Newsletter
July 21, 2025
An Alternative to the Proposed Cap on Research Funding
Excerpts (links in the original, boldface added):
“A coalition of 10 heavyweight higher-ed organizations is proposing to Congress an alternative to the research-spending cap the Trump administration has been seeking to impose. The new model would overhaul the federal system of reimbursing universities for indirect costs incurred for their research, which has been in place since World War II.
“The Joint Associations Group, or JAG, which includes the Association of American Universities (AAU), the American Council on Education (ACE), and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU), announced its proposal on Friday [July 11]. The coalition sees its plan as a middle ground, one that responds to long-held gripes about how indirect costs are administered while lessening the billions in lost revenue for universities under the 15-percent indirect-cost cap proposed by several federal agencies, among them the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Departments of Defense and Energy.
“JAG’s ‘Financial Accountability in Research’ (FAIR) model would offer institutions two options to be reimbursed for expenses tied to a particular project: a line-item accounting, or a less-time-intensive 'base option' that would put a fixed percentage of a project’s total budget toward certain costs. The plan represents a radical restructuring of the nation’s research-funding ecosystem, but one that JAG leaders say is necessary given mounting political pressure....
“Among the advantages of the FAIR model are that it accounts for the varying costs of research across an institution, [U. Illinois Prof. Kelvin K. Droegemeier] said. Humanities, social-sciences, and theoretical math research, for example, don’t require the same expensive equipment and facilities as medical research. That makes a more-flexible approach 'more appropriate for the 21st-century research enterprise,' he said.
“The FAIR model would also eliminate the need for institutions to periodically negotiate indirect-cost rates with the government, an arduous process that typically occurs every two to four years. ‘This flexibility empowers each institution to define its own categories and cost structures using internal data, while ensuring auditability and public accountability,’ a JAG executive summary said...."
Full article at Chronicle of Higher Education.
Reform Higher Education by Raising Standards
Excerpt (links in the original, boldface added):
. . .
“Most faculty who have taught in universities for a long time are aware that educational standards have fallen dramatically in recent decades. Even the most prestigious universities have made it much easier for students to graduate with little gain in knowledge and critical thinking. As David Butterfield argued in a viral article last fall, education has become infantilized. His article was about teaching classics, but the problem is widespread in the humanities and social sciences.
“Let me give an example from my own experience teaching history at Harvard. When I began teaching 40 years ago, I regularly assigned over 300 pages of reading per week. At present, assigning more than 75 pages per week, as we are advised by curriculum committees, is considered an unmanageable burden for most students. Students at highly selective colleges and universities average only about 15 hours of study outside the classroom, down from 24 hours in the 1960s. The average includes students in the natural sciences, who generally put in more hours outside of class. As long ago as 2011, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa argued, on the basis of data from the College Learning Assessment (CLA), that American higher education did not deliver substantial intellectual growth for at least a third of students. The figure must be significantly higher today....”
[Followed by detailed discussion of grade inflation, loss of core curricula, interdisciplinarity, unlimited extracurriculars, ignorance of foreign languages, politicization, and the impact of university rankings and accreditation.]
Full op-ed by Harvard Prof. James Hankins at Law & Liberty.
Higher Education’s Crisis of Domestic Confidence
Excerpts (link in the original, boldface added):
“Buried in a recent report from the Economic Innovation Group is a statistic that should make every university administrator in America lose sleep: Foreign-born workers who arrived in the U.S. on student visas now out-earn their native-born peers with college degrees by nearly $30,000 annually. They’re also more than twice as likely to work in research and development -- the engine room of national progress.
“Let me be very clear: This isn’t about IQ. It’s about institutions. It’s about a cultural drift so deep, so corrosive, that a native-born population is slowly being nudged out of its own future -- not by brute force or some grand conspiracy but by decades of educational decay, elite indifference, and intellectual cowardice. America didn’t run out of smart people. It ran out of the will to cultivate them....
“Today’s American student is increasingly guided into disciplines that produce little beyond debt and disillusionment. Fields once synonymous with discovery -- engineering, chemistry, and applied physics -- are under-enrolled, underfunded, and under-defended. Instead, ... we infantilize students, training them to feel rather than think, and then we wonder why employers look elsewhere.
“Enter the international student....
“Because it’s not just that America imports talent. It’s that we now rely on it. We lean on the drive of students raised in far less wealthy, far more disciplined societies because we’ve abdicated the responsibility of developing our own. We send our kids into debt traps for gender-theory degrees while begging H-1B visa holders to keep the lights on at Google and the research running at Stanford.
“In this academic vacuum, universities continue courting international students -- not for the sake of diversity or global exchange but for the money. Foreign students usually pay full freight. They rarely need financial aid. They’re low-maintenance revenue streams. In many cases, they subsidize the cost of educating domestic students, and colleges are now addicted....
“Finally, and perhaps most critically, the culture of education must be rehabilitated. American students have been raised in a soup of narcissism, cynicism, and ideological confusion. They are not stupid. They are not lazy. They are malnourished. Universities must stop selling therapy and start modeling truth, intellectual seriousness, and rigor. The pursuit of knowledge is something sacred, not performative....”
Full op-ed at James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal. But see also “U.S. Universities Can’t Innovate in Isolation” at Inside Higher Ed: “At a time when the global race to develop cutting-edge technologies is accelerating, the U.S. should be expanding -- not constraining -- its international research partnerships.”
Cornell Historian Offers Hope for Higher Education
Excerpt (boldface added):
. . .
“We are in an exciting period of reform and rebuilding. On reflection, however, I think that reforming universities will take work both on the inside and from the outside. It’s a ‘both/and’ rather than an ‘either/or’ process. Within the institution, we need leadership from administrators who understand the problem and are committed to restoring liberal education. Trustees and overseers need to back them up. Those administrators need to find like-minded faculty members and work with them. They also must be committed to devoting resources to hiring new faculty, because rare is the institution that already has enough faculty who are dedicated to those goals and not to activism instead....”
Full interview of Cornell Prof. Barry Strauss at College Fix.
See also our Back to Basics at Stanford webpage.
The Real Crisis in Education Is What We Aren’t Measuring
Excerpts (link in the original, boldface added):
“There’s a reason so many students feel disconnected from school. It’s not a lack of effort by teachers or disengagement by families. It’s that the structure of our schools still reflects priorities from a very different time. We are operating a 21st-century society on a 20th-century education system, shaped by 19th-century design...
“For years, we’ve referred to communication, teamwork, empathy and leadership as ‘soft skills.’ That phrase undersells their value. Increasingly, scholars and employers are calling them what they are: durable skills. These are abilities that persist, deepen and grow in importance across careers and life stages. They don’t become obsolete with each software update. In fact, they become more essential the more complex our world becomes....
“The stakes are real. A 2024 survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers found that fewer than half of employers believe recent graduates are proficient in leadership. Confidence in graduates’ critical thinking and collaboration skills was even lower. That’s not just a workforce challenge; it’s a civic one. In a democracy, we need citizens who can engage across differences, analyze complex problems and lead with empathy. If we don’t teach those skills with intention, we shouldn’t be surprised when they go missing in public life....”
Full op-ed by Utah Cong. Jason E. Thompson at The Hill.
Other Articles of Interest
How Much Will Universities Pay in Endowment Tax?
Full article at AEI including chart showing, in descending order, projections for Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford and MIT followed by 20 others.
Editor’s note: If Stanford were to significantly reduce its over 13,000 to 18,000 managerial and other non-teaching personnel (see the charts at our Stanford Concerns webpage as well as Part 3 of our Back to Basics webpage) and were to move the 200 to 300 centers, accelerators, incubators and similar entities that are not primarily engaged in front-line teaching and research along with their restricted funding into one or more separate nonprofit entities (see Part 4 of our Back to Basics webpage), to what extent might that realignment impact the pending taxation of Stanford’s core endowment? (FYI, faculty colleagues at Harvard believe Harvard has over 5,000 personnel at Harvard's own centers and similar entities -- reportedly numbering 100 to 200 and possibly more -- and that Harvard’s faculty disparagingly refer to as the peripherals.)
Why I’m Leaving Columbia (Full op-ed by former Columbia Prof. Shai Davidai at Tablet: “Don’t let the current calm on campus fool you. Even under congressional investigations, lawsuits, and threat of losing accreditation, Columbia’s leaders cling to the fantasy that these problems will fix themselves.”)
Confidence in Higher Education Rises from Recent Low (Full article at Gallup: Great deal/quite a lot of confidence was 57% in 2015, 36% in 2023 and 42% in 2025).
But see also “Trust in Ivy League and Elite Universities Is Tanking” at College Fix: “Only 15 percent of voters have a great deal of trust in the elite universities, while 46 percent have little to no trust at all.”
How to Save Higher Education (Full op-ed at Free Press, including text of the Manhattan Statement on Higher Education as signed by a number of faculty members nationwide, including at Stanford).
State Legislatures Are Requiring Colleges to Cut Degrees in Low Demand (Full article at Inside Higher Ed: “It’s just another sign that the era of ‘trust the universities, they’re doing the right thing’ has long since passed.”)
Samples of Current Teaching, Research and Other Activities at Stanford
Click on each article for direct access; selections are from Stanford Report and other Stanford websites.
Oceanic Humanities Project Envisions New Wave in Education
Five Things to Know About Ultra-Processed Food
Symposium Charts New Frontiers in Brain Health
“We cannot force someone to hear a message they are not ready to receive, but we must never underestimate the power of planting a seed.” -- Monica Harris, executive director of Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR).