By Peter Hans
President, University of North Carolina System
RALEIGH (May 1, 2025) – For more than 70 years, federal funding for university research has been a patriotic bargain and a core driver of national strength.
Coming out of World War II, American leaders recognized that dominance in emerging fields is key to national power. The whole world had just seen the starring role that scientific advancement played in winning history’s largest conflict, and policymakers rightly believed that the United States should be at the leading edge of discovery across a wide range of disciplines.
The question was how to support such a far-reaching goal without creating some immense, centralized bureaucracy that would trample traditional American values of free enterprise and open competition. We needed a strategy to harness national resources without the drag of central planning.
The solution was distinctly American, drawing on the diverse network of universities scattered across every part of the country. Instead of writing five-year plans and letting Washington try to decide the future of science, we embraced competitive grants, awarded to individual researchers, spread across independent universities that were, themselves, competing for prestige and progress. We trusted the academic marketplace of ideas to test things out and determine the most promising pathways for new knowledge.
“Scientific progress on a broad front results from the free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice, in the manner dictated by their curiosity for exploration of the unknown,” wrote Vannevar Bush in 1945, laying out the case for this open and competitive approach in Science, the Endless Frontier. His vision shaped a uniquely American model of progress: one where liberty, freedom, and open-minded exploration provided fertile soil for economic growth, medical advances and national security.
The competitive grant system aligned the structure of American science policy with the country’s broader commitment to pluralism and free thinking. Just as our economy thrives on decentralized innovation—on countless entrepreneurs and firms testing new ideas—its scientific enterprise thrives when many minds pursue many different questions. It was a deliberate, pointed contrast to the command-and-control system of Soviet science, where apparatchiks made the key decisions about scientific investment.
The American vision has worked brilliantly, keeping the United States at the forefront of global competition in everything from agricultural production to artificial intelligence. It made us a magnet for talent from across the world and turned higher education into one of the few major sectors where the United States runs a consistent trade surplus, bringing in ambitious students from abroad who want to participate in a free and open system.
That was the federal side of the bargain — competitive funding, awarded on the basis of academic merit, without ideological strings attached. The university side of the bargain, which Bush and his colleagues took pains to emphasize, was to maintain a true marketplace of ideas and recognize a responsibility to the public interest. “It is chiefly in these institutions that scientists may work in an atmosphere which is relatively free from the adverse pressure of convention, prejudice, or commercial necessity,” Bush wrote. “At their best, they provide the scientific worker with a strong sense of solidarity and security, as well as a substantial degree of personal intellectual freedom.”
Both universities and the federal government have strayed from that original vision in recent years, and both must return to it. At the University of North Carolina System, we have done difficult and important work to keep up our end of the bargain and preserve an environment of genuine intellectual freedom. We recognized that ideological pressure can come from within the academic community as well as from outside, and we’ve made concerted reforms to protect students and scholars from conformity of all kinds.
Scholars should not face political litmus tests from anyone — not from an accreditor, not from a campus administrator, and not from a federal agency. “Research thrives best in an atmosphere of academic freedom,” Bush declared, and that’s the atmosphere we want for the UNC System.
The patriotic compact that made American universities into the world’s most productive engines of discovery and national strength can work again. But it requires a recommitment, from the federal government and from our universities, to Bush’s original ideal of open-minded exploration. It’s a fundamentally American value — and a foundational strength for higher education.
Peter Hans is the President of the University of North Carolina System.
Paul Fisher Williams says
President Hans is another Republican who refuses to take responsibility for a situation his party created. The “market place of ideas” as the source of America’s scientific and technological leadership is the right-wing narrative. Another narrative for which historical facts are more consistent is that the American genius was that it socialized knowledge production. Computers, microelectronics, satellites, radar, the internet, etc. were all the result of government investment in basic research. No private enterprise would undertake the risk necessary to land a man on the moon. As one economist put it the U.S. Federal Government is the most entrepreneurial organization of the last 150 years. Science is not a marketplace. Nor are grants “competitive” as in a market place. Scientific experts decide what is meritorious dictated by what nature tells them is the direction to go. Disciplines are indeed what they are called: Disciplines. They are disciplined not by market forces but by the strength of the better evidence. If something is wrong with the academic world the party of Reagan should have the intellectual honesty to acknowledge that it has been going progressively more wrong with each passing year of neoliberal rule Republicans have inflicted on all of us.
Ed Samulski says
Defund Research? A Swiftian Perspective.
Teaching at Research-1 Universities has definitely gotten out of hand. Students should not be subjected to what their professors think. Why do they need to learn to create new knowledge? Isn’t there enough knowledge to go around? They should be learning common sense instead of arcane skills like critical thinking.
If President Truman had rejected Vannevar Bush’s 1947 proposal advocating for government funding of basic research in universities “in an atmosphere of academic freedom,” he would have impeded the cancerous growth of scientific progress. Why does the US government lavish approximately $200 billion annually on R&D with nearly half going to Research-1 Universities like NCSU and Carolina? More frugal spending would have, for example, retarded the miniaturization of transistor (discovered in 1947) that powers our cell phones, personal computers, and the servers on the farms that will usher in the Artificial Intelligence Age. Current iPhones are good enough and should be passed down from one generation to another, eliminating research expenditures on new models thereby narrowing the extortionate trade deficit with China. AI will only weaken future generations, reducing the workday to a mere 60 hours a week.
Before 2025 the NIH spent nearly $50 billion annually improving our understanding of health-related diseases and spawning new therapies. But the average life expectancy in the US is already above 79 years. Diverting that funding could reduce life expectancy and eliminate the need for geriatric care, retirement homes, and even Medicare by allowing the elderly to die out from natural diseases. Herd immunity could replace vaccines to accelerate the process.
On a more positive note, defunding university research now will stem the tide of immigrant students who have flooded American universities, staffing the research laboratories and medical schools, giving us a new, more positive meaning for the dreaded STEM word.