Northwestern reaches $75 mn deal with Trump admin to restore funding

Northwestern, which has campuses in Evanston, Illinois, and Chicago, had been crippled financially by the federal freeze and was self-financing its research, paying millions of dollars each month

By Janet Lorin and Isis Almeida

 

Northwestern University has reached a deal with the Trump administration to restore hundreds of millions of dollars in research funding and close all pending federal investigations, while paying the government $75 million over three years.  

The administration will also lift all stop-work orders on terminated federal money and will make Northwestern eligible for future grants and contracts, the university said in a statement on Friday. 

 

The agreement follows others in recent months with institutions including Cornell, Columbia and Brown. Critics have argued that the Trump administration is impinging on academic freedom and seeking to use universities to advance its own viewpoints at the expense of research.

 

 

Northwestern, which has campuses in Evanston, Illinois, and Chicago, had been crippled financially by the federal freeze and was self-financing its research, paying tens of millions of dollars each month. In July, administrators said they expected to make significant reductions in administrative and academic spending, which were likely to include staffing cuts and called those cuts “among the most difficult in our institution’s 174-year history.”  

 

Northwestern’s president, Michael Schill, abruptly resigned in September. He was one of several college presidents called before a congressional committee in 2024 over antisemitism on campuses. Schill was summoned because of a deal school administrators made with pro-Palestinian protesters to clear an encampment on the Evanston campus. 

 

He was replaced by interim president Henry Bienen, 86, who had been Northwestern’s president before retiring in 2009.

 

“We must now refocus on what matters most: advancing our mission, upholding the highest standards of academic and institutional excellence, and empowering students and scholars to drive change in the world through research and innovation,” Bienen said in a statement.

 

Northwestern said it would review its policies about international students, affirm its commitment to protect Jewish members of the community and terminate the pact Schill made with protesters in April 2024, known as the Deering Meadow agreement.

 

“We would not relinquish any control over whom we hire, whom we admit as students, what our faculty teach or how our faculty teach,” Bienen said. “I would not have signed this agreement without provisions ensuring that is the case.”

 

Northwestern is the sixth university to settle with the White House. Its payment would become the second-highest dollar amount behind Columbia University, which was the first to settle in July. The Trump administration hasn’t yet come to an agreement with its biggest target: Harvard, America’s oldest and wealthiest university, with an endowment of about $57 billion.