Dispensing with US universities (extended)

Coming, ready or not

I’ve extended this post to start thinking about how a break with the US university system might happen and how it could be funded. Feel free to skip the first part if you’ve already read it.

It’s been evident since Trump’s inauguration that the US, as we knew it, is over. I’ve been looking at some of the US-centred organisations and economic dependencies that will need to be rebuilt. But I hadn’t given much thought to the university sector, where I work, until I got an urgent email asking everyone at the University of Queensland to advise the uni admin if we had any projects involving US funding.

It turns out that Australian participants in such projects had received demands from the US to respond, at short notice, to a questionnaire asking if anything they were doing violated any of the long list of Trump taboos: contacts with China, transgender issues, persecution of Christians and so on.

This is front-page news in Australia but I couldn’t find anything else about it except for a brief story in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago. Presumably, though, this is happening everywhere.

Taken in the broader context of the Trump dictatorship, this means the end of international research collaboration involving the US. That will be a huge blow to global research of all kinds. Faced with this prospect, I would have expected our response to start with denial, before working through the other stages of grief.

And that’s exactly what we got from our Education Minister Jason Clare, who put out a waffly statement ending with “We look forward to working with US counterparts to demonstrate the benefits of collaborative research to both US and Australia's interests."

But, amazingly, the Group of 8, representing the management of the leading research universities seems to have moved on to acceptance, calling for a turn to Europe saying “Australia must double down on getting a seat at the table to access the world’s largest research fund, Horizon Europe,”

Research funding is only the first stage in the story. As Trump closes off travel from much of the world, holding major conferences in the US will become intellectually indefensible, if not physically impossible. In my own field of economics, the central role in the job market played by American meetings will need to end. The central role of US journals will last a bit longer, but can’t be tolerated indefinitely.

In the longer term. Trump is setting out to destroy US universities as centres of intellectual inquiry. That will take a while, and the US will continue to be central in many fields of research for some time to come. But the eagerness of university managers to collaborate with the regime means that time may be short.

The axe is already falling on biomedical research and climate science among other fields. Work in these topics will have to move elsewhere, as will researchers who value their independence. Is such a shift financially and technically feasible, given the resources of what’s left of the free world? On an initial analysis, it’s a task comparable in cost and difficulty to taking responsibility for our own defence.

Looking at cost first, the US government currently provides around $200 billion a year in research funding, and total US R&D expenditure (including commercial R&D) is around $900 billion a year. Combined GDP for OECD countries other than the US is around $40 trillion, so we are looking at somewhere between 0.5 and 2.25 per cent of GDP.

Fortunately, there’s no need to replace all of that, certainly not at once. The areas under most immediate attack are biomedical research, where the US currently funds about $100 billion a year and climate science, about $15 billion a year. Finding this kind of money, along with a defence buildup, will be politically painful, but it is certainly feasible economically. And the long-term payoff to achieving a dominant position in biomedical research will be huge.

And compared to defense, where complex US-centred command structures have been built up over decades, the logistics will be relatively straightforward. Academics are a mobile bunch, and there will lots of them looking to get out of the US, even with lower salaries and, initially, constraints on infrastructure. In any case, they may have little choice.

The rest of the natural science/STEMM sector will presumably carry on relatively unaffected for a while. I’d be interested in comments from people closer to the action on this.

This process won’t lead to a complete break with the US. There was, after all, a significant amount of co-operation between the US and USSR during the Cold War. And, once we accept that the US and China are going to be more alike than different in the future, we can be a bit more relaxed about research interaction with China.

Then, there’s AI. Without taking a position on whether it’s a fad, a technological revolution, or, potentially, The End Of The World As We Know It, it’s vital that these issues should not be decided by dictatorial regimes. As with Starlink, an independent capacity is essential. US firms have spent a fortune, with limited returns so far, and China has shown with DeepSeek that much of their work can be replicated/independently reproduced at low cost. It should not be too hard for the free world to do the same.

Finally, there’s the humanities and social sciences, including economics. These fields have never flourished under dictatorship, as can be seen by comparing China’s near-invisibility in these fields with its leading position in many fields of technological research. They will, inevitably, wither on the vine if Trump’s dictatorship is sustained long enough. But there is a lot of ruin in an academic discipline. We can hope that Trump’s winter will be short relative to the lengthy time-scales of the academic world, and that when it passes, there will be a new spring/

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