New York – He confrontation Between the Trump administration and Harvard University is highlighting Knuckle policy and great dollar figures. But in the battle of the moment, it is easy to lose sight of a decades between the United States government and the most prominent universities of the nation, forged to fight a world war.
For eight decades, this interdependence has been appreciated by academic and political leaders of both parties as a model for American discovery and innovation.
“Somehow, I think it is a central part of the history of contemporary America,” said Jason Owen-Smith, a professor at the University of Michigan who studies the scope of research on the Campus of the Nation. “Harvard is an example, but it is not the only one.”
That explains the more than $ 2 billion in subsidies of several years and Harvard Frozen contracts This week by administration officials after the school challenged its demands to limit activism on campus.
Subsidies are a testimony of a system that has its roots in the early 1940s, when the United States government began to ensure avant -garde investigation through a singular association. Federal officials provided money and supervision; The institutions, led by large state and private universities, used these billions of dollars to plumn the unknowns of science and technology, while training new generations of researchers.
The association delivered innovations in times of war, including the development of the radar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and, decades later, the birth at Stanford University of what became Google.
Now the Trump administration is trying something that many other executive directors have avoided: impose ideology in an association that has balanced responsibility for a long time with independence.
“Many Americans wonder why their tax dollars go to these universities when they are not only indoctrinating the students of our nation, but also allow such atrocious illegal behavior to occur,” said the press secretary of the White House, Karoline Leavitt, during information with journalists this week.
But the observers for a long time of the association between the government and the universities see the actions of the administration in a very different way.
“The way in which the Trump administration is doing it has never been politicized because it has always had bipartisan support,” says Roger Geiger, a higher education historian who is retired from Penn State. “It’s unusual that we don’t see that support now.”
Cut Harvard continues Similar movements in Columbia and other prominent universities to force compliance. At the same time, Johns Hopkins University delivered More than $ 800 million in federal grants for medical and health programs that it manages after the administration began to dismantle the United States Agency for International Development and cut funds by the National Health Institutes.
The dollar figures for use in national laboratories and programs may seem surprising for a more familiar audience with great universities as teaching and student life centers.
But to make sense of the current battle, it helps to understand how the government and universities became so interdependent.
A large community ago, a much smaller community of research universities depended largely on private funds. But as US officials rushed to prepare for entry into Second World War In 1940, a former MIT dean, Vannevar Bush, launched president Franklin D. Roosevelt About the critical need to mark the government’s defense research associated with scientists from universities and other institutions.
“The urgency in the 1940s was really primary motivation,” said G. Pascal Zachary, author of a Bush biography. “But the structure was lasting.”
Bush agency supervised the search for the first Nuclear weaponsdeveloped in a laboratory administered by the University of California. And when the fight ended, it prevailed in Roosevelt to expand the research association to guarantee national security, promote scientific and medical discovery, and grow the economy.
“It is only the schools, universities and some research institutes who dedicate most of their research efforts to expand the borders of knowledge,” Bush wrote in a 1945 report to Roosevelt, presenting his plan.
However, federal financing for research remained limited until Soviet Union launched the First artificial satellite in 1957. Determined to catch up, US legislators approved a current of funds for university research and training of new scientists.
“We locked ourselves in the Cold War, this battle with the Soviet Union, which was in many ways a scientific and technological battle,” said Jonathan Zimmerman, education historian at the University of Pennsylvania.
The research schools, which total between 150 and 200, used the entry of federal dollars to build laboratories and other infrastructure. That growth occurred as the registration rose, and the government pays for veterans to assist the university through the Gi Bill and measured in the 1960s to help the poorest students.
The association between the Government and the universities has always come with an incorporated tension.
Federal officials were at the helm, giving money to projects that meet their priorities and tracking the results. But it is explicit that government officials do not control work itself, allowing researchers to look for answers independently to questions and problems, even if they do not always find them.
“The Government can basically treat a nationally decentralized universities system as a resource for use to solve problems,” said Owen-Smith in Michigan.
With that understanding, universities have become the receiver of approximately 90 percent of all federal research funds, raising $ 59.6 billion in 2023, according to the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics.
That represents more than half of the $ 109 billion spent on research in universities, and most of the rest comes from school, state and local government and non -profit organizations.
Johns Hopkins has been the largest concessionaire, which represents $ 3.3 billion in federal expenses in 2023. Federal dollars for research at the Technology Institute of the University of Washington, Georgia, UC San Diego and Michigan also exceeded more than $ 1 billion each. Harvard received around $ 640 million.
Trump administration movements to nearby agencies and impose changes in campus present to universities with an unprecedented threat.
“Generations of Hopkins researchers have brought the benefits of discovery to the world,” said the president of the school, Ronald J. Daniels. “However, a fast and high -range cascade of federal research in higher education is dishonoring this long -standing compact.”
The association is supposed to be protected by railings. The rules specify that officials who believe that a school is violating the law cannot reduce funds, but must present details of alleged violations of Congress.
But the Trump administration, determined to make schools change the policies designed to promote diversity on campus and take energetic measures against protests, is ignoring those rules, said Zimmerman.
Financing cuts will probably exert pressure on the remaining resources of schools, leaving them with less money for things as financial help for modest media students, he said. But the greatest danger is the academic freedom of schools to teach and investigate how they seem better.
“Let us remember that in the last three months we have seen people” in universities “scrubbing their websites for references to certain words,” he said. “That is what happens in authoritarian countries.”
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Associated Press Zeke Miller writer in Washington contributed to this report.
