For American higher education, this past year has been anything but typical.
Since President Donald Trump took office Jan. 20, 2025, his administration has attempted — and, at times, succeeded — to mold colleges and universities nationwide to fit its political agenda, and Northeastern was no exception. Through federal funding cuts, visa revocations and compact offers, the Trump administration reminded the nation how reliant universities are on the federal government.
After Trump won the White House in November 2024, the atmosphere on campus shifted. The Huntington News talked to several students the day after results were announced as some celebrated and others mourned.
An analysis done by The News in the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election revealed that while Northeastern faculty and staff gave the majority of donations to Democratic candidates and groups, members of the Board of Trustees heavily preferred Republican campaigns and causes. James Pallotta, a trustee since 2016, donated $864,000 to Republican candidates Nikki Haley and Trump in the 2024 election cycle.
Pallotta’s donation was the largest among Northeastern’s trustees. Pallotta, a billionaire who founded private investment company Raptor Group and previously co-owned the Boston Celtics, has effused his conservative views on social media.
The first major noticeable change at Northeastern came around a week after Trump took his second oath of office, when the university quietly renamed its Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, or DEI, and changed related messaging. Replaced with the “Office of Belonging,” the department’s structure remains somewhat unclear.
Senior Vice President for External Affairs Mike Armini said in May that the university had been working to shift its language to “Belonging” prior to Trump’s re-election, starting when current Chief Belonging Officer Richard O’Bryant assumed the role in September 2024. (The position was previously named chief inclusion officer.) Internet Archives show the university used words like “Belonging” to refer to diversity initiatives in the fall of 2024 but still linked to the Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion website. In August, The News reported that several employees left the Office of Belonging, but the university declined to confirm whether the positions were eliminated.
Trump’s crackdown on DEI programs also reached collegiate sports. In April, The News reported that the university had drastically changed language about transgender and nonbinary athletes on its website. A webpage titled “Policy On Belonging” states the university adheres to NCAA guidelines, which changed following a Feb. 5 executive order that requires trans people compete on teams aligning with their biological sex.
Although it is unclear when exactly Northeastern updated the page, it previously stated that “people of trans identities have equal opportunities to participate in sport programs” and outlined rules on which categories athletes undergoing hormone therapy should compete in.
Northeastern’s scrubbing of DEI language rattled many students and prompted an unusually high turnout — more than 430 attendees — at a Jan. 29, 2025, faculty senate meeting.
In March, the federal government ramped up deportation efforts. In a pivotal event, plainclothes immigration agents in Somerville detained Tufts University doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk. Protesters nationwide decried the detention of Öztürk, which came after she co-authored an op-ed in the Tufts student newspaper that expressed pro-Palestinian views.
Northeastern Vice President for Communications Renata Nyul confirmed April 7, 2025, that the State Department revoked 40 visas of people affiliated with Northeastern, including 18 current students and 22 alumni. The number of visas revoked, which once appeared on an FAQ page published on Northeastern-run media outlet Northeastern Global News, was later removed. International students told The News in April they were increasingly concerned about their safety and whether the federal government would protect their legal status.
A Northeastern graduate student from India, who was granted anonymity due to fear of retaliation from the federal government, said in April that their visa status seemed to be “dependent on fate.” At the time, the Trump administration signaled that it would be cracking down on international students with a history of political activism, but was not giving clear reasons as to why student visas were revoked.
“I will not interfere in whatever your internal politics is,” the student said. “But the thing is that we have to look after ourselves in the end because nobody else is going to do that for us.”
By April 28, the university confirmed that every Northeastern student and recent graduate whose legal status had been terminated had their status restored in the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System. Since last January, the university has relied on its FAQ page to relay information. Originally titled “Navigating a New Political Landscape,” the FAQ page has remained the primary means of communication with the university community since Trump took office.
In May 2025, Armini, who oversees the university’s communications teams, said the university avoids top-down messaging, namely emails, in favor of FAQ pages, which may be continually updated. Armini said the university’s success in its response to Trump caused communication teams at other institutions to reach out for advice.
“I just tend to get a lot of calls saying: ‘How do you guys do this?’ or ‘What are you thinking about that?’” he said.
Armini underscored the political diversity of Northeastern’s community, which includes nearly 350,000 living alumni, parents, the Board of Trustees, donors, faculty, staff members and more than 40,000 students. He recalled one of the first emails Northeastern received after President Joseph E. Aoun penned a statement last February regarding the new presidential administration, “Reaffirming our Mission Together,” was one of confusion.
“The first reply we got to [Aoun’s] email was from the parent of a student who said, ‘I don’t like this email because I don’t know why you’re sending it. We think Trump is fantastic,’” he said. “That always is a good reminder for us about how diverse the community is.” (Aoun has signed onto two other statements challenging Trump’s overreach.)
Northeastern, as a whole, mostly evaded the spotlight for the past year unlike many high-profile universities.
Last February, then Northeastern first-year student Edward Coristine landed in headlines after Wired Magazine reported on Elon Musk’s now disbanded group of mostly twenty-somethings employed as engineers for the Department of Government Efficiency. Coristine, who nicknamed himself #BigBalls on social media, gained national attention. (“Saturday Night Live” spoofed him in a March 1 cold open starring Mike Myers.)
Financially, Northeastern was not immune to political headwinds. While the university avoided an all-out hiring freeze, it reported a hiring slowdown, former Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs David Madigan told the faculty senate in March.
Madigan stepped out of the role of provost in June; Beth Winkelstein, a longtime leader and researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, assumed the position at the end of August.
Swiftly after taking office, the Trump administration zeroed in on “woke” research, and despite the nation’s decades-long stronghold in scientific discovery, authorized sweeping cuts to federal grant funding. In an interview with The News at the beginning of the fall semester, Winkelstein said the university “fared really well” in terms of overall federal research grant cuts.
Research grants cut at Northeastern included studies surrounding cancer misinformation, water quality and whether fungi could help plants become more resilient to global change in coastal salt marshes. In February, nearly $14 million worth of grant money received by Northeastern researchers was deemed “neo-Marxist propaganda” in an investigation led by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas. Cruz’s committee flagged grants that included keyword phrases like “female” and “diversity.” The National Science Foundation immediately froze its annual grant review to ensure compliance with Trump’s directives.
Brian Helmuth, a professor of marine and environmental sciences at Northeastern, told The News last summer that the uncertainty surrounding the cuts is “demoralizing.”
“We spent our entire careers doing work that we think has a positive impact on society,” Helmuth said. “And it’s really disheartening to be told by the federal government that what we do is a waste of money and is useless when really our careers have been centered on this idea that we can use scientific research to benefit society.”
In Aoun’s February statement, which remains the only statement he personally authored since Trump took office for the second time, he fell back on familiar Northeastern themes: experiential learning and the global campus network.
“I understand that the onslaught of daily news about changes in public policy — across broad areas of impact — has left many of us feeling anxious,” Aoun wrote. “Yet this is a time when our work has never been more important. This is not a time to retrench. Teaching continues in our classrooms. Experiential learning blossoms around the world. Our researchers pursue discoveries that improve lives by making us healthier, safer, and better stewards of our planet.”
“For more than 125 years, Northeastern has been a source of opportunity and discovery,” Aoun added at the end of the statement. “Let us harness the power and possibilities of this mission to shape a better future for all.”
