Trump's team weighs withholding massive research grants from universities that are too 'woke': Report [View all]

Source: The Independent

Friday 06 December 2024 23:15 GMT


President-elect Donald Trump’s team is considering the possibility of withholding massive research grants from “woke” schools they claim lack academic freedom. Trump’s nominee to head the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a physician and economist at Stanford, reportedly wants to target so called “cancel culture” at a number of top progressive universities, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Those with knowledge of Bhattacharya’s thinking told the newspaper that he’s considering linking the doling out of billions in federal research grants to a measure of “academic freedom” on campuses and punishing those that apparently don’t adequately embrace perspectives championed by conservatives.

Bhattacharya wants to take on what he views as academic conformity in science, which pushed him aside over his criticism of the response to the COVID-19 pandemic, including his opposition to school closures and mask mandates to stop the spread of the virus. He suggested in a Wall Street Journal op ed in 2020 that only up to 40,000 Americans would be killed by the pandemic. More than 1.2 million people died.

While he hasn’t yet established how to measure academic freedom, he has been looking at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and the nonprofit’s scoring of universities and their rankings based on freedom of speech. The nonprofit bases its rankings on surveys of students’ views on whether they feel comfortable sharing ideas, with schools being negatively scored if their administrators punish faculty for opinions, or if they withdraw an invitation to a speaker following a possible controversy.

Read more: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/donald-trump-research-grants-woke-b2660318.html