon how they are interpreted, applied and enforced by federal agencies and the courts, the senior leadership team at the College is carefully reviewing them and what they mean for Bowdoin,” Zaki added.

Federal Funding and Scientific Research

Shortly after taking office, Trump attempted to freeze trillions of dollars in federal grants and loans across a wide variety of programs and agencies, including research institutions like Bowdoin. The Trump administration issued an executive order capping grant funds for biomedical research through the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that support maintenance, infrastructure, communications and employee wages and benefits.

A federal judge temporarily blocked the measure last week, but many researchers at Bowdoin worry that their work will be impacted.

Professor of Neuroscience and Biology and Director of Neuroscience Program Manuel Díaz-Ríos worries that such blanket cuts to federal funding will harm labs across the country, including those at Bowdoin.

“It’s been a pretty big uproar by major universities, and what’s so shocking about this is just the blanket aspect of it,” Díaz-Ríos said. “It doesn’t matter if you’re a public university, a private university, a highly funded, well-endowed research intensive or not.”

Professor in the Natural Sciences Barry Logan currently serves on a grant-funded advisory group that helps improve access to funding for macrosystems ecology research with a central DEI component. Logan also holds a federal grant that he uses to study the global carbon cycle.

Logan said he received a notice from his grant manager to cease any DEI-related work after the NIH freeze, but the statement was retracted about 72 hours later. While Logan questions the legality of the federal government interfering with the terms of his current five-year grant, received under the Biden administration, he fears that future funding for his area of research could be jeopardized given the Trump administration’s rolling back of climate change policy.

“Federal funding for research is going to become, I fear, more ideologically driven, and so climate change research will be in the line of sight for that,” Logan said.

Logan commented on how climate change work is already being targeted through substantial layoffs in the National Science Foundation Division of Environmental Biology, where climate change research is vetted. Logan called the changes “heartbreaking,” both in terms of loss of personnel and DEI programming.

“I think that what we are experiencing was a deliberate test of presidential power, and it is a test of our systems of government and the checks and balances that are baked into federal processes,” Logan said.

Assistant Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience Jennifer Honeycutt, who studies the sex-specific effects of adversity on rodent brains, expressed concerns over the future of her lab and the NIH funding she’s benefitted from throughout her career.

“I’m a first-generation college student and a queer woman,” Honeycutt said. “I have benefited from programs that directly support underrepresented students.”

Despite feeling largely unprepared for these executive orders, Honeycutt has a small amount of leftover grant savings stored away should her lab or students not receive funding in the future.

Professor of Biology and Neuroscience and Chair of the Biology Department Hadley Horch pointed out potential impacts on Maine’s research capacity through non-tuition-based research institutions.

“I think they are set to lose many millions of dollars if this cut in [funding] comes through, and they don’t have another huge stream of money … to pay the lights, to keep the water bill on. That’s what the [funds] are supposed to do,” Horch said.

Horch, like many other professors closely monitoring federal actions, will continue her research with the funding that she has received from the College and federal agencies for the time being.

“I think to a certain extent, you try to keep your head down and keep doing the work that you have the money to do, but it’s definitely worrisome,” Horch said. “It’s a little nerve wracking, because you don’t really know what’s going to stick, what’s going to not, what’s coming tomorrow.”

Non-U.S. Citizens

In 2017, student F-1 visa holders all over the world had trouble returning to the U.S. after Trump imposed a travel ban against several predominantly Muslim nations. This term, Trump’s crackdown on immigration has left international students in the U.S. wondering how his policies could affect them.

Dean for F-1 Visa Holders Dean Hussey sent an email on December 9, strongly recommending that students re-enter the country before Trump’s inauguration. Arrangements were offered to discuss concerns regarding policy changes, visa statuses and financial assistance for flight changes.

“Given uncertainty surrounding potential changes to U.S. immigration policy, the safest way to avoid difficulty in re-entering the country is to be physically present in the U.S.,” Hussey wrote.

The Orient has been unable to reach Hussey for further comment.

During Trump’s first presidency, the Dean’s Office invited immigration lawyers to speak on the legality and consequences of Trump’s executive orders implicating the status of sanctuary cities and the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, as well as travel bans.

In 2017, Bowdoin joined a lawsuit with 50 other higher education institutions to challenge Trump’s order to end protections for undocumented immigrants who came to the United States before the age of 16. Additionally, Bowdoin filed amicus briefs in 2020 following Trump’s plan to potentially discontinue the education of international students during the pandemic.

International student Chris Zhang ’25 noted that while the College has not given international students more specific information or institutionalized support since Trump’s inauguration, Zhang questions what Bowdoin administrators could do to better support international students in their capacity.

“Unfortunately, the College has very little influence over the government policies and immigration rules that international students face after graduation,” Zhang said.

Endowment

During Trump’s 2024 campaign, he called for increased taxes on higher education institutions to protect students from “radical left and marxist maniacs infecting educational institutions.” Trump proposed that these endowment revenues go towards funding the “American Academy,” a free online university education program absent of “wokeness.”

During the last Trump administration, the 2017 Tax Cut and Jobs Act set a 1.4 percent tax on the annual net investment income earned by colleges and universities with at least 500 students and endowment assets that exceed $500,000 per student.

On January 15, Congressman Troy E. Nehls introduced the Endowment Tax Fairness Act, which would raise this excise tax on private university endowment profits from 1.4 percent to 21 percent.

Senior Vice President for Finance and Administration & Treasurer Matt Orlando explained the negligible impact of this 1.4 percent tax on Bowdoin’s endowment since 2017.

“This tax was entirely performative—the actual revenue raised by the tax was hardly a blip against the massive cost to the Treasury for the tax cuts. For Bowdoin, the 1.4 percent tax is frustrating in principle, but nothing has changed with respect to endowment policies or practices since it became law,” Orlando wrote in an email to the Orient.

Orlando was unable to comment on what proposed changes to endowment taxes may look like during the current Trump administration.

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Initiatives

On February 19, the U.S. Department of Education sent a letter to all educational institutions receiving federal funds, giving them two weeks to remove all programs relating to DEI. This policy extends Trump’s executive order ceasing federal funding for DEI programs. On February 21, a federal judge blocked Trump’s executive orders seeking to halt federal support for organizations with DEI programs.

However, these policies raise many concerns for the future of DEI initiatives on college campuses. The Diversity and Inclusion Committee of the Bowdoin Student Government (BSG) issued a statement on Tuesday to the student body detailing their awareness of these policies and what they currently mean for the committee’s existence.

“These statements from our federal government and other groups do not dissolve our existence as a committee of BSG,” the committee wrote.

The committee added that it will continue to advocate for “an equitable, inclusive campus environment and policies” through BSG initiatives and by holding the Bowdoin administration accountable for its commitment to DEI on campus.

Senior Vice President for Inclusion and Diversity Benje Douglas could not comment in detail on how the College will respond to the Trump administration’s attempts to curtail DEI programming nationwide but emphasized the College’s diligence in monitoring federal activity implicating campus programming.

“The College is actively reviewing the executive orders and is doing so carefully, and I anticipate we will be doing so for some time to come,” Douglas said.

Where do we go from here?

Professor of Constitutional and International Law and Government Allen Springer, who has taught at Bowdoin for 49 years, said the College’s uncertainty under the Trump administration today exceeds that of any previous presidential administration. He cited “rapidly” changing federal policy as a concern.

“We just don’t really know at all what’s going to come out of this administration,” Springer said. “I think it’s the uncertainty of it all that’s probably making this year a particularly crazy one.”

Associate Professor of Government Jeffrey Selinger said that though individual citizens and coalitions can—and should—combat “transparently illegal and immoral measures advanced by the Trump administration,” he emphasized the vulnerability of Bowdoin as an institution.

“Bowdoin is an institution of higher education; it is not equipped to stand at the vanguard of the resistance,” Selinger said.

Logan shared that, as a father of three teenagers, he has struggled to find the right words to approach these topics with his kids and Bowdoin students but hopes to continue these conversations in the upcoming weeks.

“How we take care of ourselves as individuals in a moment of real anxiety is important, and as a senior member of the faculty, I want to lead in some way, and I’m still unsure what that looks like at the moment,” Logan said.

In terms of grants, Associate Professor of Mathematics Jack O’Brien believes that Bowdoin, as a majority private institution, will remain relatively unaffected.

“One of the ironies of this situation is that Bowdoin, because it’s a relatively, almost exclusively private institution, actually has the capacity to hold up a lot of its institutional structures in a way that the [public universities] of Maine will not be able to,” O’Brien said.

As new orders and federal actions arise, Zaki said the College is preparing to respond accordingly.

“We are also in regular contact with our peers, legal experts and advocacy groups as we chart a path forward. We will comply with federal law while ensuring we fulfill our mission and cultivate the type of campus environment that allows us to live up to our values and our students to thrive. We are being deliberate as we move forward—focusing on how these recent measures will be interpreted and applied—to ensure we continue to put the well-being of our community at the forefront,” Zaki wrote.