Barbara's Blog

Facilities and administrative costs are necessary to America’s scientific enterprise, writes AAU President Barbara R. Snyder.

Universities conduct cutting-edge research that leads to new innovations and discoveries, and educating the workers and citizens our country needs to compete in the global economy.

On the campuses of America’s leading research universities, students and professors have returned to class and researchers are hard at work on medical and technological breakthroughs; unseen is all the groundwork that university leaders have been doing over the past months to make the new school year safe for students and conducive for learning.

Congress is considering several measures that threaten to withhold research funding as an ideological weapon against universities – but it’s their discoveries that advance Americans’ health, security, and prosperity that would be the collateral damage. 

Congress already badly underfunded the cutting-edge research of the National Science Foundation in FY24. Are they coming for the life-saving research funded by the National Institutes of Health next?

By making substantial cuts to a key research-funding agency, Congress has us falling farther and farther behind our competitor nations – and if America wants to stay the world’s first in science and innovation, we must catch up.

While debates and protests have roiled campuses since the Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023, AAU member universities are doing what they do best to fight antisemitism and other forms of prejudice: Educating.

AAU is proud to lead a task force to look at ways to expand critical research partnerships with India’s leading universities.

Congress should avoid misguided attempts to tax nonprofit funds that support scholarships and research known as college endowments.

The student debt crisis is real – but America’s leading research universities are part of the solution