By Haidee Chu,THE CITY | Editorial credit: Little Vignettes Photo / shutterstock.com 

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute is terminating a $505,000 STEM grant that was supposed to support an “Inclusive Excellence initiative” running through 2028.

The CITY partners with Open Campus on coverage of the City University of New York.

The country’s largest private funder of biomedical research has cut its funding for a program at Queens College that had focused on making science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education more inclusive and engaging for students of diverse backgrounds, the college confirmed to THE CITY.

The Inclusive Excellence initiative, launched at the Flushing-based CUNY college in 2022 with funding from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), ended abruptly last month when the Institute cut short what was supposed to be a $505,000, six-year grant running through 2028.

“I was pissed. I called them cowards,” said Desiree Byrd, a psychology professor at Queens College and a member of the initiative’s advisory board, referring to HHMI. “It felt like an abandonment. It’s as if the work was disposable.”

Until HHMI decided to pull the plug, Byrd said, the Queens College initiative had been focused on creating professional development programs to help STEM faculty members better accommodate the needs of immigrant students, students of color and students with disabilities. In the past, for example, the initiative has offered fellowships to support neurodivergent graduate students and hosted workshops for faculty to improve student interest and engagement in STEM courses.

The grant was cut short days after President Donald Trump signed an executive order requiring federal agencies to identify large foundations and corporations for potential investigations into their diversity, equity and inclusion and accessibility programs, writing that they “deny, discredit, and undermine the traditional American values of hard work, excellence, and individual achievement in favor of an unlawful, corrosive, and pernicious identity-based spoils system.”

While that executive order was initially blocked in federal court last month, an appeals court last week lifted the injunction and allowed the Trump administration to enforce the order while a lawsuit challenging it proceeds.

HHMI spokesperson Alyssa Tomlinson wouldn’t say whether it had slashed funding for institutions in the program because of the executive order. She also declined to provide an explanation for the cut, saying only that the institute “remains dedicated to supporting outstanding scientists and talented students training to become scientists.”

Byrd, for her part, said she had been hopeful that the privately funded initiative at Queens College would continue on despite cuts to DEI programs across federal agencies and cuts to research funding from the National Institute of Health and the National Science Foundation.

“I remember thinking, ‘Okay, well, HHMI is not the government. Right? It’s independent, so at least we’ll still have that,” she recalled. “But what’s the justification? Nobody’s forcing you to take all this preemptive complicity. I was mad and I’m still mad. Like, who is gonna stand up for us? Can someone stand up and say ‘No, this is not right,’ or at least fight till the end?”

HHMI funding will continue to support the initiative for the rest of the school year, said Queens College spokesperson Maria Matteo.

But after THE CITY first inquired about the program, Queens College updated the initiative’s page on its website to say it “ended in February 2025” and removed a page listing its staff.

“We are assessing the priorities and identifying alternative funding sources for the planned work,” Matteo said, citing projects to address areas “where students identified additional support needs in teaching” and the development of tools, resources and training for faculty to improve classroom outcomes.

In a Dear Colleague guidance issued last month, the federal Department of Education ordered universities to forgo DEI programs and activities to continue to receive federal funding.

CUNY’s central office — which oversees the system’s 25 colleges — did not respond to THE CITY’s question about whether it plans to make pre-emptive cuts to DEI programs to avoid funding cuts.

But in a Board of Trustee meeting last month, CUNY chancellor Félix Matos Rodríguez said the university is “assessing the implications of this guidance.”

He added: “We are not going to panic with every single action that comes out of Washington.”

University spokesperson Noah Gardy also told THE CITY: “CUNY remains deeply concerned about the potential impact of federal cuts to research and will continue to work with our partners in government to advocate for funding and continue CUNY’s tremendous growth as a preeminent research institution.”

The Hits Keep Coming

To Sara López Amézquita, an assistant professor of English at Queens College and a member of the initiative’s advisory board, the HHMI program was a place where she was able to meet colleagues outside her department who are equally dedicated to making the classroom a welcoming space for students from all walks of life.

“It’s very rare that we have this place where we can come together and really brainstorm and dream big and ambitiously because we can test things out and hopefully it can stick,” López Amézquita said, noting how she had been encouraging her colleagues in first-year writing to bring forward their own suggestions for making STEM education more inclusive given their expertise in working with new students.

“I was like, ‘Oh, here’s this space where you could possibly talk about equity,’ and unfortunately, that’s something that has also been rolled back now,” López Amézquita added. “This political climate is creating so much distraction for spaces like CUNY, where things were already very difficult to advance and to happen, they now then become even harder to carry out.”

Workers in STEM typically earn more than those in other professions, and the growth in STEM employment is projected to outpace those in most other fields in the coming years.

But even as the number of STEM graduates has dramatically increased since 2010, Black and Hispanic adults remain underrepresented among STEM graduates and workers relative to their share of the overall population, according to the Pew Research Center.

The Inclusive Excellence initiative was intended to help close those gaps. But now any effort to try and close those demographic gaps would potentially violate the Trump executive order that lambastes any efforts to track such information as “illegal, pernicious discrimination that has prioritized how people were born instead of what they were capable of doing.”

In the past, the Inclusive Excellence initiative at Queens College has hosted educational workshops for faculty and staff to support awareness, teaching and learning for neurodivergent students — and López Amézquita, for one, noted how she’s seen progress in improving student experiences on campus.

“Just last semester, for the first time, I had three students in my classroom who not only self identify as neurodivergent, but they made sure that I knew that they needed certain kinds of accommodations,”  López Amézquita said. “And that was the first time in all my seven years at Queen’s College where I was like, ‘Oh, the school actually had the correct assessment for what they need and they have the support system.’ And that’s not to say that it was easy for them to navigate Queens College, but it was certainly easier for them to have that kind of support.”

Byrd, for her part, said the initiative was not only instructive to her classroom practices but also supportive to her own career advancement as an African American professor in STEM.

“I’m someone who recently went through the tenure and promotion process and I struggled to figure out how and where to reflect my service,” said Byrd, who has volunteered to host events on disability rights and language justice. “HHMI was helpful, and it was nice to be able to come and sit at a table where other people got it and offered ideas.”

In her six years at Queens College, Byrd has also observed how class curricula and class-assigned readings often do not reflect the identities of many Black, brown and immigrant students, and how some students are sometimes unable to access expensive textbooks — and had hoped that the HHMI initiative would help address those common frustrations.

But the funding cut has made that work increasingly challenging.

“I don’t live with anxiety like that generally and I’ve never had to experience it professionally,” Byrd said. “But now there’s all this breath-holding, and I’m just bracing myself: Like, what’s the next hit? What’s the next hit that’s going to come? Because they just seem to keep coming.”

She continued: “But I always close class by saying, ‘But we’re still here. Let’s think of one piece of gratitude.’”