By Michael Hicks
Guest Columnist

MUNCIE — As recently as 1900, American colleges and universities educated too few students and did too little research. One way to gauge that is to examine the Nobel Laureates in the physical sciences — chemistry, physics and physiology or medicine. The awards began in 1901, and over the next two decades only two Americans received the prize, one of whom was an immigrant. We won two more in the 1920s, which is a poor showing for a large, prosperous world power.

Michael J. Hicks

Then things began to accelerate. We won nine Nobel Prizes in the 1930s and 13 in the 1940s, with five immigrants. Americans won 29 Nobel prizes in the 1950s, followed by 28, 35, 38, 40, 48 and 41 in subsequent decades. Since 2020, the U.S. has won 20 Nobel Prizes in the physical sciences. Part of this is due to larger teams winning the award, but most of it is due to the dominance of American science.

Our record in economics is even more astounding. Of the 96 recipients, 63 are Americans. We over represent Nobel Prizes in literature and peace as well. Today, the global language of scientific publications is English.

The reason for the ascendancy of American research universities is a simple one — brain drain from Europe.

After World War I, much of Europe descended into fascism. Authoritarian governments in Germany, Italy, Spain, Hungary and Romania all caused an exodus of talent, both professors and students. It started with attacks on free speech at universities, followed by the closing of some academic departments and, in some places, the expulsion of Jewish faculty and students. Then genocide.

This helped usher in an American century of science, technology, productivity and creativity. Thankfully, it cost Germany, Austria and Italy a world war.

Authoritarian governments don’t like colleges and universities. In college classrooms and laboratories, people are free to think for themselves. Powerful and petty tyrants are terrified of free thinking and will do almost anything to stop it.

I’ve criticized the stifling effects of left-leaning campus ideology and written about the failings of DEI. We cannot replace a stifling leftist orthodoxy on campus with one from the right. Universities need to be free, not conformist.

Conservative voices, like the Indiana Policy Review (see inpolicy.org/search/), should loudly criticize these new assaults on free speech. They’ve been strangely quiet, either through fear or forgetting their mission statement (see inpolicy.org/about-us/).

Still, the biggest problem for American higher education isn’t from wannabe petty tyrants trying to get a professor fired. It’s the elimination of billions of dollars of science, medical and engineering funding from the federal government.

I’m the first to say that there is plenty of irrelevant research published every day. But the irony of the Trump administration’s spending cuts is that they aren’t targeting any weird, woke research like Critical Menstruation Studies. That stuff rarely gets funded. The spending cuts are hitting right at the center of American scientific breakthroughs in medicine, engineering and the laboratories where the basic sciences — physics, chemistry and biology — are performed.

I don’t mean to be alarmist. The attacks on American higher education do not spell the end of U.S. scientific research. But, it clearly marks a renaissance in research for Canada, Great Britain and western European nations. Unchecked, it will end our global dominance in many fields.

The academic job market is a global affair. One recent job opening in my department attracted 520 applicants from around the world. The global scientific talent is especially footloose, with most professors moving seamlessly between universities in the U.S., Canada and Europe.

For a bench scientist in engineering, medicine, physics, chemistry or biology, a stint overseas can be a real boon to a career. It will be easy for another nation to scoop them up.

There’s already been a spike in scientists seeking employment in Canada, and help wanted advertisements in the U.S. that mention Canada for people with a doctorate (Ph.D.) are up 20 percent since President Trump’s inauguration day. Over the same time, advertisements for doctorates in the U.S. are down 13 percent. Across Europe and in Asia, there are plans afoot to exploit brain drain from the United States.

To be clear, I’m not at all worried about the livelihoods of people with doctoral degrees. Their unemployment rate surpassed 3% for only six months out of the past 25 years. These are serious people. For every doctoral degree in gender or related studies earned last year, there are 108 in engineering and the sciences.

However, a third of all doctorates awarded in the U.S. went to foreigners, many of whom are now worried about our anti-immigrant sentiment.

Every billion dollars of scientific spending supports more than 5,000 doctorate degrees, so it would be a rounding error in the Canadian budget to hire most American Ph.D. graduates next year. One thing we can all be certain about is that Canadian, British and EU national science strategies are going to be a lot more thoughtful and effective than anything Trump and Elon Musk’s DOGE are doing with science.