UCSD Joins Elite Universities in Billion-Dollar Grants Clash With Trump Over Harvard Showdown

The showdown between the Trump administration and Harvard University has placed bare-knuckled politics and big dollar figures in the national spotlight.

But in the battle of the moment, it’s easy to lose sight of a decades-long alliance between the U.S. government and the nation’s most prominent universities, forged to fight a world war.

For more than 80 years, that interdependence has been prized by academic leaders and politicians of both parties as a paragon for American discovery and advancement.

UC San Diego has been a big part of that innovation, as one of just a handful of universities to receive more than $1 billion in government grants two years ago.

“In some ways I think it’s a core part of the story of contemporary America,” said Jason Owen-Smith, a University of Michigan professor who studies the scope of research on the nation’s campuses. “Harvard’s an exemplar, but it’s not the only one.”

But the renowned Ivy League university is facing extreme pressure, with more than $2 billion in multi-year grants and contracts frozen this week by Trump administration officials after the school defied demands to limit activism on campus.

Refer back to World War II

The grants are testament to a system that has its roots in the early 1940s, when the U.S. government began securing cutting edge research through a singular partnership.

Federal officials provided money and oversight; institutions, led by big state and private universities, used those billions of dollars to plumb the unknowns of science and technology, while training new generations of researchers.

The collaboration yielded wartime advancements such as the creation of radar technology. Massachusetts Institute of Technology And, many years later, the origin at Stanford University of what would become Google.

Currently, the Trump administration is attempting something that numerous other leaders have shied away from: enforcing an ideological stance on a collaboration that has traditionally maintained a balance between responsibility and autonomy.

“A lot of Americans are wondering why their tax dollars are going to these universities when they are not only indoctrinating our nation’s students, but also allowing such egregious illegal behavior to occur,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said during a briefing with reporters this week.

However, those who have long watched the collaboration between government and universities view the administration's moves quite distinctively.

It has never been as politically charged as it is under the Trump administration because it typically enjoyed support from both parties," notes Roger Geiger, a historian of higher education who is retired from Penn State. "The lack of such backing nowadays is quite uncommon.

Cutting off Harvard follows similar moves at Columbia and other prominent universities to force compliance. At the same time, Johns Hopkins University handed over more than $800 million in federal grants for health and medical initiatives following the administration’s move to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development and reduce funding. National Institutes of Health .

Behind the dollars

The monetary amounts allocated for utilization in domestic labs and international programs could be startling to many people who primarily associate large universities with education and campus activities.

However, to comprehend the ongoing conflict, it’s essential to grasp how governments and universities developed such intertwined relationships over time.

One hundred years back, a significantly tighter-knit group of research institutions depended mainly on individual financial support. However, when American authorities hurriedly readied themselves for involvement in World War II in 1940, ex-MIT dean Vannevar Bush proposed to President Franklin D. Roosevelt the essential requirement to coordinate defensive scientific efforts. partnering government with scientists At colleges and various organizations.

“Urgency in the 1940s was really the overriding motivation,” said G. Pascal Zachary, author of a biography of Bush. “But the structure proved durable.”

Bush’s agency oversaw the quest for the first nuclear weapons , developed at a facility managed by the University of California And once the conflict was over, he persuaded Roosevelt to broaden the research collaboration to enhance national security, promote scientific and medical breakthroughs, and stimulate economic growth.

"As stated in a 1945 report to Roosevelt,Bush noted that primarily colleges, universities, along with some research institutions, dedicate significant effort towards advancing the boundaries of knowledge," he explained in outlining his proposal.

Federal support for research stayed minimal until 1957 when the Soviet Union launched the first artificial satellite. To close the gap, U.S. legislators sanctioned an influx of funds aimed at supporting university-based research and fostering the education of new scientists.

"We found ourselves entrenched in the Cold War, a conflict with the Soviet Union that was largely a scientific and technological struggle," stated Jonathan Zimmerman, an education historian from the University of Pennsylvania.

Colleges numbered between 150 and 200 utilized the influx of federal funds to construct laboratories and enhance various facilities. This expansion occurred concurrently with an increase in student enrollment, thanks to governmental initiatives like the G.I. Bill aiding veterans' education and programs launched during the 1960s aimed at supporting less affluent students.

Stressed relations from the beginning

The collaboration between government and universities has inherently involved a strain.

Government authorities are in charge of distributing funds to initiatives that align with their goals and monitoring outcomes. However, it is clearly stated that these officials do not dictate the actual research work, enabling scientists to freely investigate solutions to queries and challenges without being constrained, despite not always achieving definitive conclusions.

"The government essentially views this mostly uncentralized national university network as a pay-as-you-go asset for addressing issues," according to Michigan's Owen-Smith.

Given this insight, universities received approximately 90% of all federal research funding, amassing $59.6 billion in 2023, as reported by the source. National Center for Statistics and Engineering .

That accounts for more than half the $109 billion spent on research at universities, with most of the rest coming from the schools themselves, state and local governments and nonprofits.

Johns Hopkins has been the single largest grantee, accounting for $3.3 billion in federal spending in 2023.

But UC San Diego ranked higher than any other UC campus that year, receiving more than $1 billion in federal dollars for research, along with the University of Washington, Georgia Institute of Technology and Michigan. Harvard, actually, was far behind, with about $640 million.

Actions taken by the Trump administration to shut down certain agencies and implement alterations on college campuses pose an unparalleled challenge for universities.

Researchers from multiple generations at Johns Hopkins have shared the advantages of their discoveries with the global community," President Ronald J. Daniels stated recently. "Nonetheless, swift and extensive reductions in federal support for educational institution research are seriously undermining this longstanding commitment.

The collaboration is meant to have safeguards in place. According to the rules, officials who think a school is breaking the law aren't allowed to simply reduce funding; rather, they must provide specifics about the alleged violations to Congress.

However, the Trump administration, intent on forcing schools to alter policies aimed at promoting campus diversity and curtailing demonstrations, is disregarding these regulations, according to Zimmerman.

Budget reductions probably will exert pressure on schools' available funds, resulting in fewer resources for student financial assistance and similar areas. However, the more significant threat lies in undermining the institutions' capacity to freely instruct and conduct research according to their judgment.

“Let’s remember that in the past three months we’ve seen people” at universities “scrubbing their websites for references to certain words,” he said. “That’s what happens in authoritarian countries.”