Investigations

Federal funding may return too late for UNC’s soon-to-be consolidated area studies centers

By Satchel Walton, Senior Writer, March 13

Leaders of UNC’s six area studies centers are continuing to negotiate the future of their disciplines with UNC administration, after it was announced in December that they would be closed down after the loss of federal funding under Title VI of the National Higher Education Act. Recently, Vice Provost Barbara Stephenson told the Faculty Council that UNC “is moving forward with implementation” of a plan to consolidate the centers into one unit.

Now, universities will be able to reapply for Title VI grants after Congress reinstated funding for the program. But UNC’s new home for global education will likely start with far less funding than the six area studies centers had before. 

Consolidation of the centers 

The administration had two preconditions for starting negotiations for a consolidated area studies unit, according to Graeme Robertson, director of the Center for Slavic, Eurasian and East European Studies.

One is that the new entity cannot be known as a “center” or “institute.” In an email to The Daily Tar Heel, UNC Media Relations did not comment on whether or why the new organization is barred from being called a “center” or “institute,” or on other issues related to the future of the area studies centers.

The second condition, Robertson said, is that two-thirds of the University-allocated funding for the six centers would be cut when they merge. Since announcing a budget cut plan over summer 2025, the University has been finding ways to trim $86 million from its annual spending.

The University has said that the area studies centers were cut largely due to the loss of federal funding and concerns regarding their long-term financial viability. However, Robertson said that the loss of federal funding was “always an excuse rather than a reason” to cut the centers. The real reason, he thinks, was pressure from 30 miles east of Chapel Hill.

“There is a political demand coming out of Raleigh — and it’s there in Project 2025 — to cut and close centers and institutes for reasons that are political and have nothing to do with the nature of the centers or institutes. When the proposal to close our centers was made, it was very clear to us that University administration had no idea what we actually did,” Robertson said.

The current proposal for a new hub, put forward by a working group of the centers’ faculty and staff, is called the “International Program for Scholarship, Innovation, Training, and Education,” which would be abbreviated INSITE.  The working group has prepared an organizational structure, preliminary budget and business operations model for the new program. After three months packed with meetings in South Building, the details are still being worked out.

“To be honest, it’s a little bewildering to be negotiating with the same actors, and being encouraged to create a new unit that protects the work that was in place,” Gabriela Valdivia, director of UNC’s Institute for the Study of the Americas,  said.

Valdivia hopes that INSITE will be able to preserve scholars’ deep regional expertise while promoting dialogue between scholars with focuses on different international areas. But Robertson worries that its prospects for securing outside funding have already been damaged by the perception that UNC is pulling back from global education.

“No one wants to give money to a dying program, and so by botching the rollout of these changes, the administration put us behind the eight ball to start with,” Robertson said. “Because by announcing that the centers were going to be closed, that’s the word that got out nationally and internationally.”

Title VI funding

The loss of federal funding was cited as a reason for closing the centers — specifically, funding from Title VI of the National Higher Education Act. 

Title VI funding traces its roots to 1958, when the federal government began pouring money into scientific research at universities in an effort to catch up with the Soviet Union in the Space Race. In the same law, Congress set aside funding for the study of global regions and languages. Many of the country’s diplomats, national security officials and international businesspeople have since come through Title VI-funded programs. In every budget for nearly 70 years, Congress reauthorized the funding for foreign language and international education, which totaled $86 million in 2025. 

The second Trump administration quickly put this funding in jeopardy. In May 2025, the entire office that administered the grants was functionally dissolved during cost cuts led by the Department of Government Efficiency. Many grants were delayed over the summer,  and in September, the Department of Education terminated them.

Brian Cwiek worked for the Department of Education administering Title VI grants until he was laid off in March 2025. He said his office worked smoothly under the first Trump administration and that he did not expect it to be cut.

“There was no reasoning provided,” Cwiek said. “And you know, all of our subsequent efforts to try to get some sort of reason documented yields nothing, which is unsurprising, I would say par for the course.”

A September DOE letter to universities receiving Title VI money stated that the grants “are inconsistent with Administration priorities and do not advance American interests or values.” Without congressional approval, the administration reallocated all the funds into a one-time investment in Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

This caused financial trouble for some of the country’s premier area studies centers, including the six in Chapel Hill. Only four schools — the flagship universities of Indiana, Michigan, California and Wisconsin — had more centers receiving the prestigious federal grants.

When many of UNC’s area studies centers’ federal grants were cut by the Trump administration, the University stepped in to financially support the centers in the spring semester of 2025 by paying salaries for affected staff. While Robertson and Valdivia’s centers did not rely mostly on federal funds, much of the staff who worked at the centers were paid through Title VI.

“What has been affected is the infrastructure of the centers — who does the programming, who carries out the initiatives, who talks with students, who tells them about what study abroad programs are best or not,” Valdivia said.

Additionally, UNC administration told the centers’ directors that the N.C. General Assembly, in its budget shortfall, had requested that $1.5 million of state funding used on area studies center salaries be returned, Valdivia said. She added that without the funding to pay salaries for affected staff, many positions within the area studies centers were set to be cut by July.

Louis A. Pérez Jr., a professor of history and former director of the Institute for the Study of the Americas, said that his center had significant endowments and grants from other sources that would have allowed it to support itself without Title VI funding.

“No one was privy to the conversations and the deliberations that accompanied this decision. It was made by an anonymous ‘working group’ of — they said — faculty and staff. But at the time, no one knew who these people were,” Pérez said.

This January, UNC revealed the four-person advisory committee’s members, all of whom hold primarily administrative roles as a vice chancellor, associate provost, vice dean and senior associate dean.

Now,funding has been reinstated by Congress. But in this new round of Title VI grants, there is also uncertainty; they will now be administered through the U.S. State Department rather than the Department of Education, and they will likely focus more on Trump administration priorities.

UNC hopes to be well prepared to put in strong grant proposals with its new home for global education, according to Vice Provost Barbara Stephenson. But people like Robertson worry that the consolidation of the area studies centers will decrease UNC’s competitiveness for such grants.

Pérez said UNC’s decision to sunset UNC’s centers left him wondering if the University had decided to make global engagement a lower priority.

“Does the decision to close the centers speak to a larger redefinition of the purpose of the university at large: its programs, its place in institutions of higher learning?” Pérez said. “Is that what this signifies — a turning away from what had been the aspiration of the University for many years to be a global player?”

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By Satchel Walton, Senior Writer

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