Let's be honest: private sector funding is going to come with as many if not more strings attached that will limit or warp 'true intellectual freedom'. The only way a college could avoid those pressures would be to be completely self-funded and put their endowment money in investments not subject to political whims.
From the article: “But universities cannot get around the fact that federal grants, by their nature, selectively fund certain ideas at the expense of others. The government picks intellectual winners and losers among private citizens, which is the exact opposite of intellectual freedom.”
But couldn’t this be said about any source of funding? All funders, public or private, make decisions about the projects and people they choose to fund. This selection process is not an infringement on academic freedom. In fact, restricting who and how patrons choose to fund research is itself an infringement on their freedom to fund what they want. If I want to fund cancer research, how is this an infringement on physicists and mathematicians?
The real problem in academia regarding academic freedom isn’t federal research grants, but the dependence on external funding from any source to help maintain operations, and how this affects tenure decisions. Tenure-track professors should be able to do whatever research they want, but this freedom is tempered by two pressures: (1) publish-or-perish culture, and (2) the pressure to raise money for the university. In practice, this means having to do research that is more likely to get funded and published. Modern research universities are effectively think-tanks with researchers working on what could get published and funded. It’s still possible to do curiosity-driven work under such a setting, but one must still “play the game” to get tenure.
Getting rid of federal research grants won’t solve those problems. In fact, it may make things worse. I’m not confident about industry’s willingness to fund research, given the demise of legendary research labs such as Bell Labs and Xerox PARC and the overwhelming culture these days of only supporting research that has a high chance of getting productized immediately.
The consequence of getting rid of federal research funding is that a lot of universities will end up reverting to the pre-WWII model where there was very little funding to do research at all. This is the norm at many teaching-oriented universities, but research universities today rely heavily on research grants, particularly those from the federal government. Relying entirely on grants from private individuals and organizations won’t solve academic freedom issues if professors there are required to do publishable and fundable work in order to earn tenure, and with less money for research, this may make things worse.
It would be easier for universities like Harvard to just stop violating the civil rights laws: https://manhattan.institute/article/harvards-civil-rights-vi...
Harvard may prevail on some of its challenges to the administration. But the gaping hole in its defense is that Title VI, by design, uses the threat of revoking federal money to regulate behavior in ways that would otherwise raise first amendment concerns. The Supreme Court is never going to rule that universities can invoke the first amendment as a shield against Title VI allegations, because that would gut the civil rights laws. If universities could, for example, engage in race conscious practices to increase diversity while still retaining federal funding, they could also engage in race conscious practices to decrease diversity while retaining federal funding.
The government, as a grant maker, obviously doesn’t have to provide federal funds to say neo-nazis. And if that’s true, it follows that the government can withhold federal funds based on any ideological disagreement. These organizations are of course free to say whatever they want, but the government doesn’t have to fund it!
Why are these researchers allowed to keep their data private for their future benefit? The data generated here should be part of the public domain.
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How about at the Library of Congress or National Archives? Just create a `nih-GR12345-2025-05-31.torrent` for all the data which would offer lots of benefits:
- small network traffic for LOC/NA to seed - American-skin-in-the-game to share the publicly funded data - more eyes on the prize, the "FOSS" case for data
I think public data would also help all of us, collectively, to lead us out of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
All the more reason to go abroad for school and try to immigrate to the country where you study. Soon there will be no reason to stay here except to lose weight on the poverty diet.
Quite right. We need to keep in mind that: He who pays the piper calls the tune. And that is especially true of government, who has a monopoly on the use of force and the power to make laws and enforce those laws at the point of a gun.
For most of the essay, the author pretends to care about Harvard's loss of funding. But at the end they awkwardly transition into their real argument, which is that every tax dollar spent on something they potentially don't 100% agree with is morally wrong.
Colleges' problem is that they weren't taking enough federal funding. If they had achieved TBTF status then Trump wouldn't be harassing them now.
Why do these researchers get to benefit from patents and other intellectual property generated using the public money? The IP generated here should immediately enter the public domain.
Oh, like https://www.hillsdale.edu ?
This is like saying if Trump says you have to pay for air, then you have to stop breathing to have true freedom.
No. We don't need this, and we also don't need a return to the status quo. What we need is a more equitable system where everyone's freedom is guaranteed and everyone accept that, such that actions like what we see Trump taking here are treated like an old crank on a street corner screaming about the apocalypse: we put him into a padded cell and move on with our lives.
At the end of the day, the executive branch still has widely delegated authority to regulate foreigh student visas.
Trump could easily move towards a work visa style, where the universities would need to prove they can’t get Americans to fill their admissions spots and quickly eliminate virtually all foreign students from highly selective US universities while still allowing your local non-selective university to fill their roles with high paying foreign students.
This would totally align with his ideology and could easily and quickly happen.
The memo to Harvard directing them to hire someone approved by the feds and survey staff AND STUDENTS and then implement "Viewpoint Diversity" as it relates to admissions and hiring as directed by the feds was straight up thought police type stuff.