Relief but caution is the order of the day, counsels the Harvard Crimson’s Megan Blonigen and Jona Liu: “Harvard’s Funds are Back. Can Its Scientists Trust the Government Again?”
The real question for Harvard’s scientists should be: Do we want the funding back? The answer to that question should be “no.”
For several decades, our colleges and universities have been the main characters of a classic tragedy, of hubris stalked by nemesis, marching toward an inevitable doom that everyone, save that main character, sees coming.
The latest act of this tragedy turns on the Trump administration’s withdrawal of substantial amounts of federal research funding from several prestigious research universities, Harvard among them. For Harvard, that amounted to a $2.6 billion hit in terminated grants and contracts. As this act unfolded, Harvard immediately sued to recover that money. In September, a federal court found in Harvard’s favor, and by October, $46 million from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) landed back in Harvard’s coffers, with more set to return. End of act. Curtain down. Intermission. Refreshments in the lobby.
What will the next act bring?
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The Harvard Crimson article features reflections of several of Harvard’s prominent scientists on their experiences with the recent funding disruption. Here is the synopsis: We are doing so much good in the world, our work is so virtuously motivated, our lives have been so needlessly disrupted, and we’ve had to go to extraordinary lengths to pick up the pieces. We are heroes, betrayed.
This is hubris personified. It is worth noting that hubris is not arrogance; it is pride that blinds the main character from his inexorable march to doom. There is nothing unlikeable about any of the scientists whose stories Blonigan and Liu tell. They are justly proud of what they do, and of their devotion to science. As someone who spent a multi-decade research career in a never-ending scramble for funds and living with perpetual uncertainty, I feel their pain.
Nevertheless, they are in the grips of a prideful delusion: that they are valued as scientists, that the funding, privilege, and prestige they enjoy have been conferred on them so that they might advance science, and that what they do is valued by their universities as science. They are blind to the reality that they are galley slaves, chained to the oars, valued not for the science they do nor for their good intentions, but for the revenue streams they generate.
Doubt me on this? Here’s a thought experiment. Decide to dedicate your career to an intellectually promising line of inquiry that doesn’t cost much money to pursue, or even better, that can be funded without grants. What do you suppose will happen to your academic career? Here’s my hypothesis: you will soon have no academic career.
And where is nemesis in all this? Pull away the mask, and her identity is revealed. Nemesis is the mighty river of federal research funding, roughly $100 billion that streams into universities nationwide every year. (See my Rescuing Science). That money doesn’t just support research. Approximately a third of it funds the growth of a network of rent-seekers, bloated academic administrations, a near monopolistic concentration of academic publishing in three massive publishing houses, and politicians always eager to deliver goods to powerful academic interests in their districts. None of these interests cares about science. Like all rent-seekers, they care about securing and aggrandizing money, power, and influence. Science is no more than the means to that end.
The result has been a transformation of the entire ethical landscape of the academic sciences.
Before World War II, when federal spending on academic science was minuscule, an ethic of discovery prevailed. The landscape of career incentives then turned on the discovery of new knowledge, and this cultivated a flourishing culture of basic science. Since then, scientists’ careers are increasingly shaped by an ethic of production: how many papers published, how many grant dollars won, how many PhDs graduated? Discovery is now subordinate to oxymoronic metrics of “scientific productivity.” Academic scientists now labor under a set of perverse incentives that have reduced them effectively to serfdom.
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How did the sciences come to this tragic denouement? Hubris led them there. Following WWII, the federal government embarked on an unprecedented experiment in federalizing academic science. Since 1950, federal and state governments have dominated academic research spending, accounting for 60 percent to 80 percent of an exponentially growing stream of revenues. At some universities, nearly their entire research portfolio is funded by just four federal agencies. This has transformed academic science into a near-fully-owned subsidiary of the government.
Recent laments of the Trump administration’s alleged politicization of science thus ring hollower than a lead pipe. The academic sciences politicized themselves in 1950, when their soul was sold in exchange for federal research dollars. The only thing that changed in 2024 was a shift in the political winds. Hubris has blinded scientists to their real nemesis: the federal research spending that they lamented losing last year, and then welcomed back in October. It is enslavement to federal research dollars that is driving their tragic march to their inevitable doom. They have walked right into the trap.
If this were a Hallmark movie, the last act would complete the classic hero’s journey. The scales would fall from the eyes, and the academic sciences would pluck up the courage to spurn the false “affections” of their fickle and conniving “research partner” and reclaim their independence and freedom.
I’m not holding out for a happy ending, though. This is a tragedy, not a romance.
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I will listen to the great scientists, with and without Nobel prizes, concerning government funding of science. Rather than this guy who has always struck me as a loser dreamer of little note or success.