Boston faces the identity crisis in the midst of the Trump cuts at university and the financing of research

For generations, students and researchers from around the world have flocked to Boston, attracted not only to a college or a university, but in a region where high intellectual life has been part of its brand. The Boston region has prospered their presence, its many highest classified research schools and research hospitals, keeping its strong economy and standard of living in the United States.

“It is the densest concentration of academic talents in the world,” said Lawrence S. Bacow, who was president of Harvard University from 2018 to 2023 and president of Toft University from 2001 to 2011. “Universities and teacher hospitals are in Boston what cars are in Detroit, what energy is in Houston or finance in New York.”

Now, however, the city is seized with anxiety. The Trump administration’s assault on higher education funding is a greater threat to Boston and the surrounding region than perhaps elsewhere in the country. Harvard faces an examination of the government of $ 9 billion in federal subsidies and contracts, several universities freeze hiring and cancel admission offers, research laboratories end and international students are intended for expulsion.

And Boston faces an implausible question: will his main identity survive?

“Boston is the target of this fight,” said Mayor Michelle Wu in his city state speech last month. “We were built on the values ​​that this federal administration seeks to demolish.”

It rarely took place to question this key component of the identity of the city, since John Harvard donated 800 pounds of Sterling, and his library of 400 pounds, at the nascent college which would bear his name, established by the Colony of the Bay of Massachusetts in 1636. The first public school in the country, Boston Latin, was founded in Boston a year earlier. The constitution of the State forced each city to establish high schools.