The White House is emphasizing a new science research model that places emphasis on private American citizens, and private American enterprise. It is right to do so.
Read more Thank your friendly neighborhood data center
White House science advisor, Michael Kratsios, announced in a hearing before congressional lawmakers this week in Washington, D.C., that the U.S. needs to find better ways to research and finance science and technology including artificial intelligence, robotics, and nuclear energy.
The administration found that way: cut back on the university research role, and focus on more direct and efficient investments in the private sector, and in individuals. It also makes a bet on science itself, acting as a source of scientific discovery: AI.
Referring to the report, “Science: A New Golden Age,” the White House calls it “the first comprehensive rethinking of the U.S. science and technology enterprise in over 80 years.”
Indeed it is. The last was from American inventor and engineer, Vannevar Bush concerning the Manhattan Project.
But the White House has put their finger on something else that has been holding the U.S. back in science: universities. It is not only their bloated cost structure and institutional bureaucracy that have turned real science into make-work for faculty, but the faculty itself, acting as political ideologues who are hostile to U.S. national interests.
Unlike individual entrepreneurs and scientists working independently or allied with private teams, the faculty within major R1 research universities are first and foremost, a unionized labor group with overwhelmingly progressive left representation, and nearly unanimous DNC party affiliation. They are a reactive political class first and foremost.
University administrations have also corrupted the research process by using federal grants to subsidize all manner of unrelated ideological interests, by “skimming” the expense allotment which can be upwards of 50% beyond the underlying grant amount. Universities don’t report how this is spent, and have gotten “fat, dumb, and lazy” from taxpayer largesse. It is little wonder that they are up in arms in a collective and legal revolt as their gravy train is getting cut, while that train is now being led by President Trump to a new, more efficient and more accountable research destination. Not surprisingly, universities falsely act as sudden American patriots and assert that their reduced funding will hurt the U.S.
Universities, however, pose a particularly serious risk to U.S. research and development: national security. The U.S. university system is effectively an open door with few safeguards, little oversight, and liberal interpretations of what is, or is not, subject to national control standards. The same faculty that leisurely work away on thousands of obscure “research” projects, are also a group made up of foreigners, many from China, who are not only rank and file faculty, but are welcomed into senior university administration where highly sensitive work is under their direction.
As the National Association of Scholars recently reported, many of our universities are actually training Chinese nationals in theoretically advanced, highly sensitive defense areas that any sane American would find effectively treasonous. But not our universities.
To them it is business as usual because their economic rewards come from both U.S. taxpayers, and from foreign governments: they are straddling a dangerous conflict of interest, but justify it because the culture of the modern university rests on a progressive “global village” of international faculty who use their academic credentials as an open pass, and where “knowledge creation” is thought an idealism among an elite intellectual class that doesn’t need to be bothered with the concerns of states, citizens, and sovereignty. Those are often thought to be the symptoms of “empire” and capitalism, and few things get academics more excited than thinking they are a force combating competitive markets and nations, and working toward an equitable open society.
Read more America’s Golden Age: Trump sows seeds of economic prosperity
The U.S. Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, recently described the fundamental threats posed by this toxic combination of academic elites, progressive liberal ideology, and a resultant compromised national order that must be corrected. Cutting university involvement in American science research, and placing conditions on what research it may conduct under federal grant, is a wise position of domestic realpolitik.
But it is also mature and practical because it gets back to what individual Americans do best: invent.
We make things no one thought of before, and we do it so well that everyone else copies us, or is inspired to compete. Americans have invented hundreds of things that we take for granted today, and most of these things had little if anything to do with universities.
The list of U.S. inventions is breathtaking, but many often forget how it all happened because we’ve handed over too much of our youth’s natural instincts for invention to university bureaucrats who hold out to students that they are the ones who benefit from university research, and that includes their job prospects.
Universities are motivated by self-interest to turn entrepreneurial American risk-taking into the placid, and safe, routines of a promised career, created within the sheltered cloisters of a university campus. Those rewards must also be purchased first, of course, with an “up front tax” in the form of tuition, and it is no wonder that US student debt is nearly $2 trillion. Imagine if that were instead a venture capital fund, and students had open access to research information. That is one of the promises of AI.
Not unexpectedly, universities are trying to fence in AI with their old teaching and research methods, and treat AI as just another “elective” within their medieval learning system. They know that it risks putting them out of business. AI has tradeoffs of course, including how it is managed, but its disruption of legacy practices is inevitable.
Some may otherwise point out that the Manhattan Project involved the university sector. It did. But it was a project under strict military management, including converting one university into a secretive military site. But it was a project that was ultimately realized by individual, independent scientists assembled under direct U.S. Army control, and was never left to the discretion of university administrators. That is probably the only way universities can expect to have a credible role in future U.S. research: as a limited part of a much larger team that they do not control, and whose national security is strictly isolated from their purview.
It was a serious mistake to relax oversight of university research. The Trump administration is finally addressing it, and much more.
Matthew G. Andersson is a former aerospace CEO and law and policy author. He has testified before the U.S. Senate on new aircraft in the national airspace system, and has been featured in the National Academies of Science on technology and regulatory economics. He is a graduate of the University of Chicago.
Read more A slip of the mask
Image: Pixabay // Pixabay Content License