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There are three ways to kill a university.

First, freeze federal grants and contracts to research laboratories. Next, decapitate the major science funders — shutter the National Institutes of Health and starve the National Science Foundation — so that there is no longer a pipeline for funding in the first place. Then, when operating budgets have been thoroughly depleted, when desperate university administrators crawl to Washington on their knees, jack up taxes on endowment earnings and watch these grand institutions crumble.

The Trump administration has begun step one, withholding more than $400 million in federal funding from Columbia, $175 million from the University of Pennsylvania, and a still-unspecified amount from Princeton. On Monday, the administration came for Harvard, too, threatening to jeopardize an astonishing $8.7 billion — yes, billion with a ‘B’ — in federal research grants and contracts if the University does not accede to the President’s demands.

If implemented, the Trump administration’s sanctions — for that is what they are, sanctions on university research — would have indescribable, inescapable, and immeasurable consequences. Killing American universities, arguably the greatest innovation engines in human history, will not only destroy higher education as a catalyst for social progress, it may also forever cripple the American economy.

In an attempt to quantify the immense economic impact of university research, I analyzed data from the National Science Foundation, which collects statistics on research and development for both universities and private industry.

In 2023, the most recent year for which data is available, Harvard alone spent $1.4 billion on research — half of which came from federal funding. The vast majority of what we do here is focused on life science, which includes subfields such as biomedicine and health science. You know, the little things — like eradicating Malaria.

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The data tell a similar story for universities across America. Federal funding provides the backbone for research in every single discipline, from psychology to engineering. For the most part, universities engage in “basic research,” fundamental exploratory science too risky for private industry, because the payoffs are uncertain and often decades away.

Of course, nearly every single major technological innovation — from the batteries in our smartphones, to the appliances in our houses, to the internet itself — must have evolved from years and years of government-sponsored basic research. Consequently, the economic return on federal funding for research has been staggering. According to one recent estimate, government investment in research and development accounted for at least 20 percent of American productivity growth since World War II.

The data also suggest that flagship research universities are in large part responsible for the American innovation ecosystem. To show this, I looked at state-level statistics on corporate patents — one of the clearest, most concrete proxies for innovation. Using a method from economist Adam B. Jaffe, I analyzed whether research spending by universities or by private industry delivers a bigger innovation return, as measured by patent output.

The results are telling. For every $1 million invested in university research, the average state sees about 1.5 additional patents developed in a given year. In contrast, an identical investment in industry research typically only generates 0.3 new patents. And in some fields, the gap between university and industry is substantially larger. Put more simply, university research gives you better bang for your buck.

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If the Trump administration withholds $8.7 billion in federal funding from Harvard, America would lose out on about 13,000 patents. To put that into perspective, Nvidia, one of the largest companies in the world, generated 561 new patents in 2024. So the funding cuts would have (roughly) the same effect on patent output as shuttering Nvidia’s research and development arm for over 20 years.

Importantly, my analysis reveals that the effects of university research largely occur indirectly, through spillovers in knowledge from academia to industry. When universities push the frontier of cutting edge research, they attract businesses to locate nearby, in turn increasing industry research and creating a cluster of innovation.

Of course, it is difficult to definitively track all the causal links that make up the enormous nationwide societal impact of university research. However, I’d argue that, if anything, the data actually hugely underestimate the true return to university research.

After all, a lot of Harvard’s research adds immense societal value but will never lead to a corporate patent. The modern retirement savings system, for example, which has improved the wellbeing of who knows how many American citizens, was designed largely by Harvard economists. Treatments for smallpox and polio were developed by Harvard doctors. One lab at Harvard is currently working on a cure for diabetes, which, if successful, would provide an incalculable benefit to the country.

Even more striking is how universities have directly kickstarted America’s largest companies. Sergei M. Brin and Larry E. Page would not have developed Google if they were not both at Stanford pursuing PhDs in computer science. Mark E. Zuckerberg would not have created Facebook if he were not inspired by Harvard’s student directory. Bill Gates would not have invented Microsoft if he had not spent eight weeks holed up in Harvard’s computer lab programming the first BASIC interpreter, the seed of what would later become Microsoft.

Naturally, we cannot attribute the successes of these trillion dollar companies to universities alone. But we also cannot discount the undoubtedly critical role that universities played in their founding. The presence of Stanford University isn’t the only determinant of Silicon Valley’s technological success, but it certainly explains a large chunk of it — considering that it directly incubated companies like Hewlett-Packard, Varian Associates, and Litton Industries back in the mid-20th century.

The effects of these clusters show up in the data. The farther away you move from a research university, the fewer patents you generate. If you’re five miles from the nearest major research university, you produce twice as many patents than if you were 10 miles away, and five times as many than if you were 30 miles away.

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Again, there are, of course, other factors driving this trend — such as the fact that both universities and businesses tend to locate in cities — but the point remains: The modern American economy was built on the backs of universities.

These unbelievable incubators of social progress do not exist elsewhere. Few other institutions exist where researchers spend years of their lives generating groundbreaking discoveries so that they can race to be the first ones to freely share them with the rest of the world.

Perhaps universities are not the only contributors to successful innovation. But for the Trump administration to recklessly gamble with America’s future for the sake of some short-sighted vendetta against the so-called liberal establishment is beyond deplorable.

Julien Berman ’26, a Crimson Editorial editor, is an Economics concentrator in Adams House.