Trump NIH Pick Dr. Jay Bhattacharya Wants to Take on Cancel Culture in Higher Education
“is considering a plan to link a university’s likelihood of receiving research grants to some ranking or measure of academic freedom on campus”
This is great news. Someone has to do this eventually.
The Wall Street Journal reports:
The Trump NIH Pick Who Wants to Take On ‘Cancel Culture’ Colleges
President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the National Institutes of Health wants to take on campus culture at elite universities, wielding the power of tens of billions of dollars in scientific grants.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford physician and economist, is considering a plan to link a university’s likelihood of receiving research grants to some ranking or measure of academic freedom on campus, people familiar with his thinking said.
Bhattacharya, a critic of the Covid-19 response, wants to counter what he sees as a culture of conformity in science that ostracized him over his views on masking and school closures.
He isn’t yet sure how to measure academic freedom, but he has looked at how a nonprofit called Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression scores universities in its freedom-of-speech rankings, a person familiar with his thinking said.
The nonprofit scores schools based on a survey of students’ perceptions of factors such as whether they feel comfortable expressing ideas. Schools are also penalized if their administrators sanction faculty for opinions or disinvite a speaker from a campus event after a controversy.
Universities that are leading recipients of NIH grants but have poor FIRE rankings include the University of Pennsylvania (“very poor”), Columbia University (“abysmal”) and the University of Southern California (“very poor”). Schools with top scores in FIRE’s most recent rankings are the University of Virginia, Michigan Technological University and Florida State University.
The academic-freedom prerequisite is among several proposals for overhauling the NIH and its billions of dollars in grant-making that Bhattacharya would pursue if the Senate confirms him, the people said.
DONATE
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
This sort of policy is nothing more than a measure of what is important to the federal government.
The fedguv already imposes strict regulations on institutions that receive federal funds in any form, as to the distribution of minority students and faculty, and how they cater to “protected classes.” And I mean any form. You have a veteran who wants to use HIS money from his GI Bill benefits to attend school? The entire school gets yoked into slavery.
The government is all in on enforcing racial and sexual issues, but apparently care nothing about intellectual and political oppression, censorship, and hiring practices. I think it’s wonderful that Bhattacharya wants to address that. Just keep in mind that it signifies nothing more than a policy change that almost certainly won’t survive the next Democrat administration.
Give out less money. In times when there is a budget deficit, give out none at all.
Dr. Battacharya — Maximum respect from me fwiw; however, if you really want to fix the NIH external granting system, I’d urge complete decoupling of research from university.
Let researchers do research. Independently. Or affiliated with independent institutes.
Get schools out of the money-seeking grant-seeking business.
That’s where the mischief has taken root and festered.
M R I A !!!
Make Research Independent Again
(If the Wright brothers had been at a university, airplanes wouldn’t have been invented.)
Jay Bhattacharya is walking into a mega-Superfund site of instantly-fatal DEI poisonous waste at NIH! The rot there is not measured in feet, nor in miles, but in Astronomical Units. I did grant evaluations for NIH for a while, and as Duke d’E says above, it is a nightmare. It would be better for NIH to get out of funding research directly and let it be handled through some other mechanism, because higher education cannot be trusted to use NIH funds for anything but grift and graft. The studies they fund range from very useful (a small minority) to off the wall bizarre (think gay rats and drunk mosquitos). And yes, the latter examples did get funded.