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Boston Globe
19-04-2025
- Business
- Boston Globe
How universities became so dependent on the federal government
Now this mutually beneficial bargain has started to unravel. President Trump and many Republicans say they will use the threat of deep funding cuts to rein in out-of-control progressive activism on campus, which they believe has driven universities away from their mission to educate and mold better citizens. With confidence in higher education waning among Americans, the president also believes he has public opinion on his side. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up But as the Trump administration starts cutting -- including an announcement it would pull $2.2 billion in multiyear grants from Harvard University this month -- the future of the partnerships is anything but certain. Advertisement American universities spent $60 billion in federal money on research and development in fiscal year 2023 alone. That's more than 30 times as much as what they spent in the early 1950s, adjusted for inflation, when the research university system was just beginning to grow into the vast industry it is today. Advertisement There is no other system like it in the world, in part because of the sprawling, decentralized nature of American higher education. Unlike many other countries, the United States never had a national university. And the founders left matters of education to the states. It was inside university labs where military radar was developed in the 1940s, the code for Google's search engine was written in the 1990s, and wonders of the universe are still being discovered. Dismantling the system -- as Trump and many conservatives seem intent on doing -- could partially rewind the clock to when the federal government largely left research in the hands of the private sector. The work was done at foundations created by wealthy families such as the Carnegies and Rockefellers or in the laboratories of DuPont, Westinghouse, and other corporations. The genesis of the system that exists today was World War II and the Great Depression -- crises so large, they required the kind of money only Washington could spend. Roger Geiger, an emeritus professor at Pennsylvania State University, wrote in a 1993 history on American research universities that political leaders knew nothing short of a large-scale undertaking was needed to mobilize and incentivize the best scientists. 'And the fate of the democratic nations of the world might very well depend on its effectiveness,' Geiger wrote in his book, 'Research and Relevant Knowledge.' At first, there was some resistance to funding academic research on such a large scale. And anti-New Deal Republicans were opposed in principle to the further expansion of a federal government they already saw as too big and powerful. But the race to beat the Nazis to an atomic bomb wiped away much of that reluctance. Advertisement The Manhattan Project, the biggest research endeavor of the war, with a cost of $2 billion (more than $30 billion in today's dollars), grew out of work by scientists at schools including the University of California Berkeley; Columbia University; and the University of Chicago. 'We all know this, thanks to Christopher Nolan,' said Christopher Loss, a professor at Vanderbilt University who studies higher education, referring to the director of 'Oppenheimer,' the 2023 film about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who oversaw the development of the bomb. 'But that's the defining moment,' Loss added, 'the touchstone of the research economy.' The government-academia partnership spawned other military innovations, such as the radio-powered bomb fuse that was developed at Johns Hopkins University. Hopkins spends more federal money than any other university on research: $3.3 billion in fiscal year 2023. About half of that came from the Department of Defense. Deprived of the resources to pursue big ideas, Loss said, the American research university will cease to function as an institution 'geared toward the discovery of -- not just the preservation of -- knowledge.' After the war, policymakers in Washington were eager to replicate the formula in other fields such as medicine. It was, Geiger said, 'a seller's market for research.' But not everyone was comfortable with the growing reliance on money from the government. Scientists worried about interference from federal agencies and the possibility that their work could be compromised. Military personnel sometimes viewed academia with suspicion. More broadly, professors and university leaders had concerns about becoming beholden to the government. 'I think academic freedom in those days was thought to be perhaps threatened by new funding sources from government -- perhaps presciently,' said John Tomasi, president of the Heterodox Academy, a nonpartisan organization that promotes the exchange of more diverse viewpoints in academia. Advertisement But the money was hard to resist. Student enrollment soared at many institutions. Faculties doubled and tripled in size. Universities provided the human and intellectual capital to power some of the most important Cold War initiatives, including the development of the hydrogen bomb -- hundreds of times more powerful than the first-generation Manhattan Project bomb -- and the space race that was set off when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957, the world's first human-made satellite. Research funding still flowed primarily to a small number of elite institutions in the 1960s. So in 1965, President Lyndon Johnson issued an executive order that would spread the wealth around. 'We want to find excellence and build it up wherever it is found so that creative centers of excellence may grow in every part of the nation,' the order declared. But the social upheaval of the Vietnam War era started to alter the perception of academia in the eyes of many Americans. Student-led protests against the war became deeply unpopular. The era of Republican dominance that followed was less hospitable to higher education. Research funding plateaued as conservative politicians asked why taxpayers were subsidizing institutions they saw as hotbeds for anti-American radicalism. But one bipartisan reform helped stimulate a boom in the emerging fields of biomedicine, computer science, and engineering. In 1980, Congress changed the law to transfer patent rights for federally funded research to the universities from the federal government. The idea was to apply conservative free-market principles to the academic research sector, allowing universities to profit from licensing the innovations created in their labs. It led to a transformation in academia, ushering in what scholars have described as the current era of 'Big Science.' Advertisement Today, all that money has made universities a target of the Trump administration. Many of the universities receiving the most from the federal government for research and development are among dozens of schools under review by the Trump administration, over allegations they are not doing enough to prevent and punish antisemitism. Of the 25 schools that received the most federal funding in fiscal year 2023, at least 16 are under investigation. The 10 colleges receiving additional focus from a government task force on antisemitism spent a combined $9.3 billion in federal money on research and development -- roughly 15% of what colleges nationwide spent from federal sources. The Trump administration doesn't appear to be finished. Although Ivy League institutions have borne the brunt of the retaliation, public universities make up roughly half of the broader list of schools under review. They include the University of Washington; the University of California San Diego; and the University of Michigan. And they all have a lot of money on the line: Each spent more than $1 billion in federal research funding in fiscal year 2023. This article originally appeared in
Boston Globe
21-03-2025
- Business
- Boston Globe
The 1997 book that prophesied a revolutionary on the scale of Trump
I, a historian, was one of very few professional academics who took an interest in what Strauss and Howe had to say, and I began using their framework in my own work. Their critical insight, the idea that set their work apart, was that even the most stable domestic and foreign orders and the values that underlie them will die off along with the generations that created them. That leaves an intellectual and even emotional vacuum that someone inevitably comes along to fill. Get The Gavel A weekly SCOTUS explainer newsletter by columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr. Enter Email Sign Up Events have now confirmed their predictions, even if they are not unfolding as inspirationally as Strauss and Howe expected. The United States is experiencing the climax of a crisis that will transform our country, its government, and its role in the world. And Strauss and Howe's framework of generations and turnings still provides the best framework for understanding where we are. We can understand this by analogy with the last crisis: the Depression and the Second World War. How the New Deal order arose The Civil War had created a new elite composed of Northern and Midwestern businessmen, and their views dominated the nation for more than 60 years. The Carnegies, Morgans, Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, and the rest built new industries and new infrastructure, paying immigrant labor subsistence wages. New ideas of economic justice arose during the Progressive Era, but corporate dominance survived into the 1920s. Advertisement By 1929, however, a new generation with different values was taking power, and under Franklin D. Roosevelt, they radically changed the role of the federal government. The New Deal strictly regulated the financial community, raised top marginal income tax rates well above 50 percent, made the government the employer of last resort, passed Social Security, regulated wages and hours, and recognized and defended the rights of labor. FDR also mobilized 10 million young Americans from the GI or 'greatest' generation to fight and win the Second World War, and the United States emerged as the leading world power and the leader of new institutions like the United Nations after 1945. The GI generation, which included every president from John F. Kennedy through George H.W. Bush, generally remained committed to those principles for most of their adult lives. Faced after 1945 with the threat of communism around the world, they committed the United States to defending every bit of free territory. But as their generation eventually fell from power, both the values of the 1933-93 era and the bond that Roosevelt and his successors forged between the government and the people eroded. Neither the silent generation (born 1925-42) nor the boomers had the same respect for authority or commitment to an egalitarian economy. In 1996, Strauss and Howe looked forward to a catalytic event that would allow a transformative president to form new bonds with younger generations — particularly millennials, a term they had coined Advertisement We have experienced a few of the kinds of events they predicted — 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis, and the COVID pandemic — but successive presidents failed to deal with them effectively or use them to create a new national consensus. The missed opportunities Trump exploited George W. Bush after 9/11 explicitly proclaimed that the nation was in a crisis comparable to the Second World War. The United States, he explained again and again, had to go to war to remove dictators and spread democracy to protect us from nuclear terrorism and move the world into a completely new era. Bush invaded Afghanistan and Iraq to overthrow hostile governments, but he did not bring back the military draft to get the whole population involved in his crusade, and he cut taxes instead of raising them. Worst of all, his ambitious team ignored the problem of setting up new governments in nations of tens of millions of people. Both wars had become unpopular by the time Bush left office, and both ended in disastrous failure. When Barack Obama took office in 2009 in the midst of the worst economic collapse in 80 years, a Time cover explicitly compared him to FDR in 1933. Roosevelt had immediately eased the citizenry's three biggest problems — bank failures, unemployment, and home foreclosures — with legislation targeted at those ills. He thereby increased his congressional majorities in 1934 and passed new measures, including Social Security. Obama accepted his advisers' view that the system remained fundamentally sound and that recapitalizing major financial institutions must be the country's top priority. He failed to mobilize the nation's anger against the financial interests responsible for the crash, as Roosevelt had. As a result, he lost his majorities in the House and later in the Senate, and with them went any hope of further transformation or any renewal of the American people's confidence in their leadership. Advertisement So it was that Donald Trump, businessman and entertainer, easily defeated a field of Establishment candidates for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016 and narrowly beat the Democratic heir apparent, Hillary Clinton, in the general election. Trump was our first president with no experience in public service at all — a measure of how low the prestige of our governmental leadership had sunk. He argued that both party Establishments had betrayed average Americans. He spent much of his first term battling with the Establishment of his own party, and he too failed the test of the great crisis that struck his administration: the pandemic. That probably cost him his reelection. Joe Biden, however, lacked the energy to form a real bond with the American people and failed to deal with the inflation that made his administration unpopular. Kamala Harris lost a close but undisputed election to Trump, and the Republicans emerged with control of both houses of Congress. Donald Trump now leads a coalition of interests that have long opposed key aspects of the post-1945 order. Much of the business community never completely accepted the New Deal, and in the 1970s it began a long counteroffensive that has undone the regulation of the financial community, rolled back the rights of labor, and built a network of think tanks and foundations dedicated to smaller government and free markets. The Federalist Society has recruited, trained, and helped put in place hundreds of new federal judges who would endorse that agenda. The religious right, angered by Supreme Court decisions on school prayer and abortion, is another major element of that coalition. The fossil fuel industry relies upon Trump to keep increasing its production, and the pro-Israel lobby has won him over to all-out support of right-wing Israeli governments. In a remarkable turnaround, the working class has become majority Republican. And Trump's coalition now includes a number of young tech billionaires from Silicon Valley who believe that they can use the computing power of AI to transform virtually every feature of economic life around the world. All these actors reject key aspects of the post-1945 order, and most have worked for decades to overturn it. Now their time has come. Advertisement Trump and his coalition want to kill off the idea that the federal government should protect the environment, guard against monopoly, regulate financial markets, and protect the rights of labor. They want to deport millions of immigrants. They also are renouncing US responsibility for fighting famine and disease overseas or protecting an international order with stable frontiers and security for all nations and peoples, such as the Ukrainians. Trump's loyal, dedicated team — most of it relatively young — will never stand in his way. Elon Musk and his acolytes are trying to destroy the bureaucracy that FDR created. Strauss and Howe anticipated that a boomer leader would eventually fill the vacuum left by the disappearance of the previous generation of American leadership. They could not anticipate either that Trump would be that man or exactly what he would do. Trump is clearly the most important American political figure of the 21st century thus far, with a devoted following that no one else has been able to match. He has taken advantage both of the Establishment's specific failures and of the general disregard for authority and precedent that has characterized the last 60 years of American life. He is now reshaping our government, our society, and our role in the world according to alternative values that various constituencies have been promoting for several decades. This transformation is parallel to what happened under the New Deal, but we are now going in the opposite direction. The values of our mid-century order are being eclipsed. This is not where many of us wanted history to go, but I have learned not to argue with history. Democrats tried for too long to live off the legacies of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson, even as they helped destroy the New Deal economic order. They now see Trump as a usurper promoting evil principles and threatening democracy. That is exactly how Republicans saw FDR. The battle between selfish greed on the one hand and respect for the good of all on the other never ends. The Republicans enjoy small congressional majorities, but Trump has unprecedented control over them. The Supreme Court will side with him on at least some key issues. Neither the media nor academia has nearly enough prestige to stand up to him successfully. Whether or not he does the United States and the world any good, he may keep more than half the country on his side just by making a series of decisive moves, as his three immediate predecessors failed to do. And the United States will probably emerge from the Trump era with a very different set of political and economic values, just as it did following the Civil War and the Second World War. History suggests that new values will prevail for decades. History gives us every reason to believe that the nation will eventually change direction again, but this fourth great crisis in our national life seems to be ending with a Republican victory and the consolidation of a new Gilded Age. The generation that will effectively challenge it may just be beginning to be born.
