Psst... Everyone Relies on the Government

Some commentators believe that academia is reaping the whirlwind. Are they right?

Photo by Leon Wu on Unsplash

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World will be in Chicago for the next few days attending the International Studies Association annual meeting. Given the current state of the world, I anticipate a copious amount of alcohol consumption fervent debate among the assembled scholars about what the future holds. Posting on here will be rather light.

As I go to meet my colleagues from universities across the country and the world, I find that my industry — higher education — facing a existential crisis. The Trump administration’s capricious, intrusive, and probably illegal actions have nonetheless frozen or terminated a lot of federal funding that goes to U.S. universities. I suspect more punitive actions will be on the horizon. And while higher education attracts income from a variety of different sources — tuition, executive education, foundation support, alumni giving, endowments for some, state governments for others — federal research dollars play a critical role in keeping the hard sciences and medical schools surviving and thriving.

What I am saying is that the vibes are not just dark in DC — they are dark at every research university in the country. As an associate dean for research at Tufts, I have witnessed this carnage up close. There are a lot of researchers who had secured grants that are now suddenly being informed that the money they was promised to them is no longer promised to them.

So I certainly appreciated that Megan McArdle pointed out in her Washington Post column last week that the damage caused by this “slash-and-burn approach” to budget-cutting will be extensive.¹ As she notes, “a research project is not like a car, which can be safely turned off and started again when you’re ready to use it, so making ham-fisted cuts to science funding risks setting society back by years.” Indeed, this is a penny-wise and pound-foolish approach.

However, McArdle did not stop there — she opened up her schadenfreude spigot pretty wide:

Let me make a less obvious and probably less welcome point: The left, not the right, picked this fight. Too many institutions set themselves up as the “Resistance” to Trump and tried to make a lot of mainstream political opinions anathematic, while expecting to be protected from backlash by principles such as academic freedom that they were no longer honoring. This was politically naive and criminally stupid for institutions that rely so heavily on U.S. taxpayer support.

Academia at least should have known better, given that it has entire departments devoted to studying how politics works. It has long been clear that cuts to research funding could be the first step if Republicans were so minded. The student loans and Pell grants that subsidize tuition could be slashed, the tax rules that let elite institutions accumulate massive endowments could be changed, and in red states, government aid to public schools could be reduced. The resulting budget holes would be calamitous in many cases and would filter through the ecosystem even to schools that survived: If small schools stop hiring new faculty, that means fewer jobs for graduate students from large research universities….

This danger has been evident for years, yet when I asked academics if this was really wise, most were curiously oblivious to the risks. Though they complained about stingy state legislatures and meddling Republican politicians, many bizarrely took them as evidence that there was little cost to politicizing academia — essentially, “They’re already attacking us, so there’s no point in trying to placate them.” They did not seem to grasp how much worse it could get.

Fundamentally, they took their prestige and public support for granted and seemed unable to imagine a world where the word “education” no longer conjured reverent deference among most of the population. Like children throwing rocks from an overpass, they felt protected by their elevated position, assuming their targets could do little but yell back. They weren’t expecting one of the drivers to get out of the car and grab a baseball bat from the trunk.

So there is a lot going on in those paragraphs — and the rest of her essay, which should be read in its entirety. As she documents, some university leaders and academics have committed their fair share of screw-ups since 2017.

As one of those academics tasked to study politics, however, I do have one observation to make:² McArdle’s argument, carried to its logical extreme, implies that every sector of the U.S. economy should keep their mouth shut for fear of a cutoff of government support. Academia is hardly unique in receiving federal subsidies to enable their business plan. Sectors ranging from agriculture to zinc mining benefit from government subsidies of one form or another. Two days after McArdle’s column ran the Washington Post published an exclusive with the literal headline, “Elon Musk’s business empire is built on $38 billion in government funding.” The richest man in the world is, if anything, more dependent on government largesse to make his enterprises run than higher education.

Whatever venal sins university leaderships have committed over the past five years are nothing compared to the mortal ethical sins Musk and his minions are now committing with their newfound power. And if the rule is that any economic sector that relies on some form of government policy should curtail their speech lest they face the wrath of the state, well, public discourse would be reduced to silent meditation.

It is noteworthy that Silicon Valley moguls were also rather outspoken in opposition to Trump during his first term — and yet have not faced a similar reckoning from the new administration. McArdle’s logic would explain why — the public display of Silicon Valley plutocrats bending the knee to Trump has been observable to one and all.

But it is worth noting that — a few notable exceptions aside — university presidents and college professors have been remarkably quiescent in 2025. They have not uttered much in the way of protest in response to the new administration’s actions. Perhaps that is insufficient — maybe McArdle et al want the leaders of higher ed to display outright fealty to Trump. That sure seems like a violation of the free speech principles that McArdle’s boss Jeff Bezos has been talking about as of late, however.³

It is also a violation of what universities are supposed to do. There’s a longer conversation to be had about when university leaders should speak out on public issues of the day, but as the American Association of University Professors noted last month, even the supporters of institutional neutrality acknowledged that sometimes there are exceptional moments:

The University of Chicago’s 1967 Kalven Report, often cited as the source of calls for “institutional neutrality,” declares, “From time to time instances will arise in which the society, or segments of it, threaten the very mission of the university and its values of free inquiry. In such a crisis, it becomes the obligation of the university as an institution to oppose such measures and actively to defend its interests and its values.” This is undoubtedly such a time.

As Wesleyan University President Michael S. Roth told McArdle’s colleague Perry Bacon Jr., “Leaders in higher educational institutions should stand up for their values…. We should stand up for our values because we’ve said we believed in them for the last many decades now.” He added:

This is an administration that is prioritizing loyalty and attacking people who stand, not against them necessarily, but for their own ideals and missions. That is the authoritarian playbook. If I were hiding — Wesleyan is a small school — maybe they would never notice us.

But that’s how tyranny gets instituted in a country…. I’m a professor, a teacher. I don’t look for trouble. But I would feel ashamed if I didn’t speak up for the values that have guided my institution and many others.

It is going to be a rough few years for the American academy. Perhaps McArdle is correct and we are reaping the whirlwind. But I fail to see how academia’s sins over the past decade have been any more egregious than other sector of the United States. And we do agree on one thing: the Trump administration’s actions during this term will make both the academy and the United States more impoverished.

1. Full disclosure: I’ve known Megan for more than twenty years.

2. Actually, I have others like the fact that even red state Republicans are super-queasy about the Trump administration’s cuts to research spending and that administration actions ,like this are a surefire way of eviscerating the pillars of American power. But I have a conference to attend.

3. /<sarcasm>