Long before she became president of the University of Minnesota, Rebecca Cunningham trained in emergency medicine. She draws on that experience often these days.
Cunningham, who is also a public health researcher, is just a year into steering a public university with five campuses and more than 70,000 students through a time of profound uncertainty. UMN has seen grants terminated, an international student arrested, and state support flatline. Amid all this turmoil, she has had to propose a budget for the 2026 fiscal year.
The situation Cunningham finds herself in echoes that of academic leaders throughout the U.S. right now. To understand how she is steering her school through this moment, STAT sat down with Cunningham for a conversation about making tough budgetary choices, what she’s doing to support students and faculty, and why she’s still optimistic about the university’s long-term future.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What has your first year on the job been like? Do you feel like your training in emergency medicine helped prepare you?
The good thing for me is I don’t know if it’s unusual because it’s my first year, right? So for me, this is just what college presidency is, and it’s a great university, despite the time that we’re in.
I like to say emergency medicine is the best senior management training you can possibly have. Leadership at this level is around crisis management, as well as setting strategy. And the crisis management part is very comfortable. There’s lots of triage to be done, and that’s also very comfortable. Emergency medicine is also very much a team sport, and you have to be very collaborative, so it’s wonderful training. And that, combined with my science background, has set me up very well for this position, and has me not too ruffled.
Speaking of triage, you proposed a $5.1 billion budget for the university, which the board approved. The budget allows for merit raises, but it also raises tuition and calls for a 7% cut to academic programs. How did you settle on that budget?
To move ahead strategically, you need to double down on your strengths and invest, but this is also a time of resource constraints with federal funding reductions. We [also] have a flat state budget this year, and a flat budget is a reduction of 3%, essentially, with inflation. We made the decision this year, like many universities did, to take a hard look at areas where we could indeed trim some, and we did that specifically with the focus of being able to then invest in our people, in our workforce, and invest in our operations and buildings moving forward, and our infrastructure.
The Trump administration has terminated grants for studying vaccine hesitancy, health disparities, and other topics. How are you supporting affected researchers?
We have about 100 grants that have been stopped, and about $40-plus million of funding. The difficulty with that really is the suddenness at which it happens and the inability to plan.
We’re trying to address that issue specifically in using some university funds that are modest, with some donor support. Instead of having a [sudden] stoppage of their labs and firing of all their people, [we] try to give [faculty] some funds for a respectful ramp down over more months so that we can fully try to gain and utilize at least some portion of the data and not lose the workforce of postdocs, grad students, and junior faculty that are on those grants, so that we can help them transition to areas then that may have more funding.
Despite those efforts, have there been layoffs?
Absolutely. You can’t lose $40 million in grants without layoffs and terminations. And just this past week, we had SNAP-Ed [Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Education] terminated across the country. University of Minnesota Extension administered that program in all 87 counties, helping to provide education around food assistance to predominantly rural Minnesotans. That program was ended, and we laid off 80 people. So that is not one that we are able to continue, and that will be felt in the communities directly.
How could additional cuts, such as a proposed slashing of the National Institutes of Health budget or a cap on indirect cost payments, impact UMN further?
If we step back, federal research support is integral and critical for the future of a thriving biomedical economy here in the United States, as well as for our competitiveness on a global scale.
In terms of our university, we have a very diversified portfolio, which helps. We are not solely reliant on NIH or solely NSF or solely industry-funded. This gives us a little bit more breathing room. But the original proposal to reduce [the] indirect cost rate to 15% would have had an immediate impact on the university of $100 million — not insignificant over the course of a year.
We are a $5 billion-a-year organization. Can it be addressed? It can, but [cuts] certainly could have devastating effects in the short term.
You’ve talked about trying to identify new revenue sources for the university. How is that going, and what’s possible there?
Certainly it’s a time for philanthropy and for friends of the university to help us invest toward the future. [We’re] fairly unique in terms of large, R1 public universities in that we sit in the middle of a thriving ecosystem. If you think about our other Big Ten peers, many of them, with all due respect, sit in cornfields or in very small towns. But we sit in a thriving metropolis, which has been called the “headquarters economy” of the country, with nearly 20 Fortune 500 companies. And so that gives us new ways to think about how we partner with industry moving forward.
But we have to be realistic; that is not the same as the contract we’ve had with the federal government for many, many years. We have $800 million a year in federal funding. We’re not going to suddenly replace that funding if it was radically reduced.
Some people have asked why universities can’t use their endowments to patch funding gaps. What’s your response?
We can’t shift funds from the endowment. As a public university, we certainly have a modest endowment, but it is 99.5% allocated directly for uses designated from that donor to do a specific thing or invest in a particular student or program. In order to change that, we would have to either go back to the donor individually or go back to the courts. It’s not changeable.
International students make up a major chunk of the academic workforce, and a lot of them have been on edge lately with the administration revoking visas and detaining some students. What are you doing to support them?
It’s a difficult time for the international community, for staff, students, and faculty, with so many changes to the rules and regulations. The university has not been immune to that. One of our students was detained for quite some time. We’re doing what a university can do, which is we’re making sure that our international student program is providing the most support that they can to the community in helping them know where their visa stands, how they obtain their visas legally, and what the rules of the road are in that regard.
Looking ahead, UMN is in the middle of developing a long-term strategic plan. What’s the time frame for that plan, and what will be its guiding principles?
It’s thinking over the next five or 10 years. It’s premature for me to discuss exact priorities, [but] I’ll give you some broad brushstrokes. We have a strength at the University of Minnesota, which we plan to expand on, in experiential learning. Part of a land-grant mission originally is a practical education in many ways, and our students overwhelmingly have opportunities — either in internships, community-based work, or study abroad — to be out of the classroom and learning. That’s certainly an area where we plan to lean in even more,
[We also] will be leaning into our excellence in health sciences and sustainability work. If you want to do mapping, spatial work in the country, you need to be at the University of Minnesota, and if you want to be thinking about AI and health, you also really need to be paying attention to what we’re doing there. So those are some of the things we’ll lean into more. I’m really excited. It’s a turbulent time, but it is also a time of great opportunity.
