Data gone, partnerships ended: Trump’s ‘cleaning’ of academia is affecting the Netherlands and TU Delft

Since Donald Trump took over as President of the United States, he has been undermining academic freedom in all sorts of ways. Thousands of academics have been fired and words such as diversity and gender have been banned from use by academics applying for government funding.

Survey and meetings

This new direction is also being felt in the Netherlands, as is shown in a survey among more than 200 academics from 12 different universities. More than 40 of them were interviewed at length.

One third of all the respondents say that they are feeling the effects. They say that partnerships with American academics are being halted, research funding is disappearing and conferences are being cancelled. Seventeen academics say that certain ‘datasets and/or software’ are no longer available since action was taken among American academic institutions. One institute (Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) Program) that has collected health data internationally for years has been ‘currently stopped’. And some NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) climate datasets have also been decommissioned.

Data is no longer accessible

This is also happening at TU Delft. Riccardo Riva, a sea level specialist, can no longer access data from the National Center for Atmospheric Research that he uses for his research. ‘This will not affect my research this year as I downloaded the data in March and can work with this for now. But after that, I will have to look for European sources’, he said in an email.

Previously, Pier Siebesma, Professor of Atmospheric Science told the Trouw newspaper (in Dutch) that a workshop that he and an American peer were planning to organise will not go ahead. The workshop was about the role of clouds in climate models. ‘My co-organiser did not get permission to organise a workshop on this subject in Europe and to travel here’ Siebesma told the Dutch newspaper. In a previous information gathering round by Delta in March 2025, there seemed to be fewer problems. At the time, three TU Delft researchers called the consequences of the American ‘limited’.

The United States is TU Delft’s most important international partner in terms of the number of academic publications. Over the last 25 years, 8,381 academic publications have been published that have involved both a TU Delft academic and a researcher located in the United States of America. The second and third TU Delft partners in terms of the number of publications are China at 7,288 and Germany at 5,427 academic articles.*

* This data is from the Web of Science and only refers to academic publications. Other forms of collaboration are not included.

The question is whether the American state of affairs will spread to the Netherlands. HOP, NU.nl, Investico and De Groene Amsterdammer asked their respondents the following question: ‘Apart from the Cabinet cutbacks, do you believe that the academic climate here in the Netherlands is also changing?’ Most do not believe so, but 76 of the 210 respondents do indeed believe this.

HOP, Bas Belleman/ Delta, Annebelle de Bruijn