Published on: September 25, 2026 at 2:08 pm
Tighter enforcement of immigration regulations and cuts in research grants under the Trump administration are having negative impacts on academic work and the U.S. higher education industry in general and on not-for-profit professional associations, including the Academy of Management, in particular.
Academy of Management (AOM) Scholar Peter Bamberger of Tel Aviv University, the president of AOM, says you can see it clearly in the AOM’s Annual Meeting, which was held in Copenhagen in 2025 and Philadelphia in 2026. The 2027 AOM Annual Meeting will take place in Vienna. Among other issues, there is concern about how the visas of foreign students and professors are being treated by authorities such as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
“A good number of the research papers that were accepted for presentation in Copenhagen came from non-U.S. citizens studying for the doctorate in the United States,” Bamberger said. “Some of these opted not to attend the meeting and present their research due to fears that they would not be allowed to re-enter the U.S.
“This is a continuing concern for all of our annual meetings held outside the U.S. Put simply, we are concerned that some of these foreign Ph.D. students, rather than taking the risk of exiting the U.S. to attend a foreign conference, may opt to stay at their offices in the USA and not present their research, which would obviously be deleterious to our science,” he said. “It was very unfortunate that innovative papers and important findings were not presented at the 2025 conference because foreign U.S.-based scholars were concerned about the validity of their visas.
“Visa and border-control policies in the USA similarly affected attendance at this past summer’s Annual Meeting in Philadelphia as some of our non-U.S.-based members opted to stay home, feeling that they would have difficulty navigating immigration.”
Bamberger said he doesn’t know any AOM members whose students have been deported, but he does know that some AOM scholars are among those being hit by cuts in federal funding for research.
“Those individuals who had grant money to study diversity, equity, and inclusion—that’s all gone,” Bamberger said. “Those individuals don’t have the grants anymore and as a result, the research stops.
“Now, it’s the right of a government to determine how it wants to allocate funding for research, so I can’t necessarily say that this is something that’s undemocratic or unfair,” he said. “That was the result of the election, but it is having a problematic effect.”
Bamberger said he sees an ironic example of how cuts in research can have unexpected results.
“A lot of that research on DEI is not necessarily pro-DEI,” he said. “For example, my own research on gender and racial pay equity suggests that contemporary policies oriented towards enhancing the equity have significant unintended negative consequences, including compensation compression.
“So when you cut off the funding for all research that mentions certain keywords assumed to be related to DEI, you’re cutting off the funding of people doing research that indicates problems with DEI policy, as well as perhaps supporting policies that may be favored by certain politicians.”
