Post #6

Relief and Reckoning: T32s Return to CUIMC

by Melanie Wall

Several principal investigators at Columbia University Irving Medical Center (CUIMC) learned this week that their NIH T32 training grants—previously terminated—have been reinstated.

T32s are institutional training grants awarded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to support pre- and post-doctoral research training in key areas of science and medicine. Groups of medical and public health faculty working in a similar area apply as a collections of mentors from an institution (like us at CUIMC), and then once awarded by NIH, those faculty select trainees (graduate students, residents, postdocs) that they support at Columbia with stipends, tuition coverage, and training resources.

CUIMC has long been home to a wide array of these training programs. Name a public health or biomedical topic, and chances are CUIMC has—or had—a T32 in it. These grants are extremely competitive: proposals often span hundreds of pages and require detailed training plans, evidence of mentoring capacity, outcome metrics, and proof of past success in launching research careers.

We are relieved to see these programs reinstated. But it’s impossible to forget that we just spent four months in institutional limbo—with our work, our trainees, and our futures held hostage while non-scientific demands played out behind closed doors.

Yes, the funding is back. But it returns under conditions negotiated under pressure: new definitions that constrain speech and right to protest, increased surveillance, and a shift in governance that compromises academic values and consolidates power at the top — stripping authority from the University Senate and concentrating it in the hands of the president, provost, and Board.

I understand why this feels like good news. In many ways, it is. But we should also make space for discomfort—and for action. Let’s not forget the context in which this “good news” arrived.

In solidarity,
Melanie Wall
Coordinating Committee, CUIMC Stands Up