Attacks on Higher Education Are Attacks on All Americans

Attacks on Higher Education Are Attacks on All Americans

If Americans don’t fight back against efforts to dismantle higher education, the U.S. will lose lifesaving medical research, innovation that spurs our economy, and the ability to freely study science and society. Grant cancellations and budget reductions at the National Institutes of Health have put millions of dollars in research for promising new cancer treatments, tuberculosis therapies, and much more in jeopardy. Our elected officials could intervene if all Americans, not just academics, were to send a clear signal that they should. Instead, much of the public has shrugged its shoulders.

Since January, the U.S. government has frozen billions of dollars in federal research funding to institutions such as Harvard University, Columbia University, and Princeton University. The Department of Education has opened investigations into 60 universities over allegations of antisemitism, using these inquiries to justify funding cuts and impose policy mandates. The administration has also placed international students under scrutiny, threatening visa revocations and deportations for those participating in campus protests deemed hostile to government interests. The administration has detained foreign-born academics such as Kseniia Petrova, a researcher at Harvard, who was recently released after she was placed in criminal custody for failing to declare research materials at customs.

Collectively, we’re witnessing unprecedented attempts to bully academic institutions with the administration’s ideological aims. These attempts challenge long-standing norms of academic freedom—that is, the ability of a teacher or researcher in higher education to investigate and discuss subjects without fear of political interference. Our elected officials should stand up for scientific research and those who produce it in the face of politically motivated attacks. But public apathy is making it easier for legislators to ignore the problem.

In late March, we worked with YouGov to conduct a nationally representative online survey of 1,500 U.S. adults. We found that while few Americans actively support the president’s attacks on science, many more are unbothered by them. For example, 65 percent of Americans either have no position or outright support the possibility that the Trump administration might revoke federal funding to universities that support “pro-Palestine / anti-Israel protests”. According to our survey, a majority of Americans either support or do not oppose politically motivated grant funding cancellations—including efforts to study differences in health outcomes attributable to race and gender or research about LGBT populations—mass firings, and even forbidding foreign academics from entering the U.S. if they hold opinions at odds with the Trump administration.

Many of our colleagues initially believed that attacks on academic freedom and scientific research would cause public outcry. After all, U.S. academic research institutions are behind the country’s global leadership in innovation, medicine, and technological development. American universities host most of the world’s top-ranked research programs, serve as engines of regional economic growth, and train future leaders in fields such as medicine, public health, and technology—in other words, they provide real jobs for people in and outside of academia. More urgently, defunding and censoring science could have dramatically negative consequences for all Americans. Canceling research on vaccine communication hinders not just our preparedness for future pandemics, but also our response to seasonal flu and COVID. Curtailing studies of health disparities weakens efforts to improve maternal mortality rates, particularly in communities of color, people who have low income, and gender-diverse communities. Cutting international academic exchange isolates the U.S. from global scientific collaboration, including partnerships with entities such as the World Health Organization that are trying to promote access to lifesaving medical treatments and preventatives.

The costs of academic repression, in other words, are not confined to elite institutions—they are borne by everyone. Yet very few Americans seem to be concerned. Decades of polling demonstrate that perceptions of science increasingly align with political identity. Trust in science across the American political spectrum has undergone a dramatic reversal. The administration’s attacks on science demand a response from Congress, especially when political appointees try to circumvent the law. Our congressional leaders can also stand up for science in the process of assembling a new budget for the coming year. But if Americans of all stripes do not send their congressional representatives a clear message that they need to fight against cuts to academic science and research, our elected officials may not be motivated to do so.

Institutions such as the Ohio State University (OSU)—one of our own—demonstrate what’s at stake. OSU contributes more than $19 billion annually to the state’s economy, supports nearly 117,000 jobs, and generates more than $650 billion in tax revenue for state and local governments. These are not abstract stakes—they are material, local, and immediate. If voters, especially in politically conservative areas such as Ohio, make clear that dismantling science and academia undermines their communities, Congress may yet act. But without that pressure, the cost of inaction could be catastrophic and long-lasting and will affect people far beyond the walls of higher education.

This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.