How US universities became so dependent on the federal government

NEW YORK – For more than eight decades, American universities and the federal government wound themselves into an ever-tighter embrace.

The US wanted to build the most powerful bombs and cure the worst diseases. It wanted to be the first to explore the outer edges of the solar system. It wanted to grow more efficient crops. And so it offered millions, and then billions, to researchers at universities across the country – in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Berkeley, California, but also in Minnesota, Indiana and Mississippi.

The schools took the money. They built the best labs and attracted top-notch professors and students from around the world. They also became increasingly and, at first, somewhat warily beholden to the whims of politicians in Washington.

Now this mutually beneficial bargain has started to unravel.

US President Donald 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 mould better citizens. With confidence in higher education waning among Americans, the President also believes he has public opinion on his side.

But as the Trump administration starts cutting – including an announcement

it would pull US$2.2 billion (S$2.89 billion) in multi-year grants from Harvard University

this week – the future of the partnership that built the American research university into the world’s engine of scientific innovation is anything but certain.

The birth of the modern research university

American universities spent US$60 billion in federal money on research and development in fiscal year 2023 alone. That is 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.

There is no other system like it in the world, in part because of the sprawling, decentralised nature of American higher education. Unlike many other countries, the US 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 Mr Trump and many conservatives seem intent on doing – could partially rewind the clock to when the federal government left research largely 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.

Emeritus Professor Roger Geiger from Pennsylvania State University wrote in a 1993 history on American research universities that political leaders knew that nothing short of a large-scale undertaking was needed to mobilise and incentivise the best scientists.

“And the fate of the democratic nations of the world might very well depend on its effectiveness,” Prof Geiger wrote in his book Research And Relevant Knowledge.

Wariness about a new relationship

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.

The Manhattan Project, the biggest research endeavour of the war with a cost of US$2 billion (more than US$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 Professor Christopher Loss from 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,” Prof 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: US$3.3 billion in fiscal year 2023. About half of that came from the Department of Defence.

From defence to medicine to space

After the war, policymakers in Washington were eager to replicate the formula in other fields such as medicine. It was, Prof 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 Professor John Tomasi, president of the Heterodox Academy, a non-partisan organisation that promotes the exchange of more diverse viewpoints in academia.

But the money was hard to resist. Student enrolment 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.

A ‘great society’ vision for university research

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 centres 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 subsidising institutions they saw as hotbeds for anti-American radicalism.

But one Republican 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”.

Success begets backlash

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 anti-Semitism

. 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 anti-Semitism spent a combined US$9.3 billion in federal money on research and development – roughly 15 per cent of what colleges nationwide spent from federal sources.

The Trump administration does not 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 US$1 billion in federal research funding in fiscal year 2023. NYTIMES