The Trump Administration has announced a $1 billion funding freeze for Cornell. A Trump admin official told Fox News that “the money was frozen in connection with several ongoing, credible, and concerning Title VI investigations.”
Cornell now joins Brown, Columbia, Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, and Princeton in the list of Ivy League schools subject to federal government funding cuts. Only Yale and Dartmouth have not suffered such defunding.
According to the New York Times, the cuts will mainly affect “grants and contracts with the departments of Agriculture, Defense, Education, and Health and Human Services.” While the full impact of the cuts are not known, Cornell conducts a significant amount of agricultural research and can be particularly vulnerable to this freeze. In comparison, Harvard is at risk of not receiving $9 billion in federal funding. To address this shortfall, it plans to borrow $750 million for “general corporate purposes.” Cornell could similarly be forced to increase its debt burden, which currently stands at $2.3 billion.
