The Trump administration has added Princeton to the list of universities from which it is withholding federal grant money while it investigates allegations of antisemitism, suspending $210 million in public funding on Tuesday.
Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber sent an email to the campus informing it of the funding freeze:
Princeton University yesterday and today received notifications from government agencies including the
Department of Energy, NASA, and the Defense Department suspending several dozen Princeton research
grants. The full rationale for this action is not yet clear, but I want to be clear about the principles that will
guide our response.Princeton University will comply with the law. We are committed to fighting antisemitism and all forms of
discrimination, and we will cooperate with the government in combating antisemitism. Princeton will also
vigorously defend academic freedom and the due process rights of this University.We have begun reaching out to affected faculty, academic researchers, and grants managers.
The Daily Princetonian reported, citing the Daily Caller, that the amount of funding affected was $210 million:
The exact amount in question and the reasoning for the pause itself are unclear, and Eisgruber acknowledged only the latter in his statement. But the Daily Caller, a right-wing news organization, reported last night that the government would halt $210 million in federal funding to Princeton due to an ongoing investigation of antisemitism on campus, citing an anonymous Trump official.
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The amount paused reported by the Daily Caller would represent nearly half of Princeton’s government funding pool. The University received $455 million in grants and contracts from government sources in the 2024 fiscal year.
Princeton is seen as less egregious than other Ivy League colleges in its failure to address antisemitism on campus. However, a Daily Caller reporter noted that the funding freeze had been triggered by a federal civil rights complaint first filed by the editor-in-chief of Campus Reform, a publication that reports on radicalism at American universities.
Campus Reform noted:
Marschall’s complaint, filed in January 2024, claimed that the school took no serious steps to combat anti-Semitism after the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre of Jewish civilians. He stated, for example, that students protested against the Jewish state only weeks after the massacre, chanting messages like “Brick by brick, wall by wall, apartheid has got to fall,” and calling for an “Intifada.”
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Marschall’s complaint led the Department of Education—then under former President Joe Biden—to start investigating the Ivy League university in April 2024. The investigation was one of 16 that were started as a result of Marschall’s Title VI complaints, with other colleges such as Brown University and Tufts University also finding themselves under federal scrutiny.
Princeton is not one of the ten institutions singled out by the Trump administration for closer scrutiny. Two other Ivy League schools, both on the list, have experienced funding freezes: Columbia agreed to adopt several reforms aimed at ending antisemitism after the Trump administration suspended $400 million in grants; and Harvard University recently learned that nearly $9 billion in federal grants had been frozen over its mishandling of antisemitism.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
