the purpose of research isn't to fund universities

My stress and anxiety levels have been high ever since the second Trump administration began and immediately started taking an axe to all sorts of things that one should not take an axe to. For admittedly selfish reasons, though, I’ve been particularly anxious since Friday, when the NIH announced that it was dramatically cutting its support to universities (and other research institutions) in the form of indirect costs. I don’t do NIH-funded work, but we’re a very medically focused campus, and there’s no way that the $40 million that the University estimates we could lose over the next year isn’t going to have ripple effects across campus (not to mention the fact that my colleagues in the College of Communication and Information regularly look to the NIH as a source of funding health communication research). There are much more vulnerable populations currently being targeted by the Trump administration, and their concerns are more salient than mine are right now, but this is one of the administration’s decisions that’s hit closest to home, and I’ve been thinking a lot about it recently.

I’m not entirely hopeless about this situation—even besides ongoing litigation about the decision, I have some (perhaps naïve?) confidence that my Representative and Senators would at least privately push back against a decision that would cause chaos for one of Central Kentucky’s largest employers and—more importantly—healthcare providers. At least, I expressed that (perhaps naïve) confidence in the phone calls I made to their offices yesterday. At the same time, though, I understand that my confidence that this particular issue can get worked out may well be naïve, and Elon Musk’s broad hacking and slashing at the federal government isn’t leaving me with a lot of hope that things are going to look good for universities over the next four years—and for the decades to come.

Of all the worst case scenarios that are going through my head right now, one of the more pressing is the possibility that faculty across campus will have to “earn” the research part of jobs through grants and be assigned to higher teaching loads by default. This option feels plausible to me if things continue to get bad from budgetary and other perspectives. No one ever comes out and says this, but there’s strong subtext at my university that we have an obligation to get research funding because the university depends on it. I’ve heard from colleagues in my college about comments they’ve overheard from university higher-ups who just don’t understand why we can’t pay our own salaries through grants like they can (could?) on the medical side of campus (university higher-ups tend to come from the medical end of campus—as McSweeney’s puts it, we sometimes act like a hospital system with a football—or at UK, basketball—team). There’s a lot of “student first” messaging coming from campus communications these days, and I worry on dark days that it’s setting the stage for pivoting folks from research to teaching.

Some quick caveats: First, I’m glad that indirect costs from funded research help keep the university running. In the absence of sufficient direct support from state legislatures and other sources, this is a much better source of funding than private donations and bugging alumni for their change. Even if I resent the messaging to this effect, I’ve applied (unsuccessfully) for external funding at least partly out of a desire to do my part keep the lights on around here. Second, teaching is good. I’m glad that it makes up half of my responsibilities, and I hate the implicit messaging that pervades U.S. academia that research is superior to teaching. I especially hate the way that we treat our teaching-oriented faculty as “less than.” I also think that a student first attitude is the moral response to our students’ drowning themselves in debt to attend our classes.

That said, I’m very worried about a possible future where the purpose of research is explicitly seen as funding the university and where only those who are bringing in money are permitted to do any research. If the Trump administration’s actions are creating an environment where I feel like this future is possible, the Trump administration’s actions also clearly demonstrate why universities cannot allow themselves to think of research funding in this way. If the value of research becomes bringing in money, it follows that the value of research is its fundability. There has always been an element of “the federal government’s research priorities may not represent what the country actually needs,” but the current administration’s hacking away at anything with a whiff of social justice only exaggerates this. It’s one thing for me to joke that my current research on right-wing Mormonism just isn’t of interest to the NSF—it’s another for the federal government to explicitly rule out funding for research that calls out racism, sexism, and homophobia.

Researchers owe the world we live in the best research we can produce, even when that research doesn’t align sufficiently with the priorities of funding agencies. We can’t allow the hobbling of funding agencies to—perversely—push them further into their arms.

• NIH
• DOGE
• research
• grants
• Donald Trump
• Elon Musk