Going after higher education

What's going on at NIH isn't new and it isn't isolated

Last week, the Trump administration announced that the National Institutes of Health would dramatically reduce “indirect costs” paid to universities. Just on its face, this sounds kind of wonky and in-the-weeds, but would have an enormous effect both on health care and on higher education. And it’s just the latest front in an ongoing conservative populist campaign against colleges and universities.

Now, just off the bat, let’s note that it’s really not clear whether these cuts will actually happen. It’s Trump’s style, and that of his appointees, to make it seem like they can just dictate massive changes in federal institutions, but this is generally not the case. It’s also not yet clear whether this cut, even if it survives considerable court challenges, would just affect future grants, or current ones as well.

But the effect it would have would be dramatic. Most external grants for university research have what are called “indirect costs” built into them. These indirect costs are, at least in theory, money given to the university for administering the grant, maintaining the lab space, and providing other sorts of overhead that make research possible. And that can be a fair amount of money, sometimes amounting to 50-70 percent of the initial cost of the grant. In other words, if I’m applying for a federal grant to do $10,000 worth of research, I’m probably adding another $5,000 or so onto the proposal, and that money goes to my university.

This, it turns out, is a massive source of funding for American universities. And the new rule that NIH is issuing would cap those indirect costs at 15 percent. This would dramatically slash funding for many research schools, specifically those with programs focusing on medical research. And it’s rightly causing a great deal of pushback. As Mark Becker, president of the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, said,

NIH slashing the reimbursement of research costs will slow and limit medical breakthroughs that cure cancer and address chronic diseases such as diabetes and heart disease. Let there be no mistake: this is a direct and massive cut to lifesaving medical research.

But this change is not out of the blue and is not isolated. The Trump administration is already demanding massive changes to grants from the National Science Foundation to remove references to DEI priorities, and it’s possible indirect costs could be capped or grants otherwise limited there, as well.

Beyond this, these changes mark just the latest front in a longstanding conservative populist war on higher education. We saw some of this last year when congressional Republicans sought to make an example of several prominent women in charge of elite universities because of their campus protest policies, and they succeeded in getting several of them removed from office. We saw this earlier when Republican leaders in several states led efforts to end tenure and reduce public funding for universities.

Universities have long been in the crosshairs of conservative populism, going back at least to Vice President Spiro Agnew’s 1969 diatribe, “The student now goes to college to proclaim rather than to learn. A spirit of national masochism prevails, encouraged by an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.” Populism in general expresses an outrage toward “elites,” but the conservative variant of it intentionally avoids references to concentrated wealth or political power; their version of elites are entertainers, legacy media, and university professors.

As I wrote here, if you were to make a list of the United States’ most significant contributions to the world, our higher education system would have to be somewhere near the top. According to U.S. News’ rankings, of the top 20 universities around the world, 14 are American. As a result, the U.S. dominates Nobel Prizes and other scholarly achievements, while it educates tens of millions of students annually. Typically, about a million students per year come from other countries to attend American colleges and universities. Those on student visas largely return to their home countries, spreading the knowledge and values they learn here. It remains remarkable to me that this is not more widely celebrated, no less that it is attacked.

Universities already have a difficult time maintaining such research commitments due to declining support from state governments and increased overhead expenses. The NIH move would dramatically impact not only life-saving research, but also the ability of universities do be the leaders in the world in research and, for many, to even keep their doors open.

I’ll note that this NIH change is one of many Trump administration moves focused on what seems like a fairly obscure part of federal spending that could actually have enormous consequences throughout the country but are initially hard to explain to people. I honestly don’t know the best messaging to use for a situation like this, and I’m sure my own job as a university professor biases me to some extent here. But if you value both medical research and the U.S.’s role as a world leader in education and scholarship, this seems an enormously consequential moment.