The Self-Inflicted Decline of Science and the Academy

A merican universities are in decline. But the oft-cited culprits — administrative bloat, the evisceration of the humanities, and “cancel culture” — are not the most serious problems. It is the academic sciences that pose the gravest threat. Far from being the last bastions of cool rationality and objectivity on campuses, the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) fields are neck-deep in the miasma. Worse, the sciences have been the principal enablers of the campus’s cultural rot.

The problem is money, federal money to be precise, that began streaming into campuses with the federalization of the academic sciences after Second World War. Federal government largesse has been a mixed blessing, because there is more at work than support of scientific research. There is an additional stream of money that has, for years, been surreptitiously funding the activities of the culprits cited above. In the process, federal money has corrupted both academic science and scientists. No longer is science an intellectual adventure at the frontiers of knowledge: It is now the servant of political agendas set by others.

Over my nearly 40-year-long career in biological research, I have witnessed the slow unfolding of this degradation. I have always been, and remain, a firm believer in the social value of both the academy and the sciences. Our society is better for having them, and I want to see both endure. On their present trajectory, however, neither will. We will all be poorer for it.

Prior to the Second World War, academic research was supported by an informal “Small Science ecosystem” of philanthropy, industrial research and development, university and college monies, and private contributions. Government support was modest. Ground-breaking science came out of this era. Then came the federal mobilization of science during the war.

Once the war was won, the federal foot-in-the-academic-door was not withdrawn but jammed more firmly in place. This drew the academic sciences into an expanding and richly funded enterprise — the “Big Science ecosystem.” The federal government is now the dominant funder of academic research.

The academy’s fulminating pathology lies in a set of perverse incentives built into the funding model for Big Science. This model fatally commingles the conflicting interests of academic researchers (intellectual independence) and the institutions that employ them (managerial and financial), while leaving all political power vested in institutions. The legislation that set the federalization of science into motion tried to reconcile these competing interests. This complicated compromise, never stable, is now completely undone.

The result? After seven decades, Big Science has become a deeply entrenched cartel, drawing in to its Jovian orbit universities, government research agencies, academic publishers, politicians, and more. The cartel is organized not around soybeans, cocaine, or oil, but around maximizing the flow of federal-research dollars. By this measure, the Big Science cartel has been spectacularly successful: Since 1950, federal expenditures in academic research have doubled every seven years, to more than $80 billion currently. By the measure of protecting the core values of science and scientists, however — intellectual independence, freedom of inquiry, etc. — it has been a spectacular failure.

How could this happen? Follow the money. Embedded in research grants is a budgetary provision called indirect costs (also known as “overhead”). Funds that support actual research are called direct costs. Indirect costs are an institutional surcharge tacked on to direct costs. These ostensibly cover an institution’s expenses for administering the grant, and are charged as a proportion of direct costs, typically around 50 percent. This means that for every $100,000 of direct costs, an institution will slap on an additional $50,000 to be charged to the government. Indirect-cost surcharges represent a substantial stream of revenue for universities, roughly $25 billion in 2017. By comparison, 2017 revenues from Pell grants, which support tuition payments for students, were $28 billion.

Indirect-cost revenues are highly valued by universities. Through various creative budgetary and accounting tricks, indirect-cost monies have become essentially discretionary funds that universities can use to subsidize all sorts of administrative mischief. Among these is administrative self-aggrandizement, which is how, for example, administrative bloat — the principal driver of the extraordinary inflation in the costs of higher education — is paid for and supported. Indirect-cost monies also pay for administrative aims unrelated to research, including that roster of usual suspects.

Universities therefore have a strong interest in driving up indirect-cost revenues. They do so by pressuring scientists to drive up research expenditures, irrespective of the scientists’ own scientific judgments. Because all the political power sits with universities, it is their interests, not those of scientists, which inevitably prevail. The science per se does not matter a jot.

This was vividly illustrated in 2017, when the Trump administration proposed that the National Institutes of Health cap indirect costs at 10 percent, one fifth their typical rate. This would have allowed roughly $4.6 billion to be redirected to funding direct costs — the actual work of scientists in their laboratories — and still allow a 22 percent cut in the NIH’s overall budget. The response: a “staggering blow to the nation’s vital interest,” according to the president of Johns Hopkins University. Just how was unclear, but he was not alone in his doom-mongering. The message could not be clearer: science, and scientists, count only as turnkeys to the spigots of indirect-cost revenues that keep bloated university administrations afloat.

One might expect that academic scientists would resist the demands of the Big Science cartel. To the contrary, they have become its enthusiastic boosters. Science per se has thereby been replaced by ginned-up activism masquerading as science. Or more properly, “science.” Rewards aplenty flow to those willing to jump on the “science” bandwagon, exemplified by the ongoing and dubious “climate crisis.” No rewards, indeed, sanctions, are the lot of those who bring a properly scientific skepticism to the agenda. The aim, as always, is not advancement of our scientific knowledge of the world, but to sustain the colossal grift on taxpayers that the academic sciences have become.

Intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the sciences has followed, highlighted recently by the COVID-19 pandemic. The multitudinous, but entirely expected, failures of a blundering political class certainly have been prominently on display. This time, though, the political class is sharing the stage with a brightly lit diorama of “scientific” expertise. The spectacle has been galling: Certitude abounds, while humility and skepticism — expected virtues of science — are rarely to be seen. This has proven to be a deadly combination.

Our academies and our sciences are urgently in need of reform. For most of my career, I hoped that reform could come from within, from scientists who would defend their core values. I no longer think that: The Big Science cartel has become too deeply entrenched, and too invested in defending its power. It may be time, therefore, to consider tackling the source of the problem: the entire edifice of federal funding of academic research.

There would, of course, be howls of anguished protest over the “devastation” of science. It would mean no such thing, of course. It would mean restoring science to the Small Science ecosystem that prevailed before the Second World War. While Big Science has produced great science, this has been bought at a very dear cost, taking two of the glories of our civilization — the sciences and the university — and making them shallow, doctrinaire, and corrupt. It’s worth remembering that great science also came out of the Small Science ecosystem, and at much smaller societal cost.

J. Scott Turner is Emeritus Professor of Biology at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. This article was commissioned by the B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies at The Heritage Foundation.