This is Brian Lairor's Daily Politics podcast from WNYC Studios.

It's Friday, April 18th.

I'm Tiffany Hanson.

Filling in for Brian today, he will be back on Monday.

First, a look at how Ivy League schools like

Harvard and Columbia are or are not standing up to the Trump administration's calls to either

get in line with the president's agenda or lose federal funding. So far, it's not just Columbia

and Harvard that have received ultimatums from the president.

According to the White House, more than a billion dollars in federal funding meant for Cornell

University has been frozen. About 790 million for Northwestern University. Officials say they're

looking into alleged, quote, civil rights violations at those schools.

We'll talk about where things stand with Columbia, Harvard, and the other schools,

and we're going to talk about the administration's efforts to more broadly to reshape higher education in this country with us to talk about all of that.

Is Rick Seltzer, a senior writer at The Chronicle for Higher Education, Rick writes their daily

briefing newsletter. He's with us now. Hi, Rick. Hi, thanks so much for having me. Rick,

let's just start with Harvard because that's sort of the news of the week. I mentioned that

$2.2 billion is on the line. So I want to dig in first just to talk about the money here. What is that $2.2 billion

used for at Harvard? Sure. It is grants and contracts largely what we know that it funds so far as

research. So the administration has already started sending stop work orders. Harvard has said that are affecting things like tuberculosis research, research into ALS treatments,

cancer, work to mitigate the side effects of radiation exposure, that kind of thing.

And I want to add one quick caveat there, which is it's hard to parse which grants are specifically being frozen because of this initiative versus some of the other work that the administration has done to slower stop grants across the country.

So it's not clear what's falling into the $2.2 billion bucket because the administration is trying to exact concessions from Harvard versus a broader

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