Higher education on Long Island is a major force for economic, scientific and cultural advancement. The Island’s 17 colleges and universities employ about 26,000 faculty and staff — roughly 2 percent of total regional employment — and have enrolled over 160,000 students in recent years. Long Island is also home to major research centers, including Brookhaven National Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the Feinstein Institutes at Northwell and Stony Brook University, among others.
While national headlines have focused on federal funding cuts and demands for compliance of elite private research universities, we shouldn’t lose sight of local impacts. All institutions rely on federal support for research and student aid. Those demands were accompanied by unsupported claims or selective evidence of institutional wrongdoing that do not follow the federal government’s own guidelines for regulatory action.
The Trump administration’s cuts to the National Science Foundation and other federal sources of research funding affect local institutions as well as those in the news. It has cut an estimated $47 billion locally and halted thousands of approved grants. Scientific advances by Long Island institutions in health science, quantitative computing and energy management, among others, save lives and improve the quality of life for all of us.
The federal government and higher education institutions have had a strong partnership dating back to the 1863 Land Grant Act, through the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act in 1944, the creation of the National Science Foundation in 1950, and the National Defense Education Act in 1958. This partnership has worked well through the years, and is grounded in several signature Supreme Court decisions, including Sweezy v. New Hampshire. In that case, Justice Felix Frankfurter articulated the four freedoms of universities to determine, on academic grounds, what to teach, how to teach, who will teach and who will be taught.
Unfortunately, this foundation for advanced learning in America is being challenged by federal and state actions. The government’s Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education would confer preferred access to federal research funds in exchange for abandoning academic freedom and institutional governance.
Most of those offered the compact, and the more recent Compact 2.0, have said no, because it would violate longstanding principles. It would interfere with student admissions, faculty hiring, academic programming and international relationships.
The latest action to reshape higher education is Secretary of Education Linda McMahon’s letter to campus boards and presidents calling for answers to a set of provocative questions. In this three-page “Call to Action” directed at wealthy institutions, the department requested information about admissions, free speech, intellectual pluralism and college affordability. Asked about any relationship between responses and federal funding, a department spokesperson said, “It would be natural for the government to look favorably on those who supported its position,” according to Inside Higher Education.
And now the authors of “Project 2025” have proposed model legislation for state governments to bar campus officials from taking positions on the “issues of the day,” even if they threaten academic freedom, and from mentioning race, color, ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation and gender identity in any policies, procedures, training, etc., unless approved by the state.
Fortunately, PEN America has rallied leaders of higher education to assert their own understanding of the “social contract” between the public and institutions. PEN’s allies acknowledge how colleges and universities can improve in transparency, costs and service to society, but they also emphasize that institutions should stand together in defense of Sweezy.
The university — and here I include two- and four-year colleges — is dedicated to the search for truth and to the preparation of students to distinguish between and among empirical evidence, epiphanies, and emotion or superstition. Its role is as much about character development and citizenship advancement as it is about preparation for careers and commerce. It should not be controlled by politics.
After all, we want students to question assertions and challenge assumptions, to know that words matter and that actions have consequences. They, too, benefit from the freedom to inquire, imagine and innovate. These are the characteristics of an educated mind.
Our universities may be in today’s headlines, but we can see beyond the present and take action to support higher education’s historic role in service to society.
Robert A. Scott, Ph.D., is president emeritus of Adelphi University and the author of “How University Boards Work.”
