How the Republican Agenda Could Hit Johns Hopkins University

As President Trump unleashes dizzying firepower at the nation’s top universities, he and his supporters have made the argument that the institutions have brought such action onto themselves.

They turned into bastions of leftism hostile to conservative thought and lost the trust of the American people, according to the administration. The universities accrued massive endowments, becoming less like noble nonprofits spreading good to the world and more like corporations taking advantage of government largess, the argument goes.

Ronald J. Daniels, the president of Johns Hopkins University, which receives the most federal funding of any American university, has been listening.

For years, he has been warning that higher education should make efforts to attract more conservatives to the ranks. His school has pushed for more viewpoint diversity and has touted a partnership with the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.

Those efforts do not appear to have protected the university. Johns Hopkins, the first research university in the United States, has been one of the hardest hit by a Republican effort to reduce federal funding flowing to schools.

The Trump administration has not singled out Johns Hopkins with lists of demands or threats that it would be cut off from funding, as the administration has done with Harvard and Columbia. Still, Johns Hopkins has already laid off more than 2,000 people in the wake of an $800 million research cut. And officials of the university are bracing for deeper cuts to the $4.2 billion it receives in annual federal research money.