UCSD among universities with billion dollars in grants at center of Trump’s Harvard showdown

An aerial view of the UC San Diego campus File photo courtesy of UCSD The showdown between the Trump administration and Harvard University has placed bare-knuckled politics and big dollar figures in the national spotlight But in the battle of the moment it s easy to lose sight of a decades-long alliance between the U S executive and the nation s preponderance prominent universities forged to fight a world war For more than years that interdependence has been prized by academic leaders and politicians of both parties as a paragon for American discovery and advancement UC San Diego has been a big part of that innovation as one of just a handful of universities to receive more than billion in governing body grants two years ago In specific means I think it s a core part of the story of contemporary America noted Jason Owen-Smith a University of Michigan professor who studies the scope of research on the nation s campuses Harvard s an exemplar but it s not the only one But the renowned Ivy League university is facing extreme pressure with more than billion in multi-year grants and contracts frozen this week by Trump administration representatives after the school defied demands to limit activism on campus Link back to World War II The grants are testament to a system that has its roots in the early s when the U S authorities began securing cutting edge research through a singular partnership Federal functionaries provided money and oversight institutions led by big state and private universities used those billions of dollars to plumb the unknowns of science and equipment while training new generations of researchers The partnership delivered wartime innovations including the improvement of radar at the Massachusetts Institute of Device and decades later the birth at Stanford University of what became Google Now the Trump administration is trying something multiple other chief executives have avoided imposing ideology on a partnership that has long balanced accountability with independence A lot of Americans are wondering why their tax dollars are going to these universities when they are not only indoctrinating our nation s students but also allowing such egregious illegal behavior to occur White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt mentioned during a briefing with reporters this week But longtime observers of the partnership between administration and universities see the administration s actions very differently It s never been politicized the way the Trump administration is doing it because it s dependably had bipartisan aid says Roger Geiger a historian of higher coaching who is retired from Penn State It s strange that we don t see that aid now Cutting off Harvard follows similar moves at Columbia and other prominent universities to force compliance At the same time Johns Hopkins University surrendered more than million in federal grants for robustness and healthcare programs after the administration began dismantling the U S Agency for International Rise and cut funding by the National Institutes of Wellness Behind the dollars The dollar figures for use in domestic laboratories and programs overseas might seem surprising to a masses largest part familiar with big universities as centers of teaching and apprentice life But to make sense of the current battle it helps to understand how cabinet and universities came to be so interdependent A century ago a much smaller area of research universities relied largely on private funding But as U S personnel scrambled to prepare for entry into World War II in a former MIT dean Vannevar Bush pitched President Franklin D Roosevelt on the critical need to marshal defense research by partnering establishment with scientists at universities and other institutions Urgency in the s was really the overriding motivation mentioned G Pascal Zachary author of a biography of Bush But the structure proved durable Bush s agency oversaw the quest for the first nuclear weapons developed at a laboratory administered by the University of California And when fighting ended he prevailed on Roosevelt to expand the research partnership to ensure national precaution foster scientific and healthcare discovery and grow the financial sector It is only the colleges universities and a limited research institutes that devote largest part of their research efforts to expanding the frontiers of knowledge Bush wrote in a overview to Roosevelt laying out his plan Federal funding for research remained limited however until the Soviet Union launched the first artificial satellite in Determined to catch up U S lawmakers approved a stream of funding for university research and training of new scientists We were locked into the Cold War this battle with the Soviet Union that was in a large number of options a scientific and technological battle stated Jonathan Zimmerman an schooling historian at the University of Pennsylvania Research schools which number between and used the flow of federal dollars to build labs and other infrastructure That expansion came as enrollment climbed with the executive paying for veterans to attend college through the G I Bill and measures in the s to help poorer students Tense relationship from the outset The partnership between administration and universities has inevitably come with a built-in tension Federal agents are at the helm awarding money to projects that meet their priorities and tracking the results But it is explicit that establishment authorities do not control the work itself allowing researchers to independently pursue answers to questions and problems even if they don t reliably find them The governing body gets to basically treat a generally decentralized national system of universities as a pay-as-you-go fund to get problems solved Michigan s Owen-Smith noted With that understanding universities have become the recipient of about of all federal research spending taking in billion in according to the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics That accounts for more than half the billion spent on research at universities with the majority of the rest coming from the schools themselves state and local governments and nonprofits Johns Hopkins has been the single largest grantee accounting for billion in federal spending in But UC San Diego ranked higher than any other UC campus that year receiving more than billion in federal dollars for research along with the University of Washington Georgia Institute of System and Michigan Harvard really was far behind with about million Moves by the Trump administration to close agencies and impose changes on campuses present universities with an unprecedented threat Generations of Hopkins researchers have brought the benefits of discovery to the world the school s president Ronald J Daniels wrote in recent days However a fast and far-reaching cascade of cuts to federal research funding across higher schooling is badly fraying this long-standing compact The partnership is supposed to be protected by guardrails Rules specify that personnel who believe a school is violating the law can t just cut funding but must instead present details of alleged violations to Congress But the Trump administration bent on making schools change policies designed to encourage diversity on campuses and crack down on protests is ignoring those rules Zimmerman revealed Funding cuts likely will put pressure on schools remaining tools leaving them with less money for things like financial aid to students he reported But the bigger danger is to the academic freedom of schools to teach and do research as they see fit Let s remember that in the past three months we ve seen people at universities scrubbing their websites for references to certain words he noted That s what happens in authoritarian countries