title: The U.S. Academic Research Enterprise (US-ARE): Possible Paths from the Pandemic
title: Possible Paths from the Pandemic
titleType: Subtitle
Creators: name: Owen-Smith, Jason
Publisher: name: Springer Nature
Year: 2020
Subjects: subject: FOS: Social sciences
subject: Higher Education
subject: University Research
subject: COVID-19
subject: pandemic effect
subject: public data

description: This white paper uses recent public data to identify what we can know systematically about how the COVID-19 pandemic is currently affecting the large, research-intensive universities that represent the core of the US-ARE. It uses those, admittedly preliminary and partial, findings to extrapolate about possible long-term effects of decisions that academic leaders, state and federal policy makers are taking right now. The descriptive story presented here isn't determinative, but it suggests that the pandemic poses unique dangers for the national and global research systems. A few themes bear emphasizing. First, the difficulties universities face during the pandemic cannot be understood in a vacuum. They result from a long history of public disinvestment. That trend in turn increased these campus’ reliance on tuition revenue and other sources of funds. Many universities were in challenging straits before the pandemic, which illuminated and exacerbated the effects of this already pronounced trend. Second, federal and state policy-makers’ efforts to address pandemic effects in higher education have been slow and partial. The options currently being considered are unlikely to be of an appropriately large scale or scope. Immigration policies and enforcement efforts pertaining to international engagements and collaborations only raise budgetary pressures. Third, the pandemic is unique in the history of the US-ARE because it simultaneously pressures all aspects of university budgets. Costs in key areas are rising just as most sources of revenue decline. The result is that the "university finance balloon" is coming to lack the elasticity it needs to avoid destructive competition and its consequences. Fourth and finally, the pressures of the pandemic highlight a key strategic dilemma for decisionmakers at all levels. U.S. research universities are essential and make dramatic contributions to the health, wealth and well-being of the world because their capabilities can be turned to address known problems like today's pandemic and because their organization, funding, institutional commitments and missions keep them poised to help identify and respond to "unknown unknowns" in our future. In responding to the pandemic, decision-makers can choose between two reasonable strategies that current budgetary, political and social pressures stand to make mutually exclusive. On the one hand, decisions can be made that focus on exploiting existing capabilities as effectively as possible to achieve known high priority goals. On the other hand, efforts can be made to prioritize the diversity of fields, people, missions and connections that make US-ARE institutions a unique form of social insurance against our uncertain future. That dilemma bites less in good times because of the typical, decentralized, organizational and funding model of universities and because of their history of public support. But today the most likely outcome I see is an increase in destructive competition among fields, units, missions and even institutions. More destructive competition can lead to increasing concentration, homogenization, and instability in the US-ARE system and, by extension, in the global research system that it helps to anchor. Deciding (intentionally or not), to pursue a focused exploitation strategy in order to address pressing pandemic questions, or even just to help insure a continued flow of limited federal research funding, seems likely to have dangerous consequences because it has the potential to: (1) limit the range of fields and topics funded; (2) make large scale  interdisciplinary research and teaching more challenging; (3) and to more thoroughly homogenize the academic research workforce. Early evidence I present from NIH and NSF COVID-19 funding and from financial data on a key academic cost-center, libraries, suggest that the "perfect storm" of challenges that accompany the pandemic may make pursuing a focused strategy more likely and more fateful, with the result that the US-ARE could become less flexible, less diverse, less comprehensive, more unstable, less prominent on the global stage, and more isolated from the very communities and concerns we may wish for it to serve. This is not a certainty, but it seems a much more likely outcome to me if immediate decisions are not taken with attention to larger strategic goals.