Wayne State, Detroit on April 12, 2019  

This is the corrected text of a talk I gave online to the Wayne State University conference, “Public Budgets, Public Good,” on April 30, 2026.  Many thanks to the audience, whose questions about theory and practice were excellent. Thanks also to the sponsors: Labor@Wayne, AAUP, HELU, and Public Good U. I’m still sorry I wasn’t there in person.

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I’ve always seen the university as a force for the general development of society, having been influence by a tradition that includes Humboldt & Fichte, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Du Bois, John Dewey, CJR James, and many thinkers since.   This has made it easier to grasp the fact that the university’s largest effects are a combination of non-monetary and public.  These public effects have been rendered “dark matter” by the political and business worlds, which have steered people exclusively toward the private pecuniary effect of the B.A. wage increment over high school. College presidents and other officials have simply echoed them.  This is overbearingly true in the US and the UK, and amounts to a mass miseducation about education. But it is also true elsewhere, and apparently in China.

New Haven People's Center on April 18, 2026  

I gave this talk at the 45^th Anniversary Conference of the Whitney Humanities Center, Yale University,  April 17, 2026. Many thanks to the organizers, speakers, audience, and my co-panelists.

I’m going to talk about humanities ambition in a time of diminished authority for its fields,  and I’ll say we need big increases in our ambition in response.  But I have to note that the humanities won’t get enough help from their universities, and in many cases will have to fight them.  The Trump administration’s systematic efforts to erase people of color from the American past and present has been translated on campuses as quiet acceptance, via, in particular, the deletion of DEI programs and the merging or closure of departments associated with ethnicity, sexuality, or countries and cultures MAGA America dislikes.

Genoa, Italy, on June 26, 2024   

You aren’t likely to have looked for criticism of Trump’s illegal war on Iran from college presidents or governing boards.  If you did type the search string, “university president criticizes war on Iran” early on March 5^th you would have gotten a string of university professors commenting as individuals (“Law school professors say strikes on Iran violate international law”).  I got the same result on March 8^th.

This is an established pattern: university professors go out in force and use their expertise to affect public debate about a major issue. Universities practice “institutional neutrality” and say nothing. The justification, as explained by an advocate, Daniel Diermeier, president of Vanderbilt University, is that an institutional position “risk[s] establishing a ‘party line’ and stifling debate among students and faculty.” 

 

East Village on October 31, 2022   

Looks like it.  

There’s some good stuff in Tyler Austin Harper’s Atlantic article, “The Multibillion-Dollar Foundation That Controls the Humanities,” but the piece unravels into a tool of the thing people actually hate about the humanities, which is not its implications for social justice but its civil wars. It blames the increasingly desperate struggles of the academic humanities not on right-wing enemies but on liberal humanists—a woke Mellon Foundation and its president Elizabeth Alexander.

I was one of the people that Harper interviewed for this article.  (Here, “Harper” always refers to the author, Tyler Austin Harper). He was fun to talk with, is a serious person, and worked hard on this piece, all of which I respect.  When we spoke, I emphasized our terrible money problems, which I argued tower over our manageable and ordinary methodological debates.  

 

I said that the real issue is our lack of the funding to produce and disseminate our knowledge at the scale that would get the kind of social attention allotted to medicine and computer science. We may think this is intrinsic to their topics and status but it is mainly the result of their vast organizational labor, labor of a kind that the humanities establishment, Mellon included, refuses to try. 

 

Harper cites my Public Humanities piece on funding—“Humanities Decline in Darkness”-- for a statistic in which federal humanities funding rounds to zero. But you have to get to his third-to-last paragraph before he makes his best causal claim about the current situation: 

The humanities are in the mess they’re in because of federal budget cuts, and because of administrators who care more about the football team than about William Faulkner, and because of the toxic pragmatism of an American culture that has a hard time valuing anything that is not immediately, aggressively useful. But the humanities are also in this mess because those of us who care about them have often preferred hunkering down in a defensive crouch . . . 

 

I would have finished that last sentence by writing, “and so we don’t build the data and resource infrastructure that would make our needs visible to politicians and the public.”  But that’s not where Harper goes.

 

Harper’s other most effective moment comes from Phillip Brian Harper, the Mellon program director for higher learning: 

“The sector needs to be taken by the collar and shaken very hard until resources that are adequate to the support of humanities doctoral students are jarred loose from higher-ed institutions themselves. . . . The role of the Mellon Foundation is to catalyze that sort of change. It’s not to serve in perpetuity as the piggy bank for research.” Mellon, he said, was never supposed to be a panacea for the humanities.

 

 

Great, but who will do the shaking of university management? Mellon? Phil Harper says its role is to catalyze. On this topic, it’s not.  

 

He is of course right that the situation is completely appalling. To repeat, even though sociocultural knowledge is essential to solving any of the world’s epic problems, the rich universities listed below spend almost none of their institutional funds for R&D on non-STEM fields.

 

Figure 1. Institutional Expenditues on R&D, Selected Universities

 

SOURCE: NSF Higher Education R&D Survey (HERD) FY2024, Tables 14, 23, 29.

Yes, these figures likely exclude individual faculty research funds via outside grants, named chairs, and other department-managed funds.  But as indicators of institutional investment in humanities infrastructure, they are shocking. Universities’ own refusal to fund humanities research is also one cause of our society’s inability to deal with its core problems.

 

Yet Harper comes not to bury funding failure but to chastise social justice. The fault for him lies not in Trump’s destruction of the National Endowment for the Humanities or 40 years of right-wing culture wars, but in Mellon’s interest in a better society.

 

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Harper makes two main claims. The first is that “classical” and “social justice” scholarship aren’t complementary approaches but rivals. They compete bitterly for scarce and dwindling funds. 

 

The solution to this is obviously an alliance between rivals to fight for massively better funding for all, at least ten times more funding than socio-cultural scholarship has today.  

 

But Harper diverts attention from funding with his second argument: “social justice” research is a betrayal of humanities scholarship, a kind of negation of it. This increase in “the decidedly sublunary work of furnishing political propaganda” makes Harper wonder whether the academic humanities are worth saving at all.  And Mellon, he writes, has shifted to funding this political propaganda since the arrival of Elizabeth Alexander as president.

 

Let’s try to understand this claim. Harper’s evidence for a policy shift is a Foundation announcement dated June 30, 2020. Mellon declared a new focus on “just communities enriched by meaning and empowered by critical thinking where ideas and imagination can thrive.” Board chair Kathryn A. Hall explained that “our reinvigorated mission and strategic direction . . . not only builds on our historic commitment to the arts and humanities, but rightly emphasizes a desire to make the ‘beauty, transcendence, and freedom’ found there accessible and empowering to all members of society.”  

 

The new direction assumes the complementarity of what we might call “basic” and “applied” humanities research, and not that applied research—addressing social questions—debases basic scholarship.  Complementarity—with awareness of different modes, aims, and questions--is assumed in every STEM field and social science of which I’m aware, so Harper has a special burden to show that the humanities are unlike all other forms of academic research in this way.

 

Alexander confirms complementarity in the announcement by adding, “We are a problem-solving foundation looking to address historical inequities in the fields we fund.” This also expresses reflexivity about Mellon’s own role in knowledge creation, which includes a past of supporting the kind of epistemic biases and limits that need constant correction in every field.

 

The new Mellon direction also seemed to aim at the democratization of humanities knowledge—at taking the results of humanities research outside of a small elite while also learning from communities about their existing knowledges and practices.

 

Harper presumably approves of problem-solving, and he definitely opposes the perpetuation of historical inequities which he agrees exist.  He sounds fine with humanities for the people, which is the official policy of the state humanities councils and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) whose origin story he affirms. He writes,

[U]nder Alexander, the foundation deserves credit for working to create a more economically just landscape within higher education. Before Alexander’s arrival, Mellon tended to disburse lavish funding to institutions that were already rich. Now, as part of Mellon’s commitment to equity, it is making a conscious effort to provide funding to public and less selective institutions. It has also increased funding for university-led prison education programs

 

All true, good, and important.  So what is so bad about Mellon’s new direction?  

 

Nothing, actually. (Its inaction on overall funding is a separate question to which I’ll return)  But to save what must have been the original idea for the story, Harper spends most of the piece making the false argument that “applied” humanities scholarship (not his term) is political propaganda.

 

How does he show this?  First there’s his prior, the false legacy dualism in criticism and some related humanities fields in which the criticism of texts and historical materials (basic) is denatured and corrupted by engaging in criticism of society (applied). It’s this dualism that turns “social justice” into “political propaganda” that ruins scholarship. 

 

This dualism may encourage him to search his anecdotes for polarity. For example, he spoke with a scholar who “confessed that . . .he had reimagined his work to focus more squarely on race; he did win a grant. I suspect that this may not be a rare occurrence.”  Harper’s assumed incompatibility between the first and more race-focused version of this scholar’s work makes this a problem rather than progress. 

 

Second is Harper’s assumption that it’s bad to get steered or shaped by a call’s language or a program officers. There seems to be a tacit idealization of “classical” humanities scholarship as pre-social and not in any good way developed by thinking about problems it might solve, or by being asked to change emphases in a proposal by an agency official.  

 

I see this as a humanities provincialism about sponsored research, which always involves calls, program officers, public pressures, institutional forces and so on.  This is not epistemically less valid than idealized autonomous scholarship. Remember actor-network theory and dozens of related ways of discussing the collaborative nature of thinking.  So the scholar who “reimagined his work to focus more squarely on race” likely improved his project. Program officers at NIH, NSF, and other STEM agencies do this advising routinely.  Agency shaping can be good or bad. 

Harper doesn’t have the evidence to rule out good shaping in that more-race-oriented project or the others. (Gabriella Coleman’s valuable commentary on Harper, “The Exposé that Wasn’t,” is really good on this point.)

 

So it’s not that “social justice” aims are inherently anti-intellectual and ruin scholarship. Better knowledge in many areas can come from working like Pasteur rather than like Einstein, to reference a classic study of the (complicated) relation between basic and applied research.  And it’s also not true that agency shaping is bad per se.   

 

So Harper falls back on a third way of making his claim that woke Mellon is ruining the humanities. That is to scorn sample program language as self-evidently non-scholarly.

Mellon’s newer Dissertation Innovation Fellowship focuses on “supporting scholars who can build a more diverse, inclusive, and equitable academy.” The guidelines list “thoughtful engagement with communities that are historically underrepresented in higher education” as one of the primary criteria used to evaluate the strength of an application; by my count, all 45 of the 2025 awardees work on issues of identity or social or environmental justice.

I assume Harper means this program, run by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS).  Awarded titles include the following: 

 

·      The Dam, the Road, the Port: The Transformation of the Brazilian Northeast during the Long Twentieth-Century

·      State of Mine(Mind): Affective Geographies of California's Rural North

·      Urban Tropics: Dwelling under South and Southeast Asian Urban Microclimates

·      Uneasy Intimacies: Seeing Irei and Aesthetic Ambiguity Through Fukunosuke Kusumi's Art

·      Black Anti-settler Placemaking: Cooperation Jackson's Eco-villages from Mississippi to Vermont

·      Fiber Optics: Henequén Classification and its Consequences

·      Troubled Waters : Natural Disaster, Space, and the State in Precolonial Panjab (1707-1849)

 

Check these and the others out for yourself.  They all analyze major issues and strike me as likely to make original contributions to knowledge.  I don’t at all see Harper’s justification for assimilating all the projects to “identity” and “justice” studies. To do this, he needs to stereotype everyone on the basis of the appearance of words like “settler,” “queer,” “colonial” etc. I don’t even see how they’re all applied rather than basic research. He offers no evidence (just the legacy assumption) that these are not intensely scholarly, deeply intellectual projects.

 

At breakfast before drafting this post, I read an interesting review of The Deformation: Attention and Discernment in Catholic Reformation Art and Architecture by Susanna Berger (Princeton University Press, 2025).  “Central to The Deformation,” the reviewer writes, “is the question of how religious elites wielded anamorphosis as a means of gatekeeping the divine.”  I love this kind of stuff. But is a book about the relations among perspective in drawing, theology, and institutional power in 17^th century Europe clearly epistemically “classical”—pure, basic research-- and thus intellectually superior to work on “Affective Geographies of California's Rural North”?  The answer is no. Mellon / ACLS funded research simply cannot and should not be delegitimated with superficial separating of the sheep from the goats.

 

The same goes for Harper’s disdain for a grant to Colorado College.

In the summer of 2023, Colorado College hosted a conference based on this prompt: “How do the humanities contribute to anti-oppressive work, and how can humanities methods—from inquiry and critique to creative production and performance—dismantle systems of oppression, create and sustain community and solidarity, and advance liberation?” It does not seem to occur to those asking such questions that the humanities may not be especially well equipped to “dismantle systems of oppression.” Nor do they seem to consider that what might in fact be most valuable about fields like English, history, and philosophy is that they aspire to stand above the flotsam and jetsam of our immediate circumstances, and instead set their sights on what the classicist Leo Strauss called the “permanent problems” that have troubled human beings from time immemorial.

Harper doesn’t actually know what the conference organizers did and did not consider, but in any case, “how to dismantle systems of oppression” is one of the ‘permanent problems” of human beings. It is also a running theme of literature, history, and philosophy for thousands of years.  One might find the Colorado College formulations a bit plodding and yet not try to discredit the program through a false distinction between intellectual work and its social contributions.

 

I can imagine Harper doing a different kind of research that leads to a different article about the humanities.  He would go to Colorado College, interview the students, staff, and faculty involved in the program, and sit in on its courses for a few weeks while also visiting classes that aren’t part of the program.  He could then compare and contrast and identify the actual cognitive and other effects of the program on the participants. We would all learn something about what actually happens through humanities funding on college campuses to (and by) students and their teachers—for better and worse.  This is the real void in public understanding, and Harper’s dismissal of a program on the basis of its terminology doesn’t help fill it in.

 

So, Mellon’s new direction is less elitist. It puts greater emphasis on “applied” over “basic” research (“Pasteur’s Quadrant”) while insisting on their complementarity (and equal intellectuality). It funds some research on white supremacy and overcoming it--along with funding many other things, and really this funding is a drop in the bucket of overall social need for knowledge about racial nationalism, the authoritarian personality, etc.  Mellon program directors shape applications, as they always have.  They may now fund a higher proportion of outreach and communication programs compared to applied or basic research, but Harper doesn’t get into this important issue.  Finally, Mellon is the last big national funder in research-starved humanities field.  Only the last of these strikes me as a scandal.

 

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Daylight does appear when Harper takes the other side of his own argument. 

It is hard to argue that the tens of millions of dollars that Mellon is putting toward internships for working-class kids at public colleges and universities would be better spent financing dusty archival research on 16th-century France. But this calculus also says something about the deeper structural problems of a model that pits various social goods—programs for humanities undergrads, resources for Ph.D. students, traditional humanities research, support for emerging fields and endowment-poor universities—against one another.

Yes, absolutely: we must address with the intent of solving “the deeper structural problems of a model that pits various social goods against one another.”  We must at the same time argue for “financing dusty archival research on 16th-century France.” But it isn’t Elizabeth Alexander or Mellon that set up the zero-sum game. This happens when critics pit different kinds of humanities scholarship against each other.  

 

Mellon et al. didn’t set up the zero-sum funding game.  But what are they doing about fixing it? 

 

I’d trace some of Harper’s completely valid distress about the system to having grown up in this barren funding world where one’s work is always losing out to someone else’s.  The real issue with the humanities’ national leadership isn’t that they politicize scholarship, but that they don’t fight openly and systematically to fund a great deal more of it.  

 

This gets us back to Phil Harper’s statement: 

“The sector needs to be taken by the collar and shaken very hard until resources that are adequate to the support of humanities doctoral students are jarred loose from higher-ed institutions themselves. . . . The role of the Mellon Foundation is to catalyze that sort of change.”

 

But Mellon is not doing that. 

 

I can find reports galore about the crisis in STEM funding—everything from the cuts to indirect cost recovery to the losses of whole areas of research (like racial disparity in public health outcomes that NIH had funded for years) and of scientific personnel. I can find nothing from the humanities associations about their research funding problems.  

 

NEH has been gutted, yet MLA, which did indeed help sue the government over NEH, has joined NHA, AHA, APA et al. in neither collecting data to show the funding problem nor developing a systematic plan for building such funding. 

 

Similarly, the ACLS’s Strategic Framework 2025-2030 doesn’t have a sentence about tracking humanities research funding or expanding it. I see all these great scholars on the board. What are they doing?  What are we actually doing?  Why isn’t something like Figure 1 above on Mellon’s website as part of a large, structural analysis, rather than on the blog of an obscure professor? Universities need to be “taken by the collar.” But who will take the humanities agencies by the collar?

 

None of the solutions are really so abstract anymore.  People here and there have sketched out plans. I outlined one version in a long discussion paper for the MLA Executive Council in 2022, and ended my presidential address in January 2023 with a sketch of the steps we need to take, somewhat expanded in the print version (“Criticism After This Crisis”).  Also in 2022, a sub-committee of the Executive Council developed a reporting structure on cuts (or growth) across the country, planning to use the Association’s large, elected Delegate Assembly to feed information to headquarters for analysis and reporting. The Association never set this up. 

 

Two years went by, and the MLA then set up a panel explicitly about funding at the Convention in January 2025. 

 

Figure 2. MLA Convention Program 2023, Panel 139

 

The panel was an excellent (re)start on the topic, and the panelists had a good planning meeting afterwards.  We outlined NEH, Mellon, MLA, ACLS working together on research data, reporting, development. Then Trump took office and started his attacks. My colleagues bailed on the plan, which as far as I know, is dead.

 

With some discipline, we can replace our historic humanities pastime, discrediting each other’s research, with the project of building a material base for all of it.  If we can’t show basic mutual respect for divergent (and radical) research within the profession, then we are doomed.  But actually we can do this, and many, many of us already are.

 

I again invite both Harpers and everyone else into the effort of building the material base. 

 

Battery, New York on November 2, 2022   

Trump’s opening blitzkrieg has happened, the first defenses are in place, and the colossal damage has been done.  What are the university system’s next moves?

• More lawsuits.  I was ecstatic about the May Day lawsuit against the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). It’s seeking to block the DOGE decimation of grants, workforce, and programs.  Plaintiffs are the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Historical Association, and the Modern Language Association. (See Karin Wolf’s good backgrounder.) Suing will bring more people into the battle. People are inspired into action when they see that the people running the humanities’ national institutions are in the fight. 
• Ongoing faculty and staff opposition. Special mention to the AAUP for jumping into the trenches and staying in there—they’ve been inspiring.  Overall, there has been action on many fronts.  
• Compiling cuts lists.  Great work on the NEH grants cuts. And on NSF’s. Some University of California faculty have started a survey of PIs to gather information, in part because an unknown share of terminated or suspended grants are not reported to the campus’s research offices. Some faculty have tried to get information from their own administrations through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.
• Rallying administrations. There have been some great individual faculty senate statements calling for mutual defense and academic alliance (e.g. U Mass Amherst, Rutgers, Minnesota, University of California).
• Objecting to ICE’s abrogation of academic freedom.  Combinations of lawyering and academic and grassroots support have obtained releases for Rumeysa Ozturk of Tufts and Mohsen Mahdawi of Columbia.  This is ongoing work.
• Bridge funding.  At Inside Higher Ed, Kathryn Palmer wrote a good piece about university research without federal funding—and its impossibility. She sampled the range of universities that are offering temporary backfill for wrongly terminated or delayed grants—Yale, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, as well as the public Universities of Hawaii, Massachusetts, and Arizona. This is a stopgap that I’ll discuss below.
• Collective Statements by Institutions.  The main one I know is “A Call for Constructive Engagement”organized by The American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) with support from AAAS, with a large number of presidents signing on. Are there others? Others that commit to oppositional modes of action?
• Other stuff??? I’m not coming up with anything.

The first responses to the NIH cuts came 100 days ago.  The research funding story has moved from litigation against pernicious and illegal federal cuts to hunkering down for a long siege. Most of the lawsuits are awaiting first decisions. Trump’s people in the agencies seem to be ignoring them. 

This is a period of enormous danger, as the slowly boiling frog gets used to the very hot water and accepts its fate. All this good work is not enough.  And it needs national coordination.  These many small groups are up against the federal government.

Administrators have not created the united front that faculty groups have called for. Harvard hasn’t gotten the public backing of the entire Ivy League, for example. Instead, we see individual universities—Dartmouth for example—looking more Trump-friendly to save themselves.

As they enter the next hundred days, universities face ten-dimensional fiscal risk. 

1.     Blanket reductions of indirect cost recovery funds at NIH, the Department of Energy, and now NSF(as of May 2^nd).  There’s a Temporary Restraining Order for the NIH cuts, but as I understand it, no funds have been restored.

2.     Cancellation of existing grants (for various and mostly arbitrary and capricious reasons, starting with any mention of diversity and also including the study of climate change, attitudes towards vaccines, etc.; the Ted Cruz blueprint / hit list seems to be in use). NSF grant terminations are compiled here.   Cancellation is coupled with opaque appeals processes of unknown likely outcomes.

3.     Reduced awarding of grants (NSF awards are, by one calculation, down 50%).

4.     Freezing of awarded grants. DOGE seems to be behind this. When they will be unfrozen is unclear—if ever.

5.     Non-review of new applications.  Reviews have stopped and started in opaque and unpredictable ways.

6.     Non-allocation of funds for awarded and uncancelled grants.  Executive impounding is happening across government, very much including research agencies. 

7.     New political conditions for eligibility for grant approval. The existence of DEI programs and boycotts of Israel are to be deal-breakers, but so might any student protest of the war in Gaza or perhaps something else.

8.     Retaliatory bulk funding impounding at targeted universities.  Columbia, Penn, Harvard, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, Cornell, and Northwestern were Trump’s starter list. Harvard’s total of $2.2 billion in frozen funds is more than three times the size of its federal research allocation ($639,953,000 in FY 2023), so the Trump Administration is impounding across the full range of federal fund sources.  This includes:

9.     Cuts to student-related federal funding. These are still unknown, but may include a disorderly exit from student financial aid. The Republican House is now involved in some confusing design projectsthat could cut revenues to universities and cut their underlying student enrollment.  Student tuition as well as enrollment-based state funds (at public universities) help subsidize research (“institutional funds” are 25 cents on the research dollar, up from 10 cents in 1970), so both of these cuts mean domino effects for research.

10.  Cuts to Medicaid and other programs that form a big part of university revenues, particularly through medical centers. Medical centers generate both high revenues, especially through clinical activity, and high costs. If the revenues are cut, universities’s subsidy bill could explode.

These are ten dimensions of fiscal risk.   Bernie Sanders put out a Minority Staff Report on May 13^th called “Trump’s War on Science” which shows the budgetary and personnel damage at NIH.

 

My list omits the enormous psychological distress, the incalculable wasted effort, the massive intellectual costs, the bonfire of the knowledges.

The list also omits the general sense that researchers are in limbo, whole fields are being decimated (like education statistics), and the research funding system is now “totally broken.”  

This is to also to pass over the federal crushing of academic freedom through the government-dictated bans on a long list of research topics, terms, and approaches. I am still looking for a precedent in a Western democracy other than Nazi Germany. The Nazis may be the only one.

This is to say that a united university sector must fight hammer and tongs. And also to say that current energy level is way too low—including the energy of strategy discussions. These must go beyond stopgaps that tacitly accept the new status quo.

A leading stopgap is institutional bridge funding. At the University of Arizona, the program resulted from a faculty protest in March of its administraton’s inaction.

[F]aculty senators blasted UA administrators for not providing more updates and concrete plans on how to navigate the many executive orders and funding cuts from the Trump administration.

“The vice president for research is not doing anything, as far as we can tell,” Keith Maggert, a UA professor of molecular and cellular biology and a faculty senator, told [Senior Vice President for Research Tomás] Díaz de la Rubia in response to his report Monday to the senate on federal funding orders.

“I’m sorry to be so blunt. The (UA) president has not announced anything to help research. It’s down to the department, who is the least able to cover this,” Maggert said. 

….

“We don’t know what’s going to happen,” said Díaz de la Rubia, who appeared to be taken aback by the blunt questions.

He said the administration is in “constant communication” with officials in Washington, D.C., and colleagues at the federal funding agencies, and repeated his advice that UA faculty and researchers keep in touch with their program managers because they are the ones with the most information.

In response, Maggert said program officers weren’t returning emails or communicating with researchers so Díaz de la Rubia’s advice didn’t get them anywhere.

“If I don’t get bridge funding, I will have to shut my lab in about two or three months,” Maggert said.

“I have graduate students that can’t be paid. I have organisms that need to be fed. I haven’t heard anything about any of these ideas or bridges that you’re talking about. So, it may be occurring in your office, but it’s not [trickling] out to the people who (have) research programs, the students that rely on them, and the staff that helps support them,” he continued.

“And so, what specifics can you give us other than broad statements that have yet to turn into action? How can the University of Arizona support the research infrastructure that it has created, that we have invested in, that our lives and careers depend on?”

The Arizona Daily Star reported that meeting on March 4^th.  It reported a new bridge program on March 7^th.  The open protests worked. 

I’m happy for Prof. Maggart and his colleagues, and pleased that he was rewarded rather than punished for speaking out.

 

However, I see three problems to bear in mind.

 

One I’ve mentioned: patches normalize the status quo.  They say, “universities can work with this. We have institutional funds that we can use to keep a lower but perhaps adequate level of research going.”

 

The second is that this “perhaps adequate level” is actually a bad level. For example, the Mellon Foundation has offered $15 million to replace cut NEH state humanities councils. This is good. But those programs had been budgeted at $65 million.  If only 1/5^th or 1/4^th of current funding is replaced, universities will lose the majority of their research activity. They cannot accept this. 

 

The third is possible internal cuts to the research not covered by bridge funding. 

 

The University of Arizona is a case in point. It spends $955 million (FY 2023) on research from all sources, of which about half, or $434.7 million, comes from the federal government (NSF Higher Education Research and Development [HERD] survey, “Data” tab, Table 22, Row 42).  To support that research, the University of Arizona spends $304.7 million of its institutional funds. This means that nearly 1/3^rd of the U of A’s research funding comes from its own pockets.  

 

The “bridge funding” package is a promise to increase the University’s institutional expenditures. (Details are not available to the general public.) Where is that additional institutional money going to come from?

 

Since (almost) every single public university income stream is under pressure or just plain inadequate or both, the most logical source of Prof. Maggart & Colleagues’ bridge funding is the $304.7 million the university already spends on research. 

 

The most likely method is a zero-sum reallocation from some fields to biology and related fields with laboratory commitments and crunches.  Non-Science & Engineering fields, with fewer facilities and personnel commitments, are likely sources.

 

Arizona spends $27.3 million of its institutional funds on all non-S&E fields, or 9% of the total (still using the most recent data from FY 2023, Table 28, Row 23).  It spends a total of $4.5 million on the humanities, (Table 58, Row 72), somewhat more on both visual arts and Education, and so on.  

 

Extramural funds (when not nullified by Trump) cannot be diverted by a university administration, but institutional funds are the university’s own money and can be. At Arizona’s institutional funds rate, it is putting around $9 million of its own funds into non-S&E fields.  It would be tempting to raid this money for the benefit of biology and chemistry labs that can’t cover their payroll or keep their organisms alive. 

 

No one would really want to do this. But there aren’t obvious alternative funding sources, and no transparency about fund flows in the American university even in normal times. 

 

Bridge funds in one field thus can mean cut funds in another.  They are not a good short-term solution, and they won’t work at all medium-term.  

 

If the main current funding idea is limited like this one, university officials need to come up with much better ideas, and fast.  

 

I think all better ideas are going to require a collaborative front among numbers of universities rather than these individual deals.  Otherwise universities will be doing much of Trump’s work for him.