“An Atmosphere of Fear”
In his opening keynote address to the “Censorship in STEM” conference earlier this month—ten days before President Trump’s second inauguration—new Heterodox Academy board member Jonathan Rauch warned about the dangers of politicians trying to control scientific work.
“We have a very long history showing that when politicians get directly involved in directing intellectual inquiry,” Rauch told those assembled, “they politicize it and you wind up in an atmosphere of fear significantly worse than where we are right now.”
Now, a sweeping freeze on federal funding (reported yesterday to be rescinded, though details remain unclear)—motivated by the Trump administration’s stated desire to ensure that federal spending aligns with the president’s priorities—is causing widespread confusion and fear at institutions of higher education whose teaching, research, and administration rely heavily on NIH and NSF grants.
Which is pretty much every institution engaged in serious scientific research.
On Tuesday afternoon, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported, “Higher-education advocates condemn the move with Mark Becker, president of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, calling it “an overly broad mandate that is unnecessary and damaging.” In response to the orders, the provost of the University of Chicago “instructed the faculty not to purchase new supplies or equipment, or start new experiments or university-funded traveling.”
At this point, there is a substantial amount of chaos and confusion, including over whether the president intended this much disruption—and whether he intends to sustain it. While the justifications for it suggest the administration wants a merit-based approach to federally funded research, the reality is merit-blind.
Labs are being told to hold off on purchasing materials that would be funded by federal grants. Researchers are seeing their publications delayed over communications orders, with some calling it “censorship.” Some are wondering if they will need to get government clearance to publish work funded by federal agencies. This is not good for open inquiry.
We know this much: Trump has set his sights on ending anything that may look like DEI, even going so far as to put vaguely “equity-related” projects on the chopping block. He has also declared an end to federal funding of what he calls “gender ideology.” Who is going to determine what counts has yet to be seen, but it appears it will be political appointees. It’s worth noting he’s also targeting so-called “clean energy” projects, which could implicate a wide swath of the hard sciences that have nothing to do with DEI or gender.
As Rauch alluded to in his conference presentation, for decades under administrations of both parties, researchers in many scientific fields have had to putatively align their work with various political trends to obtain funding. Sex researchers have had to claim their work would promote sexual health, for example, while hard science researchers have sometimes had to claim potential benefits to national defense.
At this moment in history, it’s fair to guesstimate that thousands of currently-funded projects were required during the application process to submit some sort of diversity-related component as a part of their proposal (a kind of forced political speech to which HxA has steadily objected). For example, many NIH funding opportunities required a Plan for Enhancing Diverse Perspectives.
Now, the words researchers put forth to fund their careers, labs, and students may be what gets their work killed.
Many are reasonably wondering how political appointees asked to approve or cancel grants are going to understand “DEI.” Will federal funding no longer be used to study varying rates of obesity among various races and ethnicities? Will studying the effects of particular drugs on females be disallowed? What about medical compliance rates among various demographics? Will evolutionary psychology, evolutionary anthropology, and epidemiology, which necessarily focus on inter-group differences, get thrown out with the bathwater?
While we fully recognize the serious problem with requiring forced ideological adherence in hiring, promotion, and granting systems as has happened in too many cases with DEl, banning ideas from funding is antithetical to open inquiry. Yet the ambiguous and seemingly broad stroke of Trump’s executive orders would seem to make these research areas unfundable—not because of their merit, but because of their perceived viewpoint.
If the Trump administration’s intention is to be surgical in its approach, what we are seeing presently is anything but. The funding we are talking about threads through institutions as lifelines to tens of thousands of intellectuals engaged in research and learning. Will graduate students funded by diversity supplements now be forced to abandon their studies? What will happen at universities—especially those that train doctoral students—whose financial projections included facilities and administrative costs they reasonably expected to be paid as promised?
The executive order itself claims that DEI has been integrated into “virtually all aspects of the Federal Government,” which begs questions about the administration’s strategy (or lack thereof) in attempting to purge DEI from all levels of government all at once.
The White House indicates that it wants to cut waste, but it’s hard to even fathom the number of public dollars that will essentially be flushed down the drain if ongoing, multi-year projects are not funded to completion as promised when the grant was awarded.
Most concerning is the prospect that future administrations will run the same playbook, including (apparently illegally) firing inspector generals charged with reducing the impact of partisan politics on government spending. If Trump’s current approach becomes the norm, researchers will be stuck in an endless cycle of having research unpredictably axed by the heavy hand of politicians.
A reasonable approach—one that would rid research of litmus tests and not close down inquiry—could look like this:
- No longer require pro-DEI statements, DEI action plans, or any forced political speech in funding proposals.
- Allow researchers to include such material if it is salient to their research.
- Do not take punitive measures against ongoing projects for meeting political requirements from the time of their proposal.
- Create far more transparent peer-review processes for decisions about hiring and funding.
- Promote (do not circumvent) oversight of these systems; make sure materials are subject to the Freedom of Information Act and provide nonpartisan inspector general-type oversight.
- Make good on existing funding promises while working to depoliticize research systems.
Most of all, do not create chaos, fear, and uncertainty within and around academic research in ways that threaten open inquiry and higher education.
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