Freezing Higher-Education Funding: A Threat to America’s Talent Advantage

Freezing Higher-Education Funding America’s greatness owes much to attracting the world’s best talent to study, teach, and conduct frontier research. Public and private funding for leading international scholars helped it surpass Germany and Europe during World War II and become the dominant power. Freezing higher-education funding casts a shadow over that attraction. Countries offering better conditions and more research funding may gain a chance to catch up with America’s longstanding lead. Interfering with academic freedom, free expression, or higher education for any reason is dangerous. Other actions might be viewed as a grand Trump-administration strategy—though intuition seems more likely—but undermining these longstanding strengths harms America’s position over time. --- Harvard president Alan Garber, who is Jewish, responded to the administration’s demands in a message to the community: ‘The University will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights… No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.’ The administration’s antisemitism task force then froze over US$2 billion in federal funding, threatened Harvard’s tax-exempt status and ability to enroll international students, and demanded records of foreign funding.