Ripple effect

Since then, he has dismantled the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which funded many research projects globally, and tried to slash the budgets of key funding bodies such as the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation, which collectively also saw thousands of research grants terminated, suspended or frozen last year.

All of this has had a knock-on effect on research and academia in Europe. Last summer, it was reported that numerous research projects at leading universities in the United Kingdom had been served stop notices by the US government. In other instances UK institutions that had received some funding as part of a larger research project were informed by the US-based lead researchers that their grants were terminated.

Institutions elsewhere in Europe have seen collaborations disrupted, while many academics speak about an environment of increased caution around travelling to the US, or what they post on social media.

Last year, the British Association for American Studies (BAAS) ended its US Embassy Small Grants programme, rather than remove criteria or goals relating to equality, diversity or inclusion (EDI) as requested.

“Over the last several years, the BAAS constitution has become more generally supportive of EDI. So we couldn't possibly continue to accept that pressure,” the organisation’s Chair Michael Collins tells QS Insights. “We put it to the community at large, and it was decided that we would choose to terminate that grant, rather than accept the conditions that they were making on that money.”

The impact was significant – and costly. The programme had brought hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of a given year, says Collins. Now, the organisation must draw on its own reserves to make up funding shortfalls for projects already in the current grants cycle, as well as rely on funds from its Journal of American Studies.

“We tried, where possible, to stand by our principles,” says Collins. Writing in an op-ed after the programme’s termination, he characterised the language of Trump’s anti-DEI order as “designed to silence and bully”.

“A lot of what stops diversity and inclusion in academia generally is the absence of visible support,” he tells QS Insights. For example, language on a grant proposal that explicitly encourages applications from historically under-represented candidates goes a long way, signposting that such candidates are not implicitly excluded. When a process is “forcibly required to remove that language”, says Collins, this effectively gives credence to feelings of exclusion.

“It’s effectively doubling down and increasing those feelings of anxiety in the minorities that we were trying to support – and that, to me, is a form of coercive control. It is a form of bullying and diminishment.

Even where programmes and collaborations aren’t ended outright, the Trump administration’s restrictions regarding federally funded research have led to greater complexity. In Finland, Aalto University temporarily suspended all applications for US federal research funding for a few weeks last year, in light of Trump’s actions around DEI and research funding. Now, applications are back, but subject to a separate review process.

“There was quite a wide confusion in the beginning [as to] what the rules would mean,” says Jyri Hämäläinen, Vice President for Research at Aalto University. “Nowadays, we have a separate process for the applications where we apply for funding from federal funding organisations from the US, in order to make sure that we are not signing anything that is somehow against our culture, intentions, or even the law in Finland.

“For example, if there is a condition that we will not apply any DEI programme, or something like that, then we cannot sign such a document.”

Meanwhile over in Norway, the University of Bergen’s Centre for Women’s and Gender Research is cautiously hopeful that its collaboration with a university in Florida will go ahead this autumn after all, following its cancellation last spring in the wake of the Trump administration’s executive order.

The collaboration started well before Trump’s second term in office, when a university in Florida contacted the Centre to enquire about a collaborative online international learning course on queer theory. (The Centre did not specify the university in Florida’s name, citing ongoing negotiations).

“The reason they were asking for international collaboration was that queer theory as a teaching subject was already threatened in Florida,” Kari Jegerstedt, Head of Bergen’s Centre for Women’s and Gender Research, tells QS Insights. This came amid Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ “anti-woke” efforts, and ensuing restrictions on DEI in higher education in the state.

The collaboration saw students in Norway and Florida convening as a digital cohort, attending online lectures and doing group work together. The first iteration of the course, held in 2024, went well, says Jegerstedt, with students coming together to situate knowledge in different contexts and cultural differences.

“Then came Trump.”

After a series of back-and-forth exchanges with the university in Florida, the course was put on hold, with Jegerstedt citing her and her colleagues’ concerns over their Florida-based counterpart’s commitment to the programme, in the context of Trump’s anti-DEI push.

Now, the course is scheduled to come back this Fall semester. But it’s being revamped. “We have to really redo the course and look at the syllabus really closely,” says Jegerstedt. “In Texas, they now have a state policy that you cannot use any words that collide with this presidential decree, that if you try to teach something like that, you can be fired. So, they have a really strict rule about that, and that's the kind of rule that we would have to follow now in the Florida context too.

“What should we call the course? What kind of texts can we use? How do we describe the syllabus? What kind of problems are we going to discuss? And so on and so forth. It would all have to be within the strict limitations.”

Despite this, Jegerstedt stresses the importance of continued collaboration with colleagues in the United States, in order to uphold academic freedom and knowledge production and circulation.

“I think it's a personal act of solidarity,” she says.

However, the Centre is drawing the line at sending students on exchange programmes to the US. They had been in the process of establishing an exchange programme with another US university, says Jegerstedt, but ultimately decided not to proceed due to potential risks to students, including potentially being stopped at border control.

The Centre is pursuing an exchange programme with a Canadian university instead.

Many academics are rethinking travel to the US as well as what they post online, says Collins of the BAAS.

“I do feel more cautious about travel,” he says. “I don't want to be silenced, and I want to use my position as a Brit and as a specialist on America, as much as possible to say what I feel needs to be said. That means I have been more public and more vocal, and that worries me about what would occur in the event I was to travel.”

Schröder of the German U15 concurs, saying that many academics have become more cautious about travel, online visibility and the wording of proposals or public statements.

“I know British academics and European academics are scared of traveling, particularly if they lean liberal in their politics and, over many years, have been encouraged to be public in their expressions of things, through social media or through engagement with the press and various things,” adds Collins.

This in turn has a knock-on effect on access to research sources, for example archives based in the United States. “What we have noticed is that people are being far more cautious about that, and are relying on their universities more and more to support them in making those moves,” says Collins. “That is a chilling effect on academic freedom. It's not how it used to be in that regard.”

And by extension, he points to an added caution around research topics themselves. “My research projects are becoming more conceptual and less kind of specific, so that it becomes potentially more difficult for the US to blacklist,” he says.

Negative spillover

While some European universities are pivoting away from the US and reconsidering it as a destination for students and academics, others are continuing to collaborate, but have noticed an impact on how they engage.

Eric Neumayer is Vice President for Planning and Resources at LSE. “From the LSE perspective, there's absolutely no such intention [of decoupling].

“But [there are] negative spillover effects,” he adds. For example, Neumayer mentions that his institution’s gender studies department has had problems recruiting the same number of students as before.

“Without a doubt, I would say this is because of the attacks on gender particularly – though not only – in the US. You will have students now worrying, well, if I get an MSc in Gender Studies, will I ever be able to find a job in the US, or in other places?”

For their part, LSE faculty are not necessarily travelling less to the US, says Neumayer. “But they're certainly anxious about it, and who could blame them?” he adds. “Before, if you had an ESTA (Electronic System for Travel Authorization), you knew you would get into the country. Now, what's going to prevent some agent at the border to say: Can I have your phone please? Let me look at your social media, and if I don't like it, I'll send you straight back.”

Choose Europe?

What Neumayer can point to is a noticeable uptick overall in applications from those in the US, with people who might have otherwise stayed in the US now re-evaluating the costs and benefits of doing so.

This is in part driven by the fact that “the environment for studying in the US is not as good as it used to be”.

“We don't observe much of a brain drain by established faculty. What we do find is it’s a lot easier to recrui PhD students and to hire assistant professors from the US.”

“To me, the important point is that this is not only a story about Europe reacting to the US; it is also a story about Europe strengthening its own strategic position,” says Schröder of the German U15. She cites programmes such as the EU’s flagship Horizon Europe research and innovation funding programme, or Choose Europe for Science, and Germany’s Global Minds Initiative, which seek to attract international researchers.

All of this serves to make Europe “not just a refuge from uncertainty elsewhere, but an agenda-setter in its own right”, she says.

And though relations with US partners are still strong, says Neumayer, LSE is also turning towards other regions for partnerships.

“Because of the difficulties in the US, when Chinese or other East Asian universities approach us, we are very open towards them,” he says. “Because if it gets more difficult in one direction, we are interested in deepening our relationship with places like Singapore or China.

“There, the universities are very much on the rise.”

These sorts of partnerships have increased, says Neumayer, citing a recent visit from the National University of Singapore, and planned visits to universities from Hong Kong, as well as existing partnerships with Peking University and Fudan University.

“That’s not necessarily directly a function of what is happening in the US,” he adds. “It's just that some of these universities have a lot of money and, as I said, are really on the rise. They're becoming better and better universities. They have a lot of resources that they can pour into these relationships, and we, of course, try and take advantage of that.”

Be that as it may, academics still stress the global implications and negative spillover effects of Trump’s attacks on US academic freedom, especially at a time when the US is rapidly falling down global indices on institutional autonomy.

European universities are watching this weakening of academic freedom and autonomy with concern, says Schröder, “because this changes the backdrop for joint projects, exchanges and trust-based cooperation”. The whole situation has intensified debates about resilience and competitiveness within Europe, she says, as well as how to protect open science in an increasingly polarised global environment.

“The attacks on US universities are an attack on all; it's almost like NATO's Article 5, an attack on one is an attack on all?” adds Neumayer. “We benefit in the short run from some of the attacks on the US universities.

“But make no doubt, the academy as a whole, and science as a whole, will be hugely damaged coming out of this.”