Figuring out what to focus on now & next in science and higher ed

This newsletter is my part of an ongoing conversation among colleagues who’ve had a rough week. I share two or three pieces of the puzzle that feel are most important, hazard a guess about what to expect next, and offer at least one useful thing to do.

MEETING THE MOMENT: 2025-04-04

Hello friends,

My laptop battery and I are both fading fast. I’m heading home from a conference, writing to you while I watch lightning strobe through the thunderclouds. I spent Thursday and Friday at Science Talk 2025, the annual meeting of The Association of Science Communicators. I find even the friendliest meetings to be socially stressful. We’re pitching new ideas, meeting strangers, and trying to see how your work sits with mine. I think of it as “performing expertise” while judging the expertise of everyone else as they do the same thing. It’s no wonder that I’m tired.

But if there’s ever been a moment to literally show up, it’s now. I made the cross-country trip so that I could physically stand beside my friend Daniel Aguirre and host a frank conversation about the difficult realities confronting our communities right now. We knew that people crave such space. We knew how badly the conference needed it. We also know all too well how people squirm when they hear, “we need to talk,” and what they’ll do to avoid it.

For a lot of us, talking plainly is uncomfortable. We struggle to find the right words or figure out how much detail is necessary to make a point. We lose the thread and forget what the point is. Maybe we get mad or cry. Listening is even harder. We get bored or distracted. It’s genuinely hard to sit with pain, accept culpability, tolerate conflict, and just navigate the messy complexity of it all. And I want to make a critical distinction. Deep and honest conversations are actively dangerous for some of us: they are merely unpleasant for others. This has always been true, but since I’ve been writing this newsletter, the stakes just continue to ratchet up.

Let’s talk about how that played out in week 11.

What’s happening now

• In today’s new final ruling, Federal Judge Angel Kelly bars the administration from capping NIH indirects at 15%.
• In Week 2, I wrote about how I was worrying about tariffs. We’ll see them come into effect starting tomorrow. I’m still most worried about people who won’t be able to afford food and medicine, but lab equipment, reagents, and supplies will also become a lot more expensive, just as research funding is falling off a cliff.
• This week, the devastation at federal agencies continued to get worse and weirder. So far, DOGE is estimated to be responsible for something like 216,000 layoffs, and we expect many more, including another round of “deferred resignations.” On Monday, the entire IMLS staff was put on immediate leave. On Tuesday, HHS ended more than seven thousand additional jobs via early-morning emails at NIH, CDC, FDA, and others. Employees arriving for work waited in line for hours to see whether their badges worked and they still had a job to go to. Some received emails directed employees to file equal employment complaints to former EEOC Chair Jacqueline A. Berrien, who died last November. And it’s not just affecting low-level staff. Four NIH institute directors were among those purged while FDA director Peter Marks resigned rather than acquiesce to more “misinformation and lies.”  This list by Marisa Kabas tracks which HHS departments and offices no longer functionally exist. If you are more focused on the grants and funding side of this, don’t miss the major update to the NIH Grant Tracker maintained by Noam Ross and Scott Delaney. If you’d rather keep track of litigation, like the , you might prefer the Litigation Tracker. You can see the trackers we’re tracking and point us to helpful new ones here.
• And finally, let’s take stock of what academics are doing. Almost 2,000 members of the National Academies wrote an open letter as an “SOS and clear warning” about the decimation of science. In late March, the deans of 79 law schools condemned executive orders targeting law firms.Over the weekend, 96 Harvard Law faculty wrote a letter reaffirming the commitment to people standing equal before an impartially-administered rule of law. On Monday, more than 100 UCLA law faculty members wrote a letter committing to defend their students. And Tufts is actually doing so. On Wednesday the university filed a court declaration in support of Rümeysa Öztürk, whose arrest I wrote about last week. The Rutgers University Senate passed a resolution proposing a Mutual Defense Compact in which members of the Big Ten conference will pool funding and legal, policy, and communications capacity and expertise. We’re also seeing more lawsuits filed by interesting coalitions of individual scientists, associations, and labor unions and state attorney generals.  
  

What’s next

Expect to see mounting mobilizations. Tomorrow (April 5) will see Hands Off! protests in every state, coordinated across more than 150 groups advocating for issues ranging from civil and voting rights, labor, LBGTQ+, veterans, and science advocates. April 8 is a day of action, Kill the Cuts, sponsored by AAUP and other major academic labor unions. Finally, April 17 is A National Day of Action for Higher Ed.

What to do

This week, I hope you will do the hard work of translating your thoughts and values into words.

If you’ve been frozen or flooded, go search for and read resignation letters. Think about your own employment, involvements, and relationships. Where are your red lines? When would you refuse to comply? How would you do it? It might help to explore Daniel Hunter’s ‘differentiated pathways’.

• Protecting People
• Defending Civic Institutions
• Disrupt and Disobey
• Build Alternatives

Talk to your people, at length, and get specific about whichever pathways speak to you. Discuss scenarios and how they might play out. Maybe you keep it small and completely private. Maybe you host your own versions of the frank conversations I described in my opening (or better, hire Daniel to facilitate them). However you do it, just do it! And then tell me about it.

Find your words →  find your way

Liz