At last week’s University Senate meeting, Chief Research Officer Stacie Grossman Bloom lauded NYU for its so-called complete recovery from federal cuts to research funding. In the past year, total spending on research amounted to $1.63 billion, over $150 million more than what was spent in 2024.
While the numbers showed improvements in research spending, they do not indicate that NYU is escaping scot-free from federal rollbacks in funding. Bloom acknowledged that federal grants had to be made up in increased appeals to the private sector, encouraging researchers to sell the potential profitability of their proposals and even asking, “How do we commercialize it?”
This pivot toward private funding comes with disengagement from less profitable, yet immensely important areas of research in the humanities, arts and social sciences. Bloom admitted that several faculty members had lost their entire portfolios when federal grants were terminated in areas unable to garner the same level of private funding. NYU said last week that it would establish a $25 million initiative to “help faculty navigate the real-world process of validating market potential, refining applications and demonstrating commercial feasibility to bring breakthroughs to market at scale.” And following the recent launch of NYU’s Quantum Institute and the new Courant Institute School of Mathematics, Computing, and Data Science, it is evident the university is focused on its most profitable fields.
STEM fields are undoubtedly important, and commercialized products allow intangible forms of research to be integrated effectively into people’s lives. However, continued emphasis on commercial research, which seeks to answer a specific question or develop a product, has the potential to condemn the nation to a state of innovative stagnation. When research is publicly funded, it tends to be more basic — general studies that expand the knowledge frontier by contributing to the pool of information that other research can build upon.
A recent study shows that publicly-funded private patents, which make up only 2% of all types of patents, were responsible for around 20% of medium-term fluctuations in the country’s productivity and GDP growth. Publicly-funded projects are also important because they incentivize researchers to create non-patent literature, which makes studies more accessible by removing legal and financial barriers. Despite growing funds in areas of research that are already deemed profitable, isolated focus in these areas will eventually result in stagnation of both the quality and quantity of scientific innovation.
Another initiative outlined in the senate meeting was to advocate “for research priorities aligned with federal focus areas” in hopes that the government would provide more funding for studies they agree with. Many of the Trump administration’s health priorities, however, are being shaped by health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who spearheaded the “Make America Healthy Again” movement by accusing vaccines and Tylenol of causing autism in children despite minimal scholarly backing. The administration has also rejected the overwhelming evidence of human-caused climate change, rolling back environmental policies and even banning the use of climate change-related words. Although scientific consensus around climate change has risen to about 100%, political rhetoric has divided it along partisan lines.
Even when bending to the whims of the federal government, NYU’s attempt to align its research with a political agenda still does not guarantee funding thanks to the Trump administration’s history of blatant distrust in the scientific community. This also comes at the cost of abandoning critical areas of research that have been placed under political scrutiny, like research that aims to understand gender, racial or socioeconomic disparities.
While it’s respectable that NYU was able to recover monetarily, it’s important that the university remains transparent and vocal about the research cuts’ deeper structural harms, beyond the immediate loss of funding. Numbers alone don’t reflect the effects of political interference in academia or the discrepancies in funding across different types of research. We must fight to preserve unbiased, nonprofit-seeking research, or risk brushing off these setbacks as mere consequences of a changing political climate.
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Contact Serin Lee at [email protected].