For a president and vice president who both attended the best institutions of higher education, the leaders of our country are unusually hellbent on deconstructing the nature of academia. In recent executive orders, President Donald Trump has attempted to cut research funding to colleges across the United States by amounts that would produce drastic drops in research at universities, including ours. The impetus for the order purports to reduce government inefficiencies and eliminate research programs associated with diversity, equity and inclusion. Though this action has been temporarily blocked by the judicial system, the threat to research remains real and potent. Whatever the root cause, our government has lost a perception of research it used to espouse — university research moves humanity forward. While eliminating research funding associated with DEI may cut costs, the potential for and investment into new learning is halted by an efficiency-crazed government.
When the framework of our current federal research funding system was laid by President Harry Truman in 1950, the United States recognized the need for increased investment into the future and put the responsibility for this future in the hands of universities. In this period, universities grew to new heights but more importantly, the U.S. experienced one of the greatest periods of innovation in its storied history, raising the quality of life for everyone.
Reducing the investment into growth reduces the ceiling for university success. Thus, modern research funding cuts are unequivocally bad for universities, not to mention the nation writ large. When students are unable to receive grant money from the federal government and cannot lean on state funding, they turn to their universities — meaning institutions must raise tuition to cover the costs or simply scrap the projects. For example, universities’ National Institutes of Health funding has been slashed, leading them to potentially having to pay out-of-pocket for biomedical research. In this state, learning flounders.
Trump has made it clear that he values money now over innovation in the future by attacking academia he deems inefficient. He has critiqued the premise of research grants, contending that they waste money on unfruitful ideas. This is an accusation that is compounded by his opposition to any research that even broadly involves DEI. This research often either focuses on race or gender issues in humanities, economics and health or providing opportunities to historically underrepresented groups. Federal grants have shelled out almost $2.05 billion to DEI research at colleges, making it susceptible to criticism about its worthiness. However, the perceived unfruitfulness is precisely the point of funding these projects.
The government has forgotten what research truly entails — research is by its nature inefficient. If every project produced something significant to the advancement of humanity, I would be writing this piece from Mars. Research is meant to get things wrong, to dive into previously unexplored issues and to lay one more brick in the road so someone else can walk a step further. Just because a government official who worked in real estate all his life cannot see the value in discovering the dynamics of immigrants in the U.S. economy, or in encouraging Black students to participate in a system they have been systematically expelled from, does not mean these programs should be eliminated. Penicillin was discovered in a moldy petri dish — this government would have it thrown out because it was wasting space on the counter.
Aside from this misunderstanding of purpose, government officials have changed the definition of efficiency to fit a short term goal rather than investment in the future. The proposed algorithm designed to block grants uses broad keywords that are, in the eyes of administration, associated with DEI , such as the word “woman.” While this system cuts grants quickly, the range of words is completely ludicrous — a project with the words “trauma” and “bias” receives the same treatment as a project with “Black.” This means that any project referring to these broad concepts would be blocked, no matter the intended product. This may be efficient — or rather lazy — in that it saves time and money. However, it is inefficient in the sense that the government loses the return on valuable research that leads to new innovations. The drive towards efficiency is robbing society of the benefit students of all backgrounds might offer.
Through attempted efficiency, the government is perceiving research grants in the wrong way. Grant money to research is often falsely viewed like a savings account, and that every year, you should be able to look at it and see an increased balance due to interest that projects produce. This is not the case — grant money is like stock. It may go up and down, but it will almost always produce more than you put in. This means more technology, more political improvements and a higher quality of life. Suddenly, it seems that the U.S. has lost sight of the future and lost the capacity for patience — it has never been in the business of saving money. Boosting efficiency will not help in 20 years when we must catch up to the advanced innovation of the rest of the world. With efficiency, we lose innovation. We lose progress. We lose the spirit that drove the U.S. into a world leader. A generation’s future is gambled because government officials do not want the word “woman” in research titles.
Paul Kurtzweil is an opinion columnist who writes about economics, business and housing for The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at opinion@cavalierdaily.com.
The opinions expressed in this column are not necessarily those of The Cavalier Daily. Columns represent the views of the authors alone.
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