This is largely preaching to the choir, but it’s absent enough from the news coverage that is worth stating clearly. Most right-thinking people are aghast at Trump’s onslaught on higher education. The range of reasons is endlessly discussed and doesn’t need to be enumerated here. But through those discussions is the subtext that higher education is dependent on federal subsidies. There is some truth to this when it comes to Pell grants and backstopping student loans. But with grants to fund scientific research, it turns the reality on its head. It’s the federal government which is the initiator here, both historically and also in terms of the ongoing dynamic of grant-making.
It’s the federal government, significantly at the dawn of the country’s great power status, that decided that it wanted to fund a range of different kinds of basic scientific research. Some of it was industrial and had economic development goals, some was cutting edge technology often focused on maintaining military superiority. Biomedical research had a mix of both aims and also focused on the general ideas of scientific and national progress so prevalent in the mid-late 20th century. Some of it was focused on what we’d now call soft power. The great power, certainly the great power center of the “free world,” had to be the place with the top scientists and knowledge.
Often the products of government-funded research paid off in unpredictable ways. The building blocks of the Internet emerged from the Pentagon’s DARPA program. But the trajectory in every case started with the federal government, which wanted certain kinds of scientific research done. A core strategic decision was made early on to outsource this work to independent, though often state-run universities. There was an obvious alternative, which was to build a big federal research institution that did everything in-house as it, were. Why that did not happen is a complicated story. There’s some of this at the National Institutes of Health, of course. But most of the funding is channeled through the domain knowledge banked within NIH to underwrite research at universities and academic medical centers.
Needless to say, as things have evolved, the universities aren’t complaining. The Harvards and UC Berkeleys and Wisconsins and Princetons have to a great extent remade themselves around this almost eighty year old federal partnership. They would not have become the world-class institutions of higher learning they became without being the hosts to the research the federal government paid for. There is also big competition to land researchers who can bring in grants. The universities profit greatly, though not simply in narrowly economic terms. The more grants, the more attractive a place to do research, the higher levels of academic talent who can be brought to the university. The more top-tier people, the more grants. It builds on itself. But that doesn’t change the fact that the process began with the needs and decisions of the federal government.
To listen to a lot of news reporting, and by no means only Trump-friendly coverage, you might think that the big research universities got here like so many academic Amtraks. Down on their luck industries that were falling apart and needed federal support to survive.
This is of course a thumbnail history. The role of American universities was transformed by the post-war boom not simply because of the national government’s focus on funding basic research but because the ambitions and the ideological transformation of the country changed the basic assumptions of who should benefit from and attend colleges and universities. It’s also true that having remade themselves around federal research, grants universities are ill-prepared to have those hundreds of millions withdrawn overnight. That’s obvious. But this basic trajectory, who started what, who asked for what is the necessary context for any discussion of what’s happening today.
