There are a couple reports out very recently that NIH is lifting its block on paying grant funds to Columbia, see here and here. According to one of these reports, this applies only to Columbia, not to Brown/Northwestern/Cornell/Harvard.
Presumably Columbia has done something to make Trump happy, maybe we’ll find out soon.
There was a Zoom briefing yesterday for Columbia people explaining the current financial and grant situation. Columbia’s biggest financial exposure by far is the NIH grants, which are a large fraction of all grant income. What Trump had done starting in March with these grants was particularly egregious. The way they work, the university incurs costs payable under the grant, then gets reimbursed. What had happened was that the NIH stopped paying these reimbursements (there also were grant cancellations, non-renewals, no new grants, etc.). One would think this was so obviously illegal that one could easily get a court judgement, no one seems to have an explanation why Columbia did not sue at least on the specific issue of not getting paid for expenses incurred under a valid contract.
Max Kozlov, journalist at Nature, reports:
Several NIH staffers tell me they are beyond thrilled to finally process award notices and outlays that have been sitting idle for months. But they are concerned about what Columbia may have conceded.
Aren’t we all..
More about this later as there is further information.
Update: Good news! It looks like Columbia didn’t cave yet (or, not enough yet…). Latest from Kozlov:
Well, that was short-lived: NIH staff received instructions to HOLD funds to Columbia again.
Speculation on what happened per NIH staffer: the White House found out and blew a gasket.
As they “negotiate” the trustees should probably be thinking about the fact that, besides Trump himself, there are quite a few clowns with different agendas involved in this on the Trump side, some of whom are quite devoted to the project of completely destroying Columbia. I don’t see how they can ever reasonably expect to make a deal with these people.
Article at Science magazine here
In an email sent this morning to NIH grants staff across the agency and first described on Bluesky by Nature, Michelle Bulls, director of the agency’s Office of Policy for Extramural Research Administration, writes: “Great news, we have been told that we can resume funding awards to Columbia (funding pause has been lifted).”
It’s not clear from the email how the policy change will affect terminated grants. Bulls writes that her office is awaiting guidance from Jon Lorsch, acting director of NIH’s Office of Extramural Research, on “whether we should reinstate” awards that “were terminated for ‘antisemitism.’”
A spokesperson for Columbia said the university “is aware of the renewal and continuance of some government grants. We remain in discussions with the government and are deeply committed to our broader efforts to advance our critical medical and scientific research and all it provides to the world.”
Looks like this was written before the latest reversal, described here by:
Grants at Columbia unfrozen at 9:30 this morning…
Refrozen at 2:30 this afternoon with instructions to undo all of the releases done earlier.
It like the 7th graders in detention broke into the Principal’s Office…
Official statement from one of the clowns:
There is no Federal funding for unvetted woke ‘research’ at Columbia. Any minimal disbursements that presently exist are for specific measures, including to wind down the grant entirely.
Update: The Chronicle of Higher Education has Columbia Got Some NIH Funding Back. Then It Didn’t.
LOL:
https://bsky.app/profile/maxkozlov.bsky.social/post/3lrvns67f2k26
Dave,
I’m hoping this clown show will convince the Columbia trustees of what the “mistaken demand letter” similar clown show convinced the Harvard Corporation: the idea you can negotiate with these people is absurd.
Any attempt at compromise will be met by the Trump junta with yet more demands. Any compromise is interpreted as weakness.
The only way to beat Trump is with obdurate refusal to all of their demands. If a school has to limp along without money for research, well, so be it. Universities have assets that they can sell. Sure, it’s not easy, but it has to be done. Appeals to the alumni/ae may also be helpful; and to philanthropists with deep pockets (e.g. the Gates and Laurene Jobs Powell foundations).
>philanthropists with deep pockets (e.g. the Gates and Laurene Jobs Powell foundations)
This doesn’t work actually. Gates Foundation, for example, $ is under huge stress also from Trump actions and much of the money will be redirected. There also simply isn’t enough to cover the shortfall. I do agree there is no real negotiated endpoint with these guys that is acceptable.
David Derbes,
There was a detailed presentation from the Columbia CFO on Zoom yesterday, addressing this kind of question. One point she kept making is that different institutions are in different situations due to different size endowments, with Columbia’s endowment/student significantly lower than places like Harvard/Yale/Stanford. Columbia’s endowment is about \$15 billion, but much of it is legally committed to specific purposes by terms of the donation, and income from the endowment is what keeps much of the university afloat. Federal grants bring in about \$1.3 billion/year. If you tried to replace all that from the endowment, you’d rapidly end up running out of money and not being being able to finance operation of the rest of the university.
My general takeaway was that the really big problem is NIH biomedical research. NIH has been spending \$30 billion/year on biomedical research, maybe \$800 million going to Columbia. This is a huge operation, here and elsewhere. With the NIH money gone, Columbia has been trying to keep financing as much as possible of it out of its own funds, but can’t do this in the long term so has to decide what to fund and for how long.
The trustees seem to have started out believing that if they just “fight antisemitism” hard enough (i.e. crackdown hard enough on pro-Palestinian protests of any kind, conveniently a goal of some of the trustees), they’ll get the money restored and be back in business. They seem to now be realizing that in any case, the NIH budget is getting cut by more than half, so there will be much less grant money available even if they placate Trump. There’s a major effort to try to make contingency plans for a future with much less grant income.
Why they keep not going to court to get as much money back as possible, but instead keep saying stupid things about how the Trump people are negotiating “in good faith”, I’ll never understand.