The University of Chicago takes an institutional position against the Trump Administration’s slashing of grant monies

As you know the University of Chicago was the first higher-ed school in America to adopt a position of institutional neutrality. This was done in 1967, with the principle embodied in our Kalven Report.  Kalven prohibits the University or its units, including departments and centers, from taking official stands on political, moral, and ideological issues—save in those cases where the issue is one that could affect the mission of our University.  According to FIRE, which approves of this position of institutional neutrality, some 29 other colleges or boards of education have joined Chicago in adopting one.

Deviations from the position of neutrality are rare, but this morning we learned that our President, Paul Alivisatos, has declared official University opposition to the Trump’s administration of slashing “indirect costs” on NIH grants. “Indirect costs” are the payments the University gets on top of an award when a researcher or entity gets a grant. They are supposed to be used to support the research through university costs and infrastructure, paying, for example, for building maintenance, administrative costs, electricity, water, and other costs not directly involved in doing research.  Each university negotiates its indirect costs directly with the NIH, and they typically range between 25% to 70% of the money awarded the researcher.

So, for example, if I asked for $2 million in research for monies for a three-year NIH grant, having calculated the costs of doing the research and paying grad students and postdocs, I would ask for that amount of money. If our overhead rate is 40% (I am just making it up, as I don’t know what it is), then, if I got the grant, the university would receive an extra $800,000 in overhead, so the whole award would cost the NIH nearly $3 million.

Now not all the overhead is used to support the specific research grant funded, as there’s no way to exactly calculate infrastructure costs.  Universities therefore often put the overhead money into a big pot used to support the university as a whole, and often it’s not clear where that overhead money goes, nor is it clear that all of it supports research.   But it is clear that overhead is crucial for keeping universities running and that a lot of it does cover the costs doing research (animal facilities, safety assurance, OSHA compliance, and so on).

It was a big deal, then, when the Trump administration decided to cap the indirect cost rate on NIH grants at 15%, which would result in a severe loss of money to research-oriented universities—amounting in toto to billions of dollars.  The NIH verified this in their own announcement.  To President Alivisatos, this slashing represents an impediment to the mission of the University of Chicago, and so we broke neutrality, as delineated below his announcement below. I’ve put a screenshot of the announcement, but have put the words in larger type below it:

I’ve put the parts in bold where the University has taken an official stand:

Harvard had similar objections:

Every scientific and medical breakthrough, whether in basic or applied research, depends on the people who conduct the research, as well as the materials and laboratory equipment they use. These components of research, readily attributable to a specific project, are funded as direct costs, but they do not encompass all essential aspects of research. The work also requires laboratory facilities, heat and electricity, and people to administer the research and ensure that it is conducted securely and in accordance with federal regulations. The expenditures for these critical parts of the research enterprise are called indirect costs. They are substantial, and they are unavoidable, not least because it can be very expensive to build, maintain, and equip space to conduct research at the frontiers of knowledge.

Implementing a 15 percent cap on indirect support, as the NIH has announced it intends to do, would slash funding and cut research activity at Harvard and nearly every research university in our nation. The discovery of new treatments would slow, opportunities to train the next generation of scientific leaders would shrink, and our nation’s science and engineering prowess would be severely compromised. At a time of rapid strides in quantum computing, artificial intelligence, brain science, biological imaging, and regenerative biology, and when other nations are expanding their investment in science, America should not drop knowingly and willingly from her lead position on the endless frontier.

Since this just happened, I’ll leave the lawsuiting to the University, though I note that a federal judge has put these cuts on temporary hold as the attorneys general of 22 states, including Illinois, have filed a lawsuit claiming that the cut would irreparably damage research.  In the meantime, those of us in the free-speech community here are pondering whether and how the cuts really do endanger the stated mission of our university. It would seem obvious that it does, since part of our mission is to generate knowledge through research, but there are two caveats. Does the mission per se include medical research designed to save lives—that is, to create medical innovations? Is that part of our our mission statement? And does the mission of the university include protecting its operational budget, assuring a comfortable financial bottom line? If so, how much overhead do we require?

Clearly our university and others construe this as part of our mission, and I’m not going to object. But clearly we need to think harder about what the mission of a university like ours really is.

The last time the University of Chicago broke institutional neutrality was in 1967, when the U of C declared opposition to Trump’s cancellation of the DACA (“Dreamers”) act because having Dreamers here as part of the university was considered helping fulfill our mission, and deporting them would thus impede our mission.  As the Chicago Maroon noted at the time:

The University declined to support the DREAM Act in 2010, citing the 1967 Kalven Report which recommended that the University generally avoid taking political stances, and University spokesperson Jeremy Manier maintained this position in an e-mail to The Maroon Tuesday.

“The DREAM Act encompasses issues that do not directly affect the University,” he said in the e-mail. “However, in general the University strongly supports efforts to address this issue through legislation that protects the ability of DACA-eligible students to live in the United States and pursue their education and careers here.”

That breaks institutional neutrality. Such declarations are rare here, and thus today’s announcement is a big deal for the University of Chicago.