By Adam Geller, national writer AP
New York (AP) – The confrontation between the Trump administration and Harvard University highlights policy in the naked article and large dollar figures. But in the battle of the moment, it is easy to lose sight of an alliance of several decades between the American government and the most eminent universities in the country, forged to fight against a world war.
For more than 80 years, this interdependence has been appreciated by university leaders and politicians of the two parties as a paragon for American discovery and innovation.
“In some ways, I think it is an essential part of the history of contemporary America,” said Jason Owen-Smith, a professor at the University of Michigan who studies the scope of research on nation campuses. “Harvard is a copy, but it’s not the only one.”
This explains the most 2 billion dollars in multi -year subsidies and contracts with Harvard frozen this week by administration officials after the school has defined their requests for the limit of activism on the campus.
A link that dates from the Second World War
The subsidies bear witness to a system that had its roots in the early 1940s, when the US government began to get advanced research thanks to a unique partnership. Federal officials have provided money and surveillance; The institutions, led by major state and private universities, have used these billions of dollars to weigh the strangers of science and technology, while forming new generations of researchers.
The partnership has delivered innovations in wartime, in particular the development of the radar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and, from decades later, the birth at the University of Stanford of what has become Google.
Now, the Trump administration tries something that many other chief chiefs have avoided: imposing ideology on a partnership that has long balanced responsibility with independence.
“Many Americans wonder why their taxes go to these universities while they are not only indoor students in our country, but also makes it possible to allow such obvious illegal behavior,” said the White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, during a briefing with journalists this week.
But long -standing observers of the partnership between the government and the universities see the actions of the administration very differently.
“This has never been politicized how the Trump administration is because it has always had bipartite support,” said Roger Geiger, a higher education historian who is withdrawn from Penn State. “It is unusual that we did not see this support now.”
Cut Harvard follows similar movements to Columbia and other eminent universities to force conformity. At the same time, Johns Hopkins University has sold more than $ 800 million in federal subsidies for health and medical programs after the administration began to dismantle the American agency for international development and reduce funding by the National Institutes of Health.
Behind the dollar figures
Dollar figures to be used in domestic laboratories and programs abroad may seem surprising for a most familiar public with large universities as teaching and student life centers.
But to give meaning to the current battle, it helps to understand how government and universities have become so interdependent.
A century ago, a much smaller community of research universities was largely based on private funding. But while American officials rushed to prepare for the entry into the Second World War in 1940, a former MIT dean, Vannevar Bush, presented President Franklin D. Roosevelt on the critical need for defense research in partnership by associating with government with scientists from universities and other institutions.
“The urgency in the 1940s was really the primordial motivation,” said G. Pascal Zachary, author of a Bush biography. “But the structure has proven to be lasting.”
The Bush agency supervised the quest for nuclear first weapons, developed in a laboratory administered by the University of California. And at the end of the fighting, he prevailed over Roosevelt to extend the research partnership to ensure national security, promote scientific and medical discovery and develop the economy.
“It is only colleges, universities and some research institutes that devote most of their research efforts to extend the boundaries of knowledge,” Bush wrote in a 1945 report to Roosevelt, stating his plan.
Federal research funding remained limited, however, until the Soviet Union launched the first artificial satellite in 1957. Determined to catch up, American legislators approved a flow of funding for university research and the training of new scientists.
“We were locked in the Cold War, this battle with the Soviet Union, which was in many ways a scientific and technological battle,” said Jonathan Zimmerman, historian of education at the University of Pennsylvania.
Research schools, which are between 150 and 200, used the influx of federal dollars to build laboratories and other infrastructure. This growth occurred as registrations increased, the paid government so that veterans attended the university through the GI bill and measures in the 1960s to help the poorest students.
Scratchiness was part of the relationship from the start
The partnership between the government and the universities has always come with integrated tension.
Federal officials are at the helm, give money to projects that meet their priorities and depending on the results. But it is explicit that government officials do not control the work itself, allowing researchers to continue independently of the answers to questions and problems, even if they do not always find them.
“The government essentially manages to deal with a national system of universities generally decentralized as a paid resource to solve problems,” Michigan’s Owen-Smith said.
With this understanding, universities have become recipient of approximately 90% of all federal research expenses, taking $ 59.6 billion in 2023, according to the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics.
This represents more than half of the $ 109 billion spent on research in universities, most of the others from schools themselves, state governments and local and non-profit organizations.
Johns Hopkins was the largest beneficiary, representing $ 3.3 billion in federal spending in 2023. Federal dollars for research at Washington University, Georgia Institute of Technology, UC San Diego and Michigan also exceeded more than a billion dollars. Harvard received around $ 640 million.
Moving from the Trump administration to close agencies and imposing changes on campuses present universities with an unprecedented threat.
“Generations of Hopkins researchers have brought the advantages of discovery to the world,” recently wrote the school president Ronald J. Daniels. “However, a rapid and deep cascade of reductions in federal research financing in higher education seriously effilutes this longtime pact.”
The partnership is supposed to be protected by railings. The rules specify that civil servants who believe that a school violates the law cannot simply reduce funding but should rather present details on alleged violations at the congress.
But the Trump administration, determined to ensure that schools change policies designed to encourage diversity on campuses and repress demonstrations, ignores these rules, “said Zimmerman.
Funding reductions will probably express pressure on the remaining resources of schools, leaving them less money for things such as financial assistance to students of modest means, he said. But the biggest danger is the academic freedom of schools to teach and do research as they see fit.
“Let us remember that during the last three months, we have seen people” in universities “rubbing their websites for references to certain words,” he said. “This is what is happening in authoritarian countries.”
The writer Associated Press Zeke Miller in Washington contributed to this report.
Originally published:
California Daily Newspapers
