For generations, students and researchers from around the world have flocking to Boston, who had not only one college or university, but in an area where high spiritual life was part of its brand. The Boston region has been developed by their presence, its many schools and the leading research hospitals that maintain its economy strong and its standard of living in the United States.
“It is the most dense concentration of the world’s academic talent,” said Lawrence S. Bacow, who served as president of Harvard University from 2018 to 2023 and as president of Tufts University from 2001 to 2011.
Now, however, the city has been confiscated with stress. Trump’s attack on funding for higher education is a greater threat to Boston and the surrounding area than perhaps anywhere else in the country. Harvard is facing a $ 9 billion government review in federal grants and contracts, many universities are frozen offers of admission, research laboratories are closing and international students are aiming for expulsion.
And Boston is facing a once -necessary question: will its basic identity survive?
“Boston is the goal in this fight,” Mayor Michelle Wu said in her speech in the city state last month. “We have built the values that this federal administration seeks to break.”
There was rarely the cause of questioning the key element of the city’s identity, as John Harvard gave about 800 pounds of pounds and his library with 400 books, at the newly established college named after Colony Bay Massachusetts in 1636.
For centuries, since the configuistic focus on education has shaped almost every aspect of the city and the state-Massachusetts is firmly close to the top of the national tests and health measures-symbolizing its political liberal identity and a sense of superiority.
In addition to the rights to the city they gave to the city, colleges and universities have brought on constant economic stability. Huge investment in research by the federal government, returning to its cooperation with university scientists who helped develop weapons during World War II, supplied decades of technological and biomedical development and steady development in the educational and medical field.
In recent use, Harvard received only $ 686 million in federal research grants, while as a group, Massachusetts universities received more than $ 2 billion. This does not include a separate funding for Boston Research Hospitals: In Economics 2024, the massive Brigham General Brigham received more than $ 1 billion from the National Institutes of Health. Overall, Massachusetts receives more funding from federal research per capita than any other state.
Research discoveries have prompted private investments that define the city’s landscape, in thriving neighborhoods such as Kendall Square in Cambridge, where the Biotech Company Biogen has long been anchor in the Boston Seaport area, where Vertex Pharmaceutical has created its headquarters.
In recent weeks, the disorder of complex funding cycles has caused increasing concern for a wave of departures from academic researchers who can choose to seek more stable funding and employment prospects in the corporate world or universities abroad.
“Some will leave their science behind and end – after a huge investment, it just falls from a rock,” said Dr. Wendy Chung, head of pediatrics at Boston Children’s Hospital. “Instability is very difficult for people who are so hard workers and dedicated to their mission-can only be pushed so far before they break.”
Reservations and deportations of international students from campuses, including Tufts and Harvard, have sent another increase in fear through a state educational ecosystem in which 80,000 students and one -third of the school in some campuses have an international background. Fewer can come in the future. Others may return home earlier than planned.
“It makes no sense,” said Governor Maura Healey, Democrat, of the federal repression. In a statement, he reported negative effects on Alzheimer’s cancer and patients on the country’s competitiveness, “with tens of thousands of international second Mandilis students who come to school here and China and other countries hired by talented teachers and researchers”.
On Friday, Massachusetts led a coalition of 16 states to sue Trump’s administration “for its illegal attempt to disrupt the funding of grants issued by the National Institutes of Health”.
Trump’s administration said that in order to maintain their funding, universities must move aggressively to limit campus anti -Semitism. In a letter to Harvard, officials asked the University review programs that they are “supplying anti -Semitic harassment” and “committed to complete cooperation” with the Ministry of Homeland. Hundreds of Harvard schools have signed a letter urging the university to resist the requirements.
Vice President JD Vance, a graduate of the Yale Law School, praised Hungary Prime Minister Victor Orban for aggressive funding cuts to eliminate certain curricula and report the “left -wing” universities.
“We need to really reform them off in a way that is much more open to conservative ideas,” Mr Vance said in an interview last year.
As it was deeply felt that cuts could be in Massachusetts, where colleges provide 320,000 jobs and $ 70 billion in annual economic effects, the pain will extend far beyond the new England, city leaders and campus. Patients around the world would expect more to rescue medical discoveries, they warned. Cities across the country will miss opportunities for the manufacture of products invented in Boston and neighboring Cambridge.
In MIT, for example, years of pioneering research on Fusion Energy has led to recent announced plans to build the world’s first Fusion Fusion power plant in Chesterfield County, VA., Billions of investment.
“It is important to us here because it is our economy and our employment, but it benefits everyone in red states and blue states,” the Wu mayor said in an interview.
Ms Wu, a progressive Democrat, is one of Boston’s transplants who came to the city because of her colleges: the Gymnasium Balvanian in Chicago, enrolled in Harvard to study financially and then returned to attend Harvard Law.
At Harvard Yard in a recent Saturday, there was few external signs of turmoil behind the scenes, as tourists waited in a long line to put photos with a statue of John Harvard. The university attracts 650,000 visitors each year, a benefit to local tourism. One study found that all the principles of the college performed throughout the State each spring provide a combined economic thrust of about two super bowls.
The impetus to uncertainty, scientific researchers around the city said their ability to plan ahead has been decimated. Dr. David Corey, a Harvard neurobiologist looking for treatments for Usher syndrome, a genetic disorder that causes blindness and deafness, said he had made rapid progress and aiming at starting clinical trials of new therapies when funding began.
“Now, we don’t know what will happen,” he said. “Every day the news is different. I have to pay people working in my workshop, so if I don’t know if a grant comes, I let people go? I have people who have been with me for 25 years, 10 years. There is an institutional memory where it is important.”
Dr. Chung, of Boston Children’s, has already felt the weight of the cuts. A former member of the Columbia University School, who came to Boston two years ago, lost a significant source of funding for long -term autism research last month, when Trump’s administration canceled $ 400 million in grants and contracts.
Dr. Brittany Charlton, founding director of the LGBTQ Center at the Harvard Public Health School, lost almost all its funding. She has finished staff, resigned from her salary and may need to close her investigation, she said. A plaintiff in a separate lawsuit that challenges the cuts said the damage would flourish forward for the coming years, as career scientists reviewed their choices.
“Some of the brightest minds may abandon their work,” he said.
Growing up in a small town in Alaska, Alyssa Connell had dreamed of a career as a doctor and researcher in Boston. She shouted when an email arrived in December, offering her a coveted spot on a double degree program at the Umass Chan Medical School, one hour west of the city.
Ms. Connell shouted again last month when another email uploaded her plans: University cancels all of the admission bids to Ph.D. Programs for this autumn “due to the ongoing uncertainties associated with federal funding of biomedical research”.
“It was a punch,” said Ms. Connell, 23, a teaching assistant and a researcher at Penn State University, where her work focuses on neurodegenerative disease.
So far, only Ph.D. The acceptance of the program has been canceled, so it is still planning to register this autumn at the UMASS Medical School. But the financial aid package, which would have covered the cost of both points, was canceled, he said.
“I don’t know how to pay rent, but I hope I will understand it and find another way to participate in the research,” he said. “I’m still very excited about the transition to Boston.”
