Boston Faces Identity Crisis Amid Trump’s Cuts to University and Research Funding

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.