When most Americans think about our great universities, they probably don’t think about the origins of lasers, FM radio or bar codes; they don’t think about the Google algorithm, the invention of the computer and the iPhone, cures for childhood leukemia, the Pap smear, scientific agriculture or the discovery of mRNA vaccines. They almost certainly don’t think about the CRISPR technology that may lead to cures of many genetic-based diseases. And they definitely don’t think about the electric toothbrush, Gatorade, the Heimlich maneuver or Viagra.
Yet all these discoveries and inventions — and tens of thousands more — have their origins at American public and private research universities. For over a half-century, these institutions have housed the best and most innovative sites of learning in the world. During World War II, university researchers, often at government-sponsored laboratories, developed enhanced radar technology, found a way to mass-produce penicillin, developed the jet engine and mastered techniques for blood plasma transfusions. Each of these discoveries helped the Allies defeat authoritarian aggression.
Today, the pre-eminence of the American research university is under severe attack from the federal government. It must be defended.
Again and again, basic research has led to fantastically lucrative private development. Stanford graduates spawned Cisco Systems, Hewlett-Packard, Instagram, Netflix and a thousand more businesses. The University of California, Berkeley, produced companies, including many A.I. start-ups, that are developing better medical treatment for Americans. M.I.T., Harvard, Arizona State, the University of Wisconsin and the University of Texas, among others, have been the origin for many private enterprises supporting the American economy.
The Trump administration has sought to impose its will on higher education by withdrawing more than a billion dollars of funding from some universities and threatening others with similar punishment. It has sought to deport student protesters who are legal residents. All this is a fundamental assault on the values and functioning of our university system. Columbia and Johns Hopkins, founded in 1876 and America’s first true research university, may be only the first to feel the effects of this needless use of a sledgehammer.
Columbia’s capitulation last week to the Trump administration, in which it agreed to a number of demands in order to restore federal funding, obliterates its leadership in defending free inquiry. If Columbia allows authoritarian-minded leaders to dictate what we can teach, then the federal government will dictate what we can read, what books we may have in our libraries, what art we can display, what problems scientists can explore. Then we are no longer a free university.
Most people think of universities in terms of undergraduate and professional education — of teaching and the transmission of knowledge, as well as football and basketball. This makes perfect sense. Teaching is higher education’s first calling, and it occurs at all levels at pre-eminent universities.
What has made our universities the greatest in the world, however, is not just the quality of our undergraduate education but also our ability to fulfill one of the central quests of modern life: the production of knowledge through discoveries that change the world. The Nobel economist Robert Solow and others have estimated that such university-based discoveries are responsible for a large share of our nation’s productivity growth.
It is the United States — not Europe, Russia or China — that has dominated the last several waves of fundamental discovery, findings that have made us the wealthiest nation in the world. Since their inception, about 40 percent of Nobel Prizes have gone to Americans. And about 35 percent of American Nobel laureates have been immigrants to the United States. This is but one small indicator of American research accomplishments. This leadership has strengthened our democracy.
The agreement between the federal government and our universities took hold during World War II. In 1944, when it became clear that the Allies would prevail, President Franklin Roosevelt asked his closest science adviser, Vannevar Bush, how the United States could advance its science and technology leadership after the war. It was a time when scientists were exhausted by their wartime work and many wanted to return to quieter lives at universities. But Bush, sharing the dying president’s belief in the need for a manifesto that would articulate both values and policy, set to work on what would become the policy document “Science: The Endless Frontier.”
As developed by Mr. Bush, the compact between the American government and the universities created the National Science Foundation and reorganized the National Institutes of Health. The central message of the compact was this: The United States would commit taxpayer dollars to fund research primarily through its universities, not through government-controlled laboratories. The universities would be given intellectual autonomy to conduct research deemed by peer scientists and engineers to be of the highest potential to advance the country. The government would not invade the space of free inquiry and academic freedom, because that would limit the ability of scientists to be fully creative.
By 1950, the model was largely adopted by Congress. Thus began American supremacy in scientific and technological discovery, as well as the economic and military dominance that has lasted for three-quarters of a century.
Recently, Arizona State University’s president, Michael Crow, one of the most innovative leaders in American higher education today, used the iPhone 16 as an example of universities’ unheralded contributions. Almost all parts of the device, from the chips used to power it to the glass covering it — the culmination of thousands of discoveries — had their origins at research universities, mostly in the United States. Such contributions are the invisible hand behind the creation of much American wealth. Now the Trump administration, for vindictive reasons, has placed that superiority and leadership under threat.
If we look over our shoulder, we can see China catching up to our investments in research and development. In the past quarter-century, investments by China in higher education have become similar to those in the United States, and it has increased the building of new research-oriented universities to compete with us in STEM fields.
This is hardly the time to cripple our universities. Apart from the competition with China, we are on the cusp of thousands of transformative discoveries, and each could be hurt by Mr. Trump’s actions. Here are a few competitive battles that we could easily lose: America as leader in the development of quantum computing, America as leader in the development of useful artificial intelligence and hydrogen and fusion power, America as leader in discovering cures for various forms of cancer and Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease.
Maintaining a laboratory and preparing for discovery is not something you can easily turn on or off. If a lab has its funding suddenly taken away, it will shut down. If you cut off researchers working on a cure for, say, pancreatic cancer, the work that their lab has done may be irreparably damaged and the knowledge lost. Moreover, if young people in the United States or abroad feel great uncertainty in university research here, they are more than likely to turn to other occupations and away from this country.
We tend to think that humans are at the top of the food chain. That is not true. We almost certainly share that position with bacteria and viruses, many of which can cause us great harm. To prevent the next pandemic and a host of other diseases, support of science and engineering at our universities is an imperative.
We should renew and update the terms of the 1945 compact to reinforce the basic principles and values that have served us so well for decades and could do so for decades more. Academic freedom and free inquiry are the backbone of that compact. Where there are opportunities for reform, it is incumbent on research universities to take on those tasks without political interference.
I have spent almost 65 years at Columbia. I entered as an undergraduate in 1960, received my doctorate there and never left. Yes, universities are contentious places, but they are supposed to be places where criticism takes place — whether political, humanistic or scientific disputes. When I became provost and dean of faculties, serving 14 years as Columbia’s chief academic officer, I dealt, alongside my colleagues, with student protests almost every year. When the federal government threatened Columbia with arrests or withdrawal of federal funds after the passage of the USA Patriot Act in 2001, we defended academic freedom and free inquiry.
Today the stakes are higher. We are in a fight for survival, and appeasement never works. Despite platitudes to the contrary, Columbia’s leaders have weakened our community and our leadership among the greatest educational institutions in the world. This is not the way to fight Mr. Trump’s efforts at silencing our great American universities. If we don’t resist collectively by all legal means and by social influence and legislative pressure, we are apt to see the destruction of our most revered institutions and the enormous benefits they accrue to America.
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