This post isn’t quite a post in the way I normally do them, more jotting down some of my brainstorming over the weekend.
Universities are a core pillar of civil society. Law firms are not. Observers have been waiting to see what would come of an amicus-brief-organizing campaign in support of Perkins Coie, the Seattle-based firm which was the first to be targeted by the Trump administration. Perkins Coie is also, significantly, the law firm for much of the institutional Democratic Party. It finally came out, and the brief was signed by more than 500 firms across the country. But it was not signed by any of the nation’s Top 20 firms, measured by revenue. I don’t know enough about the internal finances of the nation’s top-grossing firms. But I suspect they’re mostly like Paul, Weiss, which is to say they’re largely M&A firms, at least in terms of where they make their money — M&A and the management of other corporate transactions I don’t know acronyms for. It’s basically impossible to be in that business if you’re at war with the state that regulates mergers and acquisitions.
Just after Paul, Weiss cut their deal with President Trump, I spoke to a number of people either at the firm or proximate to it. One thing they helped me understand is that for firms like that, with a big M&A practice centered on partners with books of business ranging well into the tens of millions of dollars, it’s not just the clients who disappear in a flash. The money-making partners can too. So these vast, hugely money-making entities are actually quite fragile in their own way. The equivalent of a bank run dynamic and poof, they’re gone. But law firms come and law firms go. It is what it is.
I’ve gotten used to not expecting much from Barack Obama’s rare forays into the public realm in recent years. But he’s right in his latest speech. Universities need to be ready to do without federal funding in order to play their role in our society, as bulwarks of civil society. I don’t discount the extreme challenge of that. It’s easy to talk big until you have to pay people’s salaries. I know that from personal experience. But the reality is simple. I’m not saying universities should write off public moneys for their missions and especially public support for scientific research. But if universities aren’t prepared to do without it, when push comes to shove, they’ve lost before they begin.
This won’t come as a surprise to anyone. But it’s worth saying nonetheless. The modern major university presidency has become largely one of fundraising and managing all that goes into and comes out of fundraising. That made sense in a different era. But it’s a different skillset than leading a bulwark of civil society during an attempted autocratic takeover. If your university president doesn’t have or isn’t willing to use that skillset, you probably need a different university president.
From a number of quarters I have seen evidence that universities are preparing themselves to play this role. There’s clearly going to be a round two of the White House’s effort to bring the universities to heel. Round one didn’t go very well, to put it mildly. But they were also unprepared. Equally significant, the White House hit them on issues on which they were themselves institutionally divided — reaction to the 2023/24 Gaza protests, post-2016 DEI. The White House has exerted full control over the tens of billions of dollars that the United States government uses to fund basic research both internally at institutions like NIH and also at universities and research centers around the country. But research, especially biomedical research, can be more than just a vast undefended vulnerability. It can actually be an offensive weapon, not just for universities but for the opposition to Donald Trump’s oligarchic autocracy more generally.
I have spent a lot of time in the last few months talking to people at NIH, people in the biomedical research world and also outside that world. My biggest takeaway, with new examples just over this weekend, is this: most people outside that world, indeed, most people even in that world outside of NIH, don’t grasp what’s happening to the world of disease research and cure-finding. And the biggest barrier to this is not just speed of what’s happened and lack of good information. It’s that people have a very difficult time believing it. We know that some people don’t want to fund Medicaid that goes to poor people. You may not think that way, but it probably doesn’t surprise you that many people do. It’s very hard to get people to believe that anyone is trying to end research into finding cures for diseases that affect everyone. The richest people get cancer and Alzheimers and Parkinson’s. Just yesterday I heard second-hand from a power player in our society saying, “That makes no sense. Who would go after cancer research?” And yet it is happening.
As I have had these many conversations, what has coalesced in my mind is that the people on the front lines of this battle — the basic science researchers, the MD-PhDs, the early career research fellows, the peer reviewers, the major lab managers — are operating through the lines of power and streams of funding that the Trump-Musk reactionaries have secured control over. That battle is already lost. They’ve secured control of the arteries and nerve system and they’re running it in reverse. That’s done.
The community of research scientists is also thinking and arguing in the language and concept structure of grants, peer review cycles, studies, ecosystems of training new generations of research physicians. That language is alien and irrelevant to the vast bulk of the population. I don’t say that dismissively. I was raised by a PhD life scientist. I spent my 20s getting a doctorate myself, albeit not in the sciences. I understand it. I get its importance. In most respects it is my native language. But it has little to no valence or traction in itself with the public at large and the path to reversing the trajectory of destruction is by going to the public at large. That revolves entirely around the end-product the public has an immediate interest in and understanding of: not wanting to die or have a loved one die of a disease advanced research might be able to prevent or cure. Simple: cancer’s brand is in the toilet. The White House and DOGE have entered the war on cancer on the side of cancer. You can make a lot of hay about that and a lot of opposition.
There are disease communities around every major disease in this country — breast cancer, colon cancer, Alzheimers, etc. I don’t mean the professional societies. I mean, the organizations and informal communities of people who are survivors, who’ve been directly affected by these afflictions, who have genetic predispositions, who are doctors and caregivers. It is totally outside the experience and comfort zone of people from the research community to speak directly to what we might call the end user and say your chance at a cure or your child’s cure is going up in flames as we speak. And I get why it’s outside that experience. Research is inherently uncertain, tentative. You don’t want to overpromise. But these people and really all of us — because we’re all in some or multiple risk communities — are the ones who are being directly harmed. No single line of research is a sure thing but biomedical research as a whole really is. There are pre-existing networks and communities of concern waiting to hear this urgent message and they are, at present, not hearing it. That’s because the destroyers are moving fast along pathways of funding and control that they understand and have seized control of. They caught the good guys unprepared, without a clear strategy or language for telling the public what’s happening.
Quite simply, until elected officials start hearing from angry constituents in town halls who are pissed that their futures and the futures of their loved ones are being lit on fire for no reason, then nothing matters. The first front in this war has already been lost. The second front, where the forces of cures, treatments and health have the advantage, has only barely gotten off the ground. This is like Herakleios abandoning the main battle in the Levant in the 620s, leading his armies through the Armenian highlands and catching the Persian armies unprepared on their home territory in Mesopotamia and destroying them. You don’t get the analogy? Well, trust me: it’s really good one. (Just don’t go too far into the 630s.) Basically it means abandoning a stalemated or losing struggle and doing a colossal end-run or flanking maneuver that your foes aren’t prepared for or expecting and beating them that way. The analogy operates on a couple levels because if you haven’t read a lot of ancient history its meaning is likely lost on you without a clear explanation. Which is to say you need to speak to people in language they understand, which is the whole point of the second half of this post.
What I’m describing here also connects up with the universities, where a lot of this research takes place and which are home to a lot of academic medical centers which are the places many communities rely on for their health care.