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.
Leaders at most of those institutions, particularly the ones accustomed to navigating complicated politics in red and purple states, concluded that suing the federal government, like Harvard had done, was not realistic. Some hunkered down, minimizing the losses where they could while remaining largely out of the fray.
U.N.C. charted a different path — one of careful conciliation.
Quiet and often noncommittal in public, the university’s chancellor, Lee Roberts, maneuvered behind the scenes on two delicate fronts. On campus, he and his fellow administrators worked to calm an increasingly enraged faculty. With an eye on Washington, they also tried nudging Trump officials away from their most destructive impulses.
Major research projects — including on cancer, infectious diseases and heart failure — were canceled or disrupted. But the university also managed to keep the vast majority of its research funding intact.
Grant money from the National Institutes of Health, the university’s largest single source of research funding, dipped early in the administration. This year, it ticked back up, even rising slightly above its Biden-era levels. The university also found new sources of federal research dollars for Trump administration interests like artificial intelligence and quantum technology.
But there was another cost. While many professors sympathized with U.N.C.’s administration, mistrust deepened on campus as professors wondered whose side their leaders were on.
In an interview this summer, Mr. Roberts acknowledged the consequences of the cuts while avoiding direct criticism of the government that was causing them.
“It’s not an exaggeration to say that we have people here who have lost their life’s work,” he said. “It’s hard to overstate how devastating that is.”
The survival strategy
Seventeen days after Donald J. Trump’s election, Mr. Roberts trooped to a meeting of U.N.C.’s faculty council.
The group’s leader, Beth Moracco, paced before professors in a video recording posted by the university. She quoted JD Vance, who had just been elected vice president, calling universities the enemy and said she had sometimes plunged into the “rabbit hole of speculation and catastrophizing.” But she pleaded with people not to engage in “anticipatory compliance.”
Then it was Mr. Roberts’s turn.
Urbane and taciturn, he was more seasoned in Washington’s ways — and less in higher education’s — than a typical university leader. His parents, Cokie and Steven Roberts, had been among the capital’s best-known journalists. Two grandparents had served in Congress. An uncle, a lobbyist, had been so powerful in Washington that Vanity Fair christened him “King of the Hill.”
In 1990, a newspaper profile noted that Lee Roberts, at the time a Duke University student, planned to become a lobbyist himself. He wound up as a finance executive, a budget director to a Republican governor and, beginning in 2024, U.N.C.’s chancellor.
When Mr. Trump was elected again, some looked at Mr. Roberts’s résumé and saw someone who could be effective in dealing with the new administration. Others worried that he might align himself with higher education’s Republican antagonists, who had already pushed the university system to dismantle diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
As Mr. Roberts faced his faculty, he agreed the university should not jump to please the incoming Trump administration. But he also counseled patience.
“There is very little that is knowable,” he said, leaning against a lectern.
U.N.C. was positioned unusually well compared with its peer universities. Mr. Trump carried North Carolina three times, and the university already had Republican-aligned board members, lobbyists and administrators. As Mr. Trump prepared to return to Washington, he picked allies of the university for influential posts; an alumnus, for example, was named deputy director of the budget office.
In Chapel Hill, a liberal oasis in a perennially contested state, many academics viewed Mr. Trump as an aspiring autocrat. But U.N.C.’s leaders thought trying to guide Trump officials, rather than fighting with them, would better protect the university.
“We’d rather be in the room before policy is developed,” said former Senator Richard Burr, a North Carolina Republican and one of the university’s Washington lobbyists.
“We’re not paid to just sit and raise hell. We’re paid to have the conversations,” said Chris McClure, the university’s chief strategic officer. Talking to Trump officials, he added, “doesn’t mean you’re accommodating.”
U.N.C. slowly made inroads. The university forged “a direct relationship” with the all-important White House budget office, talking Trump aides through the arcane process of federal grant making, Penny Gordon-Larsen, U.N.C.’s top research official, said in an interview.
Still, the stop-work orders for projects had started soon after Mr. Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20. By the end of February, according to an internal document, there were more than two dozen, unleashing havoc and anxiety across the campus.
Even when the government wasn’t sending explicit word of cuts, money was not flowing as anticipated.
In late February, Paul Maddox, a biologist who studies cancer, was still waiting for a routine extension of a grant to improve his invention, called the Mizar TILT — a light system that enhances cell images under a microscope.
“We thought, ‘They’re not going to attack our grants. Why would they attack our grants?’” he recalled. “We just kept working as normal.”
That was in line with the advice of U.N.C. leaders, who were telling professors that funding hiccups often happened during presidential transitions.
But as the government began targeting individual universities with hundreds of millions of dollars in cuts each, U.N.C. sought reinforcements. It hired a lobbying firm whose leader, Ches McDowell, was a brother of a Republican congressman and a hunting buddy of Donald Trump Jr. (Mr. McDowell, whose brother lost his re-election bid this month, did not respond to interview requests.)
It is not clear how much it helped. U.N.C., whose leaders were spending hours each day talking with one another and trying to talk to government officials, told faculty members in April that the disruptions were “fluid and change by the day, sometimes within a day,” according to an internal summary of an event for researchers.
By then, the document said, the university had counted 75 terminations or stop-work orders.
Universities around the country were experiencing similar cuts and confusion. The Trump administration had advertised its plans to target places like Harvard and Columbia, but they were also re-examining the entire federal research apparatus. U.N.C. leaders were not certain that the school could avoid the types of blanket cuts that the administration was pursuing against other top schools.
That month, Dr. Maddox learned formally that his funding program had been shut down.
“I’d never had to fire anyone,” he said. “I had to fire all these people.”
A scramble to save ‘obliterated research’
As federal funding disappeared, researchers looked elsewhere, even soliciting donations on social media.
“We invite you to give what you can to help keep this research alive,” Jaime Slaughter-Acey, an epidemiologist, posted on LinkedIn. “Every contribution — large or small — helps us continue gathering data, mentoring students, and producing science that matters.”
In May 2025, Dr. Gordon-Larsen and her deputy, Mr. Johns, held the video call with the researchers, who were considering tapping an outside funder to help cover grants the government had cut. Dr. Gordon-Larsen and Mr. Johns were not optimistic.
Instead, they warned that the university could face dire consequences if the government decided that projects defied Mr. Trump’s orders — even if the money for them didn’t come from the government.
During the private call, though, Dr. Gordon-Larsen told professors that she had a “burning anger in my heart.”
As Abbey Hatcher, a public health researcher, listened, the we’re-in-this-together messaging frustrated her. She knew other universities were more willing to test the administration.
“I liken it to the federal government pushing us off of a plank,” she said later, “and U.N.C. tying our hands behind our backs before we go in.”
In a statement, U.N.C. denied it had limited applications for outside funding. The government eventually rescinded the language that had unnerved university officials, and several of the researchers in the video call received grants from the private funder.
But around the same time, U.N.C. was grappling for other ways to stem the federal losses. A list that circulated inside the university in May 2025 advised people to “try to avoid” more than 50 words and terms, including “climate crisis,” “disability,” “diversity,” “sexuality” and “socioeconomic.”
Ganga S. Bey, an epidemiologist, expected about $250,000 to finish a project she had worked on for years. The study focused on a group of Black residents of Jackson, Miss., to understand factors that affect heart failure.
The work was just the sort of thing the Trump administration argued was exclusionary, because of its focus on one racial group. And its funding source, a pot of money meant to promote diversity, made it even more vulnerable.
The government cut the grant, forcing Dr. Bey to lay off assistants and eliminate the final leg of the project — personal interviews with the study participants.
“You have whole research portfolios that are obliterated,” she said.
The 16-campus university system capped new hiring on June 12. By late September, nearly 150 U.N.C. grants had been terminated or targeted with stop-work orders.
Like other universities, U.N.C. had been bracing for the end of N.I.H. grant money that surged during the coronavirus pandemic. But it was still a jarring shift for a university whose research projects were worth more than $1 billion. In recent years, U.N.C. has received more than $500 million each year in N.I.H. grants, its largest source of federal funding.
In the first fiscal year under Mr. Trump, that funding declined by about $27 million, compared with the average under the Biden administration.
U.N.C.’s renowned public health school, where much of the N.I.H. money has gone, was among the hardest hit.
Still, some observers thought Mr. Roberts’s Republican-friendly strategy was having some success.
Representative Valerie Foushee, a Democrat who represents Chapel Hill in Congress, said it had seemed that the administration was perhaps giving U.N.C. “a better shake” than other schools in her district, including Duke, as Mr. Roberts and his team pursued what she called “a calculated plan.”
In September, U.N.C.’s leadership faced the faculty again, and again promised it was lobbying on their behalf.
It did not feel that way to some professors.
Andrea Azcarate-Peril, a microbiologist, said in an interview that it had often seemed like faculty members, not administrators, were the ones screaming, “this is not right.”
The university sharply limited appeals to the federal agencies imposing cuts. Even a department leader’s support for an appeal could be overruled. U.N.C. said it backed appeals most likely to succeed.
It also pointed to litigation against the Trump administration led by outside groups that could benefit researchers. And behind the scenes, though the university did not publicize it, Mr. Roberts was helping indirectly.
According to two people in the higher education industry, Mr. Roberts consulted with the Association of American Universities, a group of the nation’s top research schools, as it considered whether to fight the government in court.
Some faculty members were sympathetic to the U.N.C. administration’s plight.
Abigail Knight, an associate professor of chemistry, said the university’s leaders were doing “the best they can.” But changes have been coming so quickly, she added, “I think a lot of times they don’t know what to do.”
In its statement, U.N.C. said its highest priority had always been “championing the importance of federal research funding to the university and to the state of North Carolina.”
It added, “Carolina’s results speak for themselves and have been achieved, to date, with minimal disruption compared to peer institutions.”
A thriving university, for a cost
In the fall, Mr. Roberts found a line he would not cross. The Trump administration had floated a “compact” for universities to sign, dangling preferential treatment for research funding in exchange for ideological loyalty.
“There is really no way that we can sign the compact as written,” he told faculty members in November, “and we don’t plan to.”
No other major university in the country signed it either.
The public stance, arguably the university’s strongest pushback to the Trump agenda to that point, gave some professors hope that U.N.C. might be getting braver about standing up to the federal government. The hope did not last.
In July 2026, one of U.N.C.’s most prominent researchers made Fox News — the sort of publicity that many university leaders desperately wanted to avoid — when Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gave an interview. Peering into the camera, he cast a new spotlight on a topic that had already unleashed turmoil in Chapel Hill.
Mr. Kennedy declared to Fox that Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, when he was director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, paid Ralph Baric, one of U.N.C.’s star researchers, to develop “techniques for weaponizing Covid-19,” which he then “taught” to a collaborator in Wuhan, China, where the pandemic began. No clear evidence has ever been offered that Dr. Baric’s work helped start the pandemic, and he has denied training Wuhan scientists on such techniques.
He had spent decades in Chapel Hill, sounding the alarm about coronaviruses in China and eventually helping to find treatments and test a vaccine for Covid.
But after Mr. Trump’s second term began, Mr. Kennedy’s health department clamped down on Dr. Baric, removing him from his federal grants. U.N.C. responded by placing Dr. Baric on administrative leave, barring him from his lab and opening its own review.
This January, U.N.C. reinstated him and sent the N.I.H. a four-page defense. Dr. Gordon-Larsen told the government that she hoped it would “conclude its inquiry,” adding: “U.N.C. deeply appreciates its partnership with N.I.H. and the federal government.”
Instead, the agency intensified its scrutiny.
In May, the health department suspended Dr. Baric from federal contracts and proposed that he be barred from receiving future grants. The university again placed him on administrative leave, though it has also provided him with significant financial support for his legal defense. Days later, it announced his retirement.
The case against Dr. Baric, who declined to comment, exacerbated fears on campus. If the university had seemingly abandoned someone so important, some professors worried, who would it protect?
“You go from a hero to an antihero for no obvious reason,” said Dr. Myron S. Cohen, an H.I.V. researcher at U.N.C.
In an interview in September, Mr. Roberts paused for 11 seconds when asked whether Dr. Baric had done anything wrong. “I don’t really know if I’m the best person to answer that,” he replied.
U.N.C. later said in a statement that Dr. Baric had “left behind a legacy of consequential research that reflected both his integrity and his extraordinary intellect.” The statement added that U.N.C. “supported him since allegations first surfaced in 2020, and that support continues today.”
During the university’s first faculty council meeting this semester, U.N.C. leaders acknowledged how stressful the year had been. But, Dr. Gordon-Larsen told professors, “the positives are plenty despite the overall challenges that we’re facing.”
“Research is thriving at Carolina,” she told the professors.
The Trump administration wanted American research to shift toward more artificial intelligence, robotics and nuclear energy, and U.N.C. had just won up to $35 million to harness A.I. to better understand rare diseases.
The funding came from a federal agency focused on high-risk and high-impact breakthroughs, rather than incremental research, and it has awarded U.N.C. tens of millions more for research on neurodegenerative diseases, drug development and cancer.
By the end of the fiscal year in September, U.N.C. had received about 900 N.I.H. grant awards, around 130 fewer than the average under the Biden administration.
But even as some individual researchers and departments saw their money shrivel, the university’s overall funding from the N.I.H. was even higher than before.
The university also built, or cemented, relationships with other parts of the federal government. In July, the Pentagon picked the university as a host for a program that the government had earlier yanked from schools that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called “woke breeding grounds of toxic indoctrination.”
And in October, U.N.C. and the Justice Department signed an agreement to close 19 federal inquiries and preserve the university’s access to research money.
Other universities had reached settlements more than a year earlier. The university did not pay any fines, but it pledged to comply with the Trump administration’s views on matters like D.E.I., admissions and the punishment of student groups for actions perceived as antisemitic.
Holden Thorp, a former U.N.C. chancellor who is now editor in chief of Science, said he thought some at the university had “lulled themselves into thinking that the university was somehow immune from political power.”
Now, he said, “I think Carolina is just trying to be the best U.N.C. it can in this environment.”
The midterm election results could scramble the plan after Democrats romped to big victories in North Carolina, diminishing Republican power in Washington and Raleigh. But whether Democrats will be able to reverse the president’s policies is unclear. The White House still controls the agencies overseeing federal research funding.
The toll so far has been steep. Paul Maddox, the biologist, took a leave of absence, temporarily abandoning his empty lab to run for office as a Democrat, although he returned this year. Some researchers gave up on Carolina: Abbey Hatcher, the public health professor, left U.N.C. and took her work elsewhere.
Dr. Bey, the epidemiologist, has remained. But she questions the rosy picture the university touts.
“What is success,” she asked, “when there are so many researchers who have lost their funding?”
Produced by Jeffrey Furticella and Umi Syam.