February 19, 2025 - 4:00pm
Federal research funding in the United States is facing significant cuts under the Trump administration. National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation (NSF), the nation’s two largest sponsors of academic research, have started to see reductions that many scientists find alarming. Senator Ted Cruz has led an effort to scrutinise NSF grants, identifying over 3,400 projects allegedly promoting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) or “neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda.” While a review by the blog Astral Codex Ten found that only 40% of the sampled projects could reasonably be categorised as “woke science,” the effort signals a broader trend: conservatives are using their political power to push back against an academic establishment they view as ideologically hostile.
Criticism of the cuts has been swift. Harvard professor Joe Henrich and education policy expert Stuart Buck have pointed out that some defunded research projects are rigorous, valuable, and unrelated to ideological activism. Buck, in particular, lamented that Elon Musk’s influence over the Department of Education led to the cancellation of important national surveys and education research. Yet while these concerns are valid, they overlook a crucial point: academia’s lack of ideological diversity and embrace of political activism made this backlash inevitable.
For years, dissenting academics have warned of the dangers of turning universities into ideological monocultures. Rutgers psychology professor Lee Jussim recently published a blog post titled “We Tried to Warn You,” cataloging decades of contributions from heterodox scholars about the risks of ideological overreach. The list includes over 80 books, essays, or other studies that predicted the loss of public trust in higher education.
In 2023, when Florida removed sociology from its general education curriculum, I argued it is time we start listening to our critics and “view the Florida decision as a wake-up call and an invitation to introspection.” The result? Denial and hostility by the academic mainstream. We are now witnessing the predictable consequences of having nurtured entire fields of inquiry that have managed to alienate half the country with their one-sided political advocacy in the name of science.
The Trump administration’s efforts to curb DEI initiatives was only the beginning. Republicans are moving beyond bureaucratic bloat and striking at the core of academic infrastructure. Some of these cuts will undoubtedly damage valuable scientific research, but the ultimate responsibility does not lie with conservative lawmakers. Academia has long treated conservatives as enemies rather than as a legitimate part of the intellectual community. It is unsurprising that those same conservatives, now in power, are treating professors as enemies rather than as impartial scholars deserving of public trust and taxpayer dollars. Had professors and university administrators done an acceptable job policing our troubled turf, I suspect we could have avoided having our babies thrown out with the bathwater.
If academics want to preserve federal funding, they must first restore credibility. That means recommitting to intellectual diversity, resisting ideological conformity, and acknowledging our role in fostering the polarisation that led to this crisis of confidence. Until then, no amount of protesting will stop the political forces now reshaping higher education.
Folks, we did this to ourselves. It is up to us to fix it.
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SubscribeMy original career was in chemistry/biochemistry and I spent a few years in academia a long time ago. The universities were left-leaning but not nearly so politicized as today. My strong impression of academic STEM research, however, is not that it’s strongly politicized but that so much of it is mediocre at best.
The academic research community has expanded massively over the past thirty or forty years, but the quality of the research has not improved. Many people are dotting i’s and crossing t’s and trying to make their work sound like the days of Bohr, Pauli, Heisenberg, Einstein revolutionizing our understanding of how the universe works. At least in my field, half the primary literature could disappear and we’d lose little of real value.
From a purely return-on-investment point of view, it’s time federal funding for research is subject to a thorough review.
In citing those scientific luminaries of yesteryear, a question springs to mind: how were they funded during the years of their most vital and ground-breaking research?
I don’t know enough to attempt to answer that question, but others might. I have my doubts though, as to whether the answers might be anything like “federal funding” (or the equivalent in their respective communities).
Einstein famously did much of his ground-breaking work while a clerk at the Swiss patent office. More typically, however, these luminaries made their most significant discoveries as Ph.D students or junior faculty members. Like you, I don’t know the details of their funding but I strongly suspect it came directly or indirectly from the government.
I am certainly not arguing governments have no role in research funding. I am arguing, however, that research in Western universities has adopted many of the characteristics of a bureaucracy, especially the tendency of all bureaucracies to expand and make that expansion their primary goal. Modern university departments don’t ask, “Which research deserves funding?” They ask, “How can we secure more research dollars?” Those two questions are not the same.
At least in a number of cases these scientists had far wider intellectual interests than would be common today. Perhaps a key to innovation is ideas and frames of reference making the jump from one area to another. Narrow specialisation works against this.
Actually you would be slightly incorrect almost all of them got their funding federally. Specifically from the defense budget, with the cold war on the US would throw money hand over fist at any scientist that could figure out something that might help save American lives or end Communist ones. Of course you had to bring about results and proved it work to some extent, because in a life or death struggle there is no room for lies.
That might be the problem there is no longer an acid test that forces us to fight for survival to keep the science focused and grounded.
Read “The Economic Laws of Scientific Research” for a great look into this issue.
Quite likely a lot of research is indeed mediocre. It is a sad fact that most scientists (engineers, politicians, lawyers, …) are mediocre and only a very small proportion are outstanding. Trouble is (as they said about advertising) even if you know half the money is being wasted, ho do you determine which half? Anyway, how sure are you that messrs. Trump, Kennedy et al. know how to distinguish good science from bad?
The ease at identifying Political propaganda in scientific journals isn’t difficult. Certain subjective words are a dead giveaway.
“how sure are you that messrs. Trump, Kennedy et al. know how to distinguish good science from bad?”
My views on this subject are based on personal experience where it was very easy to spot the third-rate research which was often linked to pork barrel funding. No doubt there is an intermediate quality of research which might or might not produce something of value, but we simply cannot provide limitless funding for research. Choices have to be made.
I believe the quickest and cleanest way to address this problem is to significantly cut research funding, especially in the less critical aspects of STEM–the strongest case can be made for funding IT-related projects, imo.
The research community will be left to sort the wheat from the chaff. Sure, there will be favoritism and politics within the research community, but eventually the most significant research will attract the most funding. Moreover, much federal money currently goes to what is, in fact, applied research rather than basic research. I would argue that if industry wants to research certain projects it should pay for that research.
The process of down-sizing the federally-funded research community will not be painless or neat. There will be some mistakes, but it’s a necessary project and, as the saying goes, don’t let the perfect stand in the way of the good.
I bought a Scientific American in April. There is an incredible article about Indigenous “Ways of Knowing” with a bunch of pie charts and graphs for reorganizing all of society.
I want the entire world to read this nonsense.
What part do need me to explain to you, gramps?
That requires a community with some money to dispose over, with the independence to take its own decisions, and with a strong commitment to objective truth regardless of political (or economic) convenience. That is unlikely to happen – or indeed be tolerated – under Trump.The only way to survive will be to give Trump, Musk, etc. the results they want to hear. The most important breakthroughs come from people who see something that most think is unlikely to happen but that could be important if it worked out. Good luck getting that funded under Trump.
That is an understandable idea but it does go completely against the model that has served the US pretty well since WWII. And for good reason. Companies go for approaches that promise a lot of profit for a limited investment. The old Bell Labs may have been different, but they were funded by a stable telephony monopoly; no company would take that approach today.- The US has prospered from private companies riding on top of public research. The Internet came out of DARPA, lots of the tech companies were university spin-offs, etc. Turn off the public research, and it does not seem likely that private industry will step up.
Correct, I think much of the digital age is essentially the commercialization of cold war DARPA tech. Massive public funding is essential for certain types of innovation, every planner knows this. It is also noteworthy that the government consciously maintained the monopoly position of AT&T and its subsidiary Bell Labs due to national security interests. So it was basically a public lab as well.
Also, I feel that many of the brilliant minds who came up with the breakthroughs in fundamental research were often very eccentric types. People who often do not function in a corporate environment. Again, during the wars I think those types were consciously nurtured, however, in the absence of a competitor like the Soviets a corporate short term target and PR-driven mentality took over in- and outside of academia.
I believe that a number of scientists feel that there has been little truly original thinking in science for around 50 years. This seems to be the case regardless of the maturity of the subject. It’s not quite clear why this should be though – and of course some deny it.
My experience is that a lot of time and money is wasted on managerial bureaucracy. Like everywhere, market fundamentalism became a thing, which means many researchers focus on meeting all kinds of targets and on auditing. For example, publishing as much as you can: quantity over quality. Also lot of researchers waste more and more time on grant proposals, which is also an incredibly bureaucratic process. Finally a lot of talent checks out of academia because endless unstable temporary (postdoc) positions for low wages are not worth it at some point.
Does this “experience” consist of you rage watching Fox News and believing that Jesse Watters knows more about disease transmission than Dr Fauci?
Of course it does!!!!
Calm down this time. He is right. Anyone who has worked in research will recognise the picture. Have you?
I wonder if we take the federal government directly out of the equation by giving corporations a tax advantage in diverting profits towards a blind slush fund to be disbursed for academic scholarship and research. And have a panel supervising the funding that represents an diverse array of interests, values, and political points of view?
That’s a creative idea but it wouldn’t work. The money has to come from somewhere and distributed somehow. How to do that effectively is very hard. Market forces would do it, but there is no market for scientific research.
“What a vision may offer, and what the prevailing vision of our time emphatically does offer, is a special state of grace for those who believe in it. Those who accept this vision are deemed to be not merely factually correct but morally on a higher plane. Put differently, those who disagree with the prevailing vision are seen as being not merely in error, but in sin. For those who have this vision of the world, the anointed and the benighted do not argue on the same moral plane or play by the same cold rules of logic and evidence.”
Thomas Sowell
The author says “we tried to warn them” but as Sowell points out, warnings don’t register with people that know they are right. These are not academics they are disciples. There will not come a time when they realize the jig is up so the only option is to remove them and their programs. It’s no surprise that some healthy tissue will get excised along with the rotten but that’s the price to be paid to save the patient.
The trouble is that your quote applies just as exactly lo the Trumpists as to the woke. You are not improving anything, just replacing one self-righteous tribe with another.
I like how you’re an expert on American politics now that you’re at a risk of having money for social programs redirected to national defense.
Keep trashing America. Keep it up.
Sowell spoke of logic and evidence. Is your point that those basing judgements on logic and evidence are a self-righteous tribe? If it’s that this shake-up will install a new intolerant tribe, is that based on evidence or pessimism?
It is obvious that Trump and his followers have very strong opinions that are completely divorced from and consideration of evidence or logic. Apparently they believe, in the teeth of any evidence:
That Trump won the 2020 election.
That there has been widespread electoral;fraud to benefit the Democrats.
That Covid is no more dangerous than a cold.
That vaccines are useless and dangerous
That nothing is happening to the world’s climate
That Ukraine started the war with Russia
That Zelenskly is a dictator
That the events of January 6th were no more than a friendly picnic unjustly attacked by the police.
Anyone disagreeing with those opinions is being frozen out. I see no need for pessimism – realism is quite enough.
In other words: Anyone who was not smart enough to support the revolution up front has only himself to blame when his work gets trashed.
Are you planning to become one of the komissars, Mr. Savolainen?
I see that the weird and unwelcoming redesign of the comments section that ‘greeted’ me on Unherd this morning has been scrapped – permanently I hope. I was set to cancel my subscription later this evening and move to the Daily Sceptic for conversations with more edge (for better or worse).
Because they believe their own nonsense, and are convinced they are on the side of the good.
Some more cynical souls have been shoehorning DEI into research proposals where it didn’t really fit in order to secure funding – sometimes with the aid of consultants. I wonder if that has come back to bite any of them?
Hopefully those scientists who are researching in a scientific manner important scientific questions will retain their funding while those who have allowed ideology to intrude into trivial and unscientific studies will become defunded. Clearly a necessary cleansing of the Augean Stables.
Good thinking. Donald Trump is clearly the man to determine what the “important scientific questions” are! He’s known for his rigorous adherence to the facts in all cases and strictly following the data to their logical conclusion.
Oh wait, my mistake! He’s a bigoted buffoon who wouldn’t know scientific research if it slapped him in his fat mug!
If they were only putting the hatchet to explicit diversity research one might hope for that. But they are not. They are slashing across the board. What survives will be what takes the fancy of Trump, since there are no mechanisms to protect important science against Trump’s whims. Research in climate, vaccines, or alternative energy sources will go no matter how scientific or important it is. Other fields will be no better off.
The Prussians invented the research university to make the state strong.
So really all universities are Literally Hitler.
Hilter wasn’t Prussian. Literally. Academia today? More like Stalin?
There is a lot of gnashing teeth and hysteria regarding cuts in federally funded research. While no doubt some asinine projects will be cut (and we know what these are), there have been no actual cuts in the research budget. The reduction in indirect costs for NIH grants is not a cut but a removal of a boondoggle by the universities. The actual budget has not been reduced and the result will be the award of more grants not less with more money going to research rather than funding of humanities departments, DEI initiatives and an ever expanding administrative branch.
“a review by the blog Astral Codex Ten found that only 40% of the sampled projects could reasonably be categorised as ‘woke science.'”
Checked the link. The listed figure was based on a superficial and unscientific selection of 100 listed studies out of 3,400 (by a person who was skeptical of the allegation), and actually concluded that 60 percent were either “woke” or “borderline.” (And remember that the person judging the matter was biased against the allegation of wokeness.)
Who moved my cheese?
A possible path to determine what is nonsensical and what is purposeful is in interviews with grant writers. They know what to avoid and what buttons to push. It also might identify t crossing and i dotting biases. It’s often high-risk contrarians who make breakthroughs.
Love it. Time to clean house and start over.