Funding for NAU's research project summer cohort just got canceled. Now students are scrambling

As the Trump administration continues to pursue deep cuts to federal spending, artists and scholars around the country are having their grants abruptly revoked.

Millions of dollars in funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Science Foundation has already been cut off, creating chaos and uncertainty for recipients who were counting on it.

Nicole Walker, a professor at NAU whose team recently lost an NSF grant, joined The Show to talk about what happened.

Full conversations

Steven Toya

SAM DINGMAN: Nicole, good morning.

NICOLE WALKER: Hi Sam, how are you?

DINGMAN: I'm doing well, thank you for being here. Before we get to what happened with the funding for this project, let's talk about the project itself. This was a program called Process. What was the goal?

WALKER: So the goal was to bring STEM students, usually freshmen, who had already begun their studies at NAU, and to work with them over the summer on particular research projects, but also combining creative writing and artists to encourage their creativity in their science projects and to hone their communication skills to better express what's happening with their sciences, and to institute with them a commitment to their education across disciplines.

So it's a really innovative program that we worked with the students in the summer, and then they took creative writing classes and art classes along with their science and you know, their biology and math classes. So they had this very interdisciplinary experience their second year and then hopefully onto their junior and senior years of college.

DINGMAN: Tell us a little bit about what that looked like for the students in a practical sense as the program was unfolding, like how, how would they move through their day?

WALKER: Yes. So in the mornings during the summer, these five weeks in the summer, they would go into the field and they would study burn scars and the area around burn scars. You know, we're in Flagstaff, where we have a lot of forests, so we have a lot of wildfires, and they study how the microorganisms regenerate, how the plants regenerate, if invasive species come into the area, what kind of pollinator species might be joining them, and then they take some of that material back to the lab and further study it.

But on some of the days, we would take that information and we would help them write creatively about these materials they brought home into the field, or their field experience, or we would talk about how they might use them in art installations. We presented different kinds of art projects to them. For example, there's this great artist, who in Seattle has incorporated a nurse log, which is one of a fallen tree, but these fallen trees that are necessary for the forest, and a whole new forest essentially grows from within this nurse log. And so you combine the science and the art, inspiring creativity and curiosity in various, you know, your, your people who you're trying to convey your particular science project to.

So we would, we would, you know, do a lot of discussions about art and science, we do a lot of presentations, but we also invite them to write their own, short stories, poems, essays, do their own paintings, drawings, and then they would go back in the field and again, that sort of circular, commitment to their science and their creative projects meant that they became more identified with the project they were putting together.

DINGMAN: Yes, yes, I was, I was reading that one of the goals here is to not just, you know, inspire the interdisciplinary spirit here, but also to increase STEM identity for students.

WALKER: Exactly. And, you know, this grant was directed toward underrepresented students. And one of the concerns is that people don't see themselves as scientists as readily as, as we'd like, that they don't have that connection to what it looks like to be a scientist in the field, what it means to to inhabit that scientific identity. And so the idea of writing about it, or drawing or painting about it is to say, look, this can be you. You can be this thing and you can, it can encompass all, you know, your, your various, parts of yourself.

DINGMAN: Yeah, well, so, as I understand it, about two weeks ago, you had just met the cohort of students you were going to be working with for this summer. You guys had a pizza party, if I'm not mistaken, and then, you got an email. Tell us about this email.

WALKER: Yeah. So, Saturday morning, I woke to an email with the subject line that said “Process project not good,” where I read that our grant had been summarily terminated, and there was no appeal and that we would be working with the Office of sponsored projects on how to, wind down whatever parts of the grant were left, which weren't aren't very many because we besides the pizza party, this year's cohort hadn't really started their research. They hadn't moved to NAU's dorms where they would be living. Their summer income hadn't started yet. So all of the cutting off was, was, I guess, easy to do, although incredibly painful.

DINGMAN: Yes, well, and it doesn't seem like it leaves the students a lot of time to make alternate plans for the summer.

WALKER: Exactly. This is, this is, I think, the most gutting part is the program pays these students for five weeks and houses them, and is, you know, it counts as an internship. And so they have all of their, you know, a bulk of their summer was dedicated to this. Now they have to scramble for jobs, who knows if they're going to be able to find housing. And that commitment, you know, that we made to them, it feels like we have betrayed them, and I feel terrible that these students have no real prospects for the summer.

DINGMAN: Well, just about 30 seconds left here, Nicole. I know that you've been hearing from some other colleagues about similar situations. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

WALKER: Yes, it's, it's, it's really upsetting. For example, I'm working with a researcher in Alaska who has indigenous scholars that are working on a grant with her, and that grant was entirely cut. There's a spreadsheet that my friends in the arts have compiled of grants that were canceled by the National Endowment for the Arts. When I last looked, there were 222 grants that had been cut at a total of $6.296 million.

And that was just in one day. So we're just, you know, we're, everyone's in shock. We don't know how these, you know, especially in the arts, how we're going to build back if we can build back and build up. I know private donations are, are part, part of our plan, but again, we're at a loss, the people who are losing grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Health. It feels like chaos and I don't know how we are going to put everything back together.