For more than eight decades, American universities and the federal government have injured an ever tighter embrace.
The United States wanted to build the most powerful bombs and cure the worst diseases. He wanted to be the first to explore the outer edges of the solar system. He wanted to develop more effective crops. And so, it offered millions, then billions, researchers in universities across the country – in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in Berkeley, California, but also in Minnesota, Indiana and Mississippi.
Schools have taken the money. They built the best laboratories and attracted first -rate teachers and students around the world. They also became more and more and, at first, somewhat suspicious of the whims of Washington politicians.
Now, this mutually beneficial affair has started to crash.
President Trump and many Republicans say they will use the threat of deep funding cuts to slow down progressive activism out of control over the campus, which, according to them, has distant the universities from their mission to educate and shape better citizens. With confidence in decreasing higher education among the Americans, the president also thinks that he has public opinion on his side.
But while the Trump administration is starting to cut – including an announcement, it would hold $ 2.2 billion in multi -year subsidies from Harvard University this week – the future of the partnership that built the American research university in the global engine of scientific innovation is anything but certain.
The birth of the University of Modern Research
American universities spent $ 60 billion in federal money for research and development during the year 2023 only. This represents more than 30 times more than that they spent in the early 1950s, adjusted to inflation, when the university research system was just beginning to become the vast industry it is today.
