President Schapiro: 'You have to do the right thing'

Northwestern Now: Summaries

[embedded content]CHICAGO - President Morton Schapiro declared Wednesday that Northwestern University is financially strong and well positioned to succeed in its academic and research missions, despite potential cuts in federal research funding and threats to global mobility for scholars.“I think we have the resources to carry us through,” he said in the first of two “Conversations with President Schapiro” and other top administrators held this spring, this one on the Chicago campus. “Nobody thought that we’d be almost under siege in academe,” he added, noting the Trump administration’s proposed budget cuts for research funding and strict travel restrictions on visitors from six Muslim-majority countries.In wide-ranging remarks, President Schapiro also said the University is following its values in working to protect its international students, making progress on diversity and inclusion issues and moving faster than expected toward reaching the $3.75 billion campaign fundraising goal for We Will. The Campaign for Northwestern.The President was joined at the event by a panel of top administrators, including Provost Daniel Linzer, Executive Vice President Nim Chinniah, Vice President for Student Affairs Patricia Telles-Irvin and Vice President and General Counsel Philip Harris.Funding brilliant researchPresident Schapiro explained that Northwestern gets the lion’s share of its research funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and that federally sponsored research grants amount to more than $650 million a year — or, some 28 percent of the University’s $2.3 billion annual operating budget.“When you get 28 percent of your budget to support the research labs, you worry about that,” he said, referring to proposed budget cuts to NIH. “But I think we have contingency plans.“And you know what the best contingency plan is? To have brilliant scholars, to have brilliant researchers,” President Schapiro added. “Even when NIH wasn’t increasing funding, basically, at all, with sequestration, we were still going up, because we’ve ...

Read More