I did my PhD research (1955-1959) when outside research grants were few and modest. My mentor, Herb Laitinen, had a $25,000 NSF grant that supported eight graduate students. He had no post-docs. We all had TA appointments throughout our study. A day in the student shop provided the rolling cart holding the single Tektronix oscilloscope we all shared.
This is not to complain or point out how far we have come, but to describe what graduate research is like when there is little or no outside support. The University of Illinois, Urbana/Champaign took its graduate programs seriously and all the professors had a small budget that provided for each graduate student’s experimental needs. But those “needs” were limited to what the support could bear. The system trained me very well for my academic career, but not so well for those headed into industry. The rule of thumb at the time was that new industrial hires spent their first year just learning how to use the equipment and support systems in their new “posh” environments.
Then, in 1957, Russia’s launch of the Sputnik satellite motivated a sudden showering of federal money for research, the eventual need to have a grant, the escalation of institutions competing for that money, finally settling into a steady-state where the research funding applied for far exceeds whatever funding level the agencies set. By my retirement, I had worked through that entire evolution. We ended up with an imperfect system that has turned investigators into CEOs/CFOs/CTOs of precarious enterprises and turned graduate students into hands and minds creating knowledge in highly specialized areas.
To its credit, the experience graduate students receive today is far more sophisticated than what I experienced. TA appointments are largely confined to the first year allowing much more time for research. For journal submissions to be relevant, academic labs have up-to-date equipment. Grants provide that environment. The pace and level of academic research has increased at least an order of magnitude. Research at universities has been giving science a great boost. And new industrial hires are immediately valuable contributors.
Today, that system of funding American academic scientists is being taken apart. The consequences of grants canceled, study sections suspended, programs shut down, and budgets slashed include personal distress, financial waste, and progress suspended. The years spent creating productive research groups cannot be readily recovered. The system was problematic before, but breaking it only makes fixing it harder. Meantime, we are at risk of crippling or losing our advanced degree programs in the physical and biological sciences.
As research support is withdrawn – and during the years it will take to rebuild – American scientific productivity will inevitably suffer. Universities cannot cover the cost of research at our current level, nor can they host research projects with only 15 percent indirect costs. The days of beaker-breakage budgets and student machine shops – where you could build what you couldn’t afford – are long gone. And soon, the resources needed to keep pace with technical advances – especially in fields less affected by funding cuts – will disappear too. In my opinion, there is no “making do” and remaining relevant.
This does not, however, mean that scientific progress will grind to a halt. It just means that American academic research groups will no longer be able to compete with scientists in a score or more of other countries. A recent scan of the authors from foreign institutions in publications I see confirms that excellent work, and a lot of it, is done outside the US.
In the short term, as these destructive policies take effect, the priority is to survive – and to preserve as much mentoring and productivity as possible. It is encouraging that some universities have formed consortia to pool the means to resist damaging assaults. It may be that scientists, too, could find more ways to join forces – as Joe Loo recently suggested. Perhaps groups of investigators could share the resources they already have to help all their students get the experience they need to become productive scientists. I know it’s an optimistic idea, but scientific member organizations such as the divisions of the American Chemical Society, the Association for the Advancement of Science, or the American Society for Mass Spectrometry (to name a few I am familiar with) could help facilitate such collaborations. When under threat, we need each other more than ever.
Damage has already been done and there is more to come before this reckless onslaught is over. But then, when we come to reconstruction, it would be worthwhile to consider how to better support academic research. The funding agencies have been mainly in the business of buying research. All vendors, including research institutes, government labs, and university teaching departments are in the same pool of providers. This ignores the special role of academic researchers, namely the nurturing of science students on their way to a PhD. I believe supporting this source of future innovators should be given some precedence or at least some degree of protection. Investigators “between grants” could maintain some productivity. Keeping education in mind, researchers in areas active, but not trendy, could continue their useful function. In support of accomplishing research, concern over productivity is useful; perennial anxiety about surviving the system is not.
In this way, as suggested by David Brooks' article, I Should Have Seen This Coming, in the May 2025 Atlantic, we can think about how we want to reassemble the pieces when the chaos is over. Let’s collectively work on survival and then find a way to emerge the better for it.
This article was originally published on Chris Enke’s Substack: The Science We Trust.
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