America's Two-Front War on Science
Universities’ internal culture wars threaten free speech and inquiry, but political attacks on research funding and infrastructure are crippling U.S. scientific leadership.
There is currently a two-pronged attack on higher education, research, and scholarship in the United States. Activists inside universities have hijacked many administrative functions, and significant reform is needed to ensure free speech, open inquiry, and the integrity of scholarship. But the Trump administration has used this fact to launch what may be a more dangerous direct attack on university scientific and research infrastructures across the nation. We can't afford to lose either war if we are to protect the country's scientific integrity and productivity.
Harvard University epitomizes the quandary we now find ourselves in. Over the last decade, it succumbed to much of the modern culture war in ways that have threatened faculty and students, and even prospective students. Students and researchers have alleged that Harvard has discriminated against Asian applicants, rigorously policed speech, and punished faculty whose research results didn't match preconceived notions about racism or who stated that there are only two sexes, while allowing antisemitic conduct. In addition, the university promoted staff based on identity rather than academic accomplishments, including those known to have plagiarized academic work, while discriminating against talented students and scholars on the grounds of their race or sex.
Harvard is by no means unique. Bloated diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) bureaucracies have taken root at academic institutions around the country. The University of California at Berkeley biology department, for example, in 2019, disqualified 76 percent of the applicants for a faculty position based solely on their DEI statements—before examining their research.
This behavior is seen in academia outside of universities as well. Prestigious scientific journals, such as Nature Human Behaviour, have indicated they will not publish scientific articles if they could cause offense or a sense of harm to certain groups. Physical Review, a major journal in my own field of physics, went so far as to publish a case study positing that the use of whiteboards in classrooms could be viewed as a remnant of white supremacy.
The situation has set back scientific and scholarly progress, and has undermined the credibility of many academic disciplines among the public.
At the same time, President Donald Trump has not only launched a frontal assault on Harvard but has also removed leading scientists from national advisory boards and federally supported research institutions, and declared war on universities and departments that don't bow to his political agenda. Perhaps most damaging of all, this administration is proposing to end support for most cutting-edge American research programs. This includes cutting the National Science Foundation budget by almost 60 percent, and killing major projects—from closing half of the Nobel Prize-winning Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, to ending U.S. participation in the next generation space-based detector, to considering closing the NASA-Goddard space center, where most of the science at NASA originates.
The administration's attempts to paint all university faculty as woke are misguided. Many leading scientists and scholars have continued to push the boundaries of knowledge while either ignoring ongoing culture wars or avoiding administrative activists on their campuses. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater is never a good idea, nor is schadenfreude worth risking the future of knowledge. The proper way to fight one form of intolerance is not to impose your own brand of intolerance.
This external war on science may be, at least in the near term, more destructive than the ongoing internal culture wars within universities. The very best science programs—which are the best because they have largely avoided the current assault on scholarship—now find themselves at risk. Decimating the scientific infrastructure of the nation by disenfranchising the best researchers and defunding their programs is not something that can be quickly repaired. Postdoctoral researchers lose their positions and leave academia, and departments stop supporting graduate students, who then depart for other opportunities.
In this regard, we need to continue to recruit the best and brightest minds from around the world, both as students and researchers. But the Trump administration is also discouraging talented foreign students from studying and working in the U.S. Many of these students choose to stay in this country after their education is complete (as Elon Musk did) and create innovative technologies that sustain our economy.
Attacking the scientific infrastructure of the nation ultimately undermines the economic and security interests of the nation. Reports have repeatedly shown that modest investment in basic research yields outsized economic returns for decades. Curiosity-driven research in areas from materials science and engineering to quantum physics and immunology is crucial to supporting the health, welfare, and security of the nation, and it must not be made subservient to political goals or ideologies.
A great deal of damage has already been done. If the nation's best researchers or the next generation's emerging talent leave their fields or leave the country seeking greener pastures, U.S. competitiveness on a global scale will decline, and dominance will move elsewhere—most likely to China. If that happens, science may not permanently suffer, but the nation will.
