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A NEW KIND OF CRISIS FOR AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES  
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Ian Bogost
February 10, 2025
The Atlantic
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_ The ivory tower has been breached. _

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"I personally think that the post–World War II system of big
research universities funded heavily by the government will not
continue.” That’s how one professor at a big state research
university responded when I asked how he was feeling about our shared
profession. That system is the cornerstone of U.S. higher
education—at Harvard or Princeton, yes, but also the University of
Michigan and Texas A&M. The research university has helped establish
the meaning of “college” as Americans know it. But that meaning
may now be up for grabs.

In the past two weeks, higher ed has been hit by a series of startling
and, in some cases, potentially
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cuts. First came a total freeze of federal grants and loans
(since blocked
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perhaps ineffectually
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by two federal judges), then news that the National Science
Foundation, which pays for research in basic, applied, social, and
behavioral science as well as engineering, could have its funding cut
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two-thirds. On Friday night, the National Institutes of Health, which
provides tens of billions of dollars in research funding every year,
announced an even more momentous change: According to an official
notice
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a post [[link removed]] from the
agency’s X account, it would be slashing the amount that it pays out
in grants for administrative costs, effective as of this morning.

This latest move may sound prosaic: The Trump administration has
merely put a single cap on what are called “indirect costs,” or
overhead. But it’s a very big deal. Think of these as monies added
to each research grant to defray the cost of whatever people,
equipment, buildings, and other resources might be necessary to carry
out the scientific work. If the main part of a grant is meant to pay
for the salaries of graduate students and postdocs, for example, along
with the materials those people will be using in experiments, then the
overhead might account for the equipment that they use, and the lab
space where they work, and the staff members who keep their building
running. The amount allotted by the NIH for all these latter costs has
varied in the past, but for some universities it was set at more than
60 percent of each grant. Now, for as long as the Trump
administration’s new rule is in place, that rate will never go
higher than 15 percent. Andrew Nixon, the director of communications
for the Department of Health and Human Services, told me the
administration takes the view that it could force universities to pay
back any overhead above this rate that was received in the past. “We
have currently chosen not to do so to ease the implementation of the
new rate,” he said.

In practical terms, this means that every $1 million grant given to a
school could have been transformed, at the stroke of midnight, into
one that’s worth about $700,000. Imagine if your income, or the
revenue for your business, was cut by nearly 30 percent, all at once.
At the very least, you’d have a cash-flow problem. Something would
have to give, and fast. You’d need to find more money, or cut costs,
or fire people, or cease certain operations—or do all of those
things at once.

It’s safe to assume that those consequences now affect every
American research university. Some campuses stand to lose
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million a year or more. Schools with billions of dollars in
endowments, tens of thousands of students, or high tuition rates will
all be affected. Just as your family has to pay bills or your business
has to pay salaries, so do universities. “I think we could lose $1
million to $2 million a week,” one top university administrator, who
declined to be named to avoid political scrutiny, told me. But the
loss could also be much larger. Administrators can only guess right
now. They don’t yet know how to figure out the impact of this cut,
because they’ve never been through anything like it.

Within an hour of this article’s initial publication, a federal
judge in Massachusetts put a hold
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the cap on indirect costs, just as the freeze on federal funds was
quickly stopped in court. (Stuart Buck, who has a law degree and is
the executive director of the Good Science Project, a think tank
focused on improving science policy, had told me that the cut probably
wouldn’t pass legal scrutiny.) But whatever happens next, a jolt has
already been administered to research universities, with immediate
effects. And the sudden, savage cuts are setting up these institutions
for more punishment to come. A 75-year tradition of academic research
in America, one that made the nation’s schools the envy of the
world
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has been upset.

The “post–World War II system” of research that the
state-school professor mentioned can be traced back almost entirely to
one man: Vannevar Bush. His diverse accomplishments included his
vision, published
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Atlantic_, for a networked information system that would inspire
hypertext and the World Wide Web. In 1941, Bush became the first
director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, funded
by Congress to carry out research for military, industrial, medical,
and other purposes, including that which led to the atom bomb.

Universities in America received little public-research funding at the
time. Bush thought that should change. In 1945, he put out an
influential report, “Science: The Endless Frontier,” arguing that
the federal government should pay for basic research in peacetime,
with decisions about what to fund being made not by bureaucrats, but
by the scientific community itself. Bush advocated for a new kind of
organization to fund science in universities with federal money, which
was realized in 1950 as the National Science Foundation. Then his
model spread to the NIH and beyond.

Money from these agencies fueled the growth of universities in the
second half of the 20th century. To execute their now-expanded
research mission, universities built out graduate programs and
research labs. The work helped them attract scientists—many of them
the best in their field—who might otherwise have worked in industry,
and who could also teach the growing number
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undergraduates. The research university was and is not the only model
for college life in America, but during this period, it became the
benchmark.

Now many university professors and researchers believe that this
special fusion of research and teaching is at risk. “I feel lost,”
a research scientist at a top-five university who works on climate and
data science told me. (She asked not to be named, because she is
concerned about being targeted online
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Like others I spoke with this week, she expressed not only fear but
anger and despair. She feels lost in her own career, but also as an
American scientist whose identity is bound up in the legacy of
Bush’s endless frontier. It’s “like I don’t know my own
country anymore,” she said. Even though her work isn’t funded by
the NIH, she worries that similar cuts to indirect costs will come to
the NSF and other agencies. She said that her salary and benefits are
paid for entirely by federal grants. If money for overhead gets held
up, even temporarily, the work could get stopped and the lab shut
down—even at a wealthy and prestigious school like hers.

Others I spoke with had similar reactions. Bérénice Benayoun, a
gerontologist at the University of Southern California who studies how
male and female immune systems respond differently to aging, has
already heard that the NIH overhead cut might lead to salary freezes
and layoffs at her institution. The people working in administrative,
purchasing, and shared-services roles are all funded by this pool of
money, she said, so they might be the first to lose their job. Mark
Peifer, a cell biologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill, worries that his doctoral students and research techs might not
get their paycheck if the lab’s accounting staff, which is also paid
from overhead, are let go.

Both Benayoun and Peifer suggested that, in addition to harming their
friends and co-workers, these changes would affect the pace of science
overall. Some administrative duties might be handed off to faculty.
“We’ll be able to do less science and train fewer talented
people,” Benayoun said. Support for doctoral tuition—often paid
from grants—could also be at risk, which would mean fewer graduate
students doing lab work. That would slow down research, too. Some of
these consequences might arrive “within weeks,” she told me.

Peifer told me he feels “both devastated and defiant.” His
research relies on advanced confocal microscopes that are priced as
high as $1 million each. Indirect costs on grants help a school like
UNC invest in that equipment, along with laboratory cold rooms,
electricity bills, and other, more mundane needs. Universities also
use overhead to cover start-up costs, sometimes millions of dollars’
worth, for setting up new faculty with labs. Those kinds of
investments would also be endangered if the NIH overhead cut is
maintained. “It will mean the end of biomedical science in the
United States,” Peifer said.

Biomedical science is probably not about to end. But Peifer and his
peers do have reason to worry. Many scientists have devoted most of
their lives to doing research, and they’ve done so in a system that
is designed, through its structure and incentives, to wind them up.
Even as their fields have grown more crowded over time, and grant
funding more competitive, they may be pressured by their universities
to spend more money on their work. The schools compete for rankings,
status, talent, and students based in part on the number of dollars
that they dole out in doing research, a metric known as “research
expenditures.” Given all the pressure on professors to win more
grants, and pay more bills, even just the prospect of a major funding
cut can feel like a cataclysm.

The one that kicked in and then was stopped today may not be coming
back. When the first Trump administration tried to limit overhead on
NIH grants in its 2018 budget proposal, its plan didn’t work.
Congress rejected the idea, and the NIH appropriations language
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lawmakers adopted in response is very clear: Indirect-cost rates
cannot be touched. The fact that the administration went ahead and
changed them anyway suggests “no theory of reform,” Stuart Buck
said.

At the very least, the cut to indirect costs has precipitated a
short-lived funding crisis, of a type that should now be familiar to
American scientists. George Porter, a computer-science professor at UC
San Diego whose work focuses on how to reduce the energy required to
run big data centers, has been through similar scares. In 2017, the
Department of Energy briefly halted payment on a $12 million grant he
was awarded after the administration sought (unsuccessfully
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funded it, Porter told me. Government shutdowns in 2018 and 2019
created further obstacles to his getting access to federal grants.
“I’ve been trying to tell people that science funding is very
fragile for some time,” he said.

But after most of a century of success and support from the federal
government, research universities and their faculties may have become
inured to risk. One computer-science professor who declined to be
named because he was coming up for a performance review told me that
few of his colleagues believed that anything would really change that
much because of Donald Trump. “Everyone was wondering whether their
grant funding would be delayed. The idea that it might be canceled, or
that two-thirds of the NSF budget may be cut, just wasn’t something
anyone believed could happen,” he said.

Now the sense of dread has reached even those in computer science,
where grant money tends to come from other sources—the NSF, the
Department of Defense, NASA, the Department of Energy. Any budget cuts
brought on by the NIH could be felt by everyone across the university.
“Suddenly there are some very serious rumors going around,” the
computer-science professor said, including the possibility that
faculty in his department would have to pay some of their grant funds
back to the university to make up for the total shortfall. Even
university leaders seem surprised. “This literally breaks
everything,” one senior administrator at a major public university
told me after learning about the NIH overhead cut. “What are they
doing?”

If this cut is reinstated, or if new ones follow, universities will
need to figure out how to respond. Some might press researchers to
make up the deficit with future research funds, a practice that would
make an already hard job even harder. Some might choose to invest more
of their endowment or tuition proceeds in research, a choice that
could cut financial aid, making college even less affordable. Big
state schools could try to appeal to legislatures for increased
funding.

Even if they head off a crisis, other institutions of higher ed might
suffer in their stead. Nicholas Creel is a business-law professor at
Georgia College & State University, a small, public liberal-arts
college. Schools like his focus on teaching, which might suggest that
it’s immune to the sort of government cuts that would be
catastrophic for a large research university. But Creel worries that
his college could be in trouble too, if the state government responds
by shifting money to the bigger institutions. “That’ll mean less
funding for schools like mine, schools that operate on a budget that
those major research universities would consider a rounding error.”

In the meantime, the Trump administration’s cuts aren’t even set
up to make research more efficient. The real problem, Robert Butera,
an engineering professor and the chief research operations officer at
the Georgia Institute of Technology, told me, is compliance bloat.
Buck agrees. More changes to the regulations and policies affecting
federal grants have accrued
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2016 than they did in the 25 years prior, and universities must hire
staff to satisfy new demands. In other words, the federal
government’s own rules have helped create the rising overhead costs
that the same government is now weaponizing against higher ed.

Inside universities, faculty members squabble about the details. Many
scientists would agree that overhead is too high—but only because
they perceive that money as being taken from their own grant funds.
Administrators say that overhead never covers costs, even at the rates
that were in place until last week. Despite all of this, few of those
I’ve spoken with in the past few days seem to have considered making
any lasting change to how universities are run.

Maybe this was never about efficiency. American confidence in higher
education has plummeted: Last year, a Gallup poll
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that 36 percent of Americans had “a great deal or quite a lot” of
confidence in higher ed, a figure that had reached nearly 60 percent
as recently as 2015; 32 percent of respondents said they had “very
little or no” confidence in the sector, up from just 10 percent 10
years ago. These changes don’t have much to do with scientific
research. According to Gallup, those who have turned against
universities cite the alleged “brainwashing” of students, the
irrelevance of what is being taught, and the high cost of education.
Destroying American university research does not directly target any
of these issues. (It could very well result in even steeper tuition.)
But it does send a message: The public is alienated from the
university’s mission and feels shut out from the benefits it
supposedly provides.

Scientists, locked away in labs doing research and scrabbling for
grants, may not have been prepared to hear this. The climate and data
scientist, for one, simply couldn’t believe that Americans
wouldn’t want the research that she and others perform. “I just
can’t understand how so many people don’t understand that this is
valuable, needed work,” she said.

But now may not be the perfect time to make appeals to the value and
benefit of scientific research. The time to do that was during the
years in which public trust was lost. In a way, this error traces back
to the start of modern federally funded research on college campuses.
In “Science: The Endless Frontier,” Vannevar Bush appealed to the
many benefits of scientific progress, citing penicillin, radar,
insulin, air-conditioning, rayon, and plastics, among other examples.
He also put scientists on a pedestal. Universities make the same
appeals and value judgments to this day. Cutting back their research
funding is not in the nation’s interests. Neither is insisting on
the status quo.

_Ian Bogost [[link removed]] is a
contributing writer at The Atlantic._

* scientific research
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* universities
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* budget cuts
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* Trump
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* Elon Musk
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