For generations, students and researchers from around the world have flocked to Boston, drawn not just to a college or university but to a region where high-minded intellectual life was part of its brand. The Boston area has thrived from their presence, its many schools and top-ranked research hospitals keeping its economy strong and its living standard largely unmatched in the United States.
“It’s the densest concentration of academic talent in the world,” said Lawrence S. Bacow, who served as president of Harvard University from 2018 to 2023 and as president of Tufts University from 2001 to 2011. “Universities and teaching hospitals are to Boston what cars are to Detroit, what energy is to Houston or finance is to New York.”
Now, though, the city is seized with anxiety. The Trump administration’s assault on funding for higher education poses a bigger threat to Boston and the surrounding region than perhaps anywhere else in the country. Harvard is facing a government review of $9 billion in federal grants and contracts, several universities are freezing hiring and rescinding admissions offers, research labs are closing, and international students are being targeted for deportation.
And Boston is confronting a once-implausible question: Will its core identity survive?
“Boston is the target in this fight,” Mayor Michelle Wu said in her State of the City speech last month. “We were built on the values this federal administration seeks to tear down.”
There has rarely been cause to question that key component of the city’s identity, since John Harvard donated some 800 pounds of sterling, and his library of 400 books, to the fledgling college that would bear his name, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1636. The first public school in the country, Boston Latin, was founded in Boston a year earlier; the state’s constitution required every town to establish grammar schools.
In the centuries since, that formative focus on education has shaped nearly every aspect of the city and state — Massachusetts consistently ranks near the top in national test scores and health measures — contributing to its politically liberal identity, and an ingrained sense of superiority that has long been a target of anti-elitist fervor.
Beyond the bragging rights they afforded the city, colleges and universities brought enduring economic stability. Enormous investments in research by the federal government, going back to its collaboration with university scientists who helped develop weapons during World War II, fueled decades of technological and biomedical advances, and steady growth in Boston’s educational and medical sectors, where federal research funding built a bedrock foundation.
In the last fiscal year, Harvard alone received $686 million in federal research grants, while as a group, Massachusetts universities took in more than $2 billion. That does not include separate funding for Boston’s research hospitals: In fiscal 2024, Harvard-affiliated Mass General Brigham took in more than $1 billion from the National Institutes of Health. Altogether, Massachusetts receives more federal research funding per capita than any other state.
Research discoveries have spurred private investments that define the city’s landscape, in flourishing neighborhoods like Kendall Square in Cambridge, where the biotech company Biogen has long been an anchor, and in Boston’s Seaport District, where Vertex Pharmaceuticals built its headquarters.
In recent weeks, the jolting disruption to complex funding cycles has caused growing concern about a wave of departures by academic researchers, who may choose to seek more stable funding and job prospects in the corporate world, or at universities abroad.
“Some will leave their science behind, and it will end — after a huge investment, it just falls off a cliff,” said Dr. Wendy Chung, chief of pediatrics at Boston Children’s Hospital. “The instability is very hard for people who are so hard-working and dedicated to their mission — they can only be pushed so far before they break.”
Detainments and deportations of international students from campuses including Tufts and Harvard have sent another surge of fear through a statewide education ecosystem in which 80,000 students, and as much as a third of the faculty on some campuses, have international backgrounds. Fewer may come in the future; others may return home sooner than planned.
“It makes no sense,” said Gov. Maura Healey, a Democrat, of the federal crackdown. In a statement, she cited negative impacts for cancer and Alzheimer’s patients, and for the country’s competitiveness, “with tens of thousands of international students second-guessing coming to school here, and China and other countries recruiting our talented faculty and researchers.”
On Friday, Massachusetts led a coalition of 16 states in suing the Trump administration “over its unlawful attempt to disrupt grant funding issued by the National Institutes of Health.”
The Trump administration has said that to keep their funding, universities must move aggressively to curb campus antisemitism. In a letter to Harvard, officials demanded that the university review programs that “fuel antisemitic harassment” and “commit to full cooperation” with the Department of Homeland Security. Hundreds of Harvard faculty have signed a letter urging the university to resist the demands.
Vice President JD Vance, a graduate of Yale Law School, has praised the prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban, for aggressively using funding cuts to stamp out certain curriculums and rein in “left wing domination” of universities.
“We should be really aggressively reforming them in a way to where they’re much more open to conservative ideas,” Mr. Vance said in an interview last year.
As deeply felt as the cuts could be in Massachusetts, where colleges provide 320,000 jobs and $70 billion in annual economic impact, the pain would extend far beyond New England, city and campus leaders said. Patients around the world would wait longer for lifesaving medical breakthroughs, they warned; towns around the country would lose opportunities to manufacture products invented in Boston and neighboring Cambridge.
At M.I.T., for example, years of groundbreaking research into fusion energy led to recently announced plans to build the world’s first grid-scale fusion power plant in Chesterfield County, Va., an investment of billions.
“It matters to us here because it’s our economy and employment, but it benefits everyone, in red states and blue states,” Mayor Wu said in an interview.
Ms. Wu, a progressive Democrat, is among the high-achieving Boston transplants who came to the city because of its colleges: The valedictorian of her high school class in Chicago, she enrolled at Harvard to study economics, then returned to attend Harvard Law School.
In Harvard Yard on a recent Saturday, there was little outward sign of the turmoil behind the scenes, as tourists waited in a long line to pose for photos with a statue of John Harvard. The university attracts 650,000 visitors each year, a boon to local tourism; one study found that all the college commencements held across the state each spring deliver a combined economic boost roughly equivalent to two Super Bowls.
Thrust into uncertainty, scientific researchers around the city said their ability to plan ahead has been decimated. Dr. David Corey, a Harvard neurobiologist seeking treatments for Usher syndrome, a genetic disorder that causes blindness and deafness, said he had been making rapid progress, and aiming to launch clinical trials of new therapies, when the funding shake-up began.
“Now, we don’t know what’s going to happen,” he said. “Every day the news is different. I have to pay people who work in my lab, so if I don’t know if a grant is coming, do I let people go? I have people who have been with me for 25 years, 10 years. There’s institutional memory there that is important.”
Dr. Chung, of Boston Children’s, has already felt the brunt of the cuts. A former Columbia University faculty member who came to Boston two years ago, she lost a major funding source for her long-term autism research last month when the Trump administration canceled $400 million in grants and contracts to Columbia, alleging that the school had failed to adequately fight antisemitism.
Dr. Brittany Charlton, the founding director of the LGBTQ Health Center of Excellence at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, lost nearly all of her funding; she has terminated staff, given up her salary and may have to shut down her research, she said. A plaintiff in a separate lawsuit challenging the cuts, she said the damage will ripple forward for years to come, as early-career scientists reconsider their options.
“Some of the brightest minds may abandon their work,” she said.
Growing up in a small town in Alaska, Alyssa Connell had dreamed of a career as a doctor and researcher in Boston. She cried when an email arrived in December, offering her a coveted spot in a dual degree program at the UMass Chan Medical School, an hour west of the city.
Ms. Connell cried again last month when another email upended her plans: The university was rescinding all offers of admission to Ph.D. programs for this fall “due to ongoing uncertainties related to federal funding of biomedical research.”
“It was a gut punch,” said Ms. Connell, 23, a teaching assistant and research technologist at Penn State University, where her work is focused on neurodegenerative disease.
So far, only her Ph.D. program acceptance has been rescinded, so she still plans to enroll this fall at the UMass medical school. But her financial aid package, which would have covered the cost of both degrees, was canceled, she said.
“I don’t know how I’m going to pay rent, but hopefully I’ll figure it out, and still find a way to participate in research,” she said. “I’m still very excited about moving to Boston.”
