As Trump administration punishes Ivy League, universities in the heartland stand to benefit

Boston Globe

27-06-2025

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'A lot of higher education is in a political food fight because they don't like the flavor of the current leadership,' said Todd Graves, chair of the
Mizzou board. 'We keep our head down, we educate the students, we conduct the research, and we don't try to tell people how to live their lives. We try to make people's lives better.'
A new University of Missouri Research Reactor employee, Christopher Verbsky, right, operated a mock-up hot cell while two other MURR employees watched. Each of MURR's hot cells costs approximately $2 million.
Bailey Stover for The Boston Globe
As the Trump administration starves
Ivy League schools received $473.1 million in new
from an average of $425.9 million, according to an analysis by STAT prepared for this report.
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In a few more years, as SEC school leaders see it, wealth and talent will be more broadly distributed at public universities around the country, and less concentrated in the coastal elite institutions.
'American higher education is going to thrive,' said Jay Greene, a fellow at the Heritage Foundation, the group behind
The
Trump administration is trying to force cultural changes in what it sees as the elite schools'
At seven of the eight Ivy League schools, 20 to 25 percent of students are from foreign countries,
according to US Department of Education data. At Columbia University, the figure is nearly 40 percent. The SEC colleges, by contrast, have some of the lowest percentages of international students in the United States. At most of these schools, non-Americans make up 5 percent or less of the student body.
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At most SEC schools, at least 70 percent of the student body is white, though some schools have relatively large proportions of Black students. Just 33 percent of Harvard's students are white.
Large public universities in the South, where Gaza protests were generally more muted last year than at Harvard or Columbia, have not seen the same kind of targeted attacks. Their science labs have lost money in President Trump's massive cuts to research funding, but their ambition to continue growth already underway in the last decade is fierce.
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Total terminated NIH grants at Harvard vs. Vanderbilt
The two universities have seen vastly different reductions from the federal funding cuts from the National Institutes of Health, as of May 27.
Harvard
$2,163,911,123
Vanderbilt
$23,947,335
SOURCE: Scott Delaney and Noam Ross; Note: Some grant terminations may not be included in the total; RYAN HUDDLE/GLOBE STAFF
The predominance of the Ivy League will hardly disappear overnight, of course; the schools have
For now, though, public universities in red states stand to gain from East Coast campuses'
losses. Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health, made the administration's intentions plain
Sixty to
65 percent of NIH funding goes to about 20 universities, he said: 'The system is set up almost to guarantee that that [concentration] happens,' Bhattacharya said.
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NIH director Jayanta Bhattacharya said research funding should be more 'geographically dispersed.
Win McNamee/Getty
'The way to combat scientific groupthink is by empowering researchers across the country, no matter where they are, to have a great opportunity if they have great ideas for NIH funding,' Bhattacharya said, referring to a common critique from the right that scientific research suffers from insularity.
Even before Trump took office, the SEC schools had been making major gains
in securing research dollars and recruiting students from around the country.
Applications to SEC universities have soared by almost 300 percent since 2001, while elite colleges in New England have seen a smaller 188 percent increase in interest, said Kyle Whitman, chief data scientist of the Carnegie Classifications, a system used to organize universities based on research levels and degrees offered, managed by the American Council on Education. Fewer and fewer students from New England have enrolled in the region's most selective universities, while the SEC has successfully recruited more Northern students.
'There is a broader cultural shift to the Sun Belt right now,' he said. 'There's an attitude there that growth is good.'
The SEC schools also offer attractive selling points that are hard to find in New England: booming Greek life, massive sporting events, lower sticker prices, and milder winters.
The columns at the University of Missouri's David R. Francis Quadrangle in Columbia.
Bailey Stover for The Boston Globe
'It's fun being a student at a university like ours,' said Mun Choi, chancellor of the University of Missouri and president of the Missouri system. 'Not only do you have a beautiful campus, excellent faculty members, and a thriving downtown . . . we're an SEC school where football weekends or major basketball games — literally it feels like electricity in there.'
The SEC schools' big-time athletic programs help students and faculty members see 'themselves on this greater common mission,' said
Ross Zafonte, who recently joined Mizzou's medical school administration after many years at Harvard University and Mass General Brigham, where he served as president of the Spaulding Rehabilitation Network.
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'On Fridays here, it sounds corny, people wear Mizzou Tiger stuff,' Zafonte said.
The Ivy League schools, the Trump administration and its allies argue, have fraught campus cultures because they've become obsessed with identity politics, a byproduct of DEI initiatives, and because they enroll too many
Graduates passed the John Harvard Statue during Harvard University's 374th Commencement in Cambridge on May 29.
Craig F. Walker/Globe Staff
When questioned about Harvard enrolling the 'best and brightest from around the world,' Trump said it had to offer
'Then you see the same people picketing and screaming at the United States, and . . . they're antisemitic,' he said. 'We don't want troublemakers here.'
Some students and faculty members, said Greene, of the Heritage Foundation, may want to avoid the political drama consuming campuses like Harvard, and choose instead to go to 'universities in red states,' where, he argues, students can receive a great education in a less politicized environment.
In this period of retrenchment for the elites, some SEC campuses
are developing aggressive research growth plans.
At the University of Texas Austin, federal funding cuts have affected $47 million in research funding for about 60 grants, or just 1 percent of its research enterprise, which spends about $1 billion annually on roughly 4,600 projects.
Moving forward, UT Austin plans to expand its Texas Institute for Electronics, a semiconductor research and development facility that has received substantial government investment in the past, according to the university's 2025 strategic plan for research.
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As applications from out-of-state students continue to soar, 'we see the caliber of those students exponentially increasing,' said Miguel Wasielewski, vice provost of admissions at UT Austin.
And though the University of Tennessee system is wading through almost $38 million in federal funding cuts, its leaders expect research operations to continue to grow, said John Zomchick, provost and senior vice chancellor.
The University of Missouri Research Reactor emits Cherenkov radiation, a blue glow.
Bailey Stover for The Boston Globe
In the last five years, the school's research expenditures increased by 21 percent to $384 million in fiscal 2024, and the university plans to hire more faculty to oversee research in engineering, artificial intelligence, and precision health, he said. Research expenditures at Harvard, by contrast, increased 13 percent to $1.02 billion from fiscal 2020 to fiscal 2024.
In May, the University of Tennessee signed an agreement with Consolidated Nuclear Security, which operates a government office that was initially part of the Manhattan Project. A spokesperson said the deal will create 'new partnership-powered R&D initiatives that will enhance our nation's national and nuclear security.'
Tennessee's Oak Ridge National Laboratory nearby is also partnering with the Department of Energy in plans to add hundreds of PhD students in its data, energy, and genome science programs.
'There's enormous optimism here,' said Zomchick. 'Are there some things that are happening that we will have to adapt to? Absolutely. But our intention is to hold the course, modify the course, as necessary.'
The University of Alabama
in 2018 was named among the universities with the highest levels of research activity in the country, a long-held goal of the Tuscaloosa campus.
President Trump was applauded by graduates after his commencement speech at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa on May 1.
HAIYUN JIANG/NYT
The institution's big commencement speaker this spring
was Trump himself.
'It is clear to see the next chapter of the American story will not be written by the Harvard Crimson,' Trump told a cheering crowd of thousands. 'It will be written by you, the Crimson Tide.'
As a pall descended on major East Coast research schools this spring, Mizzou's president began pitching the research reactor to the Trump administration. In a March visit to Mar-a-Lago, Mun Choi was the only university president in the room, he said.
Choi has calibrated his sales talk to resonate with a White House that has deep anxieties about global competition. If the university does not get the funding to build the new reactor, Choi said in his wood-paneled office overlooking Francis Quadrangle's six limestone columns, there is 'no other supplier in the Western Hemisphere.'
'We do not want to be in a situation where we are reliant on other countries' generosity to be able to share the radioisotopes with American patients,' Choi said.
Mizzou, like other universities with burgeoning
research enterprises, is working hard to diversify its
research funding sources beyond the NIH to rely more on other sources, including the state and the Departments of Energy, Agriculture, and
Transportation.
'Places like Harvard and Columbia and Yale, they are so heavily leveraged with NIH, which was a good thing for two generations,' said Richard J. Barohn, executive vice chancellor for health affairs and dean of Mizzou's School of Medicine. 'Now, maybe it's not such a good thing. . . . I think we're going to get faculty that are going to move here.'
And in Choi, the university has a steady leader, several faculty and administrators said. His life story embodies the American dream, and he understands the political nature of the job.
An immigrant from South Korea, Choi arrived in Akron, Ohio, as a 9-year-old and learned about resilience from watching his parents, who grew up during the Korean War, build a business making Taekwondo uniforms.
University staffers and faculty members marvel at Choi's talent for remembering the name of everyone he meets. One evening, he worked the room at an alumni event held at an outdoor bar with live music, shaking hands, and clinking a pint of beer with guests. He's also a regular attendee at athletic events and games, cheering on the Tigers in an iridescent yellow jacket, he said.
Mun Choi, chancellor of the University of Missouri and president of the Missouri system, said, 'Our objective is to create an epicenter of nuclear medicine right here in mid-Missouri."
Bailey Stover for The Boston Globe
His tenure at Missouri has not been without drama. Before Choi began the job in 2017, the Chronicle of Higher Education put the task ahead in stark terms: 'The University of Missouri system is looking for a new president, but given the system's recent upheaval a better title for the new leader might well be 'miracle worker.' '
The university, about two hours west of Ferguson, Mo., where police shot and killed Michael Brown in 2014, had been rocked by protests about race and Black students' experiences on campus in 2015. Two senior leaders resigned because of the conflagration, and school officials blamed subsequent declines in enrollment, donations, and state funding on the protests. While overall enrollment has improved since, Black enrollment continues to lag. Asked about what the university is doing to recruit students of color to recoup those losses, Choi answered carefully.
'It's very important for us to recruit very broadly, and to bring the very best students to our university so that they can benefit from what we offer,' Choi said.
Race relations on campus made headlines again in 2020 after the police murder of George Floyd when student protesters called for the removal of a bronze statue of Thomas Jefferson because he was a slave owner. The university did not concede.
There have been pro-Palestinian protests on Mizzou's campus over the Israel-Hamas war, though they were reportedly peaceful and did not attract the media frenzy many Northeast campuses experienced. Choi also forbade the student group Mizzou Students for Justice in Palestine from marching in the annual Homecoming Parade last fall, prompting criticism from students who accused university leaders of discrimination.
'I was concerned about the safety concerns, and also I didn't feel that what they planned to do, which I believe was to protest the war, was appropriate for the Homecoming Parade,' Choi said.
It's that same pragmatism that brought him to Mar-a-Lago, at the invitation of an alum who had a meeting scheduled with Republican Representative Jason Smith to discuss tax issues. Choi said he spoke with lawmakers about his idea to offer tax credits for radioisotope production.
The
lawmakers didn't bite, but Choi remains optimistic about seeking federal support. The Missouri General Assembly earlier this month approved a request from the governor to provide $50 million in funding for the project. The university in April announced a $10 million agreement with a consortium that includes Hyundai Engineering America, the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute, the Hyundai Engineering Co., and MPR Associates for the design and licensing of the new reactor.
Mizzou has also successfully brought at least one paused project back online by working with the Department of Agriculture and congressional leaders, Choi said.
Asked about the East Coast schools' plea for solidarity from campuses across the nation in their fight against what they see as dangerous government overreach that threatens academic freedom, Choi paused. Joint statements against the onslaught have crossed his desk, but he and his team made a 'conscious decision not to sign.'
'My words and my action can have dramatic impact to this institution, and I have to be very careful in what I say and what I do to ensure that those words and my actions do not negatively impact this university,' Choi said. 'I've been very mindful of that responsibility.'
J. Emory Parker, data editor for the Globe's sister publication STAT, contributed to this report.
Hilary Burns can be reached at
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