Penn faculty criticize university plan to reduce graduate admissions by a third in response to NIH funding cuts
Penn is under threat of losing about $250 million in National Institutes of Health funding because of an executive order by President Donald Trump.
Twenty-two graduate chairs in the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Arts & Sciences are objecting to an order to cut incoming doctoral student admissions by a third next year.
Penn is under threat of losing about $250 million in National Institutes of Health funding because of an executive order by President Donald Trump that seeks to cap spending on the overhead costs associated with research at universities and medical institutions. Penn also fears a steep tax increase on its $22.3 billion endowment; it’s currently taxed at 1.4%, but that could possibly grow tenfold or more, university officials have told faculty.
The university covers the tab for its doctoral students.
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“We understand that the recent federal executive orders targeting higher education have introduced profound uncertainties into what was already a challenging set of conditions for University administrators,” the graduate chairs wrote.
But they said that drastically reducing graduate students will harm the university’s undergraduate programs ― doctoral students teach, and there already aren’t enough of them to cover courses ― and laboratory research. The move also would greatly increase the workload of current graduate students and detrimentally affect their ability to learn from one another, given there would be fewer students, the chairs wrote. And it will inflict “reputational harms” on Penn, they said.
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Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine also has ordered a 35% reduction in doctoral students, according to the Daily Pennsylvanian, the student newspaper. The school has admitted an average of 307 students in recent years, but will reduce that to 201 for fall 2025, the newspaper said. It’s unclear how many of Penn’s other schools also have targeted doctoral student admissions.
Some faculty protested the cut at the board of trustees budget and finance committee meeting Thursday, where a plan for a $13 million parking garage at Pennovation Works was among the items that got preliminary approval. They sat quietly, holding signs, including: “Fund our Graduate Programs” and “Trustees want a $13 million garage. We want a university.”
They argued that instead of fighting the orders out of Washington, Penn is moving to make the cuts while the NIH executive order is being challenged in court.
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“The trustees are creating a climate of manufactured austerity,” said Amy Offner, president of Penn’s American Association of University Professors, who attended the meeting. “Penn has many ways to counteract federal funding cuts that don’t damage the university’s research and teaching mission: raising the rate of endowment spending [which Penn has done before in similar emergencies], cutting the salaries of the university’s top-paid administrators and fund managers, fundraising, and maybe even postponing the construction of a $13 million parking garage.”
Penn did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
But in a letter to faculty, arts and sciences interim dean Jeffrey Kallberg said the reduction in NIH funds would have “an immediate and broad impact on our finances” and even though a restraining order is currently blocking the executive order, “it remains clear that we are operating in a highly unstable fiscal environment and should expect to see a decline in federal support this year.”
“The reduction in graduate admissions was a necessary cost-saving measure to help mitigate the impact of these new funding realities, and similar cuts are taking place both across Penn and at some of our peer institutions.”
The cut in new admissions will ensure that Penn can continue to serve its current students, he said.
“We want the cuts repealed,” said David Kazanjian, graduate chair of comparative literature and a member of the AAUP executive committee. Kazanjian said 22 of 31 chairs have signed the letter. Some chairs had already made informal offers to incoming graduate students, he said.
“The deans told us there were 18 informally made offers that had to be rescinded,” he said.
He also questioned the timing of the move, given that a graduate student workers union was created and recognized last year, and they are amid contract negotiations.
“We’ve said why don’t you stand up for us and lobby against these cuts,” he said.
In their letter, the chairs said they wanted “to underscore the reputational harms that will be done to the university as a whole, to departments and programs, and to individual SAS faculty if the cuts are implemented. ... The graduate chairs have been tasked to communicate cuts we did not make and with which we do not agree, while the SAS Deans have remained publicly silent about a decision that is theirs.”
“This may place the institution and us as individuals at legal risk. It certainly places us in a terrible ethical position.”
They asked that deans meet with them and explain the potential impact of Trump’s executive orders and explore alternative responses.
“Graduate education is essential to the University’s reputation as a research institution,” they wrote. “We will not continue to be a world-leading research institution if we visibly disinvest from graduate education and step back from our role in training the next generation of researchers and intellectual leaders.”