Recent headlines announcing that Columbia University had “yielded” in the face of pressure from the Trump administration augur a dangerous era for everyone in higher education. The news has already led to several scholars leaving the United States for Canada. With dozens more institutions in the immediate crosshairs of Title VI investigations, it is critical that leaders articulate clear red lines that would necessitate the rejection of federal funding. Such a rejection would obviously be a monumental and painful step, but if universities want to survive as institutions dedicated to the formation of knowledge, red lines are critical.

To understand the situation, one has to recognize just how dependent both private and public research universities have become on federal dollars. The private-public partnership in research dates back to the Cold War and has produced, by any metric, the best university system in the world. Universities conduct “sponsored research” on the basis of government programs (as well as, less commonly, private foundations and companies). Federal programs include medical research funded through the National Institutes of Health, research in both hard and social sciences funded by the National Science Foundation, and humanities research funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Though not at issue in the Columbia case, the Trump administration had already leaned on higher education through a reduction in the indirect cost rate. This is an implicit subsidy to universities in the form of a fee tacked onto the basic research costs, in recognition that the institutions have to pay for their infrastructure. One cannot easily conduct cancer research without also teaching basic biology, for example, or without expensive laboratory buildings. From the point of view of the individual researcher, the indirect costs rates are experienced as an unwelcome tax, but it is central to how universities fund themselves.

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