President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to run the National Institutes of Health is considering somehow factoring campus academic freedom into how likely a university is to receive research grants, unnamed sources told The Wall Street Journal. The NIH distributes large sums of money to institutions annually.
The NIH nominee—Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University—has been a vocal critic of both COVID-19–related restrictions and what he calls violations of free speech and academic freedom that limited open discussion about the pandemic.
One person told the Journal that Bhattacharya has looked at the free speech rankings from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a prominent academic freedom advocacy organization. The article didn’t specify how Bhattacharya plans to measure academic freedom, how much it will factor into grant decision-making or how much he will borrow from FIRE’s approach. Bhattacharya didn’t return Inside Higher Ed’s request for more information Friday.
FIRE president and chief executive officer Greg Lukianoff told Inside Higher Ed Friday that he learned about Bhattacharya’s apparent interest in the FIRE rankings from the newspaper article that morning.
“It all came as a bit of a surprise,” Lukianoff said. He said he hadn’t heard anything more from Bhattacharya or the Trump transition team on the plan.
“We do the campus free speech ranking in part to draw attention to threats to free speech and academic freedom, so we want it ultimately to be a tool for reform,” Lukianoff said. However, he said FIRE’s “primary response” to the news of Bhattacharya’s plan “was caution.”
“The devil is absolutely in the details,” Lukianoff said. He said that “if there are going to be reforms based on our data,” he wants the data to be used in a way that improves academic freedom and science—not in a manner that itself violates academic freedom or the U.S. Constitution.
Some Ivy League universities could be in trouble if the NIH relies heavily on the College Free Speech Rankings from FIRE and College Pulse: Harvard and Columbia Universities both have scores of zero and come in last out of the roughly 250 ranked institutions.
