'Alarming': Small colleges bullied into silence as Trump poses 'existential threat'

As the Trump administration freezes billions of dollars in federal funds at the nation's most elite universities, some smaller colleges serving large numbers of diverse and low-income students are watching with existential dread, fearing that the administration will come for their federal funds if they speak out against President Donald Trump's sweeping executive orders.

Tribal colleges and universities and minority serving institutions are particularly vulnerable when it comes to potential federal funding cuts, threatening some schools’ very existence or, at the very least, leading to jobs cuts and the shutdown of research and student programs, current and former university administrators across the country tell Raw Story.

“This definitely is not just a hamstring, but it's a blindfold. It's a shackling of our capacity to be able to do the work that we do out here on extremely rural reservations, providing higher education to some of the most dispossessed people in the nation,” said Twyla Baker, president of Nueta Hidatsa Sahnish College, a tribal college in New Town, North Dakota, that lost a $5 million grant representing 15 percent of the school’s entire grant portfolio.

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Without billion-dollar-plus endowments to fall back on, the threat of federal funding cuts has silenced some university leaders from challenging the Trump administration and the president's executive orders, higher education experts say.

“It's a choice between silence and perhaps making adjustments in ways that reduce the possibility of the threat of loss of funding to become compliant — to over comply,” Paulette Granberry Russell, president of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education, told Raw Story.

‘A shock and a surprise’

The grant that Nueta Hidatsa Sahnish College lost supported the U.S. Department of Agriculture's NextGen Program that promotes workforce development and food sovereignty in small communities, Baker told Raw Story.

The school paused all work on the project, which supported three employees plus various student internships, and has yet to be reimbursed for about $500,000 already spent on the project.

“It was just yanked,” Baker said. “We still do not have any type of understanding or word as to whether or not it will be restored, or if we will be able to access the dollars that we have already extended on that particular project.”

Losing that money is “enormous” for a tribal college and getting notification of the suspended funds in the initial “flurry” of executive orders was “a shock and a surprise,” Baker said.

Baker was not informed of the executive order with which the grant’s work failed to align and said there’s been an “information void” related to the rescinded funds.

“It's rather frustrating because we can't really comply with rules that aren't clearly defined or even exist yet. It’s been difficult,” Baker said.

Communications about the suspended grant have been “super opaque,” and the school was simply given a statement about funding needing to align “with this particular administration's goals,” Baker said.

“I think they are kept loose on purpose so that they can claim that anything, and a lot of things, don't fall under the purview or don't meet their specifications,” Baker said.

Baker said the school of about 200 students would “absolutely” make any changes necessary to reinstate its NextGen program funding since the school is already operating on a “shoestring” budget.

Further loss of federal dollars could threaten student services and technology access for the tribal college, Baker said.

“Oh my goodness, my stomach kind of turns even thinking about it,” Baker said. “Definitely this would create chaos for at least my employees, and whether or not I would be able to keep our doors open, keep our lights on, things like that.”

‘Scared of the financial consequences’

Loss of federal funding could shut down some small minority serving institutions, as well as tribal colleges and universities, who receive the vast majority of their budgets from the federal government through treaty and trust obligations, along with federal grants.

“We're not alarmists. We've been through a lot as organizations and as a people, so alarm doesn't tend to be our default, but I would say that, yeah, it is alarming,” said Cheryl Crazy Bull, president and CEO of the American Indian College Fund. “I just think institutions are at risk because, rightly so, we are dependent on federal funding.”

Leander McDonald, president of United Tribes Technical College, a tribal community college in Bismarck, North Dakota, operates his school on a $54 million annual budget, with 74 percent of funds coming from federal dollars, and 35 percent of those funds administered through the Department of Education. Seventy-seven percent of the student body is low-income, and 68 percent are first-generation college students, McDonald said.

“If we lost these funds, we'd be hurting, too,” McDonald said. “I think we have a little bit of reserves that we'd be able to run around, maintain operations, for about six months, depending on how hard the hit was, but eventually it would shut us down.”

On March 20, Trump signed an executive order initiating steps to shutter the Department of Education. If federal fund distributions are delayed, redirected through the states or outright discontinued, that burdens schools like United Tribes Technical College and threatens operations, McDonald said.

“There's just not endowments there or alternative funding sources. I think they're very much at risk of having to close vital programs,” Crazy Bull said of tribal colleges and universities in general. “That might be why people aren't saying something because they're more scared of the financial consequences. Very powerful, right?”

In February, one of United Tribes Technical College’s National Science Foundation grants was flagged due to language in a report involving DEI — the term for “diversity, equity and inclusion” under crusade by the Trump administration. One of Trump’s first executive orders was titled “Ending Radical And Wasteful Government DEI Programs And Preferencing.”

“What's known about tribal colleges and universities is that we do more with less, so we’re already not fully funded at what we're authorized by Congress. Already being in that situation, it's hard for us to operate without funds that may be taken away,” McDonald said. “When there's notification that comes up that those funds might be pulled, that's very concerning to us.”

A project officer for the grant suggested modifying the language around DEI in a related report. The school kept its funding, and the research continued, McDonald said.

‘Existential threats are not new’

On the first day of his second term, Trump signed mandates ending executive orders from former President Joe Biden “advancing educational equity, excellence and economic opportunity” for Black, Hispanic and Native Americans.

Rather than speak out against such executive orders that affect their diverse student bodies, many minority serving institutions such as Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs), Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institutions (AANAPISIs) have kept quiet amid uncertainty about compliance.

“I think that's what many institutions are really struggling with, that they don't quite know what to comply with and how to mitigate or how to address even legal issues or legal concerns because they haven't been clearly defined,” said Cedrick Howard, associate vice chancellor of strategic enrollment management at Seattle Colleges, which are designated AANAPISIs.

In response to the executive orders, Seattle Colleges created a “federal regulation and response task force” that meets weekly to discuss developments with the executive orders. The administration hosts forums to update staff, faculty and students every other week, and the group has developed plans to respond to inquiries from federal agencies like U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Howard said.

University presidents are often “juggling” a desire to push back and accountability to their boards of trustees, who can fire them at any moment, said Marybeth Gasman, executive director of the Rutgers Center for Minority Serving Institutions.

“Because of the way that Trump leads, which is very much in a bullying manner, they could end up losing huge amounts of resources,” Gasman said.

Colleges located in states like Florida, Texas and North Carolina with their own mandates to eliminate DEI from public schools, face even more pressure to keep quiet and comply — policies Gasman calls “draconian” and “really scary.”

“I think some of this depends on where you are and what you're willing to risk,” Gasman said. “I'm not wholeheartedly faulting people for not being as vocal because I know they have all these different things that are coming at them, but I will say this: if there was ever a time to be vocal, this is it.”

Terrell L. Strayhorn, director of the Center for the Study of Historically Black Colleges and Universities at Virginia Union University, said that one-third of HBCUs have less than 3,000 students and loss of any federal grants and contracts from such institutions can be “significantly detrimental” when their budgets are dependent on federal funds rather than endowments or patents.

For larger HBCUs that aspire for designation as research universities, loss of federal research funding can be a “pretty detrimental blow," Strayhorn said. Howard University in Washington, D.C became the first HBCU to receive the top-tier research university classification in February.

“You don't want to say too much and then get out in front of your institution or your district,” Strayhorn told Raw Story. “You don't want to say something that is interpreted or misinterpreted in a way that puts you or your institution in harm's way.”

Joe-Joe McManus, an executive adviser on inclusivity in higher education and a former chief diversity officer at California State University San Marcos, said, “existential threats are not new to HBCUs and tribal colleges.”

“There's been a lot of turmoil happening, and most HBCUs and tribal colleges don't have these giant budgets and endowments that a place like Columbia or Harvard or those types of schools have, so these cause a lot more concern than they might at some of those elite institutions,” McManus said.

FILE PHOTO: Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S., December 12, 2023. REUTERS/Brian Snyder/File Photo Demonstrators rally on Cambridge Common in a protest organized by the City of Cambridge calling on Harvard leadership to resist interference at the university by the federal government in Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S. April 12, 2025. REUTERS/Nicholas Pfosi

‘Silence is a problem’

When Trump won the presidency the first time, John Silvanus Wilson Jr., then-president of Morehouse College, a private HBCU for men in Atlanta, joined more than 100 university presidents in penning an open letter in November 2016 asking the president-elect to condemn recent hate-fueled actions against students.

“His posture, his voice, his demeanor was very distinctively, I'd say, disruptive,” Wilson said of Trump’s first term. “If anything, it's even more so now.”

Now, Wilson is stunned by the silence he’s witnessed from universities across the country since Trump has taken office in a time when deportations of student activists are occurring, and schools are abandoning references to DEI, which came about as a response to “inequity and exclusion” since the founding of higher education in the United States in 1636, Wilson said.

“Silence is a problem, but I'm more distracted by the actions,” Wilson told Raw Story. “As people are remaining silent, they're shutting down all kinds of things.”

HBCUs, in particular, have historically been at the “forefront in the struggle” for civil and human rights, Wilson said. Yet, HBCU voices have seemingly been missing from the national discourse today "as we now have someone in the White House who is not above exacting punishment for criticism, and so I think there's a great deal of fear that you will suffer the consequences if you speak out," Wilson said.

“Speaking into moments like this is what brought about the major democracy positive changes in the 1960s to include the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act,” Wilson said. “Silence now, for whatever reason, is a betrayal of that tradition … fear in a moment like this is foreign to that tradition.”

Morehouse College did not respond to Raw Story’s request for comment. The U.S. Department of Agriculture and the White House did not immediately respond to Raw Story's request for comment.