November 18, 2025

University cuts put successful US research model at risk

What Grey’s Anatomy, the classic textbook on human anatomy published in 1858, was to generations of medical students, Science, the Endless Frontier, a report written by the American Vannevar Bush and published in 1945, is to Julio Frenk, now the chancellor of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

Bush’s report, Frenk told University World News in an exclusive interview, was and still is an “enlightened, visionary blueprint” for the “most successful research enterprise in human history”: the research partnership between the government of the United States and the country’s universities that laid the foundation for America’s post-war pre-eminence.

The billions of dollars President Donald J Trump has cut from medical and other scientific research at universities is, Frenk explained, a “weaponised” reaction to what he admits is his and other universities’ failure to deal with “some of the antisemitic expressions” that occurred in the pro-Palestinian encampments and demonstrations a year ago.

However, Frenk notes, the government has used antisemitism on campus to “justify” an all-out attack on universities and the successful research paradigm that emerged after the Second World War.

“Look at the grants that are being cancelled by the government. They have nothing to do with antisemitism, wokeness [or] not allowing viewpoint diversity,” Frenk said.

“These are grants in basic science, in astronomy, and in physics, which have been the basis for American prosperity and security. We need to address the real problem, but not weaponise it, and least of all, cut basic fundamental research in an attempt to address that issue,” he noted.

These cuts are being made in the context of America’s embrace of populism, which, like all populisms, disdains ‘experts’ as well as critical thinking and free inquiry, the lodestones of Bush’s report, as evidenced from the final section of the introduction, “Freedom of Inquiry Must be Preserved”.

The raison d’être of the university, Bush wrote, is to provide the “scientific worker” with the “opportunity for free, untrammelled study of nature, in the directions and by the methods suggested by his interests, curiosity, and imagination”.

At the heart of the enterprise, according to Bush, is a “substantial degree of personal intellectual freedom”, what Frenk referred to as the meaning of “liberal” in the context of “a liberal arts and science education”, with its roots in Enlightenment thinkers like John Stuart Mill.

Basic research as a public good

Most Americans are unaware of the research funding model US president Harry S Truman established after receiving Science, the Endless Frontier in July 1945. Truman’s predecessor, Franklin D Roosevelt, had tasked Bush, his science advisor, to chart the future relationship between the United States government and basic research.

Bush rejected the European model that undergirded the Kaiser Wilhelm Society for the Advancement of Science, founded in 1911, where Albert Einstein served as director of physics from 1914 to 1933.

From its inception, the organisation was dependent on direct support from the German and Prussian governments and, after the Nazis took power in 1932, became little more than the research bureau of various ministries and a contributor to the Nazi eugenics and other programmes.

Instead, Bush drew on his wartime experience, including in the Manhattan Project, which, even as Truman was reading Bush’s report, was producing the atomic bombs used in August 1945 against Japan.

While much of the work on and building of the atomic bombs occurred at the all-but-secret city of Los Alamos, New Mexico, vital work was done on the chalkboards of Columbia University, the University of California at Berkeley, Princeton University and other universities across the country; the first functioning atomic pile was secreted under the squash courts at the University of Chicago. J Robert Oppenheimer, who directed the Manhattan Project, was a physics professor at Berkeley, and hundreds of scientists and graduate students there and elsewhere worked on the project.

While Hitler’s government contracted with industrial concerns such as Volkswagen and Siemens for the sinews of war and, notoriously, with chemical company IG Farben (to, among other things, manufacture Zyklon-B, the poison gas used in Auschwitz, Treblinka and other death camps), Nazi Germany also established huge industrial concerns such as the Reichswerke Hermann Göring, which, in addition to building its own tank, aircraft and other factories, commandeered factories and ore mines in the countries Germany conquered, for example, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland and France.

At its height, half a million people – including thousands of slave labourers – worked at its many installations.

By contrast, Frenk noted, the United States’ government did not build tank factories or aeroplane or ammunition factories.

“They used the industrial infrastructure that existed and established contracts with those companies. Something similar happened with universities both during and after the war. The government looked for places where there was already the infrastructure to carry out these projects, places that had labs and the researchers needed. The universities had these facilities,” he stated.

Among the many on-campus projects were the scaling up of the production of penicillin, the development of more than 100 radar systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the development of anti-malarial insecticides such as DDT.

In Science, the Endless Frontier, Bush designed a research paradigm that, he argued, would continue to produce economic benefits that would prevent the US from slipping into a recession as it had after the First World War or, worse, back into the Great Depression, as many feared it would.

According to Frenk, Bush believed that a vital part of the research infrastructure was graduate students, who were in the pipeline to become future researchers. Research carried out at universities was not only less expensive, Frenk said, but it was also more versatile and innovative because it did not take place in government-owned silos.

In peacetime, Bush called – and Truman and Congress agreed – for the government to fund “basic research whose purpose is to advance the frontiers of knowledge” because this research was “a public good”. Rather than the government telling scientists where to put their efforts, they were to be free to follow their interests.

Bush may not have looked the part of a gambling man, but he laid down the government’s marker on a number, the payout from which was many times beyond what could have been expected in terms of industrial and consumer products that fuelled the American economic boom in the post-war years and kept America the world’s pre-eminent military power.

“When a discovery is mature enough that it can be developed into a technology or other innovation,” Frenk explained, “then universities hand that off, often in partnership, but hand off those discoveries to a company that then does the ‘D’ part of R&D.”

As discussed in these pages earlier this month, since 1980, the licensing of intellectual property by universities has been governed by the Bayh-Dole Act and has produced more than 580,000 inventions, 6.5 million jobs in 19,000 start-ups and contributed almost US$2 trillion to the US gross industrial output.

The vital link between applied research and basic research, is pithily synopsised by Frenk with this rhetorical question: “If you don’t have basic research, you have nothing to apply, right?”

Learn from history

The Trump administration’s ostentatious turn away from this funding and research model is both a symptom of and enables what Frenk calls the “most serious challenge facing higher education in the United States ever”.

Twenty-five years after then newly elected president of Mexico Vicente Fox tapped Frenk, who had studied at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and was thereafter the executive director of evidence and information for policy at the World Health Organization, to be the country’s health minister, Frenk said the world has changed.

“I was truly an expert in a political position, not a professional politician in a health job. That is a big distinction … It was a new era,” he said.

Fox’s election in 2000 had broken the Institutional Revolutionary Party’s seven-decade-long hold on power. “The government wanted new faces, and they turned to experts.”

“A quarter of a century later, in country after country, you see big political changes, parties of the extreme,” said Frenk.

“The rise of populist politicians and their attitudes is the opposite: they cast experts as part of an elite that’s disconnected from the common masses,” he said, a casting that contributed to the refusal by tens of millions of people to adhere to COVID-era mask mandates, to take the COVID vaccine, and today, a refusal to accept that the resurgence of measles is caused by vaccine hesitancy.

Asked to comment on similarities between attacks on expertise and universities in Hungary and Türkiye and the Trump administration’s almost daily barrage against the nation’s most prestigious universities, Frenk was circumspect.

“One hundred years ago,” he said, “free expression [and] critical thinking” were undermined by Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini.

“It’s not the same [in the US today]. I do not want to sound catastrophic by saying that we are there. This is not the same situation. One hundred years have passed, and the United States is a mature democracy, very different from the Weimar Republic [which Hitler overthrew in 1933].

“But what I am saying is that we have seen this before. We need to learn from history, to be warned about where things [threats to both the university and the country’s democracy] occur,” he noted.

Moral and existential duty

Frenk, whose father and grandfather, both Jewish doctors in Germany, fled to Mexico, where Frenk was later born, is not a starry-eyed cheerleader, even for UCLA, which, he noted several times, had been slow to face up to antisemitism and ‘cancel culture’. The fight against antisemitism is both a moral and an existential duty, he argued.

It is a moral and legal requirement to protect Jewish students, staff and faculty because if Jewish students, faculty and staff are not safe on campus, ultimately, no one is, he averred.

The existential issue, according to Frenk, is “the idea of the university” itself, to slightly alter the title of John Henry Cardinal Newman’s classic work.

According to Newman (d. 1890), “University training is the great ordinary means to a great but ordinary end; it aims at raising the intellectual tone of society, at cultivating the public mind, at purifying the national taste, at supplying true principles to popular enthusiasm and fixed aims to popular aspiration, at giving enlargement and sobriety to the ideas of the age… It teaches him to see things as they are… to disentangle a skein of thought, to detect what is sophistical, and to discard what is irrelevant.”

Antisemitism was not just the canary in the coal mines of Germany’s universities during the 1930s; it was the acid that dissolved these universities’ pre-eminence, said Frenk.

“The historical record is clear; German universities’ decline began with antisemitism. They lost incredible talent, including many of the scientists that helped the West win the war,” said Frenk.

To see the corruption of the German universities, you need look no further than the book-burnings on campuses or professors’ roles in developing the pseudoscience that undergirded the anti-Jewish racial laws and what, for Frenk, as a physician, represent “the worst example, the most serious, horrendous violations of medical ethics in human history: the human experiments on prisoners in concentration camps [that] were designed by professors of medicine in the medical schools”.

As did Lynn Pasquerella, president of the American Association of Universities and Colleges, in an earlier interview, Frenk argued that American higher education must own up to its role in the decline of its prestige.

The cost of a higher education degree has left some two-thirds of Americans outside the proverbial tent – and because these Americans do not have formal training in critical thinking, they are vulnerable to “demagogic discourse”, Frenk said.

False narratives

Twice during our 40-minute interview, Frenk reached for his cell phone, though not to take a call or send a text message. Rather, he held it up as he does when meeting with people to explain the journey of research-based discovery.

He tells them: “This is a basic research package in technology, and we haven’t explained that. This is a product of basic research: the physics, the material science, and the electronics that inspired this application.”

The same is true for medical science, from the use of the mRNA technology for COVID vaccines to the CRISPR-gene-editing technology developed through basic research on animals that led to the first cure for sickle cell anaemia a few months ago.

“We need to remind people again, when they get a medicine that saves their mother’s life, that it starts in a university,” said Frenk.

“We need to do our part to acknowledge where we have failed in communicating to the public, in not being vigorous enough in combating antisemitism and other forms of discrimination, [and] the cancel culture workplace.

“At the same time, we need to analyse and explain to the public that a lot of the narrative about universities is not grounded in reality. It is a false narrative that presents us as elitist, detached … when we are actually the … most legitimate avenue for upward social mobility and the most important engine for innovation, and therefore for economic prosperity and security,” he noted.

Reaching back to his days as a medical student, Frenk told University World News: “The prescription is not to kill the patient, which is what’s going to happen [if the government continues]; the patient is not the university; the patient is the United States’ position in the world.”