by Michael S. Kochin
The Trump administration has frozen federal funding to several elite research universities—including Harvard, Columbia, Penn, and Princeton—citing civil rights violations. Many Americans, across ideological lines, recognize that these institutions have been significantly influenced by radical ideologies that have compromised academic freedom, institutional neutrality, and intellectual rigor.
Some observers, however, worry that this action unfairly penalizes science and engineering research. Historian Niall Ferguson, writing in The Free Press, argues that STEM faculty are innocent bystanders caught in a political crossfire aimed at the humanities and social sciences. While acknowledging STEM professors’ past silence regarding the politicization of the academy, Ferguson maintains, “This is not the part of higher education where the cancer is located.”
But academic ideologies, like cancers, metastasize. The rot is no longer confined to grievance studies departments. It has infiltrated scientific institutions and compromised public trust in science itself. Consider the response of elite scientists to Dr. Anthony Fauci’s funding of controversial “gain-of-function” research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or the concerted efforts to suppress discussion of a possible lab-leak origin for COVID-19. Few scientists challenged these decisions or defended dissenters like Harvard Medical School biostatistician Martin Kulldorff, who questioned lockdowns and vaccination policies only to face professional censure and ultimately dismissal.
Nor have prominent scientists called for accountability from figures like Science Editor-in-Chief Holden Thorp, whose March 2020 editorial ridiculed then-President Trump for urging expedited vaccine development—an effort that ultimately yielded highly effective vaccines in record time. When scientists fail to correct their own institutions, they erode public confidence and invite external scrutiny.
Despite the real achievements of American science, we must also reckon with its failures. Federal funding for biomedical research has ballooned, yet the most transformative advances—from effective cancer treatments to implanted defibrillators—emerged from corporate or clinician-led projects rather than peer-reviewed university research. Operation Warp Speed, the Trump Administration’s vaccine initiative, succeeded not because of the traditional peer review system but through rapid coordination among private firms, clinical researchers, and government procurement.
The promise of government-funded “basic research,” as laid out in Vannevar Bush’s 1945 report The Endless Frontier, was that scientific breakthroughs would emerge when scientists were freed by peer-review-allocated funding from “applied” or practical concerns. This vision birthed the National Science Foundation and the peer-review model that dominates federal funding of academic research. But over the past eight decades, the return on this investment has been mixed. Many academic research projects yield marginal or no practical or scientific benefit. The peer-review process rewards consensus, not innovation. And the insulation of scientific elites from political accountability has encouraged a culture of self-replication rather than self-correction.
Looking back eight decades on the comparative failure of such government-funded peer-review-allocated basic research to produce significant applications or even important science, we can see that Bush made three big mistakes. First, Bush inferred from the success of unfunded scientific speculation—like Albert Einstein formulating Special Relativity by musing in the Swiss patent office on symmetries in Maxwell’s Equations—that one could get significant scientific breakthroughs by relying on the advice on what to fund of the indoctrinated experts who had failed to produce them. Second, Bush assumed, incoherently, that what was of basic importance in science would not come to light in attempting to solve problems for government or private customers.
Yet the core error of Bush’s vision was the belief that significant scientific discovery could be reliably planned by committees of like-minded experts, divorced from practical application or political oversight. In practice, many of the great breakthroughs—from nuclear weapons to transistors to GPS technology to the COVID-19 vaccines—emerged not from peer-reviewed grantmaking but from targeted, applied efforts with clear goals, deadlines, and political or corporate accountability.
The problem, then, is not that the Trump Administration has threatened to cut funding to elite universities. The problem is the assumption that if universities begin to comply with generally applicable laws protecting civil rights, this funding should be restored without further reform. The “Fauci era” of science governance—dominated by self-regulated priorities and ideological conformity—has reached its limit. Restoring public trust and scientific effectiveness requires structural change: a rebalancing of research priorities through government or corporate guidance towards prospective application, as well as greater transparency and political oversight in the public interest.
Accountability for Big Science is overdue. It will not be comfortable for academic administrators or faculty, but it is essential. With reform, we can reclaim a scientific enterprise grounded in curiosity, responsibility, and service to the public good.
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Michael S. Kochin is Professor Extraordinarius in the School of Political Science, Government, and International Relations at Tel Aviv University. He received his A.B. in mathematics from Harvard and his M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from the University of Chicago. He has held visiting appointments at Yale, Princeton, Toronto, Claremont McKenna College, and the Catholic University of America. He has written widely on the comparative analysis of institutions, political thought, politics and literature, and political rhetoric. With the historian Michael Taylor he has written An Independent Empire: Diplomacy & War in the Making of the United States (University of Michigan Press, 2020).
