Advocates for faculty and staff at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are pushing for collective organizing against federal attacks on higher education.
At a panel discussion Thursday, dozens of UW-Madison professors and affiliates discussed how best to protest federal moves to slash funding and change university operations. The event was organized PROFS, a nonprofit advocacy organization of UW-Madison faculty, and the Academic Staff Professionals Representation Organization, or ASPRO.
The Trump administration has moved to withhold millions of federal dollars from UW-Madison and other universities through actions like contested grant cuts and a cap on indirect costs. The administration has said it is trying to curb government spending and “ensure taxpayer dollars are used in ways that benefit the American people.”
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The federal threats to research will have wide-reaching impacts across campus, according to the panelists. For example, UW-Madison leadership recently told all departments to plan for possible 5 and 10 percent cuts to part of their budget in fiscal year 2026.
“The impact of this is not just that a lab has lost a grant,” said Jenny Dahlberg, research administration director for UW-Madison Veterinary Medicine. “It is much more broad-reaching than that.”
Collective action must happen across divisions, and even universities, panelist Mark Copelovitch said, citing a budding alliance of Big Ten universities to share legal and financial resources if the Trump administration targets them.
“The biggest danger is less that we won’t exist, but that the form in which we exist will not allow us to achieve the mission,” said Copelovitch, a political science and public affairs professor at the university.
Nearly half of the university’s $1.7 billion in research spending came from federal awards in the most recent fiscal year. Private donations won’t be enough to replace the federal funding that’s in jeopardy, said UW-Madison’s Vice Chancellor for Research Dorota Grejner-Brzezinska in an alumni panel on April 15.
Federal dollars are key in supporting university projects for public good, said panelist Don Moynihan, a public policy professor at the University of Michigan. Private companies aren’t motivated to step in and fund things like basic science and training for Ph.D. students, he added.
“The university involvement here was to serve a public purpose, and the private sector is not going to step in to fill that public purpose,” Moynihan said.
The organizers hope students and parents will show out along with faculty to protest federal cuts.
“If we really do see some of these large scale reductions in overhead costs or indirect costs happening, the trickle effect will mean contraction of services and support available to our students,” Dahlberg said.
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