Michelle Goldberg, Trump Wants to Destroy All Academia, Not Just the Woke Parts, NYTimes, Feb. 14, 2025.
I’ve written about Donald Trump’s plan to crush the academic left, but it increasingly looks as though he and his allies are targeting academia more broadly, including the hard sciences that have long enjoyed bipartisan support. “I think the extremely strong desire is to just punish universities however possible,” Kevin Carey, the director of the education policy program at New America, a public policy think tank, told me. “It’s not based on any kind of coherent policy agenda. It’s just a desire to inflict pain.”
This is the context for the Trump administration’s attempt, currently being challenged in court, to slash research funding from the National Institutes of Health. The details sound technical and very boring: The new policy would limit reimbursements for schools’ overhead expenses to 15 percent of grants’ value, instead of the 50 to 70 percent that universities often receive now. But if this goes into effect, the damage will be tremendous. As H. Holden Thorp, the editor of Science, wrote, for every dollar spent on academic research, roughly another dollar is needed for lab equipment, support staff and systems for managing grants. Right now, the government funds a big chunk of these indirect costs, with universities picking up the remainder. If the government reduces its contribution to 15 percent, universities could try to close the gap by raising tuition and eliminating departments, but it wouldn’t be enough. Crucial research projects, including those investigating cures for devastating diseases, would have to be scaled back or jettisoned altogether.
These cuts could hit some Trump-voting states particularly hard.
There's more at the link.
