University of Wisconsin-Madison Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin indicated during a Faculty Senate meeting Monday the university would walk back hiring and rethink grant-making if a National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding cut is implemented.
Mnookin told faculty the anticipated loss of $65 million a year would be difficult to manage “without meaningful change.” She said the past six weeks brought an “unprecedented number of significant challenges” — pointing to the NIH’s decision to cap indirect cost rates at 15% — and told faculty questioning the funding cut's impact there are no “easy answers.”
“The situation continues to unfold,” Mnookin said. “It's very important we don't rush into accepting terms without a thorough and collective assessment, including whether there could be legal consequences or risks to the whole institution.”
The decision capping NIH funding, which comprises UW-Madison’s largest source of federal support, is temporarily paused, with Wisconsin and 22 other states involved in a lawsuit. However, Mnookin said the cut if implemented would deal a blow to UW-Madison’s operations and would force the university to “think about grant-making in a pretty different way.”
Federal law forbids universities from paying indirect costs with grant money. These indirect costs, which include building maintenance, security and electricity, are typically paid for with the indirect cost rate, which the federal government gives in addition to the grants. A severe reduction in the indirect cost rate — UW-Madison’s current rate ranges from 27% to 55.5% — would pose “a huge institutional problem” with the university having to pay the associated indirect cost themselves, Mnookin said.
"It wouldn't just be that any grant could necessarily be submitted," Mnookin said.
Mnookin said the university is developing a range of scenarios for implementing budget cuts but added the university’s research enterprise would undoubtedly be impacted, though the degree would depend on the amount of budget cuts. After a faculty member asked if The Wisconsin Research, Innovation and Scholarly Excellence initiative — a targeted hiring push in key fields that boosts regular hiring by 40% — would be discontinued, Mnookin said it “wasn’t a question” the university would have to walk back faculty hiring in general.
“It certainly is true that if we were in a position of having very substantial cuts, we would probably be curtailing faculty hiring writ large,” Mnookin said.
University leadership told The Daily Cardinal Feb. 12 they won’t lay off faculty if the cuts are implemented.
What comes next for graduate students and junior faculty, speakers ask
Multiple faculty members asked Mnookin how the university would support graduate students, who have voiced particular concerns about their status in the wake of the NIH decision.
University leadership issued a memo to graduate school deans on Feb. 23 advising them to consider decreasing the number of future students admitted to graduate programs. Some graduate programs have restricted admissions to “direct admit” only, and some students have been told by labs that with funding cuts they don’t believe they can place them, Teaching Assistant Association (TAA) co-president Madeline Topf told The Daily Cardinal.
The memo acknowledged some programs have already issued letters of admissions to students, and when asked how to deal with these incoming students Mnookin urged caution, highlighting the uncertainty of the current situation.
“We don't know where this is going to land, and there's a worst-case and best-case scenario, and we don't want to get too far ahead of them,” Mnookin said. “But we also don't want to, without thinking about it, take on substantial new responsibilities that might make it harder to meet some of the other things just described.”
When pressed on what caution means, Mnookin highlighted each department has different uses for graduate students and a “one-size-fits all” reduction isn’t the answer.
“I don't feel that from my space as chancellor, I can sort of say, ‘Okay, everybody should aim to cut their graduate enrollment by 35%,’” Mnookin said, “That might be too high for some and too low for others.”
She said the university was encouraging individual deans to develop answers that match their needs.
The university reaffirmed its commitment to supporting graduate students in a release Thursday, adding they’ve instructed departments to do their best to honor existing funding commitments for continuing graduate students.
The university has also said cuts and cancellations at several funding agencies imperil UW-Madison’s ability to conduct research and train future generations of researchers, and junior faculty expressed concern to Mnookin that the national climate could imperil their ability to secure tenure.
Gender and Women Studies Professor Leigh Senderowicz said she had to “recalibrate” her entire research agenda because the USAID and CDC data she relied on no longer exists.
Mnookin said it was important to balance potentially reduced research opportunities with ensuring junior faculty still have opportunities to conduct research required for tenure, though she stressed this wasn’t a problem exclusive to UW-Madison.
Faculty suggest educating public on impact of cuts
Faculty members also floated proposals to address the potential funding cuts, including educating Wisconsinites on the toll it would take on the economy and reducing administrative costs.
Wisconsin receives roughly $654 million per year in NIH grants, which supports more than 7,700 jobs and $1.4 billion in economic activity, according to United for Medical Research, and Mnookin said the capping of indirect costs would have a “ripple effect” on the state’s economy.
She added the university was working to spread awareness of the value of indirect costs, which many people regard as solely overhead, but highlighted that people across the political spectrum report less trust in universities, which makes educating the public “significantly harder.”
Mnookin also said she “100%” agreed with a faculty member who suggested reducing UW-Madison’s indirect cost rate and cutting administration regardless of if the NIH cap goes through, though she said finding efficiency gains would be difficult as the university requires people to deal with increasing regulatory demands.
“I think we do have a responsibility to ask, ‘How can we reduce administrative costs across our institution,’ and frankly, I think we have that responsibility with or without reductions to indirects,” Mnookin said. “I think that the more that we can [find] ways to do our administrative work efficiently in order to maximize our commitments to the research and teaching service enterprises, [the more] we should be doing that.”
Gavin Escott is the campus news editor for the Daily Cardinal. He has covered protests, breaking news and written in-depth on Wisconsin politics and higher education. He is the former producer of the Cardinal Call podcast. Follow him on X at @gav_escott.
