By Amiee Zhao
Emory University President Gregory L. Fenves sent a university-wide email on Mar. 5, announcing four temporary measures in response to the Trump administration’s research funding freeze for universities: a hiring freeze for staff positions, limitations on faculty training, a freeze on compensation adjustments, and a significant reduction in operating expenditures. This email marks the start of a large-scale impact on Emory as a result of the federal research funding cut and potential, deeper cuts in education, even for previously less affected humanities researchers.
“Now I feel that everyone, not just those who had funding from the government, is being negatively impacted,” Assistant Teaching Professor in Japanese Mizuki Mazzotta said. “The third bullet point (a freeze on compensation adjustments) has a direct impact on me, and every faculty member, as we usually receive some raise every year.”
Mazzotta, working in the humanities, initially felt that the research funding cut did not affect her much. One of the only funding opportunities she has received in her career as a Japanese and Linguistics professor was “something like 500 dollars, a small amount”.
The research funding freeze also impacts cross-cultural communication programs supported by the federal government, such as the Fulbright program, where students have the opportunity to research and teach languages in more than 140 countries worldwide. Emory, producing the top number of Fulbright students, is also potentially affected. According to the National Association of Foreign Student Advisers, the Trump administration’s freeze on State Department grant disbursements will make such international exchanges of cultures, research, and language difficult. Although few Emory Fulbright students or scholars have been directly affected because they are usually also supported by fundings from the partner country, the National Scholarships & Fellowships Program at Emory communicated with the Georgia Asian Times that information is scarce, and uncertainty looms.
This uncertainty is perhaps the heaviest among Emory’s STEM departments, particularly among the healthcare researchers that Emory prides itself on due to the severe cuts to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) grants. Jinbing Bai, Assistant Professor of Nursing at Emory Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing, mentioned that some Emory programs in the field of health are in the process of shutting down. Yet, he also said that the scale and content of these changes are not determined.
“Maybe tomorrow your eRA research is not fundable anymore,” Bai said. “But I think there’s a lot of uncertainty. People feel distressed. And also, researchers collaborate, so it’s not only about your grant, but also if your collaborators are influenced.”
Bai said that the NIH grant in his department has mostly been used up, and with the recent research freeze, there is no more NIH funding available. However, the department does have a variety of other non-federal fundings such as that from the College Nursing Society.
On a similar note, Xiao Huang, Assistant Professor of Environmental Science at Emory College of Arts & Sciences, feels lucky that most of his research has been funded by non-federal organizations, such as the Gates Foundation. Yet, as he heard from his Asian friends in Texas without a U.S. citizenship or residence, the situation is more dire: the funding freeze worsened the already tense relationship between China and the U.S., rendering some universities in Texas unwilling to recruit Chinese international scholars.
Graduating Asian international students at Emory also expressed similar concerns when applying for PhD candidacy. A senior at Emory, wishing to be kept anonymous due to their uncertainty about their U.S. student visa status, told the Georgia Asian Times that they might not be able to enroll in a PhD program even though they have been accepted, as the graduate school temporarily shut down its enrollment due to the funding freeze. They also mentioned that schools such as the University of Pennsylvania are reducing their graduate admissions. Although Penn incurred the most significant funding cut in their NIH grants, the impact is diffused across different subjects. A non-resident English professor at Oxford College of Emory University also refused to discuss the subject citing the uncertain impact on their U.S. visa.
Many international students come to the U.S. for a PhD program because of the robust funding and training here, and an anonymous PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at Emory is one of them. They stressed that, in addition to the research funding cut, another significant impact on the Department of Anthropology is the accompanying crackdown on DEIA initiatives in research, which makes up a majority of their work. For scholars coming from Asian American or Asian diasporic communities, many of them engage in research about such topics. Yet, the candidate also said that this limit on research funding is not new.
“Federally funded research has long been subject to censorship,” they said. “For instance, senior students in my program often advise us to avoid using terms like “activism” or “activist research” when applying for federal grants… In my case, I recognize the irony that my research could be framed in ways that align with a U.S. imperialist perspective—such as a simplistic narrative of ‘how young people in China respond to authoritarianism.”
Therefore, for Asian international scholars seeking to stay in the U.S. to pursue their academic passions or residence status, the limits on these funded graduate programs may impact their life decisions.
However, the implication of the funding freeze for international scholars might span in a different direction. International students have always been a major source of income for U.S. universities because they usually need to pay the full tuition. Therefore, universities may enlarge their international enrollment for typically unfunded programs (i.e. a Master’s program or a Bachelor’s program), as Yale University already did. Yet, this opportunity comes with a high cost. Emory’s 2024-2025 tuition for undergraduate students, for example, rose by 5.8% from the previous year. Bai also mentioned that for scholars without a U.S. residence or citizenship, much of federal funding is not accessible. Therefore, the research freeze might not affect non-resident Asian scholars as much on the Bachelor’s and Master’s levels, but it will make them pay more to stay in the U.S.
The Trump administration’s research funding freeze order is in a state of uncertainty. There are instances of objection – from U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley, for example – and this policy may dissolve soon, or be strengthened. For the Asian American scholars community, this change inevitably brings more instability and suppresses their diverse expressions.
