By Kritika Agarwal
On June 18, more than 250 prominent business leaders from across the nation (including the former CEOs of American Airlines, Procter & Gamble, and Unilever) issued an open letter affirming the critical role of research universities in driving innovation and American competitiveness.
The letter, signed by executives and founders from a broad cross-section of American industry, urged Congress and the Trump administration to reverse actions that threaten the university research enterprise, restore funding for research and education, and to follow due process when investigating universities or reviewing their research funding.
The Leadership Now Project, which organized the letter, said that the signatories “span 35 states and represent key industries: finance (37%), professional services (33%), technology and media (25%), and manufacturing (10%).” They include Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn; John Pepper, former CEO and chairman of Procter & Gamble; Paul Polman, former CEO of Unilever; and Robert Crandall, former CEO of American Airlines.
“Many of us have founded companies and launched ground-breaking products based on campus discoveries, spanning biomedical engineering, gene therapy, pharmaceuticals, digital infrastructure, and aerospace technologies,” the business leaders wrote, continuing: “We partner with top academic researchers recruited from all over the world” and “We hire from a wide range of universities and benefit every day from the essential training that they have provided our employees.”
But actions taken by the current administration – including cutting direct research funding, artificially capping reimbursements for the indirect costs of research, targeting endowments and universities’ tax-exempt status, and restricting visas for international students – threaten to halt the university research innovation engine, they wrote. Cutting back on research and education, they argued, would “mean fewer treatments, fewer startups and fewer breakthroughs that benefit all Americans,”
The business leaders acknowledged that universities face serious challenges that merit examination. But indiscriminately cutting research funding threatens progress and hurts the nation in the long run, they wrote. “Our laws require due process, proportionate remedies, and congressional notification – rules that protect against partisan abuse,” they emphasized.
This collective call to action from the nation’s business leaders makes it clear that protecting research universities is a matter of national importance and essential to maintaining U.S. global leadership and economic prosperity for all Americans. As the business leaders wrote, quoting Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Emeritus M. Rafael Reif, “weakening universities ‘is a recipe for national decline.’”
Kritika Agarwal is assistant vice president for communications at AAU.