A tumultuous week in higher education and science

Indirect cost cuts, a new secretary of health and human services, and a Dear Colleague letter send shock waves

At the rate things are going, it could easily be topped, but last week was one of the most dramatic ever in higher education. It began the Friday before (February 7) when the NIH announced that it would cut indirect cost rates from the carefully negotiated rates to 15%. While the move is presently blocked by the courts, it could have disastrous consequences for the institutions that carry out the federal research effort. The politics of this are complicated by the fact that the way these costs are calculated is maddeningly opaque and difficult to explain.

When the federal research enterprise was set up 70 years ago, the decision was made to carry out research in universities rather than having the government do it directly. The rationale for this was that professors at universities would be more likely to make impactful findings by following their curiosity rather than at government direction. This idea enabled the vast majority of scientific progress and was copied in most other countries.

To build the infrastructure for this effort, the universities had to construct laboratories and provide the support to administer the grants in accordance with federal regulations. The social contract that was agreed to was that the federal government would share the costs more or less equally of creating this environment with the institutions. The feds contribution to this would come in the form of “indirect costs,” which were a fraction of the direct costs of paying the researchers and buying the supplies needed to carry out the work. The rate of indirect costs were specific to institutions, but over the years ended up at around 50% for public universities and 70% or so for private universities in urban areas. Cutting these rates to 15% would take more than $100 million out of the budget of major research universities.

I explained all of this in an editorial in Science and a couple of days later on NPR’s Morning Edition. Here’s the audio of the NPR hit:

The next day I was contacted by a producer at the Joy Reid Show (The ReidOut) to explain this on MSNBC. But by the time I did my appearance there, Robert Kennedy had been sworn in as the next Secretary of Health and Human Services. Earlier that evening, the AAAS CEO, Sudip Parkikh, made the following statement at our national meeting in Boston: ‘Let me just say this clearly: Robert F Kennedy Jr is not the right person to lead the HHS. He is not the right person because solving disease, curing disease, addressing health, requires a search for truth, requires science.’ Here’s the video of Sudip at the meeting (starting at 17:19):

So when the producers at MSNBC asked, I agreed to talk to Joy Reid about RFK. Here’s the video of that:

All of this was unfolding while we were in Boston with 3,000 very stressed out scientists at the AAAS meeting. There was lots of coverage of that, also. Here’s the piece in The New York Times that has statements from a bunch of us.

The mood was even more somber as the next body blow came when thousands of probationary employees were let go at the NIH. Here are former director Monica Bertagnolli’s statements in an interview done at the meeting.

Then on Friday night, higher education took another bombshell when the Department of Education issued a Dear Colleague letter threatening to withhold federal funding from schools that carried out diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs in a way that went even beyond earlier guidance.

As I’ve said earlier, the first step in dealing with all of this is sharing compassion and care with the scientific community. That starts with acknowledging the pain that this is all causing. There will be a scientific enterprise left in the US when the dust settles, but much will be lost. So as Sudip said at the AAAS meeting, grief is a logical emotion right now. There will be a time in the future to take stock of where things stand and formulate a plan for moving forward. But not everyone will be ready to do that at the same time, and it makes sense for things to take a while to process.

In the meantime, take care of each other, y’all.