Chicago – March 18, 2025
There is no area in which the United States’ global dominance is more total than higher education. With about 4% of the world’s population and 25% of its gross domestic product, America has 72% of the world’s 25 top universities by one ranking and 64% by another. But this crucial U.S. competitive advantage is being undermined by the Trump administration’s war on colleges. Hat tip to the New York Times’s Michelle Goldberg for raising this issue as well.
“We have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country. … The professors are the enemy,” said JD Vance during a speech at the National Conservatism Conference in 2021.
The administration has put those words into action. The most dramatic assault has been financial: a freezing or massive reduction in research grants and loans from the federal government. Some of these efforts are under court review, but the cumulative impact could be billions of dollars in cuts to basic research, much of it disrupting ongoing projects and programs.
High quality research in the US is emerged in a unique ecosystem. the federal govt provides much of the funding through high quality institutions like the national institution of health and National Science Foundation and private foundations and companies account for the most of the rest.
professors at the universities, both private and public, use these funds to conduct the research. No other country has a system that well. What is at risk is what Holden Thorp, the editor-in-chief of “science” calls “the social contract the federal government and institutions have had to enable the scientific enterprise in America in the last 80 years.”
The fury with which the trump administration has turned on academia resembles nothing but the early days of the Cultural Revolution when an increasingly paranoid Mao Zedong smashed China’s established universities, a madness that took generations to remedy. Meanwhile in Beijing last week, the Chinese government announced its intention to massively increase its funding for research, technology and science so that it could lead the world in science in the 21st century.
so, as America seems to be copying the worst aspects of China’s recent history, China is copying the best aspects of America’s, striving to take the edge as America goes through its own cultural revolution.
