Federal funding has long played an important role in research assessment in the United States. The HuMetricsHSS Initiative argues this must now be reassessed in light of the Trump administration’s interference in the education sector.

Federal research funding has not only enabled but defined scientific excellence in the United States for generations. Since World War II, research universities and the government have enjoyed the mutual benefits of a symbiotic relationship in which the nation invested billions of dollars in research universities and those universities established the country as a powerhouse of innovation and discovery.

Now, however, this long-standing partnership, which has had an enormous positive impact on the political and economic well-being of the United States and the world, is being systematically dismantled by the Trump administration as it seeks to bend the autonomy of higher education to its will. Even as the administration inflicts irreparable harm on the research infrastructure of our colleges and universities, its attacks also expose the fragility and facility of how we have measured research excellence to date.

Ideological conformity

As a proxy indicator of the quality of research, and a longtime component of researcher evaluation, federal funding has had its advantages. The sophisticated infrastructure of peer review for federal funding seeks to ensure that funded projects are both academically credible and practically feasible.

In addition, as a quantitative measure, federal research funding offers a simple monetary basis on which to compare a wide diversity of research activities across a broad swathe of institutions or individuals. There is little wonder we have come to depend so heavily upon it as a key performance indicator (KPI) in our strategic plans, as a primary indicator of research quality in our rankings, and as significant criteria for professional advancement, including membership in our most prestigious research institutions.

Federal funding decisions are being shaped by the political, ideological and personal interests of those in power. Federal funding, once an indicator of research quality, is now becoming an indicator of ideological conformity.

The effectiveness of this system depends upon the presumed integrity of the process by which funding decisions are made. For generations, federal research funding has been distributed on the basis of the quality of the research proposed as discerned by the leading researchers in a given field. Now, however, federal funding decisions are being shaped by the political, ideological and personal interests of those in power. Federal funding, once an indicator of research quality, is now becoming an indicator of ideological conformity.

Existing limitations

If we are honest however, the use of federal research expenditures as a primary indicator of excellence has long had limitations. It privileges the issues and priorities that are eligible for federal grants, attractive to granting agencies, or consistent with prevailing research paradigms, leaving studies that do not focus on the innovative, current or popular by the wayside.

What is more, the scope, scale, and influence of federal funding overshadows important research supported through private foundations; state, local and industry sources, or, as is often the case in the humanities, by the institutions of higher education themselves through the salarying of their researchers. This research is often focused on important but under-resourced communities, deploys innovative modes of community-engaged and participatory inquiry or uses new forms of multimedia and digital publishing.

Furthermore, federal funding has always been less generous in its support of research in the arts, humanities and the humanistic social sciences. In 2024, National Science Foundation (NSF) funding supported over 2,500 graduate student fellowships at approximately $159,000 each for a total of almost $395 million.

When…[federal] funding is the coin of the realm, artistic and humanistic ways of knowing are disadvantaged and our understanding of the world impoverished.

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), on the other hand, awarded 71 fellowships for faculty members (with no funding available for graduate students) averaging up to $60,000, for a total of approximately $4.2 million. Humanities disciplines, relative to their science counterparts, are simply at a disadvantage when it comes to federal funding – and when that funding is the coin of the realm, artistic and humanistic ways of knowing are disadvantaged and our understanding of the world impoverished.

Reimagining the future of higher education

A heuristic of dysfunction is at work here: as the current system breaks down, the limited logic of its operation reveals itself. As the integrity of federal funding is dismantled, we begin to recognise the ways our reliance on federal funding as a primary indicator of research excellence has limited the scope of innovation available to us and the range of ways of knowing we will need to respond to the most intractable challenges of our time.

Every major problem society faces, from the climate crisis to poverty, from global health to the rapid expansion of AI technology or migration, requires creative new approaches to inquiry and the wisdom not only of the sciences and engineering, but of the arts, the humanities and the social sciences. When our systems of research assessment privilege traditional research practices and a limited range of ways of knowing over others, we fail to acknowledge the breadth and importance of the research taking place in our institutions and thus fail to tap into the full potential of our intellectual powers.

Moments of systemic breakdown such as these, while painful, offer new pathways for exploration. We might, for example, consider how to create new processes of values-enacted academic decision-making, funding distribution and peer review that recognise a wider diversity of research practices as excellent and worthy of support. Another shift might propose a realignment from the amount of funding to the purpose of the funding. How might we better focus on and count publicly-engaged scholarship, as scholarly societies have encouraged us to do? The Carnegie Community Engagement Classification is an important move in this direction.

In addition, how might we reimagine the ways we evaluate and reward faculty of all appointment types by integrating the vital work they do across the research, teaching and service mission of the university? The realignment undertaken by the Charting Pathways of Intellectual Leadership (CPIL) initiative, which shifts the focus from research, teaching and service to sharing knowledge, expanding opportunities and mentorship/stewardship, offers a promising, award winning, approach.

The destruction of the higher education research infrastructure and academic credibility of the United States wrought by the current administration will be devastating. From their ruins, we will need to rebuild. We must begin the process of reimagining the future of higher education now. At its heart, that future must align the values for which our institutions profess to stand with the indicators of excellence we hope to embody so we can live up to the promise of higher education to enrich society, advance democracy and pursue truth wherever it may lead.

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HuMetricsHSS offers a values-enacted, process-oriented approach to scholarly production, decision-making, and evaluation. For almost a decade, the team has been working with individual departments, colleges, institutes, and academic-adjacent organisations to bring about meaningful changes in promotion, tenure and hiring processes, leadership development, campus culture, and strategic planning. Their most recent initiative is the Values-Enacted Leadership Institute (VELI), funded by the William and Flora Hewlett and the Mellon Foundations.  

The randomly-generated authorship order for this piece is Jason Rhody, Simone Sacchi, Bonnie Russell, Christopher P. Long, Nicky Agate, Penelope Weber and Bonnie Thornton Dill. For team bios and more, see the HuMetricsHSS website.