New York (AP) – Showdown There’s a spotlight between the Trump administration and Harvard University Naked politics And big dollar numbers. But in the battle of that moment, it’s easy to lose sight of the decades-long alliance between the US government and the nation’s most prominent universities.
For 80 years, its interdependence has been praised by academic leaders and politicians of both parties as a paragon of American discovery and innovation.
“In some respects, I think that’s a central part of the contemporary American story,” says Jason Owen Smith, a professor at the University of Michigan, studying the scope of research on the country’s campus. “Harvard is an example, but that’s not all.”
It explains more than $2 billion in multi-year grants A contract with Harvard Frozen This week, according to administrative staff after the school rejected a request to limit activities on campus.
Links dating back to World War II
The grants are testament to a system that has its roots in the early 1940s, when the US government began securing cutting-edge research through singular partnerships. Federal authorities provided money and surveillance. Institutions led by large states and private universities have used these billions to deploy unknowns of science and technology while training new generations of researchers.
The partnership has enabled wartime innovations, including the development of radar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Google.
Now, the Trump administration is trying to do something many other chief executives have circumvented. It imposes ideology on partnerships that balance accountability with independence.
“Many Americans are wondering why not only indoctrinating students in our country, but why their taxes go to these universities when they cause such a terrible illegal activity,” White House press director Karoline Leavitt told reporters this week in a briefing with reporters.
However, longtime observers of the partnership between the government and the university view the regime’s actions very differently.
“They’re the ones who are retired from Pennsylvania,” said Roger Geiger, a historian of higher education. “It’s rare that we don’t see that support right now.”
Cutting Harvard Similar moves in Colombia Other prominent universities that enforce compliance. At the same time, Johns Hopkins University I surrendered More than $800 million federal grants for health and health programs it manages after the administration began to dismantle US International Development Organization And that will cut down on funds National Institutes of Health.
Behind the dollar number
The dollar figures for use in national research institutes and international programs may seem surprising to the public who are most familiar with large universities as the centre of education and student life.
But it helps us understand how governments and universities have become interdependent in order to understand the current battle.
A century ago, a much smaller community of research universities relied primarily on private funding. However, US officials were in a hurry to prepare for school admission. World War II In 1940, former dean of MIT, Vannevar Bush, promoted president Franklin D. Roosevelt On the important need to marshall defense research by partnering with scientists from universities and other institutions.
“The urgency of the 1940s was truly a top priority,” said G. Pascal Zachary, author of Bush’s biographies. “However, the construction has proven to be durable.”
Bush’s agency oversaw the first quest nuclear weaponswas developed in a laboratory managed by the University of California. And when the battle ended, he defeated Roosevelt, ensuring national security, promoting scientific and medical discoveries, and expanding his research partnership to grow the economy.
“Only universities, universities and several research institutions will devote most of their research efforts to expand the frontier of knowledge,” Bush created his plan for Roosevelt in a 1945 report.
However, federal funds for research remained limited until then. soviet union Release The first satellite of 1957. Deciding to catch up, US lawmakers approved a funding flow for university research and training for new scientists.
Jonathan Zimmerman, an education historian at the University of Pennsylvania, said:
Research schools with numbers between 150 and 200 have used the influx of federal dollars to build labs and other infrastructure. That growth came when registrations rose. GI Building In the 1960s, measures were taken to support poor students.
The wounds are part of the relationship from the beginning
Partnerships between government and universities always come with built-in tensions.
Federal officials were at the helm, awarding money to projects that met priorities and tracking the results. However, it is clear that government officials do not control the work itself, allowing researchers to independently pursue answers to questions and questions, even if they have not always found them.
“Government will essentially treat a generally decentralized national university system as a pay-as-you-go resource to solve problems,” said Owen Smith of Michigan.
According to the National Center for Science and Statistics, that understanding means the university receives about 90% of all federal research funds, earning $59.6 billion in 2023.
This accounts for more than $109 billion spent on research at universities, with the rest coming from the school itself, state, local governments and nonprofits.
Johns Hopkins was the largest grantee, accounting for $3.3 billion in federal spending in 2023, and the federal dollars for research at Washington University, Georgia Tech, San Diego, California, and Michigan each exceeded more than $1 billion. Harvard received approximately $640 million.
The Trump administration poses an unprecedented threat to universities in order to shut down agencies and impose changes on campuses.
“The generation of Hopkins researchers has brought the benefits of discovery to the world,” wrote Ronald J. Daniels, the school’s president, recently. “But the cascade of rapid and widespread federal research funding across higher education has seriously worn out this long-standing compact.”
The partnership is to be protected by Guardrails. The rules specify that officials who believe schools are violating the law cannot simply cut funds, but must instead present Congress with details of the alleged violation.
But the Trump administration has succumbed to changing policies designed to promote campus diversity to schools and crack down on protests, Zimmerman said.
Fundraising cuts are likely to put pressure on the remaining resources of the school, and he said students with modest measures will have less money for things like financial aid. But the greater danger is that the academic freedom of schools is to research and study them as they think they are appropriate.
Remember, “We’ve seen people for the past three months.” At universities, he said, “scratches websites for references to certain words.” “That’s what happens in authoritarian countries.”
___
Zeke Miller, Associated Press Writer in Washington, contributed to this report.
Source link
