PRIVATELY RUN, PUBLICLY FUNDED

Gray Bittker

The private research university is a quintessentially American concept: public money gets funneled into private institutions that will benefit the country with the fruits of their experiments and studies. This conceptualization of research places it squarely in the arena of other public goods like fire departments and judicial systems that are understood to benefit society as a whole even if they wouldn’t be commercially viable. Politicians have long been apprehensive of this tradeoff, and the coffers of government have served as a dependable and lucrative source of funding for universities like Brown to engage in cutting-edge research across a variety of disciplines. However, actions by the Trump administration have thrown into question the social contract between the private research university and the American taxpayer, demonstrating in the process how dependent schools like Brown are on federal funding for their everyday operations. At the core of the recent federal funding debacle remains a crucial yet unanswered question: how can institutions so reliant on federal funding remain private and independent in practice?

The modern research university system in America finds its roots in the Cold War, when competition with the Soviet Union spurred the federal government to launch a series of initiatives designed to bolster the country’s scientific and technological prowess. One of the most important of these was the National Science Foundation, which was founded in 1950 to fund scientific research at some of the top academic institutions in America. The NSF operated on a tight budget in its early years, forcing it to pass up on many appealing grant proposals, but everything changed following the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1958. Fears over Soviet technological superiority led lawmakers to more than triple the NSF’s budget from $40 million in 1958 to $134 million in 1959, and by 1968 the NSF was allocated a yearly budget of almost half a billion dollars to improve America’s scientific research. This proved to be a windfall for private research universities, and the NSF now operates a $9 billion budget that schools have come to depend on for both direct and indirect research expenses. Other government agencies like the National Institutes of Health (NIH) spend tens of billions of dollars on medically focused research, with over 80% of the NIH’s $48 billion budget going towards extramural grants for research outside of government laboratories.

These government funding programs have become a lifeline for top research institutions like Brown to engage in what would otherwise be prohibitively expensive research: in 2023 Brown spent more than $350 million on research, over 70% of which was financed directly by the federal government. This figure is particularly interesting given that on paper Brown is a private university that is theoretically independent from the federal government in its operations. Brown is legally registered as a “Rhode Island nonprofit corporation,” and just like any other corporation it has a governing body that makes decisions for the university on matters related to faculty, finances, and gifts among other responsibilities. This model is common to nearly every private university in America and is understood to be a necessary safeguard for the protection of student and faculty academic freedom. This makes it all the more concerning that universities, especially those dedicated to costly research, are effectively in the pocket of the federal government, something that administrators only recently woke up to when their federal funding came into question.

Earlier this year, the Trump administration rocked Brown and other universities when it announced that it would be withholding billions of dollars in pre-approved research federal grants over claims of antisemitism on college campuses. Brown was hit especially hard given its already unstable financial footing, and the school was forced to take out a $300 million loan to stopgap the lost federal funding. Trump’s actions, while controversial, raise an important question: how much say should the federal government have in its provision of grant money to schools? These grants are, after all, taxpayer funded, and government agencies like the NIH already heavily influence the research process by determining which projects to fund. The Trump administration is also not the first to put strings on federal grants, with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibiting discrimination based on race, color, and national origin in federally funded projects. The Biden administration made its own updates to federal grant policy, expanding the definition of sex discrimination to include gender identity for the first time, and the Trump administration has since updated the NSF grant policy to prohibit federal money from going towards “DEI and other far-left initiatives.”

In order to restore its research funding Brown reached an agreement earlier this year with the Trump administration, making controversial concessions that concretely demonstrate the university’s lack of independence. Brown is so dependent on federal funds that it willingly limited its provision of gender affirming care for minors and made a number of other policy changes to appease the Trump administration, moves that President Paxson explicitly tied to the burden of frozen grant money. Other schools took far more drastic steps to get their federal funding back: Columbia University named new faculty members to certain departments and Cornell agreed to turn over its admissions data to the government. While both of these concessions might not seem like much, they also came with fines in the tens and hundreds of millions of dollars that some have decried as extortion payments to the Trump administration.

It is evident that the federal research grant system is actively hurting the independence of America’s “private” research institutions, though schools unfortunately have to toe the government’s line if they want to engage in scientific research. There is simply no other funding source that can match the scale of federal grants, leaving America’s research institutions at the mercy of policymakers who have the final say over where the money goes. While this control over universities was certainly not an intended outcome of government agencies like the National Science Foundation, it has since become a useful tool for politicians to influence a sector of America that they would otherwise struggle to touch. This leaves research universities like Brown with a difficult choice: retain academic independence, or submit to the power of the government’s purse and the political consequences that come with it.