Punish the administrators, not the researchers, for campus antisemitism

It is never wise to throw the baby out with the bathwater. But that is the perverse prospect we now face because of the striking failure of many college and university officials to confront campus antisemitism, both during the last academic year and now as the students return to campus.

Political decisionmakers who view the performance of the administrators as unacceptable — and who are answerable to voters rather unimpressed with campus elitism — often have only blunt instruments with which to address the kind of administrative behavior that we have seen.

One such blunt instrument is a potential reduction in federal funding for a wide range of campus activities and functions.

Congressional responsibility for budgeting as part of its role in the foreign and defense policymaking process makes it appropriate, as an example, to eliminate funding for government laboratories in China or other foreign adversaries.

But other programs conducted in substantial part at research universities are hugely efficient economically in terms of spurring technological advances yielding cost reductions, new production processes, new and improved products, and stronger long-term economic growth. Because some products of research efforts are not patentable for various reasons, the private sector is not well positioned to invest the sizable resources needed to pursue them. It is economically efficient for the federal government to make such investments as a substitute, even though the efficient amount of such funding is always a subjective judgment.

Unfortunately, the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology — justifiably outraged at the potential antisemitic violations of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act at universities receiving federal funds — recently sent letters to several federal departments that administer such research grants, pointing out that any such violation of Title VI would make the universities ineligible for federal grant funding.

A cutoff of federal research funding for universities would be deeply problematic in terms of the ongoing process of technological advancement. Universities must maintain the requisite laboratories and centers, and researchers must feel sufficiently confident in terms of their investments in their own human capital. Two examples illustrate the point. Long-term basic research at MIT has proven the utility of superconducting magnets in the long-elusive pursuit of fusion power. Yes, the fusion power lobby has told us for decades that such power is just around the corner. Nonetheless, because the federal funding role for such basic research is wholly justified in any sensible model of limited government, it is justified whatever the specific interests of the research lobby itself.

The Idaho National Laboratory has supported basic research on next-generation sodium-cooled nuclear reactors. Perhaps such a technological advance, if achieved, will prove competitive with natural gas-fired electricity; perhaps not. But the federal financial support of the basic scientific advances needed to prove the theoretical concept clearly is an appropriate function for the federal government.

States would not have the correct incentives because of an obvious free-rider problem, except perhaps in industries that are large components of their respective states’ economies. The proper level and allocation of such federal funding are difficult to determine, but there is no obvious reason that the Congressional bargaining process yields inefficient outcomes in this context, and there is no obvious reason that such federal funding should be cut. The only plausible argument is the creation of an interest group on campus (the research institutions) opposed to the long-term progressive drift.

Such basic research is likely to prove more productive when conducted by semi-independent institutions somewhat insulated from political pressures, rather than by federal bureaucracies directly, dependent upon Congress for their budgets. In any event, it is not beyond the ability of Congressional appropriations committees to use federal funding cuts to punish campus antisemitism narrowly without doing damage to the essential need for support of basic research.

Benjamin Zycher is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.