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From the article: “But universities cannot get around the fact that federal grants, by their nature, selectively fund certain ideas at the expense of others. The government picks intellectual winners and losers among private citizens, which is the exact opposite of intellectual freedom.” But couldn’t this be said about any source of funding? All funders, public or private, make decisions about the projects and people they choose to fund. This selection process is not an infringement on academic freedom. In fact, restricting who and how patrons choose to fund research is itself an infringement on their freedom to fund what they want. If I want to fund cancer research, how is this an infringement on physicists and mathematicians? The real problem in academia regarding academic freedom isn’t federal research grants, but the dependence on external funding from any source to help maintain operations, and how this affects tenure decisions. Tenure-track professors should be able to do whatever research they want, but this freedom is tempered by two pressures: (1) publish-or-perish culture, and (2) the pressure to raise money for the university. In practice, this means having to do research that is more likely to get funded and published. Modern research universities are effectively think-tanks with researchers working on what could get published and funded. It’s still possible to do curiosity-driven work under such a setting, but one must still “play the game” to get tenure. Getting rid of federal research grants won’t solve those problems. In fact, it may make things worse. I’m not confident about industry’s willingness to fund research, given the demise of legendary research labs such as Bell Labs and Xerox PARC and the overwhelming culture these days of only supporting research that has a high chance of getting productized immediately. The consequence of getting rid of federal research funding is that a lot of universities will end up reverting to the pre-WWII model where there was very little funding to do research at all. This is the norm at many teaching-oriented universities, but research universities today rely heavily on research grants, particularly those from the federal government. Relying entirely on grants from private individuals and organizations won’t solve academic freedom issues if professors there are required to do publishable and fundable work in order to earn tenure, and with less money for research, this may make things worse. |
The authors of the article are not claiming that this infringes on academic freedom, but intellectual freedom. They explain here:
"Intellectual freedom is the principle that all individuals have the right to think for themselves, to express their convictions on any subject, and to give their support, financial or otherwise, only to the ideas they choose. When government coercively seizes your money and uses it to subsidize some research program or viewpoint for any reason, it is violating your intellectual freedom. This is the injustice inherent in all government research grants. It is this that private universities like Harvard should now name and challenge.
Instead, they fight for “academic freedom,” which is actually the opposite of intellectual freedom. It asserts the right of universities and professors to teach, write and research whatever they see fit — and to do it at the taxpayer’s expense."