As Columbia and Harvard have recently discovered, federal research money comes with strings attached. Displease the master in Washington, D.C., and the faucet gets turned off.

Is this a good arrangement? In today’s Martin Center article, Terence Kealey argues that it is not.

He writes:

By nearly universal consent, the federal government’s cuts to the universities’ research budgets portend disaster, and the national commentary is unanimous in suggesting that the threatened cutbacks to U.S. university science will damage Americans’ health and economic wellbeing. Here, however, I argue that, if the administration will only introduce its cuts in a measured way, the consequences will be wholly beneficial.

Kealey surveys the history of federal research and points out that for most of our history, it was minimal. There was lots of research going on, but it was funded privately. Then, with the Cold War, things changed. He continues, “Once the universities had tasted federal grant money for research, they became dependent on it, and the Ivy League today is a research league with a bit of teaching attached.”

He would like to see a separation of federal research money and the universities. There would be less waste and the schools could go back to their real mission of teaching.