Listening and talking on a plan for the future of American science

Tales from the road

Since the inauguration, I have been on the road pretty much nonstop talking to folks about the attacks on science and how to respond. I have been proposing and seeking ideas about the next logical steps. I’m thankfully getting off the road now for a month so writing up my assessment of what I’ve learned. I think the current status is more or less agreed on and is as follows:

1. The administration is using science funding as a weapon to extract other concessions about other matters that are in many cases only partly related to science, such as protest policies, the ideological views of the faculty, affirmative action, and the content of humanities and social sciences about identity generally.

2. The attacks involve cutting the research funding almost completely to some institutions like Columbia and Harvard, cutting other individual grants deemed to be in violation of the administration’s orders on DEI and antisemitism, ending training grants and related programs for graduate students and postdocs that are perceived as targeting marginalized groups, restricting the flow of international students, and slowing the overall dispersal of new grants (phew).

3. The administrations attacks seem fresh but are driven by decades-long beliefs that universities are responsible for the development and propagation of liberal thought in America that go back to William F. Buckley in the 1950s and the Allan Bloom in the 1980s. The action and animosity have been accelerated thanks to social media, the decline of mainstream media, and the isolation and resentment of the pandemic, where academia was blamed for the restrictions that were placed on society. These issues were further exacerbated by the Oct 7 attacks on Israel by Hamas and the ensuing protests and disagreements, which intensified long-standing concerns that universities were harboring and cultivating antisemitic thought by describing the injustices towards Palestine.

4. The future is uncertain and there are a few promising signs. On the promising side, the Senate appears poised to release a budget proposal that will be flat for science funding, not the drastic cuts proposed by the administration. On the frightening side, the Office of Management and Budget appears certain to continue to come up with new ways to slow the dispersal of funds and perhaps even to do a rescission package to claw back money already disbursed. Columbia University has settled with the administration and will likely see at least some money again; Brown University also agreed to a settlement. A fair analysis of this is probably that there will continue to be a funded scientific enterprise in the US, but it will face continued difficulty from OMB for 3.5 years.

Now what?

There is a lot of disagreement about what comes next. There is an understandable desire among a lot of people in and around the scientific community that the institutional players should do more. Here are some possibilities.

Keep fighting back and wait for the courts. It’s absolutely true that many of the actions of OMB are likely to be illegal; indeed, they have lost many legal challenges. But these matters are all likely to eventually be decided by the Supreme Court, which has been handing the administration a lot of victories of late. And getting to the Supreme Court will take time. Some people against Columbia taking the deal have said they should wait for the court challenges. However, a lot of researchers could be harmed in the meantime. So, for Columbia and Harvard to wait for the Supreme Court to decide these matters could take longer than they can make it without firing huge chunks of their research workforce. I’m out with a new editorial trying to explain why Columbia had no choice but to take the deal. Critics of taking the deal should ask whether they would be willing to fire all of the postdocs and research staff at their institution in order to wait for an uncertain court ruling. People will still differ on this question, but it is not straightforward.

Be more public and confrontational. There has been a lot of understandable pressure on college presidents and the heads of the associations to be more openly confrontational and transparent about their strategies. But talking about their strategy would be like the inviting the other team into your locker room to hear your game plan. Politics involves strategy and much of that is more effective if not shared widely. And the results on the appropriations process suggest this approach has worked. Nonetheless, there is a lot of pent-up pain that needs to be addressed, and I have written previously about how leaders could be more open without giving away their precise strategies. While the universities and traditional associations are playing it safer, other groups such as the Union of Concerned Scientists are being more confrontational. As with all social change, there is a need for both approaches.

A more positive approach

I don’t believe we can just double down on everything we’ve been doing. To continue the sports analogy, that would be like going into the locker room down by four touchdowns and making a plan to go out in the second half and follow exactly the same plan as in the first half. Here’s a video I got AI to make about that.

So our usual standbys of “we’ve got to tell our story better,” “let’s make every scientist a communicator,” “let’s change the reward system,” and let’s make K-12 science education more engaging (like they don’t already have enough problems to worry about) are probably not going to be the ways we get past all this. We’ve spent decades repeating these points. What I’ve been advocating for is an approach that involves identifying and living into our fundamental values of the scientific enterprise and focusing on those rather than reacting to the administration. We were reactive during the pandemic, and that didn’t work so well. Of course we should support those who are pursuing the legal angles, working the politicians, supporting candidates who will be advocates for science, and carrying out more direct advocacy. But most of us don’t know how to do those things ourselves. Instead, we should focus on being honest about our mistakes and shortcomings, inviting public scrutiny of what we do, doing the best science we can, and building the best scientific enterprise with the highest possible integrity and human compassion. Here is the slide I use for that.

I’ve refined these as I’ve given these talks around the country. Some of these things are topics I’ve written about in the past. Suggestions always welcome. Note added: Thanks to a reader, I realize the comment “the public can understand science if they want to” is something that gets a lot more attention when I give the talk. What I mean by that is that the assumption that the public is incapable of understanding science, which unfortunately creeps in a lot of our rhetoric, is wrong and not useful. It’s on us to get them interested and do a good job explaining things.

The other thing we need to do is stick together. The opponents of higher education right now are very skilled at sowing division. The challenge with “let’s all just focus on being the best scientists we can be” is that it has to be combined with serious acknowledgment of the damage that has been done and the injustice of it all. If folks have the courage and are willing to talk about how we can do things in a different way, they shouldn’t be shouted down as complying in advance or drawing a moral equivalence, since it’s clear we need change. And the Columbia deal is a good test, because while the scientists may get some of their money back, most of the restrictions fall on faculty and undergraduate programs that are outside the sciences. The scientists need to support their colleagues in the humanities and social sciences or else there will be another fissure to be exploited.