Abstract:
When Trump recently cut federal research funding, the tremors were felt even in America’s richest universities. Harvard, Stanford and MIT, with endowments worth tens of billions of dollars, were forced to cut budgets, delay projects and draw from reserves to stay afloat. The academia in the US soon realised that private donations and endowment income cannot replace the steady flow of govt support. That decision has shaken the very foundation of the American research ecosystem and offers an important lesson for the rest of the world. Public funding is not charity. It is the backbone of a nation’s knowledge economy.
Not charity but investment: When govts withdraw support, universities begin to behave like businesses
Every great university system, both public and private, is built on predictable govt support. In the US, private universities like Stanford, MIT and Caltech each receive hundreds of millions of dollars annually from federal agencies. Every grant carries an overhead, often between 40 and 60%, to support laboratories, staff, maintenance and compliance systems. These overheads sustain the invisible infrastructure that keeps research alive. Without them, even the wealthiest private universities would struggle to survive.
