How the University of North Carolina Tried to Avoid Trump’s Wrath

The professor was crying.

She had joined the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to research race and environmental disasters. Now the Trump administration had cut off money that made much of her work possible, and university leaders had few ideas to keep it going.

Directly fighting back in the courts was not an option, administrators told a handful of professors during a video meeting in May 2025. Maybe, the officials suggested, researchers could rewrite their proposals to avoid mentioning topics that the Trump administration might find objectionable, like race.

That seemed like “whitewashing,” the anguished professor said in a recording of the meeting obtained by The New York Times.

One of the university’s top research officials, Andy Johns, fought tears himself.

“There’s no part of this that feels right,” he told the group. “But right now, we have to navigate it as best we can.”

As the Trump administration pursued the most consequential reshaping of American scientific research in generations, it sought to slash funding at private universities it depicted as hotbeds of intolerance and left-leaning ideology. But the campaign was so indiscriminate that it reached far beyond the Ivy League to include many of the nation’s large public research universities.