1. Emphasize personal interactions. You are an AI-proof product. Give exciting and interesting lectures that students actually want to come to. Host fun and engaging office hours. Design the course so that if students don’t show up, engage, and work, they will clearly fall behind and get a bad grade. Make sure your students know you care about them as people and are trying to help them gain skills and develop maturity.

2. Grade hard. Show the students that you take your course seriously by making it demanding and avoiding grade inflation. I think a B+ average is a good target (that counts as grading hard now!). Having to work to get an A, feeling the danger of failing, and having a robust sense of competition for top grades make your course a fun adventure for students.

3. Use as much active learning in class as possible. For example, intersperse short (~5 minute) mini-lectures with longer (~10 minute) small group work.

4. If AI teaching packages get good, assign modules using them as homework for developing basic skills. Assume students have mastered basic skills at home and use class time to teach advanced skills.

5. Do some evaluations (or whole courses) with no AI-capable devices at all. For example, in-class tests with only a writing implement or oral examinations.

6. Do some evaluations (or whole courses) that allow and assume full use of AI. I’ve found that I can assign coding and data analysis as undergraduate final projects that used to take graduate students several months of devoted time. The undergrads just use Claude to get the technical stuff working, then focus on trying to understand the results. Make sure you couple an assignment like this with at least a 15 minute oral examination. Read the student’s project before the examination and write down some probing questions that they could only answer if they actually understood what’s in the project. Be ruthless about failing students who don’t have any idea about what they handed in.

In the 2022 documentary What Is a Woman?, conservative commentator Matt Walsh interviews Patrick Grzanka, a psychologist and women’s studies professor at the University of Tennessee. During the exchange, Grzanka says he feels “really uncomfortable with [the] language of, like, getting to the truth.” Pressed on the point, he adds that Walsh’s attempt to determine the truth sounds “deeply transphobic,” and that even invoking the idea is “condescending and rude.”

Statements like these illustrate a broader shift in parts of contemporary academia. The suggestion that seeking truth might itself be objectionable stands in tension with the traditional understanding of what universities are for. Institutions of higher learning have long defended controversial speech by professors on the grounds that open inquiry—even when it produces uncomfortable ideas—is essential to scholarship.

In late 2023, however, UT did not merely defend Grzanka’s right to speak freely. The university selected him as the inaugural dean of social sciences.

It is difficult to know how much influence the university’s governing board had over that decision. What the episode does reveal is a deeper structural problem in public higher education: governing boards often lack either the authority or the resolve to intervene in major institutional decisions. In practice, universities can become insulated from meaningful oversight. Appeals to “shared governance” and “faculty autonomy” frequently shield internal decision-making from external scrutiny, even though public universities ultimately operate with taxpayer support.

The Manhattan Institute has argued that states should address this imbalance by strengthening the role of trustees. Legislatures can do so by clarifying the powers of governing boards and encouraging them to exercise responsibilities they already possess under existing law. Trustees should have a greater role in reviewing faculty hiring decisions, supervising administrative leadership, and ensuring that core curricular requirements serve legitimate educational purposes. Such changes would depart from prevailing norms of shared governance, but they may be necessary to restore accountability.

To that end, my colleagues John Sailer and Tal Fortgang have drafted model legislation aimed at reforming university governance. The proposal requires governing boards to evaluate and approve general-education requirements on a regular basis. The objective is to confirm that required courses provide meaningful intellectual foundations, encourage civic understanding, and merit public resources. Because faculty hiring shapes the direction of academic programs, tenure-track job postings would also require board approval after public notice. Senior university leaders would undergo periodic public review as well, including scrutiny of their credentials and their commitment to fostering civic learning and engagement with diverse viewpoints. Texas adopted several reforms along these lines with the passage of Senate Bill 37 last year.

The legislation would also introduce greater transparency into faculty governance. Faculty senates would continue to provide advice on academic matters, but their authority would be formally limited to an advisory role. The proposal would regulate their membership, funding, and procedures while requiring greater openness in discussions involving curriculum and senior leadership decisions. Faculty expertise remains essential to the academic enterprise, and their input should be taken seriously. Still, the ultimate responsibility for ensuring that public universities serve the interests of citizens rests with boards that are publicly accountable.

In fact, many governing boards already possess sweeping authority under state law—which powers have often been left unused. The Georgia Constitution, for example, assigns the Board of Regents responsibility for the “government, control, and management of the University System of Georgia,” language widely understood to include curricular oversight and faculty employment decisions. Likewise, the legislation that established the University of Virginia granted its Board of Visitors the authority “to appoint and remove Professors.” In many cases, therefore, reform would simply mean encouraging boards to exercise powers that already exist.

Greater trustee involvement would help reestablish the fundamental bargain underlying public higher ed. Taxpayers fund universities with the expectation that they will educate citizens, cultivate knowledge, and prepare students to contribute productively to society. Transparent governance and publicly accountable leadership are necessary to uphold that promise.

Critics of these proposals will likely contend that stronger trustee oversight threatens academic freedom. But that concern rests on an overly simple view of how academic freedom operates. While faculty self-governance can sometimes support intellectual independence, it can also create conditions that restrict it.

Historically, the concept of academic freedom has contained two related but distinct elements. One concerns the rights of individual scholars to research, teach, and express their views without interference. The other concerns the collective authority of the academic profession to define standards and priorities within scholarly disciplines. Both ideas have deep roots in the history of universities, and advocates of faculty governance often emphasize the second interpretation.

The appeal of faculty control is understandable. The model is designed to insulate universities from censorship or political pressure. In many respects it reflects a principle similar to subsidiarity, the idea that decisions should be made by those closest to the relevant expertise. Faculty members possess specialized knowledge in their fields and thus have a natural interest in advancing scholarship. By contrast, outside actors such as politicians or donors may pursue objectives unrelated to intellectual inquiry. Granting universities substantial autonomy has therefore been seen as a safeguard against ideological interference from outside the institution.

For these reasons, faculty governance became an influential norm in American higher education. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP), in its 1994 statement “On the Relationship of Faculty Governance to Academic Freedom,” argued that “allocation of authority to the faculty in the areas of its responsibility is a necessary condition for the protection of academic freedom within the institution. The protection of free expression takes many forms, but the issue emerges most clearly in the case of authority over faculty status.”

Yet the success of this system depends heavily on the intellectual culture of the faculty itself. When faculty members remain committed to open inquiry, shared governance can function well. But when ideological conformity takes hold, collective authority can be used to marginalize dissenting views. In such circumstances, faculty governance can become a mechanism for enforcing orthodoxy rather than protecting academic freedom. The growing role of diversity statements in hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions illustrates this risk—an approach that the AAUP has supported when implemented through faculty governance structures.

Public oversight through governing boards can provide an important corrective. When universities become dominated by ideological trends, the justification for leaving authority entirely in faculty hands becomes weaker. Closed systems of self-governance often struggle to reform themselves. In those cases, outside accountability may be necessary to restore balance.

Universities, like other institutions in a democratic society, function best when power is distributed rather than concentrated. Different groups—faculty, administrators, trustees, and the public—should each play a role in maintaining the institution’s mission. Over time, however, many universities have shifted heavily toward administrative autonomy. This concentration of authority has contributed to the political controversies that frequently erupt on campuses today.

Rebalancing governance by strengthening trustee oversight would not eliminate those conflicts entirely. But it would make public universities more transparent and accountable to the citizens who sustain them. In doing so, it would help ensure that these institutions continue to serve their basic purpose: the pursuit of knowledge and the education of future generations.

Given1 everything we now know about institutional inertia, bureaucratic constraints, faculty governance, accreditation capture, federal funding streams, and political realities, is meaningful reform of existing universities even possible? Some very serious thinkers (Peter Thiel and Jordan Peterson, among others) have concluded that the answer is no. In this view, the only realistic path is to build entirely new institutions from scratch. Others believe that a combination of legislative action, donor leverage, regental authority, and new centers can still move the needle. What is your stance on this?

Before elaborating, here is a short summary of my answer.

The probability that universities can reform themselves from within, in the absence of powerful external pressure, is very close to zero.

External pressure by local governments can be successful, despite enormous internal resistance, in creating islands of excellence within public universities, as is the case with the Center for Intellectual Freedom (CIF) here at the University of Iowa, or the Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida, and a few other examples, all in red or purple states. Insofar as these new centers are viewed as unacceptable intrusions within the bodies of their universities, they remain highly vulnerable to the vagaries of local political trends.

Relentless pressure from a reform-oriented federal government may, in principle, have a large impact over a long period of time, unfortunately a lot longer than typical election cycles. Thus, everything that is now being pushed by the current administration can be reversed by a new democratic Congress or a new President inimical to reform.

People who have seriously thought about the state of our universities are not only skeptical about the possibility of reform from within, but are also pessimistic even about the possibility of creating successful new universities.2 Peter Thiel, for example, believes that the expenses involved are extremely high and the odds for success too small in the current, entrenched cultural environment, hostile as it is to western-centered notions of value and merit and inimical to the ideals of the US founders and more broadly to those we call “Western Civilization.” Though the reasons for this situation are complex, the result is a vicious cycle which is depressingly simple to describe.3

The feedback-elite producing mechanism-by which the elite universities educate those who will later have an immeasurable impact back on them through grants, legal mandates, civil rights legislation, donations, or as woke educators of the next generations of students, may well provide the best explanation for why the woke disease is spreading so fast, and not only in universities but in all important US institutions.

I am sorry if my assessment appears too pessimistic. My intention is not to discourage people from trying, far from it since I consider myself firmly in the camp of reformers, but rather to draw attention to the enormous obstacles we face.

Corruption of the traditional understanding of the mission of the universities

To understand the obstacles for reform you must first understand how the mission of American universities has been corrupted in the first place. This is a long story which has been brilliantly tackled by my colleagues I. Marinovic and Z. Patterson.

They gave us excellent analyses of how Enlightenment ideals, centered around faith in reason and science, inherent individual rights and skepticism towards tradition and religion, have ultimately devolved into the present belief system based on hard-core materialism and its ideological derivatives: Marxism, neo-Marxism, deconstructionism, anti-Westernism, and anti-capitalistism that shape the belief system of our intellectual elites. As in Berlioz’s “Symphony Fantastique” what started as a romantic dream about the ability of humans to improve their condition through reason has transmogrified into a witches’ sabbath of kooky beliefs, sold to the public in the name of “Social Justice.”

Below are a few reflections of my own4 of how this belief system manifests itself in the modern universities.

As many have pointed out, the most ubiquitous form of corruption of our universities is manifest in the acronym DEI and the uniquely destructive bureaucratic institution created to pursue and defend the ideology encoded by the deceptively friendly words Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

DEI is, by design, opposed to individual merit as the only admissible criteria of selection, hiring, and promotion and is, by necessity, inimical to free speech, institutional neutrality, nonviolence, and viewpoint diversity. These are all self-evident within the framework of the traditional foundational goals of the University- uncompromising dedication to Truth and pursuit of wisdom-but treated with suspicion by current university administrations. DEI has eroded these goals by demands made in the name of Social Justice (SJ), at variance with the traditional telos.

As direct forms of discrimination against minorities are now virtually non-existent in academia, discrimination has been redefined in terms of implicit bias, that is an invisible, structural form of bigotry that is suddenly everywhere. Like witchcraft, this form of prejudice cannot be directly measured, but it surely manifests through its harmful results. As Inquisition was once needed to combat witchcraft and other ideological deviances, the immense DEI bureaucracy had to be created to combat this terrible disease. Once Justice was reformulated in terms of equality of results rather than color-blind, measurable, notions of individual performance, it became untenable to insist on merit and the pursuit of Truth; they had to be abandoned or redefined whenever they came into conflict with the new orthodoxy.

Little by little entire departments, especially in humanities and social sciences, became populated by people selected less on academic credentials and more on thinly disguised quotas required by DEI. When the process of change was deemed too slow, entire new programs and departments were created whose most obvious mission appears to be that of advancing the ideology of DEI and creating its future elite cadres, particularly those who populate the ever-increasing university administrations. Once you have created enough woke tenured faculty and legions of woke administrators it becomes close to impossible to reverse the trend.

As everybody but Eisgruber (the president of my university) knows, the telos of the modern university is no longer the search for Truth, wherever it leads, through the promotion of excellence and individual merit. It is instead something else altogether, a tenuous compromise between that old telos and pursuit of social justice through the mantra of DEI.

Not all disciplines are equally affected by the woke disease; in fact, our elite institutions continue to be unmatched in Science and Engineering. The degree of infection of a particular academic discipline appears to be inversely proportional to the level of its mathematical sophistication. The STEM disciplines are thus least affected and among social sciences, economic and business departments appear less compromised than sociology, anthropology or history departments. This pattern appears also to correlate with political orientation. Thus, according to Langbert (2018), the D/R ratio varies from around 5.5 and 6.3 in professional schools and the hard sciences to 31.9 in humanities and 108 in what are called interdisciplinary studies (such as Gender, Black and Peace studies). There is also a factor of 3 difference between the corresponding ratios for women and men faculty, consistent with the higher proportion of women represented in social sciences and humanities.

Humanities, the core of a liberal arts education, are now terminally infected by various versions of neo-Marxist, deconstructionist, anti-colonialist critical theories. While it may appear that the relatively healthy state of STEM disciplines is enough to assuage the worst fears about the state of our universities, I hold that in fact the opposite is true. A healthy liberal arts education is ultimately more important to the health of the entire society, and thus indirectly to the STEM disciplines themselves, than the relatively benign, present state of STEM. The reasons for this are clear, for a society may still prosper without being dominant in the sciences and technology but cannot survive if its cultural institutions are compromised by an ideology which attacks its core foundations. It suffices to point out that STEM majors rarely become journalists, cultural figures, politicians, heads of unions, business leaders or leaders of any other important opinion shaping or decision-making institutions.

Main obstacles to reform

I give below a litany of all the obstacles to reform that I can think of. Most of them are ideological, based on the dominant beliefs of the academic and intellectual classes. The others are based on economic or legal factors.

Political ineffectiveness of conservative principles

The problem of reforming our universities is mainly one of restoration of the old conservative principles that used to govern them. It can thus be framed in the broader context of the conflict between the progressive ideology of the Left and the reactionary conservatism of the Right.

Alas, the Left has an important structural advantage in its debate with conservative ideas, that is those anchored in America’s founding principles- individual civil liberties, limited government, and the rule of law. Conservatives, who have a visceral understanding of the inherent conflict between the basic human aspirations for freedom, justice and equality, personal security, self-expression, spirituality, or the rights of the individual versus societal cohesion, are in the difficult position of having to find the right balance between them, which appear, inevitably, as uninspiring compromises.

This leaves them vulnerable to attacks from the Left which, is, or pretends to be, intolerant of any societal imperfections. The Left vehemently insists that this or that form of inequality is unacceptable and never bothers to explain how its vision of more equality is not incompatible with freedom, or how extensive individual freedoms for some do not interfere with the freedom or personal safety of others.

American conservatives are thus perpetually on the defensive, in the difficult position of explaining the complex abstract ideas of separation of powers, restrained governments, personal responsibility, etc., while the Left insists that these contribute to the specific suffering of concrete groups of human beings. The Left appeals very effectively to emotions, professes to act on behalf of an ever-expanding definition of human rights, and is constantly on the offensive. Conservative often cave in to the onslaught, which renders them politically ineffective.

The problem with academic freedom

To restore our universities to their former telos, DEI must be abolished, yet there is no internal mechanism within our universities that can push for this: there are simply too many tenured professors and bureaucrats who owe their positions to DEI. Not just woke professors who defend the status quo would have to be fired to get rid of DEI, but entire academic disciplines would have to be abolished. Not surprisingly, those who oppose such measures invoke academic freedom in their defense, and here is the rub: how can we, reformers, justify measures that go against the common understanding of academic freedom, something crucial to the very telos we want to affirm and defend? The problem is that academic freedom (AF) is essential to a well-functioning university but a huge impediment to reform of a corrupted one. Yet, unfortunately, the juxtaposition of these two beloved words, academic and freedom, are used as a mantra by both reformers and defenders of the status quo and few have made a serious effort to clarify their meaning and explain their obvious conflict. AF is used to defend all possible aberrations of the modern university and is often confused with the far more extensive notion of free speech.

Elite, woke producing, feedback mechanism

As I have mentioned above, modern universities are at the center of a vicious cycle by which they educate generations of woke leaders who, once they achieve positions of power, are able to steer their alma maters and the entire society further away from their traditional goals and values.

There is plenty of evidence that universities have indeed moved way to the Left, but nowhere is this more evident than in the humanities, which are now terminally infected by various radical versions of anti-western, anti-capitalist, anti-science, deconstructionist critical theories. The STEM disciplines are less affected, yet this is of relatively little consequence to the feed-back mechanism since STEM majors rarely become influential in shaping the cultural and political course of the country.

Lack of autonomy and uniformity

Universities, whether state or private, have gradually become less autonomous. This is due primarily to state and federal mandates, misinterpreted civil rights legislation, certification, large infusion of money through grants and donations, etc. This dependence on external factors explains the current paradox that, despite the competitive spirit of the US economy, almost all universities look alike. You would hope that if one gets mired in Social Justice policies another one would get a competitive advantage by doubling down on excellence and merit, but this is not happening.

Unreasonable university expansion and tenure

The original concept of the university system was to provide an elite education for a relatively low number of highly motivated students. That is certainly not the case today. Thus 39% of young adults (ages 18-24) were enrolled in college in 2022, while roughly 62% of recent high school graduates went straight to college that year. This, of course, led to an expansion of both the professoriate and administrative bureaucracy. It has also led to lower standards, lack of adequate job prospects for graduates and loss of institutional prestige.

Peter Thiel compares the present situation of our universities with that of a large metropolis, claiming that they are both examples of diabolic, immortal, creatures, too large and indispensable to fail despite their permanent state of corruption and dysfunction. As such, Thiel argues, they can indefinitely resist demands for change.

Any serious reform would require a serious retrenchment of the size of universities. US businesses are well equipped to do that by job cuts, something inconceivable in the modern university system due to its tenure policies. Tenure is justified on the basis that it ensures freedom to pursue uncharted and political risky avenues of research and scholarship. But, just as large endowments have not prevented universities from becoming less intellectually diverse, tenure has not had much effect on making the professoriate, arguably the most privileged class of individuals in our society, less risk-averse.

Though there are a few cases when courageous individuals have publicly supported unpopular causes, most professors, freed from worrying about their employment by tenure, are still too mindful about their careers or reputation to take controversial positions. Moreover, even though tenure provides protection for professors who betray the mission of the university through shoddy scholarship, faulty data, plagiarism, or inadmissible political activism and indoctrination in the classroom, it has not helped, at least in some notable cases, individuals whose heterodox opinions displeased their employers.

Contrary to common opinion, I believe that tenure incentivizes junior faculty to play it safe and pursue low risk directions which they believe will get them tenure. Once they have tenure, most continue, by inertia or in expectation of promotions, to play it safe.

Dismal state of the elementary educational system

No serious, sustainable, reform of higher learning will be possible without a major overhaul of the K-12 educational system. Indeed, tomorrow’s college students are educated, or rather ill-educated, today by recent, poorly educated, graduates of our universities-another sad aspect of the elite producing feedback mechanism mentioned above. The direct culprits in this sorry situation are schools of education, teacher’s unions, and accreditation mafia, all seriously infected by Wokeism and incompetence, but ultimately this is a systemic failure of our entire educational system.

Conclusion

Back to the main theme of this article - can universities be reformed? Count me a pessimist, if you think that this could be done by internal reforms, as many well intentioned, but rather naive colleagues believe is still possible. To use the crude cancer analogy, an organism affected by a rapidly spreading cancer does not get any better without massive intervention by surgery, chemical and radiation treatment or by less-intrusive immunotherapy treatments.

A better analogy5, given the ideological nature of the disease, is the process of denazification pursued by the occupying powers of West Germany after World War II. This was in fact a process of restoration, in that, once the cadres of the Nazi regime were purged and a new constitution was adopted, the country recovered its sovereignty, that is, the freedom to shape its own destiny.

Can such a process take place within our university system? I am a skeptic hoping to be proved wrong. The fundamental difficulty is that the process cannot be localized to the university system itself, but, just as in the case of denazification, it must be extended to the full cultural environment of the country. This is, of course, where the comparison breaks down, for there is no authority such as the Allied Control Council in Germany between 1945 and 1949, to impose something akin to denazification.

In the absence of such an authority there remains the hope that, given appropriate leadership, and sufficient time, conservatives could replicate the extraordinarily successful march through the institutions achieved by the progressive Left in the last 75 years. This can only be done by pursuing every possible means, including legislative and judicial action, donor leverage, regental authority, the creation of centers of excellence, new universities, new academies, new cultural institutions, new media, or the use of technology, such as AI, to decentralize the elementary educational system and make it more responsive to parents. There are signs, such as this very event of the opening of the Center for Intellectual Freedom here in Iowa, that such a process is already taking place. Among other such developments one can mention the experiment going on at the University of Austin, the new American Academy of Sciences and Letters, or the remarkable success of The Free Press, as an example of the new media. ​The dysfunction is global, requiring an ​“all of the above approach.”

As more people of good faith and moral courage are fed up with the current pathologies of our cultural and educational elites and take steps to fight them, not only by demonstrating the intellectual superiority of conservative ideas but also, through effective organization and political action, I see no reason why such a process could not eventually succeed, hopefully in less time that it took the Left to achieve its present dominance of the cultural space.

Now, seventy-five years and roughly a trillion dollars of federal disbursements later, the results of the experiment are in. By any objective measure, federalizing the academic sciences has been a failure. Instead of fertilizing discovery as intended, federal spending has mostly fed the growth of a network of hangers-on and rent-seekers - universities, funding agencies, an increasingly monolithic academic publishing industry, and of course, politicians. These now constitute an effective Big Science Cartel, that trades, not in cocaine or soybeans, but in federal research dollars. It is their interests, not the interests of science or scientists, that now run the show. To quote that Somali pirate in the movie Captain Phillips, “I am the captain now.” Scientists are no longer explorers of science’s endless frontier. Rather, they serve the cartel, and their job is now to keep the cash flowing in. Do that and (again to quote the Somali pirate), “nobody gets hurt.” Don’t, and … well, you know.

The Trump administration’s recent actions on federal research spending, whether one is in favor or opposed, has forced scientists to confront a difficult and long-neglected question. Do we continue funding the experiment, to the tune of about $100 billion in 2024? Or do we admit that the experiment has failed and pull the plug? Overwhelmingly, the science ecosystem is opposed, strenuously. This is the illusion of the status quo talking. In reality, science has become so dependent upon federal funding that it is impossible for most scientists to imagine a life without it. But where science once could count on public trust to support the illusion, that trust has been squandered, on multiple fronts and for multiple reasons.

It’s time for science and scientists to come face-to-face with the uncomfortable conclusion that federalizing basic science has inflicted net harm on the intellectual adventure that basic science is meant to be. Instead, university scientists have been reduced to being turnkeys for the spigots of federal research dollars that keep the Big Science Cartel in place. Keep the money coming, and you are safe. “Go rogue” and pursue questions that don’t keep those money gushers flowing, and your career will not be a pleasant one.

Are scientists really happy with being merely generators of revenue? My conversations with colleagues indicate that they are not. The three-year grants funding cycle has been compared to a “grants treadmill”, a never ending scramble for money that leaves little energy and time for the creative thought that basic science demands. What about the army of administrators and grant consultants who think that you, the scientists, work for them, rather than the other way round? Or the continual emphasis on “grantsmanship” as an essential academic skill, over expertise, mastery, and originality? Or the absurd metrics of scientific “productivity” that scientific careers are now measured by? My sense is that the discontent is widespread, but there is little sense of how to resolve it. Some choose “incentivized dishonesty.” To quote an anonymous colleague:

I will lie about my most deeply held beliefs or convictions on paper in order to get funding.

Others choose to just keep their heads down until retirement age, in the increasingly vain hope they will be allowed to just “do science”, unnoticed and unmolested . Again, are we scientists really happy with the state of science in the modern academy?

The trouble is that there is no clear path to liberation of basic science from the grips of the Big Science Cartel. How do we go from $100 billion of the federal funding that has enslaved us to zero? What happens to science if the National Science Foundation is closed? Or when the extramural research programs of numerous federal agencies (the NIH foremost among them) are shuttered? Can we even imagine a time when science prospered without federal subsidy?

At the National Association of Scholars, we have been mapping out a long-term plan to do just that. Our report, Rescuing Science: Recovering Science as Civic Virtue lays out a viable rescue plan. It begins with laying out the history of the relationship of the federal government with science, which lets us see that there was a flourishing culture of science before the academic sciences were federalized.

We go on to outline a series of political and cultural reforms to gradually disentangle basic science from the suffocating grip of the Big Science Cartel. Some of these reforms are immediate, such as dismantling the indirect costs flim-flammery that has been much in the news lately. Some are longer-term reforms of the mechanics of grant funding and support of graduate student education. These include funding scientists, not institutions, making support mobile so that funds follow the scientist and student. Others are intended to restore basic science to its traditional sources of institutional and philanthropic support, which are better suited to the fluid, ad hoc, and opportunistic nature of basic research than the sclerotic and bureaucratic infrastructure of federal research agencies. Others restore, either partially or completely, decisions about research priorities and funding allocations back to scientists themselves, rather than with essentially political imperatives set by the national science agencies.

These reforms are not intended to inflict pain, although they inevitably will. So too does the status quo, including the smothering of the flickering remnant of the ethic of discovery that prevailed prior to World War II and that made American science the envy of the world. Scientific discovery is still happening, some of it brilliant, some of it in the endless frontier’s backwaters. The aim of our proposed reforms is to fan that flickering ember back into the flame it should be.

Only scientists can do that, and they will do so by seizing control of their professions back. The only question before all is whether scientists are willing to embrace their liberation?

J Scott Turner is Director of Science Programs at the National Association of Scholars.

[Sujatha Srinivasan, Host]: This is “Where We Live” from Connecticut Public Radio. I’m Sujatha Srinivasan in for Catherine Shen.

Last year, the National Institutes of Health cut more than $3 billion of funding for medical research across the country. Congress is now working to undo those cuts before a January 30th deadline. But for many, the damage is done. Grants were cut, frozen or delayed.

In Connecticut, UConn lost $41 million from grant terminations and non-renewals. And as of January, federal actions have resulted in more than $26 million of research funding lost at Yale. Today, we hear how these cuts are impacting the future of medical research.

Joining us now is Rob Stein. He’s a correspondent and senior editor on NPR’s Science Desk. Rob, thanks for being with us today.

[Rob Stein, NPR Science Reporter]: Well, thanks for having me.

[Host] Also with us is Professor Evan Morris with the Yale School of Medicine. His research was impacted by the federal cuts and delays. Professor Morris, it’s a pleasure to have you on Where We Live.

[Evan Morris, Yale Professor] Thanks for having me.

[Host] Rob, we are talking about federal funding cuts for medical research. What are you hearing from researchers around the country?

[Reporter]: Well, I guess I would characterize the past year as incredibly tumultuous, and in many ways traumatic for many researchers around the country. I mean, they’ve gone through something unprecedented when it comes to federal funding for scientific research.

As you mentioned, billions of [dollars in] grants were terminated, cut, then restored, then terminated again, and it’s just been a chaotic year for scientific research, making it very difficult for a lot of projects to continue and making the future very uncertain. So, I think people are really kind of traumatized by this past year.

[Host]: And as you mentioned, Rob, first there was a funding cut and then [grants were] frozen and then [there were] delays in grants and then changes [in awards were] introduced. We’re going to get to that in a bit. But there’s been a lot of flip flopping with the cuts and Congress stepping in to potentially undo them.

What are the politics behind all this? Where do President Trump and Health Secretary Robert Kennedy want to take the NIH?

[Reporter]: They have made it pretty clear that they think the system is broken in many ways and that they need to fix it. They feel like a lot of the priorities of the scientific establishment have been misplaced and they feel like they need to step in and have a reset. Reset the kinds of research that are funded, the priorities for scientific research, everything about it, how grants are judged and approved or not.

There’s been an overlay of judging research based on whether [the proposal] has any involvement in DEI. It has become a sort of litmus test for [funding] that is still ongoing. Researchers, and even a lot of grant makers, are constantly having to read the tea leaves and try to navigate a new terrain to avoid a forbidden list of words in [writing] scientific grants.

[Host] And talking about reading the tea leaves, Professor Morris, how have you been reading the tea leaves these last several months?

[Professor] Frankly, I’d be happy if I had some tea leaves to read.

There’s just been such great uncertainty that it makes it impossible for people to plan. You mentioned delays in funding, which have affected me and we can talk about, but there has even been confusion in the messages being sent from NIH, which is my primary funder. I can’t make decisions.

[Host] (NIH Director) Jay Bhattacharya recently was talking about how hard it has been to get scientists on board. I was listening to that with some interest. Thinking about all the unexpected and sudden shifts, e.g., to the clampdown on indirect costs, to shift to multi-year grants. Could you explain that in a sort of fireside chat to people who are not familiar with how this works on the inside? What are these changes?

[Professor] Sure. If I can.

You mentioned some of the critical ones. Indirect rates, you’ve probably talked about before. Indirect costs are the monies that don’t come to me in a grant, but go to the institution. People like to say, “to keep the lights on”, but that’s too much of a simplification.

They go to all sorts of infrastructure that we need but that cannot be charged to my particular grant, which is configured to study and answer a very narrow question. So that’s an uncertainty at the university level, which filters down to the researchers.

Let’s see, what else did you mention?

[Host] The multi-year grants. Even should Congress overturn the cuts, which would require the full House, Senate, and President to sign, it sounds as if multi-year grants, are here to stay.

What are multi-year grants? How are they going to affect researchers? Why are researchers so concerned?

[Professor] Right.

Normally, let’s say I apply for a five-year grant and it is awarded. I’m only given a year of the money I requested at a time. That enables lots of others whose budgets need to be funded that year to get the money they need.

If, on the other hand, NIH goes to a lot of multi-year funding, it means giving me all five years of the money I’ve asked for at one time. But just simple arithmetic says that four other people won’t get funded this year at all.

Multi-year funding is not entirely unprecedented. I’ve had two-year grants before, and to save on bureaucracy, the government has given me the money for both years at the same time. But those were small and it wasn’t a wide-spread practice. This sounds like a significant change, which would, as most of us fear, mean that far fewer people, certainly in the beginning, have any money at all to work with.

[Host] Tell me about your life’s work.

You’ve dedicated, as I understand, just at Yale alone, more than 17 years. But what is it that you do that makes you get out of bed in the morning and excited to say, “this is the difference that my work makes in this world?” What do you do?

[Professor] Well, that’s a tall order. I’m not sure that I can claim to make that much of a difference, except on the local level.

But I’ll tell you what I do and what I really enjoy doing. What I do first. I’m a biomedical engineer by training, and I’m a professor of biomedical imaging, which means two things for me. One, my students and postdocs and other people who work for me develop new algorithms, new methods, new mathematical models to understand medical images, most of which, for me, are images of the brain.

And second, we also apply those algorithms to ask basic biological and medical questions. So that’s my gig.

What I really enjoy the most, which is related to this topic, is interacting with my students and postdocs. That’s very rewarding.

[Host] And you’ve studied the effect of stress on people with substance use disorder and drug craving. That’s a critical area of study given what’s been unfolding across our country for years now.

[Professor] Yes. My claim to fame, as it were, is that my colleagues and I have put people in the PET scanner and asked them to smoke cigarettes.

And during that smoking period, we have acquired brain images and analyzed those brain images to identify the particular response of the brain to the substance that a person is addicted to.

One of our interesting findings, for which we’re about to publish a replication study, is that the response in the brain of men to smoking their cigarette is different from the response of women to smoking their cigarette. Now, that could simply be taken as a sort of scientific oddity, but it does beg the question: “Well, if the brains of women and the brains of men respond differently to what they’re addicted to, maybe they’re actually different diseases, and maybe they need different treatments?”

So even though what I do is basic research, it has implications downstream for medical practice and treatments.

[Host] So where does your work stand now? Is it stalled? What about your people that work with you, researchers? Are they still on your payroll? How deeply have you been impacted?

[Professor] Yes, thanks for asking that. I have absolutely been impacted to the extent that I had to lay off one talented research scientist.

I still have at least three, four active funded projects. So, the layoff was not the result, in my case, of a grant being canceled, per se. It was merely the result of the funding being delayed for four months.

Unfortunately, during that period that the money was held up, I was in a position of having to sign a letter saying, “yes”, I have money for Sarah’s salary for next year. And I was unable to sign that letter. So, Sarah had to [leave and] make deals with other investigators.

That was a loss to me. And, it was a loss to the public because we have, as yet, not been able to publish the results that the public paid us to acquire and to report. And it’s a loss to the scientific community because nobody can yet build on what we’ve done.

[Host] I’m sorry to hear that. How much of your research funding actually does come from the federal government? Do you rely for the most part on the federal government?

[Professor] Yes, 100 percent of my funding at the moment [comes from NIH]. It’s not always been the case, but the great majority has always been from NIH.

And another important thing, if I could, that people have to understand is that a lot of people like me who work as professors and researchers at big research institutions are on what is called soft money. That means that we depend on those grants for the entirety of our salary, the salaries of all the people that work for us, and to fund the research itself.

So, when there’s no money coming in, there’s no money to spend. And even though large research institutions like our favorite one in New Haven have big endowments, that’s not money that I can access.

I don’t have a rainy day fund.

[Host] Rob, how would you respond to what we just heard from Professor Morris? He’s with Yale, one of the country’s largest institutions with a huge endowment. What about the smaller institutions across America? What are you hearing from them?

[Reporter] Yeah, I’m hearing a lot of despair, honestly, about the current state of affairs and about the future of the scientific enterprise in this country. I think it might be helpful to step back for a minute and remind everyone about how our scientific [research] system works.

It started after World War II when, essentially, the federal government made a grand bargain with academic institutions around the country that this is the way the United States would establish itself as the leader in scientific research around the world. The federal government would fund research institutions around the country, universities, and their research labs. And that built a great edifice that did[, in fact,] make the United States the scientific powerhouse of the world. And it fueled not just scientific discoveries, but it became a big economic engine. It led to vaccines, was the basis for the Internet, you name it.

But it was all predicated on trust that the federal government would be there to support the system into the future. Because the way science works, it takes a lot of time. You have to be able to plan for the future.

The big concern right now is that the trust in the system has been shattered.

And the question is, can it be rebuilt? People are not sure.

[Host] Rob, has anything like this ever happened [before] in the history of the NIH?

[Reporter] I don’t think so. It has been very unprecedented this past year.

I’ve been covering science for decades and I’ve never seen anything like it. The tumult, the chaos, the confusion, and the uncertainty are certainly unprecedented.

[Host] Congress appropriators are looking to overturn this. Can you walk us through the NIH budget for the coming year.

It looks like there’s been a direct rebuke to the Trump administration’s decision to clamp down on medical research. So, there has been some pushback. But how strong is it and how far can it go?

[Reporter] Yeah, it’s interesting.

The Trump administration had proposed a massive cut to HHS and to the NIH budget. But so far in Congress, as you mentioned, there’s been pushback. At the moment, not only is Congress not signing on to a giant cut in the NIH budget, it is proposing a slight increase in the NIH budget. [Understand,] the NIH budget has been increasing steadily for years now.

It’ll be interesting to see if that survives or not. You also mentioned the indirect costs issue.

That was an earthquake when the administration first proposed it. It came late on a Friday, suddenly out of the blue. And it was a shock. The indirect costs, as Professor Morris mentioned, keep the lights on.

And that is a simplification. But without the federal government supporting those indirect costs, research cannot continue. They pay for everything from keeping the lights on, to taking the trash out, to administrative costs.

[Host] That [cut] was stopped in the courts. And so far in Congress, there doesn’t seem to be any support for it. For the moment, the indirect cost system seems to have survived. And we’re going to have to see if that continues.

It’s back to looking at the tea leaves and we’re talking about uncertainty and we’re talking about years of work and advancement being put on hold.

But I’m concerned, as you are, Professor Morris, about the future of young academics looking to break into the profession. On the one hand, you have the immigration clampdown, the $100,000 H-1B visa fees that would affect universities like Yale. And then on the other hand, you have these NIH funding cuts. How concerned are you about their future?

[Professor] I’m very concerned about the system, and I’m glad that Rob reviewed where it came from.

To use a sports analogy, you can’t get a championship major league team without a good farm system, without an adequate pipeline of new players coming in. And my new star players come from all over the world.

And if those players who are potential stars, many of whom come and stay to be long-term contributors to the United States science community and economy, are deterred and/or recognize that there’s so much chaos in the United States that they should go elsewhere for their advanced training, they will and they’ll stay there. They’ll stay in China. They’ll stay in Singapore. They’ll stay in Australia.

And it’ll be a great loss to us.

So, two things are going to happen, I fear.

One is that the veteran players like me will retire earlier than we had planned. And, two, without those veteran players, there’ll be a shortage of mentors, and so the young players coming up will go elsewhere for training.

[Host] It’s not wholly unexpected, but put that way, it’s a pretty bleak picture for the future of medical research in our country.

Where do you see a silver lining? Does all of it rest in the hands of our politicians now?

[Professor] OK, let’s see if there is a silver lining. I am completely on board with the idea that the public, through its elected government, gets to periodically evaluate and re-evaluate priorities. That’s how a democracy should work.

To the extent that we scientists now recognize that, and have been put on notice that the public, through its elected politicians, is re-evaluating its priorities, it puts the onus on us to make the best case we can for what we do. Maybe we got a little lazy, thinking that there’d always be support for us. That’s not fair, and it’s not true to the public that funds us.

I have an obligation to explain myself because I have the privilege of working with federally funded grants. So, there’s the silver lining, perhaps.

[Host] It comes down to a functioning democracy, and at the heart of it is communication.

We have brilliant scientists across the country, but scientists are famously known to be very scientific in their conversations and perhaps above the heads of people who are not directly associated with the field and don’t quite know the answer to, “Wait a minute, what’s at stake here? Why should I care?”

So, in the meantime, how do you plan to continue your research, Professor Morris? How do you go to your lab and keep doing what you do?

[Professor] That’s a very good question, and I have to say that it’s become much more difficult.

I still have grants that are funded and will continue to work on them, and my colleagues and I are looking for alternative sources of funding. Although again, a lot of what I do is basic research. So, there isn’t necessarily a commercial market for it or an obvious funder other than the federal government.

I’d like to re-emphasize what Rob said, that this arrangement has worked wonderfully over the years. And notwithstanding the re-evaluating of priorities, we have gotten a lot for our massive investment, and there is no investor of the same magnitude as NIH for biomedical research.

I admit that was a little bit of a dodge of your question.

[Host] No, the essence is very clear. The heart of your message is very clear. From Connecticut Public Radio, this is “Where We Live”. I’m Sujata Srinivasan.

Evan Morris, professor at the Yale School of Medicine, thank you for being with us.

Interpersonal trust refers to the trust you have in people personally known to you. Generalized social trust is a broader measure from the WVS [World Values Survey], GSS [General Social Survey], and other surveys mentioned below that asks about people in general with the question: “Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you need to be very careful in dealing with people?”

Indeed, that precise survey question has been central to scholarly research on trust; other trust questions are used from time to time but that’s the main one, and it’s routinely treated as a measure of what’s frequently called generalized trust. But as we’ll see, that same question is also routinely treated as a measure of interpersonal trust by leading researchers in the field—entirely contradicting Nowrasteh’s claim that interpersonal trust refers to trust in people you know personally.

First, let’s start with Eric Uslaner, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, and a godfather of modern survey research into trust. In his most-cited paper (with a book of the same name), “The Moral Foundations of Trust,” with over 6600 citations, Uslaner writes:

The interpersonal trust question that has been so important in much research on social capital does reflect generalized trust.

I could just stop right there but let’s continue with the quote, which studies responses to the famous World Values Survey generalized trust question and other trust questions (italics and bold here and throughout added by me):

The Pew Center… asked people whether they trusted eight groups of people–and whether they trusted “most people.” I performed a factor analysis on these trust questions and found distinct dimensions for trust in strangers (people you meet on the street and people who work where you shop) and for friends and family (your family, your boss, and people at your workplace, your church, and your club). The standard interpersonal trust question loaded strongly on the trust in strangers dimension, but not at all with friends and family.

Uslaner not only treats the famous “most people can be trusted” question as a standard measure of interpersonal trust (contradicting Nowrasteh). Uslaner then rules out any link “at all” between that interpersonal trust question and trust in friends and family. A clear contradiction of Nowrasteh’s definition of interpersonal trust.

But, you might wonder, perhaps Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute wasn’t thinking about political scientists when thinking about the standard usage of the term “interpersonal trust.” Perhaps Nowrasteh was only thinking about how economists use the term. So let’s look at some papers co-authored by the economist best known for using the World Values Survey “most people can be trusted” question to study economic growth, World Bank economist Stephen Knack.

In Knack and Zak, “Building Trust: Public Policy, Interpersonal Trust and Economic Development,” (495 cites), interpersonal trust is right in the title. Do they use that term the way Nowrasteh does, to refer to “people personally known to you?” No, of course not. Here they mention statistical results involving interpersonal trust:

Our empirics show that education affects trust in three ways: by raising institutional quality (Table 1), by reducing inequality (Table 3), and directly raising interpersonal trust (Table 4).

And earlier in the paper, they note how Table 4 measures interpersonal trust:

In Table 4, the dependent variable is the percentage of a country’s respondents in the World Value Surveys (sic) who agree that “most people can be trusted.”

So Knack treats the famous World Values Survey trust question as a great way to measure interpersonal trust. Quite the opposite of what Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute claims.

In a far more famous paper, “Trust and Growth” (over 5000 cites), Knack and Zak run statistical tests where they “control for levels of interpersonal trust.” Do they control for a measure of trust in “people personally known to you,” as Nowrasteh would expect? Obviously not: they use the same World Values Survey measure.

The same thing happens in Knack and Keefer’s best-known paper in the trust and growth regression literature, a paper with over 20,000 citations, “Does social capital have an economic payoff? A cross-country investigation.” I won’t provide the relevant quotes here; you’ll just have to trust me on this one. These two trust and economic growth papers by Knack are, incidentally, cited in Nowrasteh’s trust paper published in Kyklos.

In these papers by two leaders in the field of trust research, economist Stephen Knack and political scientist Eric Uslaner, the “standard” trust question is used to measure interpersonal trust. At this point, there’s a clear conclusion: Whether or not Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute is personally known to you, you shouldn’t trust his definition of interpersonal trust.

Co-organized by University of Chicago professors Dorian Abbot, Harald Uhlig, Peggy Mason, and Rachel Fulton Brown, the Nov. 7 event featured spirited debates on contentious topics plaguing the academe.

“Each of the parasitic ideas, postmodernism, cultural relativism, social constructivism, radical feminism, they all have a similar original goal, which is to pursue some noble objective” — even if the cost is the “murder and rape” of truth, said Gad Saad, author of “The Parasitic Mind,” during a panel discussion.

Saad was joined by fellow academic compatriots Bryan Caplan, Amy Wax, Anna Krylov, Sally Satel, Garett Jones, and J. Michael Bailey, all of whom have previously expressed verboten views, sometimes incurring serious professional or personal consequences.

Covered topics ranged from Saad’s notion of suicidal empathy to Wax’s defense of bourgeois values to attempts by Bailey to better understand autogynephilia.

“The speakers are chosen specifically to address issues that are not being addressed on many campuses, thereby demonstrating the special intellectual atmosphere at the University of Chicago. Attendees will be electrified by the chance to openly discuss topics and consider perspectives they may never have been able to on campus,” Abbot wrote on the Heterodox STEM Substack.

And, with speakers and attendees alike, partially sequestered together under what Abbot jokingly referred to as “anti-Hotel California rules,” the event offered ample opportunity for those present to engage with one another in vibrant discourse without fear of cancellation.

During a panel discussion comprised of Saad, Caplan, Wax and Bailey, and largely focused on the role of the elites and their ideas in society, Caplan noted there is “this original great guilt about the treatment of black Americans and then there’s this hope that the Great Society and anti-discrimination laws are going to totally change that.”

However, Caplan added, when the changes brought about by these programs failed to meet expectations, those who favored them were left asking themselves “What’s going on?” and had to choose between a genetic story, a cultural story, or a “We didn’t do enough” story.

Wax, a University of Pennsylvania law professor, suggested there is an “equalitarian fetish [that] goes way back in the American character.”

“I think there is an obsession with everyone is equal, we need to make them all equal, equality is the most important value,” Wax said. “Therefore, if you blame someone or if you judge someone, you’re kind of creating this hierarchy. You’re looking down on people somehow, so it’s very unfashionable.”

Saad said, “I think the fetish…of equality is a form of [an] infantile sort of folk psychology, and that’s why in every generation you have new people that think socialism, if properly implemented, will be the good thing.”

When the discussion turned to matters related to immigration and the compatibility of non-Western cultures with Western ideals, Saad noted, “There is something to be said about whether certain ideologies, if they come into the West and take a foothold in the West, whether all of the beautiful virtues that we love will be allowed to flourish or not.”

Added Wax: “I think there is a toxic romanticism about cultural assimilation, the third world, the global south that is really, to me, inexplicable.”

“When, you know, students or other people tell me…magic dirt works, the minute [immigrants from such regions] hit the United States they’re going to become wonderful and believe in all of our … traditional Anglo-American values and be just like the founders and all this, I say, ‘Then why are their countries such a shit hole?’” Wax said.

“I know that’s not a nice thing to say,” she added. “But it is a good question.”

A separate panel officially made up of Krylov, Satel, and Jones, but often with additional input from Wax, discussed the precarious position in which universities now find themselves as they navigate student protests, an increasingly antagonistic relationship with the federal government, and growing uncertainty regarding the role of the university within society.

Early in the discussion, in response to a question regarding student protests, Krylov, a USC chemistry professor, noted many universities have long had clear policies that could have been used to rein in the excesses of campus protests, including the disruption of normal university operations and the harassment of Jewish students.

However, Krlyov said, she believes these policies were often ignored due to a confluence of factors including the commercialization of education, the treatment of students as paying customers that need to be kept satisfied, an incentive system that rewards weak leadership, and an obsession with social justice.

Yet, what should be done about such problems turned out to be a matter of considerable debate among those present.

One UChicago alumna and parent in the audience argued that higher education is effectively a consumer product and that parents can and should put pressure on administrators when the delivery of that product is disrupted.

Others in the audience suggested foreign-born and scholarship students might be over-represented among campus protesters and that reducing the number of the former while making the latter pay some nominal amount toward their education could curb future protests.

Multiple people, both speakers and attendees, also expressed reluctant support for portions of President Donald Trump’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” but simultaneously voiced reservations about how it would increase government bureaucracy’s role in higher education.

“We have a kind of emergency of capture in our higher-ed establishment,” Wax said. “[The institutions] want to be able to do whatever the hell they want. But truck drivers and store clerks are paying taxes. … Taxpayers are funding these institutions.”

“So I think it does give [the government] a certain degree of leverage,” Wax said. “There are tremendous dangers here. The administration can change. Whatever. But something has to be done.”

Similarly, Krylov expressed her own concerns, pointing out how other government efforts to influence university policy through programs such as Title IX have proven highly toxic, but also said she was losing hope that universities could be reformed without outside intervention.

“Maybe the only thing to do is to have some people to come from the top with a big club and beat universities into doing the right thing again,” she said.

Yet, at the same time, Krylov and others also said they worried how this would affect international students, STEM programs, and university life more broadly.

“In STEM programs, especially at the graduate level,” Krylov said, “you cannot do anything without a constant and significant influx of foreign students because we just don’t have enough American students who are interested and skilled [enough] to pursue STEM.”

Jones, a George Mason University economics professor, later noted, “I think societies independently figure out that it’s really good when you’re building a university to find the best people in the world, partly because the professors love it, right? They like teaching smart people. They like teaching the smartest people they can.”

In a somewhat tongue-in-cheek manner, he added, “If you have a choice between a bunch of local folks who are as dumb as a box of rocks or some smart people from around the world, that’s how you get professors to work for below market wages.”

Wax added: “Okay, professors love smart students. Is [higher education] a jobs program for professors? Is that the central purpose here?”

This article originally appeared on The College Fix at this link.

1. Put out more messaging similar to Dean Ellison’s famous 2016 letter emphasizing that we challenge ideas vigorously here and people are supposed to argue with each other. Disagreement is normal and sometimes feelings get hurt. There’s nothing wrong with that.

2. Create an annual “Disrupter of the Year” award for faculty who publicly challenged ideas and narratives popular among their colleagues. Critically, this has to be for challenging the faculty, not for disagreeing with the public. The ceremony will be hosted by the President and the prize will be $100K in unrestricted funds. The winner will give a ten-minute talk to incoming faculty.

3. Initiate “The Iconoclast Incubator,” an internal call for proposals for controversial, high-risk ideas. Provide seed funding of $100k for successful proposals. The application will be a one-page proposal and a colleague willing to bet the provost $1k that the project will not lead to a paper within two years (to ensure that the idea actually is high-risk). The money will be held in an escrow account and either kept by the Provost’s office or returned with an equal odds pay out depending on the outcome. Award funds randomly among proposals that fulfill requirements to avoid conformity bias of peer-review.

4. Start a “Risk Sabbatical” program. 10 faculty per year will be awarded a six-month paid sabbatical by lottery. The proposal is a 150 word description of a high-risk idea. Turn off the winners’ uchicago email and disable their keycard access to ensure that they are off campus doing something new and different (but allow online access to journals). The sabbatical is immediately ended if a winner is caught on campus. Require a one-page write up of what they did and what they expect it to lead to at the end of the sabbatical, which will be made public.

A department score function should quantify performance on advancing the mission of the University: original research and teaching. This is stated clearly in the Kalven report

The mission of the university is the discovery, improvement, and dissemination of knowledge.

and the Shils report

The existence of The University of Chicago is justified if it achieves and maintains superior quality in its performance of the three major functions of universities in the modern world. These functions are: (1) the discovery of important new knowledge; (2) the communication of that knowledge to students and the cultivation in them of the understanding and skills which enable them to engage in the further pursuit of knowledge; and (3) the training of students for entry into professions which require for their practice a systematic body of specialized knowledge.

We need a score function that combines research and teaching impact using the same unit. The most straight-forward unit is dollars, which is appropriate given that budget cuts are motivating the consideration of closing departments. Moreover, using dollars is easy to explain to the public and politicians. Teaching impact can be quantified by tuition generated from enrollments and research impact can be quantified by grant money obtained1, including all sources (federal, private foundations, industry, and internal). The score function for department j with faculty members indexed by i would therefore be:

Here T is the tuition generated by a faculty member, G is the grant money generated by a faculty member, N is the number of faculty members in the unit, and f is the fractional commitment of the faculty member to the unit (for example if a faculty member is in two departments, her f would be 0.5 in each department).

Now let’s develop intuition for the balance between research and teaching in this score function to confirm that it is reasonable. A typical federal grant is for about $150,000 per year. Annual tuition at the University of Chicago is $66,939, but the average tuition paid is only $36,991 due to financial aid. Students typically take 10 courses per year, so per-course tuition received is $3,699.10 per enrollment. This means that teaching a class with 40.5 students generates as much score as getting a typical federal grant. Having taught many classes and gotten many grants, this seems like a reasonable balance in terms of time commitment and University mission advancement.

To make things more concrete, let’s consider the score Dorian contributes. In the 2024-2025 year he taught two classes with a total enrollment of 349, so his tuition contribution was $1,290,985.90. He also had a three-year grant from the Army Research Office for $554,747, a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation for $568,887, and a three-year grant from NASA for $91,590. So his per-year grant contribution was $405,074.67. His total contribution to the University in the 2024-2025 year would therefore be $1,696,060.57. It’s important to note that he relied on teaching assistants and research assistants to generate these funds and do this work, so this should not be viewed as his individual contribution. But for the department score function, it’s easiest (and equivalent) to index and normalize by faculty members. This gives us a sense of the sort of scores faculty might generate for their departments.

The main advantages of this score function are that it measures well the stated mission of the University and it can be applied equally and fairly across all units within the University. As shown above, Dorian’s contribution is more heavily weighted toward teaching than research. Another professor might bring in huge amounts of research funding, but only teach a couple small graduate seminars. The score function naturally accounts for this variation in valued contribution in a fair way. More broadly, entire divisions and schools might be more heavily weighted toward either teaching or research, and the score function allows us to fairly compare their performance. It also avoids subjective judgements and difficulties assessing contribution across fields due to different expectations for publication rate and citation statistics. If you are doing good research by your field’s standards, then presumably you will be able to generate research funding. Similarly, if you are working hard and teaching good courses, then students will take them and you will generate tuition. Finally, a major advantage of the score function is that it only counts work that contributes to the mission of the University, and explicitly does not count other activities, such as political activism and protest, that do not contribute (and probably even impose a negative externality on the productive units of the University).

The proposed score function is not perfect, and it would be possible to make a variety of criticisms of it and try to complicate it in various ways. This would be a mistake that would open it to corruption and exploitation. As an analogy that shows how imperfect, but simple, quantitative measures can be extremely useful, let’s consider some measures in health that we are all aware of: Body Mass Index (BMI), total cholesterol, and blood pressure. Everyone acknowledges the limitations of these measures (for example a muscular athlete might be classified as overweight using BMI), but if at your annual physical examination you have a BMI of 34, total cholesterol of 280, and blood pressure 160/100, we would all agree that you are in bad shape and need to make some major changes to your lifestyle if you want to survive long. Similarly, if a department has a score of $60,000, we can all agree that it simply isn’t performing at an acceptable level and would be a good unit to close if we have to close one. Stated another way, I don’t think the score function would be very useful for comparing the performance of departments with scores of $1,000,000 and $1,500,000, but I do think it would very clearly tell us that a department with a score of $1,000,000 is contributing much more to the University than a department with a score of $100,000.

A second criticism is that the score function does not count high-level, low-enrollment courses (and the faculty who teach them) with a weight commensurate with their intellectual importance. I strongly agree that these courses are essential and departments should continue to offer them for high-level undergraduates and graduate students. Since the score function is for an entire department, it just requires that the department teach some large enrollment courses that appeal to a broad range of students as well. But within the department, faculty teaching small, essential courses should be valued as contributing to the department’s mission.

A third criticism is that the score function does not include costs. If two departments have the same score but the University spends twice as much of its own funds on one (in terms of salaries, lab equipment, secretarial support, etc.) it seems you should prefer the cheaper department. This is a valid point, and definitely something the administration should take into account. But figuring out the cost of a department is pretty straight-forward and we already know how to do it. The University could certainly combine the score function described here with its cost estimates to determine which departments are the most “cost-effective” to retain. The point of the score function we are introducing here is that it allows you to quantify the contribution of a department to the University’s mission, which we haven’t seen done before, and would be very useful at the moment. Additionally, the per-faculty cost to the University likely varies much less than the per-faculty score function outlined here, so it is better to start with this score function to identify under-performing departments.

The last potential criticism we want to address is the claim that the value of some entire fields is not well-represented by course enrollments and research funding. This boils down to arguing that the experts in a field know that their own field is extremely important, but they can’t convince others of this (neither students nor funders). It is not surprising that experts in a field would argue that their field is important, whether it actually is or not, so their opinion can’t be taken at face value without external evidence. To put it bluntly, we’re being asked to justify ourselves to society (and bankers) right now. We don’t think either group is interested in accepting this type of self-serving argument anymore.

A critical aspect of this proposal is that the process must be open and public. All the data should be made publicly available and the scores for each department should be listed on a website. This would make sure everyone understands why tough decisions are being made, ensure that there’s no funny business, and help departments understand what they would need to do to improve their score and put themselves in better standing with the University.

Although budget cuts can be uncomfortable, they do force a focusing on the mission that can be very healthy in the long term. If the right departments are closed, a University can even emerge from a fiscally challenging period in a stronger position, leaner and more mission-focused. Using a score function to quantify contribution would increase the chance that this is done rationally, show the federal government that we are taking their concerns seriously, and help to convince the public that we are providing value to society and deserve support.

The worst parts of the book are author Ritchie's uncritical acceptance of vaccines & climate science, despite the self-professed necessity of skepticism and scrutiny for such contentious topics of investigation. This is worse than hypocrisy. Ritchie weaponizes the sensational cases of fraud to smear scientific critiques of vaccine & climate studies, de-legitimizing the counter arguments he doesn't bother to summarize. It is an anti-science ideology masquerading as a defense of science. Ritchie would seek to boost the reputation of The Science only so far as it serves his own sociopolitical agenda, and that is antithetical to the principles of science as even he describes them.

Although Ritchie was writing during the COVID lockdowns, he makes no mention of the scientific censorship that was necessary to promulgate disastrous public policies. He overlooks the essential contributions that citizen scientists made to revealing both Truth and fraud at the time of his writing - despite the fact that he positions the science of public health and medical research at the core of his arguments.

Ritchie's recommendations fiddle about the edges of centralized, industrialized science. He admits that pre-publication peer-review is not even 100 years old, but lacks an understanding of the problem to which peer-review was purportedly the solution. He misses the fact that the value the journals provide is not truth, but prestige. They are not the gatekeepers to knowledge. They adjudicate only status, and that is the more valuable commodity to the Universities who sell it to their students, their sports fans, and their other stakeholders (including the US government).

Science cannot be "saved" by tuning the knobs on the centralized institutions that have created the status hegemony. Although @NIHDirector_Jay is making incremental improvements in the current structure, I think the topology of science governance must be changed from centralized & oligopolistic to a more decentralized structure prioritizing a marketplace of ideas.

The danger in this approach is that scientific knowledge might be reduced to a click-contest, as if justification of belief were determined by a Prom Queen popularity contest.

Truth must not be subject to secret ballot. However, the problem with the current system of peer review already amounts to little more than that. Our current preoccupation with peer reputation reduces many scientists to the developmental level of the typical Middle School child, whose utmost concern is their standing in the social hierarchy.

One of the most difficult things, in science, in business, in social media, is determining the quality of an idea. In this regard, humans are not equally well-equipped.

There is an acute need for science critics who establish reputations unto themselves for being able to identify and communicate good ideas. Like movie reviewers, or restaurant critics, these professional science critics must operate as journalists, librarians, curators, communicators, and independent arbiters of what knowledge is worth spreading. You might think this is the job that journal Editors are expected to perform and to some extent they do, so long as they do not stray too far from their roles on the stage as scientists themselves.

I'm arguing for a new role entirely, in which experts in critique make their careers as such - not on the stage, but from box seats in the theater.

Perhaps science communicators like @hubermanlab are prototyping the right model, despite the fact that Universities have no idea how to replicate that role within their existing organizational structures. My own view is that the University Library is probably the right place to house this new position of Science Critic, so long as the public and the citizen scientist are also invited.

As a schoolchild in the 1970's I was taught "There is no talking in the library." That model is now out of date. The library must remake itself into a forum for conversations that include pre-publication review, post-publication review, and constant revision of a meritocracy of ideas.

It may be that this new type of “library” cannot exist within the structure of the University, but instead must exist independently such that it can benefit from a multitude of crowd-sourced contributions. For example, it was @MartinKulldorff who first pointed out to me that PLOS stands for Public Library Of Science. What hasn't happened yet is a new realization of what a PLOS should look like in the Information Age.

Both reinvention of the University library and independent, public libraries is called for such that the best forums can compete for the most attention.

Ritchie cannot really be faulted for failing to describe this creative vision. His writing doesn't strike me as particularly creative. Nonetheless, what he offers is not a cogent deconstruction of the existing paradigm, but a smokescreen that would facilitate its further abuse.