Four years ago, Jay Bhattacharya was ostracized by his colleagues at Stanford and censored on social media platforms thanks to a campaign against him by the public-health establishment. The director of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins, sent an email to another NIH official, Anthony Fauci, urging a “quick and devastating published takedown” of Bhattacharya and his fellow “fringe epidemiologists.”
Bhattacharya is far from the fringe today. Donald Trump nominated him this week for Collins’s old job, director of the NIH. Assuming the Senate confirms him, it will be a major victory for science and academic freedom—and a serious threat to the universities that suppressed scientific debate and promoted disastrous policies during the pandemic, causing public trust in science to plummet. Academic researchers and administrators have mostly refused to acknowledge their mistakes, much less make amends, but Bhattacharya promised yesterday to “reform American scientific institutions so that they are worthy of trust again.”
As NIH director, he would wield a potent tool to induce reform: money. Stanford and more than a dozen other universities each get more than $500 million annually in grants from the NIH, the world’s largest funder of biomedical research. The NIH grants support not only researchers but also their universities’ bureaucracies, which collect a hefty surcharge to cover supposed overhead costs. The federal largesse has helped finance the administrative bloat at universities, including the expansion of diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracies under the Biden administration, which took into account a university’s commitment to DEI principles when deciding whether to award grants from the NIH and other agencies.
Those priorities are about to change. Trump has vowed to rescind immediately Biden’s executive order directing federal agencies to promote DEI. During his first term, Trump threatened to issue an executive order barring universities from receiving federal funds if they suppressed free speech. He didn’t issue that order, but whether or not he does so in his next term, the NIH director will already have the power to consider a university’s commitment to academic freedom in deciding whether or not to award funds.
“For science to thrive and progress, we must be open-minded and allow vigorous and passionate debate,” says Martin Kulldorff, a former professor of medicine at Harvard. “Why should taxpayers subsidize universities that don’t allow that?” Kulldorff, an eminent epidemiologist, lost his job at Harvard after he became an early and outspoken critic of pandemic policies. In 2020, he joined with Bhattacharya and Sunetra Gupta, an epidemiologist at Oxford, to write the Great Barrington Declaration, a critique of lockdowns that was signed by tens of thousands of scientists and physicians.
Bhattacharya, who has a Ph.D. in economics as well as an M.D. from Stanford, hung on to his job as professor of health policy at the latter’s medical school, but his views were taboo on campus. After he and colleagues did a field study at the start of the pandemic showing that the Covid fatality rate was much lower than the doomsday number used to justify lockdowns, they were vilified by academics and journalists, and Stanford subjected them to a two-month inquiry by an outside legal firm. (They were vindicated by the inquiry and also by subsequent research confirming their findings.)
As Bhattacharya has recounted, his department chairman blocked his attempt to hold a seminar discussing the Great Barrington Declaration, and the dean of epidemiology at Stanford circulated a petition at the medical school quoting him on Covid and asking the university to censor such speech. A dozen federal agencies successfully pressured social-media platforms to censor his speech, as revealed in the Twitter files and a lawsuit. Facebook removed a video of him discussing Covid policies in Florida; Twitter shadow-banned him by limiting the reach of his tweets, and Google “deboosted” the Great Barrington Declaration so that a search for it pointed users to criticism of it rather than the declaration itself.
So far, the academic and public-health establishments have ignored criticism of their abandonment of scientific principles during the pandemic—and the evidence that their lockdowns and other mandates were largely futile and enormously harmful. The Stanford faculty senate last week had a chance to atone for one of the worst abuses: its 2020 vote to censure Scott Atlas, a health-policy analyst at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, for making statements about Covid that were declared “anathema to our community.” Last week, Atlas’s defenders, including Bhattacharya, asked the faculty senate to reverse its action. But the senate, ignoring the principle of academic freedom (not to mention the subsequent evidence that Atlas’s statements were correct), voted not to rescind the censure. The vote prompted a post from Bhattacharya on X: “Academic freedom at Stanford is dead.”
But now Stanford and other universities will be facing new financial pressure from critics. Cost-cutters in the Trump transition team are already contemplating a reduction in the overhead surcharges that universities collect in research grants from the federal government. These surcharges are more than 50 percent at Stanford and nearly 70 percent at Harvard—much higher than the surcharges that universities collect on research grants from private foundations, which are typically 10 percent or 20 percent. Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for the next administration, has proposed limiting federal surcharges to the rate paid by private organizations, which would put a dent in the budgets of university administrators.
If the NIH and other agencies start considering a school’s dedication to academic freedom when awarding grants, some elite universities could pay a price. Stanford and other universities at the top of the list of NIH beneficiaries don’t look so elite in the free-speech rankings of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). Stanford ranks 218th of 257 schools, and others are even lower, including UCLA, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, and Harvard. The campus censors haven’t been swayed by abstract appeals to protect academic freedom, but perhaps they’ll rediscover that principle once they contemplate their budgets.
Photo: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images