I am not going to attempt a thorough overview of everything that has happened here. I’ll refer you to this post by Derek Lowe in Science for that. I’ll also engage with some of the content of the post in a more critical way in a little bit, but it’s a good overview of the basic timeline of what has happened and when with scientific funding and the freeze thereupon in the last two weeks or so.
Today, I just wanted to quickly write this to address, in extreme brief, a practical aspect of what is going on. Specifically, I want to prepare you for the possibility that your primary point of political leverage, if you are a scientist or trainee affected by these actions, is not the content (or quality, or intrinsic value to humanity) of your research or research in general. Your primary point of political leverage is your role in the complex public-private interface of the university system.
Lenin’s famous pamphlet What Is To Be Done? stresses (in extremely abbreviated and simplified terms here) the importance of a revolutionary vanguard in developing class consciousness among the laboring masses. While I’m not going to opine on the finer points or the operational virtues or drawbacks of the vanguard/party formation, in Lenin’s time or our own, I will note that Lenin’s underlying thesis is correct, and has proven to be correct time after time after time: what we call “class consciousness” does not spontaneously arise from the harsh realities of class conflict. It has to be prepared, educated, and cultivated via thorough and ongoing study – not of abstruse points of Marxist theory, but of the concrete political and economic situation as it confronts us. (Gil Scott-Heron: the ‘revolution will not be televised’ because the first revolution is the one that takes place in your mind, when you suddenly understand how things really are).
The funding freeze confronting scientists today is unprecedented in our lifetimes and highly disorganizing. What passes for leftist analysis of it is, as far as I have seen, mostly just creative catastrophizing, and ever more impassioned exhortations about the dire consequences to follow if research operations are more or less defunded. It’s not that I disagree with these exhortations, but they are further disorganizing and demobilizing. While understandable, they spring from a failure to understand the concrete political and economic reality of a scientific researcher or trainee in the US today, and the mistaken idea that there is some authority “out there” to be appealed to.
I’m no expert on the economic role of universities. (This should be a topic for immediate political education, for myself and for everyone working in the university system.) I am, however, very familiar with grant-funded research of all kinds. Familiar enough to say, without hesitation or equivocation, that the purpose of grant-funded research (basically all research done here) is to transfer huge quantities of public money into the (usually) private hands of large university systems. Lowe’s article notes that, for example, NIH outlays about $46 billion annually, and that “NIH grant funds are not just paying for reagents and supplies; they’re paying salaries.” This is true. They’re also paying universities “indirect costs” at an institution-specific “indirect cost rate.” These indirect costs cover things like laboratory upkeep, hazardous waste disposal, biosafety compliance, and payment of various administrative and personnel costs relative to these. I’m not attempting a deep dive here (writing this in between work meetings and other bullshit) but I am suggesting that understanding this interface, how federal money supports universities as such and the institutional power of universities nationally, is a key area for ongoing political education and a critical site of organization and struggle. I don’t expect universities to “care.” I do hope that university organizing can result in positive political pressure.
I also hope that organizing among scientists can be articulated in a direction that is more appropriately critical of the role of science in society. A lot of the reaction to recent events has defaulted to a kind of defensive crouch around an honestly pretty crummy status quo in American science and scientific research. Stuart Hall says that “crises are means by which social relations are reconstituted.” It is certainly possible that the social relations and basis of scientific research could be reconstituted in a better direction. That will take sustained agitation, education, and organization, the prospects of which I’m not super hopeful about at this point. It will also take, bearing Stuart Hall in mind again, a fresh concept of the public and the public good and a deeper commitment to democratic participation in science and in social life.
Lowe notes in Part 6 of his post (knowingly or not titled “What Is To Be Done?”) that our hopes lie in 1) Congress, 2) the courts, and 3) our own interior commitments to “not give in to despair.” I don’t disagree with any of these things necessarily, but I also think that the greatest actual power is in the hands of the people who actually do the work. To reiterate, that power has to be actively cultivated; what I want to implant in your minds and to stress here is that it canbe. There is nothing stopping anyone. Whatever the (rather dim) prospects of success, I think this is the starting point. Understanding of the concrete political and economic situation of scientific research housed in universities, sustained organizing informed by that understanding, and a broader left commitment to revitalizing democratic and public life.