Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

News and views about philosophy, the academic profession, academic freedom, intellectual culture, and other topics. The world’s most popular philosophy blog, since 2003.

  1. Jason Leddington's avatar
  2. Jonathan Nash's avatar
  3. John Pillette's avatar
  4. AG Tanyi's avatar

The Trump war on universities

The targets so far:  Columbia, Penn, Harvard, Princeton, Brown.  All but Princeton have medical schools, and research medical schools get very large amounts of money from the federal government through the NIH.  Major research universities without med schools–like Princeton, but also Berkeley, MIT, and Caltech–may be somewhat less vulnerable precisely for this reason, although they all get non-trivial amounts of federal money for research in the natural and life sciences, but typically less than the comparable universities with med schools.  Ironically, liberal arts colleges are likely to be least scathed by the Trumpista rampage, precisely because of lower amounts of federally funded research.   As the research capabilities of the leading research universities are degraded, expect a migration of faculty to countries in Europe and Asia with better funding.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Designed with WordPress