Adrian Wooldridge: The war on ‘woke’ universities will slow US innovation

It is hard not to sympathize with the Trump administration s criticisms of U S universities The Ivory Tower has been badly corroded in new years by the twin evils of the woke mind virus and administrative bloat Selected academic disciplines all those studies are fixated on the evils of the West The administrative class has multiplied so fast that particular universities have more administrators than professors The government have failed to stand up to mobs who threaten Jewish students or silence visiting speakers And for all this certain institutions have the gall to charge undergraduates upwards of a year Yet universities are far more than just incubators of wokery They are also powerful engines of U S prosperity central nodes in the world s preponderance effective innovation system magnets for global talent generators of patents and products and linchpins of the scientific-industrial complex The danger is that a prolonged standoff between the administration and academia and it looks as if both sides are digging in will damage these engines even as other countries particularly China are building powerful engines of their own Why does America lead the world in a wide range of foundational technologies from IT to AI to genetics Why does it boast the lion s share of the world s big tech companies Why does it rejoice in more immigrant entrepreneurs than anywhere else Why is it awash with patents and new products The answer to all these questions lies in its universities Universities are at the heart of the the bulk productive U S regions such as Silicon Valley and Raleigh-Durham They are umbilically linked to its the greater part accomplished companies such as Google They suck in the cleverest people in the world More than half Silicon Valley start-ups were founded by immigrants a large number of of whom first arrived on U S shores as university students The the greater part hard-headed Trumpists might reply that America has paid too high a price for its success in brain-intensive technologies University cities have pulled so far ahead of the rest that they almost belong to a different country Amazon has killed Main Street while Facebook has rotted the American mind Yet America s universities are as vital to its manufacturing success as to its tech success The World Management Survey demonstrates conclusively that one reason for America s outstanding productivity is the quality of its management Harvard Business School continues to lead the world in producing captains of industry about of U S undergraduates analysis business as either a major or a minor The commercial triumph of America s universities is deeply rooted The land-grant universities founded in the s and s were designed to focus on agriculture and hardware During the Cold War the establishment poured money into STEM research and training to beat the Soviet Union From the s onwards both the Democrats and the Republicans fell in love with start-ups and science parks But the triumph also depends on a delicate balance between various players the cabinet businesspeople philanthropists and academics The state plays an arms-length role in funding it provides billions in research grants but distributes them through professional bodies and academic competition The universities fund themselves through a variety of sources including gifts and fees rather than just relying on the executive Professors are left as much as manageable to pursue their own ideas but are provided with grants facilities and marketing assistance if they want to turn their ideas into products The Trump administration threatens to destroy this delicate balance by withholding billions of dollars in federal funding unless the recipients comply with a long and open-ended list of demands in effect nationalizing America s elite universities Harvard has rightly refused to comply with this demand putting billion worth of funding at vulnerability and is suing the executive Dozens of other universities show signs of following in its wake The impasse between administration and academia could not have come at a more dangerous time Every ambitious country has dreamed of creating its own version of Silicon Valley China in particular has pulled off an extraordinary revolution by pouring money into higher learning particularly in STEM and sending their own scholars to survey in the U S Competition has already eroded America s lead in innovation The number of U S universities in the top in the Times Higher Mentoring university ranking is declining China accounts for a higher proportion of the world s patent applications than the U S versus in and a higher proportion of publications in scientific journals versus China is catching up with the U S in terms of world-class economic clusters with three in the world s top compared with America s four Chinese researchers are at the forefront in a growing number of areas including additive manufacturing blockchain computer vision genome editing hydrogen storage self-driving vehicles and hypersonic missiles Other countries see Trump s clodhopping tactics as a chance to weaken America s innovation leadership still further France has launched a noisy campaign to attract top U S scientists Aix Marseille University is even contemplating creating a new category of refugee scientist and Britain with a disproportionate share of the world s best universities is doing the same thing more subtly The Trump administration is constantly pulled this way and that between its Jacksonian instincts of railing against the liberal elites and its Hamiltonian desire to achieve national greatness by state activism Giving into its Jacksonian instincts will no doubt give the Trump base a thrill Before becoming vice president Senator JD Vance s introduction of a bill to raise the tax on large endowments from to for universities with endowments larger than billion sent the right-side of social media world into paroxysms of ecstasy Vance disclosed it would drain funds that would otherwise be used for DEI and woke insanity But it will also seriously damage America s ability to compete both economically and militarily with other economic blocks particularly China There are far better techniques of dealing with the woke mind virus than reducing funding to scientists and technologists who likely wished that the virus had never been hatched in the first place Trump and Vance should eschew the fun and go with Hamilton over Jackson Adrian Wooldridge is the global business columnist for Bloomberg Opinion A former writer at the Economist he is author of The Aristocracy of Talent How Meritocracy Made the Modern World