Opinion | Trump Wants to Destroy All Academia, Not Just the Woke Parts

This is the context for the Trump administration’s attempt, currently being challenged in court, to slash research funding from the National Institutes of Health. The details sound technical and very boring: The new policy would limit reimbursements for schools’ overhead expenses to 15 percent of grants’ value, instead of the 50 to 70 percent that universities often receive now. But if this goes into effect, the damage will be tremendous. As H. Holden Thorp, the editor of Science, wrote, for every dollar spent on academic research, roughly another dollar is needed for lab equipment, support staff and systems for managing grants. Right now, the government funds a big chunk of these indirect costs, with universities picking up the remainder. If the government reduces its contribution to 15 percent, universities could try to close the gap by raising tuition and eliminating departments, but it wouldn’t be enough. Crucial research projects, including those investigating cures for devastating diseases, would have to be scaled back or jettisoned altogether.

These cuts could hit some Trump-voting states particularly hard. In Alabama, North Carolina and others, universities are among the biggest employers, which is why some Republican senators are at least gingerly objecting to the new reimbursement rules. But that’s only one reason the administration’s full-spectrum war on academia defies rational self-interest. The post-World War II system of government-funded research universities has fueled American scientific and technological dominance, but our continued pre-eminence is in no way assured.

China, after all, continues to invest strongly in its universities. “Part of our decline as a culture and economy would be our disinvestment in higher education,” said Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan University. “Maybe we’ll just invest in World Wrestling, but I don’t think that’s going to mean that other countries and other cultures won’t continue to invest in the capacity of their citizens to learn in such a way as to create new modes of living, new modes of fighting disease, new modes of creating companies.” To torch America’s advantage in these realms seems like madness.

But there’s a lot of madness in the air these days. In December, Max Eden of the American Enterprise Institute published an article about how Linda McMahon, the former World Wrestling Entertainment chief executive whom Trump nominated to be secretary of education, could give the “college cartel” the “body slamming they deserve.” One of the first items on Eden’s list was capping the reimbursement of indirect research costs at 15 percent, exactly as the Trump team is trying to do. From there, Eden proposed that McMahon “should simply destroy Columbia University” — home, among other things, to one of the best medical schools in America — as a warning to other schools about the price of tolerating anti-Israel protest.