This is my Cassandra thread on the future of universities under the Trump 2.0 administration. Buckle up and prepare for the “told you so” a few months down the line: 1/
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Seems plausible. Although I’ve also seen comments about the plans to choke the grant budget by over 60% So with fewer grants to go around (as well as those that are made being inadequately costed) this could all happen even quicker…
Thanks for this. Laying out potential downstream effects helps identify where to shore up now. Also the impacts on local communities, will be enormous. My university is the 2nd largest employer in a middle income region bordering Mexico.
Universities will be able to litigate some changes to terms of existing grant, but these will only provide a temporal reprieve. Lower indirect costs (15-20%) will be the norm going forward. 2/
This will lead to a profound reconfiguration of research on campuses. Non-medical research will be consolidated, some programs will be shuttered, grad cycles will more to 2-3 year cycles bc postdocs are cheaper and more effective. 3/
This will hurt the teaching mission of most universities, particularly in the STEMs: faculty there will have even less support (TAs, Grad Researchers, etc), which will lead to higher attrition. 4/
States will largely not intervene. States like Ohio just won’t care. States like California will be underwriting the houses of people in Pacific Palisades with higher ed moneys. Universities will be on their own. 5/
Some institutions will try to plug some of the budget holes will loans from their endowments (like, internal IOUs), but as market turbulence makes these loans more unsound, they will stop. And so will the supported research. 6/
Won't billionaires step in with funding for their personal pet projects? Which is, like, maybe even worse as we get a series of studies that "oil- does it cure cancer?"
We should expect to see an exodus of researchers on soft money (whose salary comes mostly from grants). This will devastate health systems, which mostly operate in this basis. 7/
this is something that worries me; the people i know in academia are early tenure track or post-docs, and in both cases would see this particular result as a "good" thing for their narrow short-term interest
Yes, because their plans have all been outlined for the world to see for years. They’re simply following the playbook they told us they were going to follow. The time for outrage was before the election. Now we do what we can do adapt and use whatever tools are available to us to fight back.
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consent in academia seems too easy to obtain