Crossed Wires: Burning down the ivory towerâ the plan to defund research universities

This story has significance for readers across Africa and beyond.

On 21 July, a small volcano erupted under the most noble of institutions â the research university. It came in the form of a 123-page document unveiled by Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and it was called Science: A New Golden Age.

The document was not widely covered in the press. A surprise, because it proposes a complete upending of how science is funded, what the role of government is, and the long-unquestioned nature of the academic/research/industrial complex. If fully implemented (which is nearly certain in the US and will probably be followed elsewhere), it will be a spectacular disruption of long-held assumptions about how scientific knowledge is nurtured.

Few human institutions have run for four centuries with their operating principles virtually unchanged. The scientific method is one. Somebody notices an unsolved problem, hazards a solution via theory or experiment, and publishes it so that strangers may attempt to verify it or knock it down. Everything downstream of that chain â germ theory, the transistor, the vaccine, the entire compounding machinery of modern prosperity becomes the footnote to the research as it seeps into industry and society.

The architecture for all of this was designed and deployed in 1945, when Vannevar Bush handed Franklin Roosevelt a document called Science: The Endless Frontier and, in effect, invented the modern research university (copied and implemented in almost every country since). Its central argument was both simple and profound â governments should fund basic scientific research even when there is no obvious commercial reason for doing so. Knowledge generated in universities would, over time, diffuse into industry, giving rise to new technologies, new companies and, ultimately, national prosperity.

Scientific discovery, Bush argued, was a public good in which capital markets alone would underinvest. His document didnât just describe an administrative funding mechanism, but it became arguably one of the most successful public policy frameworks of the 20th century.

So whatâs the 21 July policy proposal? The Kratsios paper cites Bushâs 1945 paper admiringly in its opening letter but then goes on to describe the new approach as the first comprehensive rethinking of the US scientific enterprise in more than 80 years (hard to escape the irony that this is a verdict one is more accustomed to receiving than issuing. This is how US government policy PR works in these odd times). Its diagnosis is that US research has come to reward conformity over bold inquiry and has grown dependent on a narrow set of legacy institutions â which is to say, research universities.

You know where this is going, I suspect. AI. AI changes the traditional research landscape.

The machinery of discovery

AI is not simply another field of research competing for grants. It is becoming a universal scientific instrument capable of accelerating research across almost every discipline. Consequently (it is argued), governments should think less about financing individual research projects at universities and more about building the platforms on which discovery itself occurs â AI infrastructure, autonomous laboratories, robotic experimentation, nuclear energy, quantum computing, vast scientific databases and computational resources. In effect, the report argues that governments should invest in the machinery of discovery rather than just paying for discoveries one tortuous grant proposal at a time.

The US government is already moving forward. The morning after the announcement, Kratsios was on a stage unveiling the first grant winners of the Genesis Mission, launched by executive order in November 2025, which has now gathered more than $5-billion in commitments across some 20 agencies (Genesis aims to harness AI as a new scientific instrument; its ambition is nothing less than to double the productivity of US scientific research within a decade).

Unsurprisingly, the academic and scientific community has reacted with everything from fear to outrage as it becomes likely that the government will shift hundreds of billions of research dollars from universities towards industry, principally in the technology and AI sectors.

I sifted through the reactions of many informed commentators from the science community. The most articulate I found was from astrophysicist Ethan Siegel, whose podcasts I have been listening to for nearly a decade in a vain attempt to understand how the universe works.

His takedown of the policy is surgical, brutal and extensive. Besides unravelling the many internal contradictions of the paper itself, he takes issue with the unspoken goal of moving scientific funding from Congress to the executive. In other words, Trump decides who gets money. And so he comes to this chilling paragraph:

âThe Science: A New Golden Age document aligns with the policies enacted by Nazi Germany in 1933. It didnât take long for the Nazis to destroy the crown jewel of Germanyâs scientific and mathematical achievements, with David Hilbert remarking, when asked how mathematics at Göttingen was going in late 1933 after the initial purge of Jews, blacks, communists, trade unionists, those of Slavic descent, and others â âThere is no mathematics in Göttingen anymoreââ.

A little extreme perhaps. But his final paragraph is more apposite:

â[It] is not so much a visionary document for remaking American science as it is a recipe for burning the existing house down. If its architects succeed, fundamental science will still continue here on planet Earth, but it wonât be the United States that gets to reap the benefits.â

Still, reformers have a real case, and an old one. Grant competitions consume a startling share of the value they exist to allocate, and researchers routinely propose work they have already finished, because the system punishes genuine uncertainty.

Government funding of research tends increasingly to find its way to overheads, not the pure research. Wildly novel or completely unexplored ideas are treated with suspicion by most grant adjudicators. Even defenders of the research institution admit to its processes and hierarchies having become ossified, brittle and resistant to the dizzying pace of innovations that our age demands (and receives) with new tools, particularly AI.

Is it reasonable to think that AI will do a better job than humans? No, definitely not now. Even with its vast capabilities and increasing reports of truly novel scientific discoveries, we are a very long way from it being unmoored from the seas of intellectual curiosity and exploration in which the best scientists swim, or the guidance of human oversight. But next year? Five years from now? I am not so sure any more.

An awkward codependency

The likely result is not the collapse of the academy but an awkward and at least semi-permanent codependency. The models need what only the old institutions sometimes produce, grant constraints notwithstanding â unfashionable questions, instruments pointed at things with no obvious application and, above all, data that does not yet exist because nobody has been paid to gather it.

Siegelâs analysis makes this more overarching point â science is inherently uncertain, iterative and often inefficient. Dead ends, failed experiments and decades of apparently unproductive work are not signs of failure but essential features of the process. Attempts to impose private-sector metrics on fundamental research risk discouraging precisely the high-risk investigations most likely to produce transformative breakthroughs.

And finally, there is this â the core driver of human science has been the asking of unanswered questions because we humans simply want to know. The moment an AI system can decide for itself what is worth knowing without our guidance we will be in a whole lot more trouble than just the question of who funds grants. DM

Steven Boykey Sidley is a professor of practice at JBS, University of Johannesburg, a partner at Bridge Capital and a columnist-at-large at Daily Maverick. His new book, Itâs Mine: How the Crypto Industry is Redefining Ownership, is published by Maverick451 in South Africa and Legend Times Group in the UK/EU, available now.

Reporting originally appeared via Daily Maverick. Read the full source for additional context.