Trump Threatens to Cut Federal Research Funding Over Free Speech

Trump failed to mention the response from UC Berkeley, which arrested someone for assaulting Williams, who is not a Berkeley student and who had been permitted to come to campus and express his views, according to Inside Higher Ed. In a statement, UC Berkeley spokesman Dan Mogulof says that these events have “been willfully distorted and inaccurately reported.”

In an interview after Trump’s speech, Terry Hartle, senior vice president for the American Council on Education, called the executive order “a solution in search of a problem,” because “free speech and academic freedom are core values of research universities.”

Hartle also commented on the lack of a consistent position on free speech in the Trump Administration. “This is an administration that stifles the views of its own research scientists if they are counter to the political views of the administration, such as on climate change. And the president vigorously attacks people like Colin Kaepernick who exercise their free speech rights,” he said in the interview. 

Some experts believe the President may succeed in using an executive order to restrict research funds. “There’s a history of the federal government requiring universities to do certain kinds of things in order to receive federal research funding,” Cynthia Miller-Idriss, a professor of education at American University, tells The Washington Post. Miller-Idriss gives the example of the government’s ethical guidelines for projects with human subjects.