By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
Princeton University will be keeping an eye on how the Trump administration and Congress affect funding for research and tax and immigration policies, areas that Nassau Hall deems as critical., The new administration is in its first full week, but the university is staking out its ground. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this month, President Christopher L. Eisgruber said in an interview that he “hopes” Congress does not seek to tax college endowments. Princeton has one of the largest funds of any college in the country, valued at $22.2 billion, that it uses for financial aid for students, among other things., For the university, though, that is just one of three “areas of interest” that the federal government can impact., “Like any research university, we care about federal funding to support research,” said Princeton Vice President and Secretary Robert K. Durkee, whose university received $282.3 million in federal money in 2015 for that purpose. “And so we will be very attentive to what the administration proposes in terms of research funding, but also what the Congress decides to do in terms of research funding.”, “We have to pay attention to both,” he continued, “how the executive branch is thinking about funding research and then what’s happening … on Capitol Hill.”, Mr. Durkee will have his finger on that and other issues. He supervises the work of the university’s lobbyist, Joyce A. Rechtschaffen, a veteran of Washington and an ex-aide to Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Connecticut. She has worked for Nassau Hall since 2006 and is part of a three-member office that the university has on North Capitol Street, near Capitol Hill., Tax-related policies are another area the school will be watching, as they relate to incentives for charitable giving and the tax-exempt status of the endowment and its earnings. Princeton and other universities with large endowments faced questions from Congressional lawmakers last year about how they use those funds., The university has said it uses endowment earnings for operating expenses, capital projects and financial aid to students., “The reason we have the endowment is so that we can use its earnings to support teaching and research,” Mr. Durkee said. “I think if, as a country, you want to continue to have some of the world’s leading universities in it, which are dependent on endowments earnings, then you should be encouraging gifts to those universities and allowing them to use their earnings for the purposes for which they were given.”, The third area is immigration policy, a concern for college students who came to the country illegally as children. The Obama administration started the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program in 2012 for people to seek deferred action from being deported., Mr. Eisgruber has said he supports that program, one that in November he called a “wise, humane and beneficial policy.” He has joined more than 600 university leaders nationwide who signed onto a statement urging the government to keep DACA in place., But he rejected calls from advocates to turn the university campus into a type of sanctuary city to shield illegal immigrants from the federal authorities., But there could be changes on other issues. For instance, the National Labor Relations Board issued a ruling that said graduate students at private universities who also serve as teaching and research assistants can unionize. With Mr. Trump able to fill some vacant seats on that body, that policy could change if the matter comes back before the NLRB., “It’s possible this issue would come back to the board with a different membership deciding it than the membership that decided it last summer,” Mr. Durkee said. “I think the answer on a lot of these things is we just have to be attentive (and) wait and see.”
