Science Under Siege
The Science One University Sacrificed to Avoid Trump’s Wrath
Professors at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill worried how the Trump administration’s ire toward universities would affect them. But the school’s leaders thought they had a plan.
The University of North Carolina’s chancellor tried to protect the school from the Trump administration. Work on cancer, suicide, AIDS and coronaviruses was hit anyway.
Listen · 22:06 minutes.
By Alan Blinder, Stephanie Saul,Irena Hwang, and Benjamin Mueller, Visuals by Mike Belleme
The reporters reviewed internal documents and recordings and interviewed dozens of people connected to U.N.C., some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared retaliation from the Trump administration. Published Nov. 13, 2026Updated Nov. 14, 2026, 9:12 a.m. ET
The professor was crying.
She had joined the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to research race and environmental disasters. Now the Trump administration had cut off money that made much of her work possible, and university leaders had few ideas to keep it going.
Directly fighting back in the courts was not an option, administrators told a handful of professors during a video meeting in May 2025. Maybe, the officials suggested, researchers could rewrite their proposals to avoid mentioning topics that the Trump administration might find objectionable, like race.
That seemed like “whitewashing,” the anguished professor said in a recording of the meeting obtained by The New York Times.
U.N.C. charted a different path — one of careful conciliation.
Quiet and often noncommittal in public, the university’s chancellor, Lee Roberts, maneuvered behind the scenes on two delicate fronts. On campus, he and his fellow administrators worked to calm an increasingly enraged faculty. With an eye on Washington, they also tried nudging Trump officials away from their most destructive impulses.
Major research projects — including on cancer, infectious diseases and heart failure — were canceled or disrupted. But the university also managed to keep the vast majority of its research funding intact.
Read more: How the University of North Carolina Tried to Avoid Trump’s Wrath – The New York TimesSource: How the University of North Carolina Tried to Avoid Trump’s Wrath – The New York Times
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