Time for a Refreshing Bottle of FrozenAid

If you think we suddenly have to defend democracy from fascist robber barons, wait 'til you see the democracy.

Why do people hate AI? I think it’s hilarious.

Ian Bogost, a video game designer, figure of note in contemporary phenomenology, and an academic who left the Georgia Institute of Technology for Washington University due to what he characterized as the former institution’s insufficient Covid countermeasures, recently penned an article for The Atlantic (picked up at MSN) in which he describes the tense climate at the universities as Trump halts their funding. As the youngest humanities faculty hires like to say, there’s a lot to unpack.

If your information diet consists entirely of progressive-slanted sources, you’re likely already aware that Donald Trump has appointed the richest man in the world and his team of racist teenage techbros to dismantle the government illegally so that a tiny handful of theocrats and oligarchs can take all the money. I don’t dispute this, because I’ve more or less given up on trying to change anyone’s mind about anything. I can, however, point my rhetorical flashlight into the unlit passages of reports like Bogost’s. Whether your mind changes consequently is up to your mind.

Bogost describes how the modern research university traces, improbably, to one man: Vannevar Bush.

In 1945, he put out an influential report, “Science: The Endless Frontier,” arguing that the federal government should pay for basic research in peacetime, with decisions about what to fund being made not by bureaucrats, but by the scientific community itself. Bush advocated for a new kind of organization to fund science in universities with federal money, which was realized in 1950 as the National Science Foundation. Then his model spread to the NIH and beyond.

Money from these agencies fueled the growth of universities in the second half of the 20th century. To execute their now-expanded research mission, universities built out graduate programs and research labs. The work helped them attract scientists—many of them the best in their field—who might otherwise have worked in industry, and who could also teach the growing number of undergraduates. The research university was and is not the only model for college life in America, but during this period, it became the benchmark.

With NIH money frozen, this model is toast, and researchers all over the system know it. Some of them are incredulous. “I just can’t understand how so many people don’t understand that this is valuable, needed work,” says an unnamed climate scientist. Bogost, however, is aware of the rising temperature of the political climate.

American confidence in higher education has plummeted: Last year, a Gallup poll reported that 36 percent of Americans had “a great deal or quite a lot” of confidence in higher ed, a figure that had reached nearly 60 percent as recently as 2015; 32 percent of respondents said they had “very little or no” confidence in the sector, up from just 10 percent 10 years ago. These changes don’t have much to do with scientific research. According to Gallup, those who have turned against universities cite the alleged “brainwashing” of students, the irrelevance of what is being taught, and the high cost of education. Destroying American university research does not directly target any of these issues. (It could very well result in even steeper tuition.) But it does send a message: The public is alienated from the university’s mission and feels shut out from the benefits it supposedly provides.

He adds, in an apparent bid for Understatement of the Month, “But now may not be the perfect time to make appeals to the value and benefit of scientific research. The time to do that was during the years in which public trust was lost.”

Oh dear. Let’s start with a proximal unmentioned cause for the loss of public trust in science, the federal and state responses to Covid, and move on to the distal unmentioned cause for the loss of public trust in the universities, which is, as in all human woes, the Jews.

I doubt that the Georgia Institute of Technology encouraged students to cough on each other. Apparently, they responded to the pandemic by treating the pathogen like any other respiratory virus. In March 2020, someone circulated a petition to close the school, which indicates they were resisting calls to do so. Several months later they quarantined a particularly pestilential fraternity, but case numbers exploded anyway. Lockdowns, despite that no less than the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases advocated for them, did not affect Covid transmission rates. When the Great Barrington Declaration noted as much in October 2020, said director called it “nonsense and very dangerous.” In 2023 Dr. Fauci dissembled to The New York Times that he was not responsible for the lockdowns: “I'm not an economist. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is not an economic organization. The surgeon general is not an economist. So we looked at it from a purely public-health standpoint.” But economists at Johns Hopkins concluded in 2022 that lockdowns “have had little to no public health effects” and “have imposed enormous economic and social costs,” and critics of the study countered that the authors were economists and not epidemiologists. A year later, Fauci still insisted that lockdowns were “absolutely justified.” He also accused climate change of playing a role in the outbreak.

At any rate, Bogost took his trust in science with him to Washington University. He evidently has many colleagues in the hard sciences. His interlocutors in the article include a gerontologist, a cell biologist, and a computer scientist. They argue that the loss of NIH funds would impede the progress of scientific research. A business law professor adds that reallocating state funds to cover the ensuing shortfalls would starve other programs and smaller schools. In isolation, these are reasonable claims.

Bogost doesn’t mention that an enormous amount of money also flows, or used to flow, to the universities from USAID. Again, if you’re a typical news consumer, you already know that fascist robber barons are burning down USAID in an act of jingoist isolationism that will permanently damage US soft power and allow Russia and China to fill the voids. However, you may not be aware that USAID gifted Gazans a $310 million cement factory in 2016 that was almost certainly used to build its network of terror tunnels to lengths approximating that of the MTA. A new study estimates that USAID was the source of “$164 million in grants to radical organizations” in the region, “including $122 million to those ‘aligned with designated terrorists and their supporters.’” They paid $3.3 million to an antisemitic Gazan rapper. They gave $100,000 to a designated terrorist group as recently as 2022. Former USAID director Samantha Power leaned on the Biden administration to neutralize White House statements praising Israel, refused to meet with Israel’s ambassador unless he agreed to a ceasefire with Hamas that was not a National Security Council desideratum, and urged Antony Blinken to stop sending Israel military aid.

USAID sends, or sent, millions upon millions of dollars to US universities. A report this morning at the Ohio Capital Journal describes a wide variety of scientific research at the state universities that could be affected by the USAID audit. But they note,

Some critics, however, say that too much foreign aid from USAID is soaked up by universities and other contractors, instead of reaching the people in other countries who are supposed to benefit from it. …other reports, including a 2019 audit by the USAID inspector general, have faulted the agency for poor oversight of its grant awards. The inspector general found that 43% of the grants that ended in 2014, 2015 and 2016 achieved only half of their intended goals — but that USAID paid recipients the full amount anyway. “Ongoing, systematic award management weaknesses hinder USAID’s ability to hold implementers accountable for performance,” investigators concluded.

I’m prepared to bet a substantial sum of money that USAID will be found to have funded the post-October 7 explosion of Jew-hatred at the universities, which the Trump administration is beginning to investigate. Leaving that aside, money is fungible. Support for the anti-Israel protests came from the Soros-funded Tides Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and other private foundations. It would be possible for such donors to support scientific research instead, but government grants at eight- to ten-figure scales relieve the universities of having to solicit money for constructive purposes. A university that can’t even claim to be working on longevity or healthier wheat crops while students are in the quad calling for global Intafada and trying to trap Jews in the library is at even more risk of defunding than it would be otherwise.

Bogost is correct to note that public opinion of the universities is cratering, but he elides the fact that it took an especially deep dive between 2023 and 2024. FIRE compared its results to the cited Gallup poll and found that the percentage of Americans reporting “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence dropped from 36% to 28%. The categories of “very little” confidence or “none at all” grew from 22% to 30%. “Per the polls,” said FIRE, “American confidence in higher education has plummeted over the past year, reaching record lows after months of campus protests over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Congressional hearings about anti-Semitism on college campuses.”

So yes, now may not be the perfect time to make appeals to the value and benefit of scientific research. Or the universities. Or the arts. Or any number of humanistic activities that could survive by means other than a bureaucracy so sprawling and opaque and tendentious that to force it to answer to the demos is a veritable revolution.

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