The Harvard Plan: The Endless Frontier

24:32That doesn't mean the government should be in there monitoring whom we hire, how we treat particular departments, or what the distribution of viewpoints are. In fact, I think that's an intrusion on free speech. The AAU, the group Eisgruber chaired, is a consortium of schools that get big government research dollars. Harvard and Princeton are there, but so are schools outside the Northeast, like Vanderbilt in Nashville, and state schools like Mizzou, the University of Missouri. It's a big sports school. They have massive football games, big tailgate culture. All this year, my Globe colleague, higher education reporter Hillary Burns, has been working on a big multi-part series, which the Globe is running next month.

25:15Everyone should check it out. Her reporting has taken her all over the country, including to Columbia, Missouri. It's kind of a fun school. A lot of school spirit, a lot of people wearing their Mizzou gear around campus. On the south side of campus, between a golf course and the Mizzou Arena, there's a 10-megawatt nuclear reactor, which was the real reason for Hillary's visit. Christopher told you the ground rules, right, of photos and everything? Yep. It was like entering the space age. It really felt like I was in a science fiction movie from maybe the 1960s. Or the age of Vannevar Bush. The reactor was conceived in the 1950s and built in the 60s.

25:54They told me before we went in, like, don't expect a flashy, really tech-savvy environment. Like, this is old-school levers. gadgets, very manual. The University of Missouri Research Reactor, everyone calls it MER, is the largest university-operated reactor in the nation. Just real quick, sometimes people think a nuclear reactor and they think power. Yes. Right? So we don't do any power at all. Okay. Hillary's guide, Uriah Orland, told us that at MER, it's the byproduct of the reaction that they're after. Radioisotopes with names like iodine-131 or lutetium. This nuclear waste, it turns out, makes a very effective treatment for a variety of cancers, which means this facility is a pharma factory, a very busy one.

26:41Literally what we produce in the reactor today is in patients next week. So in fact, it's Thursday today. So last night, or early this morning, we pulled samples from the reactor. Those will leave the facility tomorrow as an active pharmaceutical ingredient of UTCM-177 that will go to the drug company. They'll package it, send it to a hospital, and it'll be administered to a patient early next week. Oh my gosh. And the hospitals are all in Missouri? No. These are hospitals around the world. Around the world. Yes. I went out there because they are taking on this massive project to build a second and new nuclear reactor on their campus.

27:23The current one is at capacity and showing its age. And I just thought it was so interesting, the timing. They are launching this, hosting celebratory kickoffs for this big project at a time where schools in the Northeast are entering a period of austerity and cutting and laying off people and accepting fewer PhD students and bracing for real financial turmoil. The price tag to build a new reactor looks to be a little over a billion dollars. And it may seem crazy in this moment, but Mizzou is looking to the government to help it raise the money to build it. Here's one reason it may actually work.

28:05What I'm concerned about is two-thirds of research dollars are funneled to four or five states, it looks like. At the confirmation hearing for Trump's appointee to lead the National Institutes of Health, Republican Senator Roger Marshall asks, Just like your commitment for us flyover states to spread the love a little bit. Once confirmed as NIH director, Jay Bhattacharya sounded convinced.

28:29May Mailman:From a point of view of science policy, it's absolutely vital that the NIH investments are geographically dispersed. For Mizzou, the pitch is focused on national competitiveness. The need to have a secure domestic supply so that we're not reliant on international politics. A cancer patient needs the drug whether we're friends with the country or not. Mizzou is not messing around. Last spring, at exactly the time that other university presidents were feeling Trump's pressure campaign, Mizzou's president, Moon Choi, finagled an invitation to President Trump's estate in Florida. Hillary asked him about it.

29:08How did you get the invitation to Mar-a-Lago? How did that go?

29:12May Mailman:How did I get the invitation? I was invited by a close friend who was an alum of the university, and he's a very talented and well-respected tax attorney. When he got there, Choi found the place was full of tax lawyers. He was the only college president in attendance. So that caught my eye. Choi was wowed by Mar-a-Lago's history, which goes back to the serial heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post. But he was there with a specific ask for the Trump administration. The brilliant idea of having tax credits for radioisotope production, given its critical importance to patients in the United States. And so I went there to discuss that opportunity, as well as continued advocacy for funded research from federal agencies.

30:02And has it paid off, the trip to Mar-a-Lago? I would say yes. He's been able to successfully bring a few canceled research grants back online by having conversations with lawmakers. To be clear, the tax break idea has not been adopted. But Mizzou President Moon Choi feels he's making headway. He's still very optimistic that they will get this research funding. He told me that he believes he is on the right track and doing the right thing for the university. Last spring, when the Trump administration started cutting research grants and Princeton's Christopher Eisgruber was speaking out, there were some solidarity statements circulating.

30:41President Choi was not interested.

30:43May Mailman:We made a conscious decision not to sign them. He said he really needs to focus on what is best for his institution. And right now, what is best for his institution is lobbying for the importance of this federal funding to build this nuclear reactor to fund this cutting-edge rare cancer research. My words and my action can have dramatic impact to this institution. And I have to be very careful in what I say and what I do. All research-focused schools have faced funding cuts, including Mizzou. But those cuts are not spread equally, Hillary found. Schools in the Southeastern Conference, which includes the University of Missouri, have lost a significantly lower percentage of funding than the Ivies.

31:34SEC schools tend to be whiter, with far fewer international students. When the Trump administration rolled out its compact in October, it shared the proposed agreement only with a small number of schools perceived to be potentially in line with Trump's thinking. Mizzou was not one of them. But another SEC school, Vanderbilt, was. It's led by a man named Daniel Diermeier, who went on Morning Joe to discuss. It was very clear to us, both in the initial communication and throughout, that this was something that the administration was interested in pursuing, for sure. And they were interested in getting feedback and commentary.

32:10Many higher ed watchers saw the Trump compact as menacing or bullying. Diermeier talked about it more benignly as the start of a conversation. So you didn't read it as some kind of a pressure campaign from the administration? Sign on and you'll get preferential treatment? There was, we never got any pressure on that. We got like initial conversation and then there were initial letter and then there was a couple of conversations that followed afterwards. But it was always in the sense of like, this is our proposal. We'd like to move forward in that direction. I talk with Diermeier fairly often, and when I asked him this summer about the narrative forming that university presidents are either reformers or resistors in this current moment, he was quick to tell me that college presidents don't despise each other, but there are different points of view.

32:55Diermeier has positioned himself as a leader on speech issues. That makes him an attractive figure to the Trump administration, even if other college leaders would prefer he stood with them. Yeah, so Diermeier says that other college campuses need to get their ducks in a row. They need to make these reforms, act with more urgency to fix their campus cultures. And that view, that criticism of other universities has made him quite unpopular in some higher education circles right now. Still, most schools that received the Trump Compact found it unacceptable. About a dozen have rejected it. Vanderbilt and Arizona State say they're offering feedback.

33:36So far, a two-year military college has said it will sign, and also New College, a state school in Sarasota, Florida. New College was not sent the compact, but after President Trump promoted it on social media, a spokesman said, when the president asks, we'll be first in line. New College is really a case study for how a state used the power of the government to dictate a college campus's operations and trajectory. For decades, tiny New College had a reputation as a haven for artsy types. Then, Governor Ron DeSantis attacked it as a woke institution and installed a majority of his own people on the board.

34:17A bunch of professors left. The student body started to change. Fewer artsy kids, more athletes. Christopher Rufo, probably the most famous board member, the conservative activist, said that this strategy was meant to balance the hormones on campus. New College has a culture problem. When they did a study, these consultants hired by the college, they said that the three phrases that most describe the culture here, quote, politically correct, druggies, weirdos. The college is saying this. It's still early days, but the experiment is not going great so far. The cost per student has risen sharply at New College, and graduation rates, which were low, have not improved.

34:59The school dropped 60 spots in its U.S. news ranking. A new college spokesman told us in a statement, the negative numbers you describe are inherited by previous failing administrations, and said the school shouldn't be judged until the class of 2028. He noted that the endowment has grown. Quote, we are headed in the right direction. The music plays 24-7 there. People just kind of chill out at sunset. There's a fire pit there every night. Wow. On a tour, Hillary got a look at efforts to spiff up the campus. We had our Charlie Kirk Memorial, but we really had that service with about 100 students.

35:36After Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist, was assassinated while visiting a college in Utah, New College announced it will build a statue of him. Kirk built a movement attacking liberalism on college campuses and spreading a blacklist of professors under the banner of free speech and open debate. In a lot of ways, New College wants to be the kind of place Charlie Kirk would have approved of. When we return, I'm going to put the questions raised by this series to the architect of Trump's pressure campaign. Stay with us.

36:27support for npr comes from ibm on smart talks with ibm host malcolm gladwell speaks with leaders who are pushing the boundaries of AI and technology in partnership with IBM.

36:40May Mailman:Hello, hello. I'm Malcolm Gladwell, host of Smart Talks with IBM. I sat down with Alone Cohen, who leads research and development at UFC, to discuss the complexity of using technology to analyze fight data. With kick to the head, it makes contact with the outset of my arm, which I brought up. In our world, that's a blocked strike. Yeah. But teaching a computer what exactly that means and when and how, like when my arm is up, that's a block. When my arm is down and hits my shoulder, that's not. It's those nuances that proved incredibly difficult for machines to be able to handle for a very, very long time.

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38:19This is On the Media. I'm Ilya Meritz, host of The Harvard Plan, a miniseries from OTM and The Boston Globe about Trump's pressure campaign on higher education. This is the last segment of our last episode, and I was really happy when, just as we were putting this episode together, an email landed in my inbox from a Trump official who said, yes, I'm open to speaking with you. On the day I talked with May Mailman, she was expected to give birth to her third child at any moment. She reassured me there was enough time for an interview. Due dates are fake. I switched doctors and my doctor switched my due date.

38:59She spoke to me from her home studio in the Houston exurbs with a professional-looking mic setup. But for most of the past year, until she stepped down to have her baby, she was a senior policy strategist in the White House. But the simpler way to describe that was Stephen Miller's deputy. Stephen Miller is the deputy chief of staff for policy. And so I was the deputy to the deputy. For, you know, for the many, many people on campuses who are scared by the policies that you did a lot to create and guide, I'm going to speak pretty directly. Like, why should they not be scared? Why do you think they might even one day be happy with the result?

39:39Or do you think they could ever be happy with the result? So let's just say that the thing that will happen is Colombia, right? Like, worst case scenario, what happens is Colombia. I asked her versions of this question a few times, expecting her to offer an olive branch. There was no olive branch. She told me Colombia was already in a lot of trouble over how they handled the Gaza protests in the spring of 2024 and unrest on campus. By settling with the Trump administration, the school solved a lot of its problems. People should be happy. So like, OK, some less money. All right. Some transparency in admissions.

40:17A monitor who's like a guy in New York City who's super middle of the road. No one would ever challenge this person's political bias. Among other things, the monitor will examine whether Columbia is promoting, quote, unlawful DEI goals. Some things that Columbia had already announced on what they're going to do for anti-Semitism, including if you are wearing a mask to conceal your identity during a protest and you're asked for your ID, that you are now required to give it. Some sort of public safety presence on campus, some sort of transparency in federal funds. Like, these are, this is the ultimate scary thing, is the Columbia deal.

40:56That's it. Again and again, Mailman gave no ground. She knows the critics see creeping authoritarianism from the Trump White House telling colleges and universities what to do. She told me that is exactly backwards. You know, sort of the Trump is a fascist or an authoritarian thing never strikes me as super thoughtful because when I think of what have I seen recently that feels authoritarian, the thing that I see is Joe Biden's Mar-a-Lago raid. The FBI searched Mar-a-Lago with a warrant approved by a judge. Joe Biden played no role. Something like that is the thing that feels the most authoritarian.

41:47Mailman likewise dismissed the idea that setting policy to align so closely with one president's priorities will cause problems down the line if the shoe is ever on the other foot. I'm just curious, like, if you're worried about any negative repercussions. Oh yeah. So I think the, the general conservative, like the let's play devil's advocate. What if there is a president AOC? I, I think the reason that that doesn't necessarily concern me is a few things. One, a president AOC would do it anyway. And I think that's a lesson that conservatives learn this, like, well, if you do, then they do thing is just, it's not a relevant talking point anymore because they will, I think is just like the general understanding.

42:34Mailman talks a lot about partisan conflict, but she also describes the Trump compact as something that really should not be seen as partisan. She told me it's reminding schools of their obligations. So that universities don't feel like they are running into the unexpected. And I didn't know I was supposed to, you know, comply with civil rights laws and protect students from anti-Semitic discrimination. Well, now you know. Obviously, like cancer research has little or nothing to do with anti-Semitism, which was the stated reason for a lot of stuff. If you want to make a connection, please do. But tell me what's the thinking behind that strategy?

43:12I actually do think that there is a connection because I think, for example, if you don't have the best students or you don't have the best professors because you don't comply with civil rights laws in your hiring or in your admissions, then the likelihood that money to your program is going to have a high merit result is lower than if you're in an institution that rigorously pursues merit and truth at all times. In September, a judge sided with Harvard in its complaint against the government, saying the anti-Semitism argument reeks of pretext, and adding that the mass cancellation of grants endangered the decades-long joint interest in doing research.

43:55We've talked in previous episodes about this case. When I pointed out that the court sided with Harvard specifically on the First Amendment portion of its complaint, Mailman said the judge's ruling was wrong on the law, that it should be in federal claims court, and wrong in the court of public opinion. When you put it to the American people and you're like, Harvard thinks that they have a First Amendment right to federal money, to taxpayer money. It's like, that's kind of crazy. But that actually is, ultimately, when you boil it down, what the claim is to a layperson. I think that that sounds crazy to people.

44:31So it is actually a contract claim, right? They're saying that this money is owed. And I think the First Amendment vibes of the suit, that they think that they're being attacked because they're liberal. Like, you're not actually the most liberal university. You're not the most, like, that's not actually true. Mailman was friendly and engaged and generous with her time. But she seemed to be operating on a timeline where everything moves lightning fast. No patience for process. No time to think about the effect all this is having on America's edge in science. I asked her about a provision in the Trump Compact that would require schools to monitor ideological diversity of faculty, students and staff.

45:17This is an element of the Trump compact that really concerned Princeton's president, Christopher Eisgruber. This is not a new topic. And they have ideas of things that maybe wouldn't be mandates of who to hire or mandates of what to teach. But they have seen the policies that have resulted in the degradation of intellectual diversity. And they have ideas. So whether it's rules like citation justice, where you have to cite a certain percentage of minority authors in order for your paper to be presented, those are the sorts of things that hamper intellectual diversity because they say that, like, actually what matters is your aesthetic and not your idea.

46:00Like, what are the rules that are currently in academia or on campus? Are there schools that do that? So this is, so I am not a professor. You would have to actually ask a professor. Okay. This is something that I've heard from schools. Okay. I found a handful of articles about citation justice. It is not clear that it's widely practiced anywhere.

46:28If you listened to the first season of The Harvard Plan, you know that I got started looking at how universities became so politically hot after Claudine Gay, Harvard's first black president, was ousted. It was a combustible mix of controversies that took her down. Gaza, race, speech, and questions about her own academic integrity. Gay has been pretty much silent since then. So I was very curious when I learned that she gave a talk just this past September. The boundaries of permissible inquiry gradually contract as universities internalize donor sensitivities and limit themselves to lines of inquiry that won't strain important relationships.

47:11It was at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, NIAS, in Amsterdam. And Gay took questions. case these days when it comes to the independence of academia and how to deal with the Trump administration. So when the administration came with demands just after its beginning... What is Harvard doing, the questioner wanted to know. It's fighting the government in court, yes, but also negotiating with it and also making changes on campus, like renaming the DEI office. — So, you know, the posture of the institution seems to be one of compliance. And this is distressing. — Without saying what she'd do differently, Gay said she's seeing the effects of the pressure campaign on campus.

48:01There is a mix of zero tolerance and policy ambiguity that leaves faculty and students really unsure about what we can say, do, and teach. So that's hard. Another hard question, maybe. You might wonder if in the recent past, whether the academia have navigated themselves well in very thorny discussions. Think of claims that speaking of women might offend transgender and queer students. I was thinking, didn't that play right into the hands of hard right? No, academia is not to blame. The agenda here is about destroying knowledge institutions because they are centers of independent thought and information.

48:57That's what's going on here. That is the story. Nothing justifies that. Nothing explains that. Other than authoritarians don't like independent centers of thought and information. This is a pretty commonly held view at universities. But even some defenders of the academy will concede that maybe colleges brought this on themselves. They became, in the words of their detractors, too woke, too intolerant of conservative ideas. There were too many statements and trigger warnings, not enough robust exchange of ideas. May Mailman told me that's exactly why the Trump administration is promoting viewpoint diversity as a condition of the Trump compact.

49:41And she said colleges should not be worried about it. what type of authoritarian regime would be like, I want more debate. I want views explored, debated, and challenged. Like, fundamentally, what is being sought here is freedom and the lack of an orthodoxy rather than an implementation of one.

50:07Freedom, lack of orthodoxy, those are nice words. It is not quite how things went for Claudine Gay during her short stint as president of Harvard. It's interesting to listen to her today, because the woman who sounded stiff and clinical when she was called before Congress in 2023 now sounds liberated. Let me just say one more thing I'll have to say here is... It's like after watching Harvard come under attack by the Trump administration this year, she can now make sense of the firestorm that forced her to resign almost two years ago. I would encourage us all to take note of the through line of misdirection that has been a central feature of this political moment.

50:55Getting us to argue about supposed excesses of academic jargon and excesses of the progressive left. It's all about getting us to focus on that and not pay attention to the power grab that is underway. None of that matters.

51:19The truth here is that our government, the American government, is attacking higher ed and the university.

51:43Vannevar Bush imagined an equal partnership between the government and independent research universities. To produce great science, it had to be equal. This year, the research universities UPenn, Columbia, Brown, and just this month Cornell, have agreed to settlements with the government under great duress. To preserve the science, they gave up some of that equality.

52:06May Mailman:Right after the war, I said that I didn't believe that Russia would produce much in the way of science or technology. For Vannevar Bush, the connection between freedom of thought and quality of science was clear. And the reason was that their laboratories were all commissar-ridden. They were politically controlled. Then there was a thaw. Soviet scientists were allowed to direct their own inquiries. They gave them their freedom. They gave them their entire opportunity to make their own programs. And the result was a great burst of scientific achievement and technological engineering achievement.

52:44May Mailman:It's the exuberance of newfound freedom, perhaps.

52:51Right now, that kind of exuberance is in short supply in America's research labs. But humans are a naturally curious and inconvenient species. Nothing is preordained.

53:20The Harvard Plan, Season 2, is reported and written by me, Ilya Meritz. The series is produced by On the Media's Molly Rosen. It's edited by Kristen Nelson, head of audio for The Boston Globe, and Katya Rogers, On the Media's executive producer. Mixing and original music by Jared Paul. Tom Colligan is the fact checker. Thanks to The Boston Globe's editor, Nancy Barnes, and to Ryan Huddle for episode art. And thanks to Jasmine Aguilera, Valentina Powers, Allison McAdam, Julia Barton, The Rheinhorn Family, Andrea Patino and Will Moose, Kay Lazar, Tal Capan, Eric Boodman, and Mike Damiano. Thank you so much for listening to The Harvard Plan.

54:03This is On The Media.

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