Methods Unsound

Monday 17 March 2025

Marlon Brando fascinated by a dragonfly, Apocalypse Now, Pagsanjan, Philippines, Mary Ellen Mark, 1976

I

The attack currently underway on American institutions and government agencies from the Trump administration certainly exceeds any previous examples of aggression from the executive branch. Cold Eye Earth is more typically focused on energy and economic policy, and like most other observers in this space did not find it hard to anticipate the ways the Trump team could damage the EPA, and cut into regulations in everything from vehicle emissions to natural resource extraction. But the speed at which the new administration has quickly upended the post-war order in the West, incoherently applied a range of tariffs to friendly trading partners, triggered massive uncertainty for the American business sector, tested the boundaries of constitutional rights, and unleashed a strange, almost eerie hostility upon Canada in particular, has much of the country up in arms—including many who voted for the President.

Readers of Cold Eye Earth probably don’t need to be told this, but, the problems and potential crises being put in motion right now greatly overshadow impacts to climate policy. You should pay attention, for example, to a new line of attack coming from the executive branch against the nation’s universities, and especially its research universities. To explain, the US has 187 research universities that carry an “R1” designation, a class of institutions that the Carnegie Foundation cultivates through their education classification process, that denotes those universities receiving the highest levels of research funding. There are about 52 of these in the private category—names like CalTech, Northwestern, Rice, Carnegie Mellon, Rensselaer Polytechnic, Cornell, Brandeis—and the rest are public institutions, like the University of Michigan, UC Berkeley (indeed the entire UC system), and the University of Texas. The R1 model has worked beautifully for the country.

These institutions pull in large amounts of funding from the government (and private industry too), and that helps attract graduate students from both the US and around the world who come to work in campus institutes, or under professors in their labs, on just about every imaginable aspect of scientific inquiry. Yes, there is funding for research in the humanities, but the big activity courses through all the scientific fields and at the end of the journey the country receives a payoff: significant contributions to medicine, genetics, engineering, technology, computer science, health, and so much more. It’s typical for graduate students coming out of R1 universities to start companies, to create breakthrough products, or to seek employment with many of the nation’s leading edge companies. The US economy is inextricably tied to this system and it’s not hard to understand why.

Now imagine cutting that funding. This is what the Trump administration has just done to Columbia University in New York ($400 million), and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore ($800 million). A brief word about Johns Hopkins: the university, which is heavily organized around medical education and research, has been in partnership with the federal government for many decades (if not longer) and is regarded by some as the first research university. Alot of the health research that benefits the US military takes place at Johns Hopkins, for example, and its impact on the government is so vast and important it’s impossible to list all of its contributions. If Johns Hopkins didn’t exist, the government would have to invent it.