Under one scenario presented at that meeting by treasurer Glen Shor, MIT risks losing the equivalent of 23 percent of revenues for its central budget, according to a recording of the presentation to school staff obtained by the Globe.
“Unfortunately, we should expect a prolonged period of challenge,” MIT president Sally Kornbluth told staff, according to the recording. “We really have to balance things. And I have to say, I feel a grave responsibility to you all . . . to ensure the livelihoods of this community and to make sure that we can continue to function. I need to balance all of these goals that are, again, often in great tension with each other.”
Kornbluth also outlined how she is trying to preserve institutional independence while being pragmatic with so much money hanging in the balance. MIT needs to “adapt” where necessary to the priorities of the federal government, she said, but also resist by suing when it feels the administration had overreached. Senior leaders are also working to improve the university’s reputation in Washington, D.C., and among the broader public.
A spokesperson for MIT declined to comment further on the school’s plans. She did not dispute the authenticity of the recording.
The recording offers a rare inside look into how institutions are trying to respond to a fast-moving and ever-changing dynamic, with new lines of pressure from the administration coming from unforeseen angles.
The myriad actions and threats from the administration include widespread reductions in federal funding for research, which amount to significant dollars at leading schools such as MIT, and attempts to dictate conditions on academic affairs, including prohibiting the use of diversity initiatives in admissions and hiring.
Among the steps MIT is taking or anticipating, according to the recording: pursuing “targeted layoffs,” reducing graduate student enrollment, which currently stands at about 7,350, by 8 percent, and delaying work on some of its vast real estate holdings in Cambridge. MIT had already earlier this year directed departments to cut budgets by 5 percent.
So far, the university has received 20 “stop work” orders on federally funded research projects, which represents 1 percent of all MIT awards, in addition to “sponsor delays” and a general “lack of communication,” from federal agencies, said Ian Waitz, vice president for research.
“I don’t think we’ve seen the worst of it yet,” Waitz said. “I think we’re just beginning to see the impacts, unfortunately.”
For the 2024 academic year, combined expenditures for all MIT operations were about $4.8 billion, while total operating revenues were $5.1 billion. Enrollment is just under 12,000, the majority of whom are graduate students.
One priority that emerged from the meeting is to minimize the effect on the financial aid packages MIT offers students. The total cost to attend MIT is $85,960 before financial aid, but beginning this fall, undergraduate students from families that earn less than $200,000 can attend without paying the tuition portion of the bill; families earning less than $100,000 can expect to attend for free. MIT said last fall that 87 percent of its 2024 graduates left without student loans.
“That‘s one of our top priorities and so we will work extremely hard to ensure that this is not a method for addressing challenges,” said provost Cynthia Barnhart, according to the recording of the meeting.
Catherine D’Ignazio, a professor of urban science and planning, told the Globe she believes MIT leaders have been “fairly transparent about some of its scenario planning.”
“I think they are doing what they can to manage an extremely high level of risk,” D’Ignazio said. “So while the cuts are definitely not ideal, it does feel like a fiscally sound path to prepare for uncertainty.”
One of the most costly threats identified by MIT leaders in the meeting is a Republican proposal to sharply increase the federal tax on university endowments, currently at 1.4 percent, to 14 or even 21 percent. At the maximum level, such a tax would translate into a more than $500 million hit to MIT, and would be higher still if the endowment sells off some of its more profitable investments.
While wealthier universities have long been criticized for accumulating enormous endowments, MIT uses its investment fund to subsidize operations across campus, from tuition and support for graduate students and fellowships, to research operations and faculty salaries.
But Shor pointed out in the meeting the “endowment is not a savings account with flexible funds that can be accessed for any purpose we want.”
Instead, the school is trying to identify new revenue sources, such as offering professional education programs.
The recording of the MIT meeting also brought to light a less-publicized aspect of higher education’s confrontation with conservatives: that they are on board with, or at least don’t in theory oppose, certain changes the administration is pushing.
Many higher education leaders have in private conversations and in interviews with the Globe said they don’t dispute the administration’s complaints that, for example, college campuses need to improve the environment for debate and inquiry of contentious topics and boost the diversity of viewpoints among faculty members.
“University leaders are all coming to their own version of a balancing act,” said Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education in Washington, D.C., who has worked to get industry leaders to speak out with one voice on President Trump‘s policies. In many cases that includes “recognizing that our critics generally have a point somewhere, and acknowledging that, and trying to remedy it.”
“We’re just trying to not add more fuel to the fire,” Mitchell added.
It does, however, put university leaders in the tricky position of pushing back in some areas, while implementing certain reforms that many in academia have long believed are necessary, but may look to many outsiders as capitulation.
Although Kornbluth did not specify which proposals MIT is open to considering, she said in the meeting that “not everything that‘s being suggested by the government” goes “against something we might want to do,” according to the recording. “And we are able to adapt.”
That is not to say she and other university leaders welcome how the Trump administration has gone about expressing its disapproval, which many feel has been draconian and even unconstitutional.
MIT itself has signed on to lawsuits to stop some Trump actions, such as the caps on reimbursements for their indirect costs associated with research projects.
“We believe these proposed cuts are unlawful and pose a direct threat to MIT‘s mission — and they fracture the compact between the US government and its research institutions that, since the end of World War II, has fueled America’s innovation economy and ensured the nation’s security, prosperity and quality of life,” Kornbluth wrote in a Feb. 10 letter to the MIT community about the litigation.
An even more sensitive question facing university leaders is just how public they should be in their objections to Trump‘s actions, lest they invite the kind of supercharged attention the administration has brought to bear on Harvard and Columbia.
The recording of the April 17 meeting revealed Kornbluth’s careful parsing of the political challenge facing the university.
“MIT has been trying to skate a line where we articulate the problems — we’re transparent about them, but we haven’t been trying to stir up large-scale advocacy around it,” she said. “What we’re trying to do is let everybody know the facts and let folks act on their perception of things as they unfold.”
Harvard’s very public refusal to submit to Trump‘s extraordinary demands for oversight of school operations has become something of a rallying force for opponents of the administration’s actions, and not just within the higher education community. Those demands included turning over admissions and hiring data to the federal government, commissioning external audits of specific academic programs accused of antisemitism, and alerting authorities whenever a foreign student violated campus rules.
By contrast, facing similar threats from the administration, Columbia quickly agreed to a series of conditions that included new oversight of an academic department, which many critics saw as a breach of higher education’s cherished tradition of independence.
In the April meeting, Kornbluth seemed to say Harvard made the wiser choice.
“I don’t think that they had any choice but to react in that way,” Kornbluth said, according to the recording. “I mean, frankly, we saw that Columbia took a different tact, which is they tried to sort of negotiate, if you will. And I’m not sure that landed them in any better place.”
She added she’s spoken with Harvard president Alan Garber and offered help. MIT has yet to receive the type of demands Harvard or Columbia have, which Kornbluth said would likely force it to change strategy.
“That‘s a very different problem from what we’re facing,” Kornbluth said.
She also told MIT colleagues “it has not been easy to mobilize” other academic leaders around the country by, for example, convincing them to join MIT as plaintiffs in lawsuits against the federal government.
Kornbluth was one of hundreds of higher education leaders to sign a letter in April condemning “undue government intrusion” into campus affairs. Still, beyond that letter, there is little evidence college presidents from across the country are planning to stand as one.
“Every school is in a slightly different circumstance,” Kornbluth said. “Some schools, honestly, have wanted to just hide because they know that speaking out can lead to consequences.”
She was also one of three university presidents to testify in a now-infamous Republican congressional committee hearing in 2023 about campus antisemitism in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attacks on Israel. The other two, Claudine Gay of Harvard and Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, resigned within weeks following their legalistic responses.
Kornbluth, meanwhile, is now encouraging MIT staff to speak up for the school by talking to lawmakers and people in their communities about the threats to higher education.
“The only thing that‘s going to move the needle here is when the mass American public stands up and says that they see what‘s happening and that they’re incredibly concerned about it,” Kornbluth said.
Hilary Burns can be reached at hilary.burns@globe.com. Follow her @Hilarysburns.
