Trump is attacking NIH because politicizing funding can force universities to become conservative thinktanks

It's bad, folks. The real war is on free thought in the United States.

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In early February, Trump advisor Chris Rufo wrote on Substack, “The Trump administration must renegotiate the deal [for] universities, conditioning federal funding [on giving up free speech and becoming ideological allies of the regime]." Rufo is a fellow at the rightwing Manhattan Institute, and he has been talking about breaking universities for a long time. In 2021, Rufo said “it’s time to lay siege to the universities.” And Rufo has many powerful allies in his plans to co-opt universities, which find agreement throughout movement conservatism. Rufo traveled to Mar-a-Lago last fall to present his plan to Trump to “reform” American universities. In Florida, Rufo worked with Republican governor Ron DeSantis to use state tools to gut the selective progressive New College and leave it a conservative-biased shell. And in 2021, Trump’s vice president JD Vance gave a speech entitled ‘The universities are the enemy.” Vance, Rufo, Trump and Republican elites are now acting out this agenda: attacking NIH and manipulating its grants to attack American universities.

American universities are a shining star of America’s economic power, a magnet for talent that attracts people from all over the world. So why do movement conservatives want to destroy universities? It’s an important question right now, one that many scientists are just waking up to. The answer is that conservatives hate universities because they are bastions of free thought, which leads them to self-organize into liberal places. Smart people, whether they are center-right, center-left, or left, generally support core liberal values of intellectual freedom, fairness, and the rule of law. That leads people in academia, including scientists, to oppose today’ authoritarian conservatism — today’s autocratic and oligarchic US Republican party.

Universities also occupy a privileged place in public debate. Scholars at universities get quoted in the press; scientists at universities weigh in on the truth and validity of oil CEOs’ climate claims, and on COVID deniers’ public health claims. In other words, universities are independent arbiters of truth in a free society. They are institutions that can push back on autocrats. That’s a major reason Rufo and Vance hate universities so much: universities limit the power of autocrats. So Trump and Republican elites are now seeking to politicize, damage, and corrupt NIH — they want to take over the science grantmaking system to destroy US universities.

Two parts of this situation probably bear further explanation for the scientific community: What Rufo says and what he really means, and why universities are liberal, that is, how intellectually meager movement conservatism is today.

What Rufo says, and what he actually means

Rufo cloaks his attacks on universities in language he thinks will appeal broadly to liberals. He says in his February piece:

“The Trump administration must renegotiate the deal between the citizens and the universities, conditioning federal funding on three popular demands: first, that the schools contribute to solving the student-debt crisis; second, that they adhere to the standard of colorblind equality, under both federal civil rights law and the Constitution; and third, that they pursue knowledge rather than ideological activism.”

Let’s be straight here: all of this is the purest bullshit.

Republicans do not care about making universities better, or solving anything about student debt. Just look at New College in Florida and how much free speech on campus has now been constrained by its Rufo-supported, politically-appointed president acting to boost conservative speech. And Republican elites have repeatedly voted against any solutions to the student debt crisis. The real reason Rufo is saying this because he thinks liberals and scientists will fall for his deception: he thinks that with these words he can peel off some liberals and university leaders and board members to support his project. Hopefully, no scientist is dumb enough to fall for it. Rufo doesn’t want scholars to pursue free inquiry into scientific knowledge, he wants to politicize science. And he and his donors also want to privatize science, to please the rightwing billionaires who are at the heart of movement conservatism. This is clear from the rest of his piece, when he says, for example “we should acknowledge the dirty secret of higher education: it has become a creature, or, less charitably, a parasite, of the state. It is no stretch to say that the entire business model of higher education is fundamentally dependent on federal money. … The Trump administration should act before taxpayers are asked to bail out those who borrowed money for expensive degrees. … This will require privatization.”

It is very much billionaires who guide these attacks. Rufo is not just acting alone. He is paid and boosted by rightwing billionaires who want to destroy the government to privatize it. He’s now paid by the rightwing Manhattan Foundation, which is funded substantially by Wall Street billionaires. In the past he’s been paid by the Claremont Institute and Heritage Foundation (“one of the most influential right-wing think tanks in the country, [which has] worked to undermine climate science, public health amid the COVID-19 pandemic, organized labor, and voting rights.”) And Rufo is plugged into other groups in the rightwing universe: “right-wing billionaire donors and major right-wing foundations [fund] Rufo-affiliated groups.”

Universities are liberal because movement conservatism today is intellectually weak

Why is it that Rufo and his donors so intent on boosting conservative ideas at universities? If their ideas are so good, shouldn’t they be persuasive?

There is a long tradition of conservative thought that engages with real ideas, that seeks to find a better society via efficiency, or maximizing growth. There are intellectually honest conservatives that liberals should engage with. But today, movement conservatism in the US has given up on fairness and democracy, and it’s given up on persuading people that it has better ideas. Conservatives no longer believe in any marketplace of ideas — they instead seek to jam their views onto others using raw power and money. They’ve created a massive media machine, selected and groomed judges with rightwing ideas, paid people like Chris Rufo, and now seek to use the power of the state to crush American universities.

There’s a reason universities today seem liberal to Republican elites: because universities in many cases remain places of free thought. When colleges have sought to provide advantages to conservatives, they have ended up hiring movement conservatives who embarrass the institution. CU Boulder started such a program in 2013, and ended up with professors like John Eastman, who helped twist the law to promote Trump’s election theft effort in 2020.

Conservatives need affirmative action-like programs to get ahead at universities because the large majority of smart people disagree with today’s authoritarian movement conservatism. The American conservative rump that still supports the Republican party doesn’t have many good ideas — it is largely about justifying oligarchy. As Amitabh Chandra put it more than five years ago: “There was a time when I could go to a GOP thinktank and debate Peter Bach or Henry Aaron or Mark Pauly. We agreed on lots of things, and disagreed on many others. Now, it's completely fine to just shout socialism and markets, disparage expertise, and everyone claps. I don't consider myself a Democrat, but the quality of the conversation at CAP or Brookings is orders of magnitude richer, and more sophisticated, than what is happening at GOP thinktanks. And I say this is someone who often disagrees with both of them.”

Now Trump and his allies, the billionaires that funded his campaign and that fund conservative thinktanks, want to force universities to accept what they say. By jamming it down on them using their power. That’s not free speech, it’s indoctrination.

Scientists especially should fight back. Politicizing US science in this way will break it. We can’t have a strong scientific industry in American if conservatives are making decisions about grant funding based on political factors like how many John Eastmans the university has hired. For many decades, grant decisions at NIH have been essentially made by study sections composed of actual scientists, unaffected by any forced conservative bias. That must continue for health cures to continue. Cancer treatments for everyone depend on resisting Trump’s takeover of universities.

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This is a contributed post to the Alt NIH 4 Science blog. If you’re a US scientist and/or an NIH’er, please feel free to send us posts or pitches.