Last month, U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration canceled a $90,000 grant to Oberlin faculty working to train undergraduates in collaborative research ethics, according to open data from the nonprofit Grant Watch.
The grant, issued in February 2024, had been set to run through 2026, but was terminated in late April 2025, according to a Grant Watch report. The grant sought to train students involved in Oberlin’s ongoing project to create an oral history of Africatown, Alabama. Robert W. & Eleanor H. Biggs Professor of Neuroscience Gunnar Kwakye and Professor of Environmental Studies and Comparative American Studies Jay Fiskio are listed as Co-Principal Investigators on grant documentation.
Africatown was first settled by enslaved people from the ship Clotilda, the last slave ship to arrive in the U.S. Oberlin students and faculty have been traveling to Africatown since 2013 to conduct oral history interviews with current residents. Researchers also contributed to the Netflix documentary Descendant, which premiered in 2023 and chronicles the history of Africatown and the Clotilda.
The canceled grant sought to “develop a network of researchers to respond to community directions rooted in best practices to facilitate justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion in environmental research,” according to its research abstract.
“We are disappointed as we believe this grant contributes to vital knowledge about responsible research and community collaboration,” Oberlin Media Relations Director Andrea Simakis wrote in an email to the Review. “This work was enabling students to step outside the classroom, put their studies into practice and contribute to research that addresses the priorities and interests of communities.”
Kwakye and Fiskio did not comment beyond deferring to the statement sent by Simakis.
The Trump administration has so far canceled more than a thousand National Science Foundation grants worth a cumulative $649 million, according to a Review analysis of Grant Watch data. Grant Watch has also published a dataset of parallel cancellations carried out by the National Institutes of Health.
California was most affected by NSF cancellations, with a cumulative $86 million in grants based in the state and pulled since January 2025. New York came in as a close second, with a total of $58 million in cancelled grants. Nearly 40 percent of the canceled grants, including Oberlin’s, mention the word “equity” in their research abstracts.
“Nothing like this has ever happened in recent memory,” Scott Delaney, a Harvard researcher and an organizer of the Grant Watch project, said. “It is extremely rare for either NSF or NIH to terminate a grant before it’s scheduled to end.”
Such cancellations, Delaney said, typically only happen in cases of serious research misconduct, and require a months-long review and appeal process.
“None of this is legal,” Delaney said. “In every single one of these cases, the government has not followed the legally required process.”
The American Civil Liberties Union has sued the NIH to challenge the cancellation of grants on behalf of affected researchers.
“On the NSF side, I fully expect legal action to be filed, probably within the next two weeks,” Delaney said.
Many of the terminated grants focused on racial, social, or environmental inequities in the United States, Delaney said.
“They’ve also terminated grants that sought to decrease misinformation in our society, mostly on the internet, but not exclusively,” he said.
Delaney said that the NSF has also canceled a slew of grants meant to support science education, particularly for students from underrepresented backgrounds.
“You get so much value out of these grants,” Delaney said. “If the public knew what they were losing, they would be more concerned.”
