To be fair, it’s not clear whether the choice presented to the university was genuine, and Columbia University’s loss of funding, despite accommodating some administration requests, suggests that Harvard’s public funding would have been vulnerable either way. But even taken literally, it was a horrible “Sophie’s Choice.”
Advertisement
To many, the danger of losing academic freedom is manifestly clear, but the consequences of losing public funding might be less obvious — especially to those who do not directly rely on it for their research. I’ve heard many colleagues say that academic pursuits will survive a few years and the university will be fine. But it is not as simple as that.
Advertisement
If universities lose public funding, they don’t lose all research. Instead, over the long term, they would revert to a privately funded model. Just as professors and students fear loss of academic freedom not just for ourselves but also as a threat to freedom of speech, the loss of public funding would shift control over the future of scientific and technological advances from public interests to private individuals and corporations.
When government agencies are kneecapped, it is largely left to companies to decide how much they value our protections. Look how well that is working for the environment and public safety. As part of the trend to go from public to private, the public might soon lose the ability to get a weather report for free or to count on our public water and the air we breathe to be free of pollutants, not to mention the ability to purchase goods with a clear conscience, knowing that workers have been protected. When public protections are eliminated, we have no choice but to rely on individuals and companies to police themselves.
What happens when research is fully privatized? Unlike the government, private companies are accountable to shareholders, not the public. The great scam of years of rhetoric is that the public trusts private enterprise and individuals more than the government.
Only government is directly accountable to the public. Private funding and even foundations might fund research on life extension — which private donors may care about — but they are less likely to fund research into the fundamental exploration of matter, or even the fundamental nature of the molecules of life, unless these topics have an immediate application that those funders can recognize.
Advertisement
The public hears about universities achieving advancements to cure cancer, but less about the decades of preliminary fundamental research that laid the groundwork for those advancements. The nature of DNA was discovered by an X-ray crystallographer, Rosalind Franklin, who was doing pure research to understand its molecular structure. Under the current funding crisis, Franklin might well have been laid off before making her groundbreaking discovery that accounts for much of modern medical research.
It is not only the freedom to choose research areas that stands to be lost. It is also the potential loss of independent judgment. For example, scientists funded by the tobacco industry in the 1950s downplayed the health dangers of smoking. Researchers financed by oil companies minimized the link between fossil fuels and climate change. Public funding helped balance the situation.
Private funders are also not required to choose the best applicants or the most valuable research, and can be biased in their preferred demographic. Scientists everywhere will recognize this decline. The United States will no longer attract the best scientists from abroad, and are likely to lose many of ours to foreign institutions.
To be sure, my colleagues and I are grateful for any private money that can help advance research, and we appreciate the private individuals and foundations that have stepped in to compensate for decreased funding in recent years. However, we don’t want all research to be determined by large companies and rich individuals. We need a healthy balance of public and private funding.
Advertisement
Even with Harvard’s pushback against the Trump administration’s interference, all universities are likely to be changed forever — and not for the better. Harvard is by no means a perfect institution, and neither is the government. But universities and the government are ultimately accountable to their constituencies. A democratic government is accountable to the public it represents. When the government funds research, it is in areas of public interest that have been vetted by peers and have been assessed by elected officials, or by agencies appointed by them, as valuable to society. At a university, we are answerable both to our students and to the public at large who stand to benefit enormously (though not always immediately) from the research enterprise and teaching and generating knowledge.
Research advances have been the engine of the US economy. If our government continues on its current course, which cedes the loss of public funding, and disrupts the current public/private balance, our country is going to lose what it has painstakingly and wisely developed — for years, if not decades, to come.
