Froma Harrop: Trump must stop trampling on our universities

[Thiệu Ngô]

From the commentary, "In sum, many of the smartest people in the country are being sat on by the political dunces. How dumb can America get?

By Froma Harrop

In the course of three days, six U.S.-based scientists have won Nobel Prizes. Every one of them studied or now works at America's public universities. Five were affiliated with or educated by California's system for higher education.

President Donald Trump's assault on universities, both public and private, targets the engines of American greatness. He pinned much of it on the colleges' failure to defend free speech and stop unruly student behavior, some degenerating into antisemitism. Point taken.

But it's mainly taken the form of shaking down universities. For his gentler audience, Trump frames it as "saving" taxpayer money. To quote the president: We will cut funding by X$ and thereby save Y$."

Over in the biology department, immunologists Mary Brunkow and Fred Ramsdell are sharing the Nobel Prize in medicine with Shimon Sakaguchi. Brunkow studied at the University of Washington and Princeton. Ramsdell got both his bachelor's degree and doctorate from the University of California, first at San Diego, then at Los Angeles. Sakaguchi teaches at Japan's Osaka University.
As for physics, three scientists, one British, one French and one American, shared the Nobel Prize. All three, however, are now associated with UC campuses at Berkeley or Santa Barbara. The American, John Martinis, earned all his degrees at Berkeley. They won the Nobel for having discovered -- bear with me -- "macroscopic quantum mechanical tunneling and energy quantization in an electric circuit."

And one of the three scientists just awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry is Omar Yaghi, who occupies a chair in chemistry at Berkeley. Born in Amman, Jordan, Yaghi obtained his undergraduate degree at the State University of New York's Albany campus. His Ph.D. came from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Our colleges and universities should be sources of American pride as well as power. They are a reason why, if California were its own country, it would have the world's fourth-largest economy. To think that Trump is threatening its public universities with layoffs, budget cuts and loss of federal grants. He's trying to freeze about $584 million in grants at UCLA alone. That's in addition to his attempted $1 billion shakedown over unrest at the UCLA campus.

With an economy larger than Japan's, small wonder there's a move in California to take over federal funding for scientific research with its own. Specifically, state lawmakers talk about putting a $23 billion bond measure on the 2026 ballot to replace lost federal dollars. If voters passed it, that would give California the wherewithal to make grants and loans to its own universities and research companies.

California would in effect be bypassing the National Institutes of Health. The NIH is the world's biggest funder of medical research. And who did Trump put in charge of the NIH? Health Secretary Bobby Kennedy Jr., an anti-vax ignoramus (excuse me, "skeptic") who is, mentally, many cards short of a full deck.

At least 24 University of California and California State University campuses have lost NIH training grants. UC already runs six academic health centers. If California taxpayers take over that funding, universities in other states should not expect to receive a dime of it.

That said, other states share these concerns. Washington and Oregon have joined California in setting up a coalition to review scientific data and make recommendations on vaccines. An alliance with similar goals, though probably less money, is being set up on the East Coast. Harvard and Yale do have impressive endowments.

What the great universities in the Trump-voting heartland are going to do, I can't guess.

In sum, many of the smartest people in the country are being sat on by the political dunces. How dumb can America get?

Trump is testing us for an answer.