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A couple of weeks ago, at 1 a.m., I found out the National Science Foundation (NSF) Postdoctoral Fellowship I applied for was being canceled because it did not comply with Trump’s new executive order on federal funding for DEI initiatives. I did what anyone from my generation would do in a moment like this: I took to X to share my experience. It’s clear that the Trump administration’s assault against academia has begun — and ultimately students, researchers, and our country are on the losing end.
I am a fifth year Ph.D. student in the mathematics department. For Ph.D. students wishing to continue in academia, the fall of their final year in the program — typically their fifth — is when they apply to postdoctoral positions. These postdocs are two-year to four-year positions that serve as a bridge between graduate school and becoming a professor.
If you’ve taken an intro class in the math department, you were likely taught by a postdoc. But postdoc jobs are not in abundance: At a typical top school, there are far more doctoral students applying for postdocs than there are postdocs hired. The NSF postdoctoral fellowships help create more postdoc jobs by offering federal funding for American students to go to any university they want, provided they find a faculty member willing to sponsor their application.
There are two NSF postdoctoral fellowships in mathematics: the “normal” NSF Mathematical Sciences Postdoc Research Fellowship (MSPRF) and the fellowship I applied for, the NSF MPS-Ascend fellowship. The Ascend is designed for those who wish to broaden the participation of members of groups that are historically excluded or currently underrepresented in math and physical sciences fields in the United States, such as African Americans, Latin Americans, Native Americans, and Pacific Islanders. According to the NSF FAQs, “you do not need to be a member of one of the defined underrepresented groups to successfully apply to the Ascend program. But all applicants must present a compelling plan to address broadening participation.” The fellowship’s explicit reference to race made it a target for Trump’s DEI executive order, even though it is open to anyone and has been awarded to many white Americans in previous years.
Because graduate students are not allowed to apply to both fellowships, when the Ascend fellowship got canceled, it took me out of the running for getting an NSF postdoc altogether. This unilateral decision by the Trump administration effectively prevented a large number of applicants — many of whom were minorities — from applying for NSF funding.
In a typical year, an American Ph.D. student might be able to get away with not applying for an NSF fellowship. After all, they’re not given out to everyone: Only around 40 NSF math postdoc fellowships are handed out each year. But the Trump administration has ensured that there will be no more “typical years.”
Notably, Trump’s proposed tax on endowment income, as University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 pointed out in his State of the University Letter, would severely undermine a university’s ability to bring in high quality researchers and scholars. Indeed, under a new tax proposal, Princeton’s taxes paid on the endowment would increase dramatically, from 1.4 percent to 21 percent, an increase that could amount to hundreds of millions of dollars, per one estimate. U.S. Vice President JD Vance has proposed a whopping 35 percent tax on endowment income. These proposed tax hikes, combined with a freeze and delay of federal funding, has led a number of schools to significantly cut their postdoc hiring and to admit fewer grad students.
The effects of this administration’s decisions have been both immediate and drastic. After talking to other graduate students in the math department, I’ve discovered that a majority of my cohort will be doing part or all of their postdocs in Europe. In contrast, in the three previous years for which there is data, less than 20 percent of Princeton math Ph.D. students doing postdocs have left North America to do so.
On Tuesday, Feb. 18, 2025, nearly 170 employees were fired from the NSF, even while Trump touts plans of becoming a leader in science and beating China in the AI race. How can America remain a leader in science and technology if its politicians continue to decimate the scientific and academic community at large?
So what can we do about this? The letters and petitions from Nobel Prize winning scientists and economists warned us that this could happen if Trump were elected, but that wasn’t enough to spur preemptive action. Academia is no longer a trusted source of information in America, which may be a symptom of a more general rise in anti-intellectualism, as evidenced by the comments on X telling me to “get a real job” or rejoicing at the fact that their tax dollars would no longer go to mathematics research. But we as students, postdocs, faculty — as a university community — have the power to change this.
Hidden behind a wall of racists and trolls on X is a different, much more common, kind of American: the American that doesn’t fully understand academia, but wants to understand it, where their tax dollars are going, and why it’s important. As academics, it’s imperative that we better communicate to the public not only the direct impacts of our research, but also long term positive consequences like job growth in the economy.
Academic research has led to many advances for society, in large part because it is free from the burden of profit maximization, which allows for more risk taking and hence greater discoveries, often propped up by the support of federal funding. We absolutely should speak up about the damage our government is doing, but if we want to make our voices heard, we will need a lot of voices on our side, including the Americans who have been convinced academia is not important.
We need to engage with these individuals by volunteering to speak about our research and intellectual preoccupations at schools, community centers, and even informal gatherings. We need to write accessibly about our work in addition to producing academic research articles. We need to think critically about the value our work brings to society and be willing and eager to convince others of that value. It’s time to get out of our academic bubbles and do the hard work to save our institutions.
Trajan Hammonds is a Ph.D. student in Mathematics and is originally from Chicago. He can be reached trajanh[at]princeton.edu or on X (Twitter) @trajan317.
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