Mayors of blue cities poised to feel the economic hit of President Donald Trump’s feud with universities are lining up behind one message for the schools: don’t cave.
The Trump administration’s decision to withhold federal funds from schools that don’t abandon diversity efforts and adopt new antisemitism policies is forcing universities to submit or risk losing the cash. That financial fallout could start to bleed into the communities these universities call home. Harvard froze its hiring and Northwestern University began laying off hundreds of employees amid funding cuts and new restrictions.
Despite the economic risks many cities face if their universities are at odds with a raft of White House policies, some mayors argue the stakes are about free speech and the future of academia.
“It’s my hope that Duke does remain firm on their values,” said Leonardo Williams, the Democratic mayor of Durham, North Carolina, where the university is based. “These are bumpy times and the reality is, if we’re going to get our asses handed to us, then we’re going to get our asses handed to us with our values intact.”
Duke University and its health system are the largest employers in Durham — a combo Williams said contributes more than $2 billion to the local economy. But nearly 600 Duke employees took buyouts in the spring after the school made plans to downsize amid Trump administration threats to curb spending. Duke later began involuntary layoffs in August, after $108 million in federal funds for its medical school was frozen over alleged civil rights violations.
Mayors count on the dollars generated for local businesses by the students, staff and faculty of the universities, the people the schools educate and train and the research dollars they attract.
But the list of colleges having their federal cash threatened by the Trump administration as part of an escalation of a civil rights investigation continues to grow.
George Mason University recently joined the ranks of Harvard, Columbia, Brown, Northwestern, Duke, Cornell and the University of California, Los Angeles in drawing Trump’s ire. While GMU hasn’t had a large swath of its federal research funding frozen, the school is risking its access to federal financial student aid if it refuses to agree to the administration’s demands.
The freezes are also coming as the administration instituted lower caps on “indirect costs” associated with buildings, equipment and personnel that universities often expense alongside their research.
Schools can choose to follow the path of Columbia University, which was the first institution to face off with the Trump administration and reached a deal. To reinstate $400 million in federal grants and contracts, Columbia agreed to pay a $200 million fine to the federal government and an additional $21 million to settle an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission investigation.
Columbia did not admit to breaking the law, but agreed to change its policies on hiring, admissions and diversity, review certain programs and accept an independent “resolution monitor.”
Or they could follow Harvard, which has continued to fight in court despite facing the toughest sanctions. The university won the first battle last week when an Obama-appointed federal judge said the Trump administration “used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities.”
The White House has already vowed to appeal the ruling and said the administration is holding schools accountable.
“The only people hurting their students are the administrators of the schools in question,” White House spokesperson Liz Huston said in a statement. “Universities do not have a constitutional right to taxpayers dollars — that’s common sense. Schools that want federal funding must comply with all federal laws and promote fairness, merit, and safety on their campuses.”
Other universities are unsure of which strategy to follow. But their mayors want them to fight on despite these financial risks.
“It’s just bullying tactics,” said Catherine Read, the Democratic mayor of Fairfax City, Virginia, home to George Mason University. “We are locking arms here. If [Trump] wants to take on George Mason University, he’s taking on an entire region.”
The Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights found that GMU discriminates based on race due to its diversity, equity and inclusion policies.
The department gave the school 10 days to sign a resolution agreement to settle the probe, including requiring its president, Gregory Washington, to put out a statement apologizing for “promoting unlawful discriminatory practices in hiring, promotion, and tenure processes.” The school has so far resisted settling with the administration and Washington has refused to apologize.
GMU contributes more than $1 billion annually to the northern Virginia region, according to previous reports. More than 73 percent of in-state Mason graduates stay in the state, according to an analysis by the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia.
The feud with the Trump administration comes as Virginia is set to elect a new governor in November. Read, the first George Mason alumnus to serve as Fairfax mayor, said a victory by Democratic nominee Abigail Spanberger and Democrats holding on to both chambers of the legislature could give “us a moment to regroup,” especially relating to state universities.
But Read also said she’s not sure there’s a viable legal recourse to Trump’s demands or a political one until they get through the November election.
“You don’t pick a fight you don’t think you can win… if there’s a winning path forward, I think we would be taking it,” she said. “If we’re not sure about that, I think we’re gonna wait. Nobody wants to pick a fight with the Trump administration and lose.”
That doesn’t mean the mayors of these blue cities — the Trump administration hasn’t frozen federal research funds from schools in red ones — want these schools to give in to Trump’s demands.
Daniel Biss, the Democratic mayor of Evanston, Illinois, fears what will happen if the fight between hometown school, Northwestern University, and the administration drags on. The administration froze $790 million the university was set to receive because of alleged civil rights violations. The university announced in late July it is eliminating hundreds of positions, cutting staff by 5 percent as it grapples with financial challenges that are being exacerbated by the administration’s actions.
Northwestern has a $160 million impact on the city of Evanston, according to the institution.
“When Donald Trump attacks Northwestern, he attacks us. … As bad as the layoffs are — and they’re really bad — if this nonsense from Donald Trump continues, it’s going to get worse for Evanston,” he said.
Northwestern University President Michael Schill, who has faced scrutiny from House Republicans and the White House over the school’s response to campus protests against the war in Gaza, announced plans to step down amid “difficult problems” for the university, “particularly at the federal level.”
New York institutions have also attracted the ire of the Trump administration, with Cornell University and Ithaca College being probed over alleged civil rights violations. The administration froze more than $1 billion in federal funding for Cornell. The university is said to be close to reaching an agreement with the White House to pay as much as $100 million as part of a settlement, Bloomberg has reported.
Cornell’s regional economic impact was more than $5.6 billion in the 2022-23 school year, according to the university.
Ithaca Mayor Robert Cantelmo, a Democrat, said he would continue to advocate for what he called “the normalization of federal support for research” and called on the institutions to pursue “whatever tools they may have at their disposal” to resist Trump’s demands. It’s key for higher education institutions to stand by “their commitment to academic freedom,” he said.
“For Ithaca to continue to enjoy the same level of economic opportunity and benefit that we’ve had historically, it relies on healthy fiscal situations for both of those institutions,” Cantelmo said.
