This spring, Ashley, who wished to be referred to by their first name for privacy reasons, received an email that stopped them in their tracks. The National Science Foundation, or NSF, would no longer be supporting their work with its prestigious graduate student grant. The experiments they had planned for their master’s thesis, studying alligator and crocodile nesting behaviors in the Everglades, now seemed out of reach. “I just burst into tears,” they say. “Like, there goes graduate...
