Faculty and students on US college and university campuses were key to the emergence of US leadership in science and technology in the period after WWII. This includes the revolutions in molecular biology and biotechnology, computing and computer science, chemistry and materials science, astrophysics, telecommunications and many other disciplines.

The proposed Compact from the Trump administration Is completely contrary to the conditions that led to this extraordinary productivity. It needs to be actively rejected to protect our national ability to tackle essential scientific and technical problems.

The initial leap in campus contributions to the growth of knowledge was the establishment of the land grant universities following passage of the Morrill Act and later Hatch Act. This opened higher education to the children of farmers, mechanics, and tradesman across the nation. Many of the land grant campuses grew into world class institutions of teaching and research, such as the Universities of California, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oregon, Rutgers, and Wisconsin. Even though women and Blacks were still limited, higher education in the US was made accessible to a far broader sector of the population than for example in China, France, Germany, Great Britain, Japan, and Italy, whose education systems provided almost exclusively to elites. Even today a significant number of MIT graduates come from these geographic and culturally diverse institutions.

After WWII, the GI Bill provided access to college education to more than two million Americans from all walks of life. Many became teachers themselves. Subsequently the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation were established. These agencies invented the uniquely productive “bottom-up” mechanism for supporting science and engineering research and education on campuses throughout the country. This process, now fully mature, involved scientists and scholars themselves in conceiving and initiating investigations. Their proposals were and are evaluated by “Study Sections”, teams of working scientists, engineers, and scholars who evaluate the proposals in terms of likelihood of generating valuable new knowledge. This model, coupled with significant public funding, led to the extraordinary development of campus faculties leading to the most productive advances in the growth of new knowledge in human history.

From the beginning, these organizations recruited working scientists and engineers to set scientific priorities. Though occasionally attacked by elected officials, such as Senator Proxmire’s taunting of NSF grant topics with the Golden Fleece Awards. In fact the public funding through peer-advised agencies has insured that the diversity of subjects taught and studied responded to scientific, social, and economic needs, and the prior growth of knowledge. Efforts to control or suppress areas of investigation were continually and effectively resisted by the academic community. During the repressive period of McCarthyism, the American Association of University Professors played a key role in protecting faculty from McCarthy’s censorship.

During this period there were ongoing social movements to include sectors of the population who were not white males, into the academic work force. This first successful struggle was waged by women, and slowly opened the doors of academe. (This Faculty Newsletter was the first to publish the report on the “Status of Women Faculty at MIT,” which subsequently significantly improved the academic environment for female faculty.) With the growth of the Civil rights movement, campuses opened to Black academics and other scholars of color. The diversity – economic, geographic, gender and ethnicity – all contributed to the robust growth of knowledge in all fields of human endeavor. The contributions of historians and social scientists played a key role in supporting the integration of the academic work forces. This human diversity further insured that the boundaries of investigation continued to widen and deepen.

It is the interaction of diverse faculty membership, with support for diverse investigations, that was and continues to be key for the expansion of knowledge and technology.

Of course Congress and governmental bodies were constantly setting new priorities, many of which led to new agencies, including NASA, NOAA, Environmental Protection Agency, Occupational Health and Safety Agency, and the National institute of Environmental Health. However, these priorities were almost always set by committees of lay scientists, engineers and scholars. They were not enforced from above, but always in continual and creative tension with the instincts of individual investigators. They shaped funding priorities, but did not dictate or censor. As a result program goals were constantly informed by the growth of new knowledge. For example cancer research programs were transformed when the advances in molecular biology and molecular genetics clearly established that it was mutations in the DNA of cancer cells that led to the malignant pathology.

My own early research was funded through the National Institutes of Health Institute of General Medical Sciences, which identified virus structure and assembly as a general priority. Strong programs were funded at Albert Einstein School of Medicine, Brandeis, Harvard, Mass General Hospital, Purdue, UC Berkeley, Univiversity of Oregon, University of Wisconsin, University of Pittsburgh, and of course MIT. Thus Salk’s polio virus vaccine was developed at Pittsburgh because they had hired biophysicist Max Lauffer, whose expertise in purifying tobacco mosaic virus provided the environment for the purification of polio virus particles required for the polio vaccine.

During all my 45 years on the MIT faculty I was politically active in progressive politics. For example I was a Jesse Jackson delegate in the 1984 and 1988 Presidential campaigns. That didn’t interfere with my research group publishing hundreds of peer-reviewed papers on virus assembly and protein folding and misfolding. Under the current Trump “Compact” I find it hard to imagine my group would have been able to continue that work.

As a postdoctoral fellow at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, a significant fraction of biomedical grad students were the children of midwestern farmers. In subsequent postdoctoral work at the Lab for Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK in 1970, and later a sabbatical visitor at the Institute Pasteur in Paris, I was struck by the limited representation of fellow scientists from non-elite communities and institutions. In the subsequent decades France, Britain, Germany, Japan, and the Netherlands instituted reforms which followed the NIH and NSF models, permitting them to diversify their scientific and academic communities.

Rejecting the Trump Compact will protect the independence of faculty and students upon which our future depends.

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