President-elect Donald Trump’s team is considering the possibility of withholding massive research grants from “woke” schools they claim lack academic freedom.
Trump’s nominee to head the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a physician and economist at Stanford, reportedly wants to target so called “cancel culture” at a number of top progressive universities, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Those with knowledge of Bhattacharya’s thinking told the newspaper that he’s considering linking the doling out of billions in federal research grants to a measure of “academic freedom” on campuses and punishing those that apparently don’t adequately embrace perspectives championed by conservatives.
Bhattacharya wants to take on what he views as academic conformity in science, which pushed him aside over his criticism of the response to the COVID-19 pandemic, including his opposition to school closures and mask mandates to stop the spread of the virus. He suggested in a Wall Street Journal op ed in 2020 that only up to 40,000 Americans would be killed by the pandemic. More than 1.2 million people died.
While he hasn’t yet established how to measure academic freedom, he has been looking at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and the nonprofit’s scoring of universities and their rankings based on freedom of speech.
The nonprofit bases its rankings on surveys of students’ views on whether they feel comfortable sharing ideas, with schools being negatively scored if their administrators punish faculty for opinions, or if they withdraw an invitation to a speaker following a possible controversy.
Some of the schools that receive NIH grants but have bad rankings, according to the nonprofit, include the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, and the University of Southern California, The Journal noted.
Those at the top of the rankings include the University of Virginia, Michigan Technological University, and Florida State University.
Bhattacharya also has plans to fund studies that recreate the work of other scientists in an attempt to take on scientific fraud. There are also plans to create a scientific journal to publish studies with comments by named reviewers, to urge a more open discussion.
He has also suggested limiting the amount of grant money that pays for publication in journals, and he would look eastablish a pause on research which creates new viruses for study purposes.
In addition, Bhattacharya has a goal of enacting term limits for those in charge of the research institutes run by NIH. He would would review a congressional Republican proposal to slash the number of institutes and centers from 27 to 15, those with a view into his thinking told The Journal.
Lizbet Boroughs, associate vice president of the Association of American Universities, told The Journal: “It’s not clear why we’d roadblock the best chances of finding a cure for cystic fibrosis or cancer or Alzheimer’s by adding potentially political, nonresearch factors into medical-research grant decisions.”
Former director of the National Cancer Institute Ned Sharpless told the paper that Bhattacharya might find it hard to implement his changes. While he could change the rubric used to review grant applications, it may be difficult to get grant reviewers to follow his guidelines, Sharpless told the newspaper.
“It’s much more complicated than it appears from the outside,” he said of the top job at NIH.
As many as 174 scientists on the NIH staff or who have received its funding have won a Nobel Prize, The Journal noted.
NIH doles out as much as $25 billion in grants each year, which have led to major advances, including immunotherapy cancer treatments.
