The Storied Past and Murky Future of Research Universities

Robert Brown has spent his career at research universities, first as professor of chemical engineering and provost at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and now as president emeritus of Boston University, where he held the top post from 2005 to 2023, presiding over BU’s 2012 acceptance into the Association of American Universities. His new book, Fighting Fires and Building Flywheels: How We Sustain America’s Research Universities (The MIT Press), blends history, memoir and analysis to provide a nuanced picture of what it takes to build and operate research universities—the flywheels—as well as the unpredictable crises that regularly erupt to test them.

He spoke with Inside Higher Ed via Zoom about how research institutions have evolved, why they remain vital and just how much damage the second Trump administration has done to the whole enterprise. Excerpts of the conversation follow, edited for length and clarity.

Q: When you first got to BU in 2005, you told everybody you wanted to make it a “great urban research university.” What did you mean by that?

A: One thing that’s important about Boston University—and most universities—is they operate in some kind of regional or community environment. I’d been at MIT for 25 years, and what I realized pretty quickly is that though I’d just moved across the [Charles] River—I could literally see MIT from where I was sitting—the move was profoundly different because MIT is a national global resource that Cambridge interfaces with, while Boston University is really integral to the fabric of Boston. We are this hybrid of a research university that attracts students from all over the world, but we also are very much integral to the environment. And I think that’s true of every major research university: At some level, they’re responsible to the community.

Q: You took the helm at BU following a long, tumultuous presidency by John Silber. How did you know that BU had the potential to become a great research university?

A: I did my due diligence before I took the job. I knew the pockets of where we had really good faculty, and where we had really underresourced but quality research efforts. So I thought the underpinnings were there, and it was going to take a while to get it together and get a system where it was seen by the outside world. Plus, I knew the AAU well from my time at MIT.

Q: How did your leadership style differ from Silber’s, whom you call “autocratic” in the book?

A: Over the last few decades, leadership at most research universities has become too diffuse; schools and colleges are independent. What that does is make it pretty much an oxymoron that the university has a strategy, because the strategy is a collection of what each of the schools and colleges wanted to do.

Successful research universities need to have strong central leadership. John believed that, too, but he did too many things that weren’t focused on the university. He ran for governor. If you were a corporate board and your CEO ran for major public office, would you believe he should be your CEO?

I’m a strategic pragmatist. I love building things, but I can only do it if I have the money to do it. I’m not going to risk the institution and its mission for the glory of the institution. I’m pragmatic about the resources we have and making sure we use them to serve our mission well. And I think a lot about the longer-term strategy of the institution, to fulfill the view that it’s going to be here for a long time.

Q: You note that research universities had troubles long before Trump started slashing funding in 2025. Can you talk about that?

A: Going back to even before the [2008] financial crisis, but clearly by 2010, the research university system in this country was showing wear and tear—for two reasons, and then a third was added. The first was the federal government’s expenditures on research have not kept up with inflation, or with how many institutions want to be research universities. And even though the universities spend money on research, they are not profit centers. The amount of money they spend has been going up and up over the last several decades, even before Trump. I always use 2022 data as my benchmark: R-1 universities in this country were spending 45 cents for every federal dollar they got, according to their own reported data to the National Science Foundation. And that number had been climbing.

At the same time, starting after the financial crisis, the value proposition question in the public was exploding. People were saying, “Why does it cost so much to get a degree? What’s the value of the degree?” That drumbeat has just accelerated.

There was a disconnect; ACE [the American Council on Education], which now runs the Carnegie Classification, was exploding the number of institutions called R-1s. You see it in their advertising, these institutions crowing about how they got R-1 status, right? I have data that shows that some of those that are growing are spending enormous amounts of their own money on research.

Then Trump basically took a sledgehammer to the cracks and blew the system apart by making it even harder to get research money and launching what I would call an outright attack against the private research university sector—especially in the Northeast. When the house was already burning, he started a big dumpster fire in the front yard.

The third thing that people didn’t see coming was the demographic cliff—major flagship universities missing their enrollment targets and cutting their budgets. And then Trump, of course, adds in, “Well, we’re not going to have any foreign students.” Just to make things worse.

Q: On top of that, supporting research traditionally has been a bipartisan enterprise, but now it’s become so politicized.

A: The Vannevar Bush Covenant [establishing the postwar government-university research partnership] held literally from the ’50s through the ’80s into the ’90s, right? But by the financial crisis … Look at the NSF budget for the last 15 years. That bipartisan group, although they would say they supported research, wouldn’t spend more money. It wasn’t a priority. Even the Chinese expenditures, which are just amazingly large, didn’t move them to action.

I mean, it wasn’t hostile like it is now. But if you look at the budgets that were passed, there were things not funded. A great example was the CHIPS Act, and that was under Biden. Everyone agreed that we needed to renew the semiconductor industry in this country. They passed the CHIPS Act but appropriated no money for it. And then they’re surprised nothing happened.

Q: Do you think the shift in public attitudes about cost and ROI played a role in the reluctance to fund?

A: It all stirs together. We didn’t do a good job, really, talking about how this country has moved to where the research universities are doing a huge fraction of the basic research, which is very different than in the ’50s and ’60s. The corporate laboratories that used to exist are almost nonexistent today. And we didn’t make the case to the public in a way they would believe that this longer-term view of research was important.

It was interesting looking at public data during COVID, because there was a blip up. When the vaccines hit, public sentiment went up. But the blip didn’t last.

A lot of university leaders go around saying, “We just have to tell the story better.” But we’ve been saying that for like 25 years; it’s a trite thing to say. Telling the story better is not going to fix the system.

Q: Do you think there are too many research universities?

A: I actually think that’s not the way to think about it—prescribe a number in a free-market enterprise? It’s just not the American way. The better way of thinking about it is institutions that cannot be everything to everybody have to decide where they’re going to be known and pick those areas where they can build faculties and be nationally competitive. It may be in philosophy, or foreign language, or quantum physics. But very few universities today can afford to do everything well, and yet they try, and that’s what spreads the money out and makes the enterprise so expensive.

You see this in the privates. You also see it in the publics—not so much the big flagship publics, which sort of have a mandate to be a full, comprehensive university—but the others do not have that mandate. They just take that mandate.

Q: So what’s the solution?

A: Two things are going to have to happen. One is the university is going to have to learn how to focus and thrive in a world that has less resources than they think they can get. They’re going to have to rethink the balance of their educational mission and research.

And at the same time, we’ve got to figure out a way to reinvent the covenant with the federal government, so that there’s more predictability in what’s going to happen. Right now, the amount of uncertainty is just appalling.

Q: That seems easier said than done at the moment.

A: At the end of the day, if we got back to where we were at the beginning of the Trump administration, we were still in trouble. We still didn’t have enough money. And now there’s so much smoke from the turmoil that the administration’s created that it allows universities to divert all their attention to that. There’s a whole group of leaders and institutions that are just fighting the dumpster fire, believing that once that’s out, everything will be fine. It wasn’t fine to begin with.

One of the biggest challenges we have is the decreasing amount of time university leaders stay in their positions. Because these are not short-term problems. A couple of years ago, a group of new presidents asked me for my advice for success. My answer was, “Stay a while.” If I had left after five years, nothing would have happened.

Q: Is there a viable funding alternative to the federal government–university model?

A: I don’t think so. People always talk about philanthropic and corporate funding. But if you look at all the research universities in the country, corporate funding is like 4.5 percent of their total funding, right? So if it doubled, it’s 10 percent, compared to the federal government’s 55 percent. The same thing for foundations. And the other thing about foundations and corporate funding is it is not spread evenly. If I’m a corporation today and I have an area I want to support, I go find the best people on the planet—I don’t care where they are—and I fund them.

Q: Is there a post–research university world where something different moves in to fill that space?

A: The interesting thing is if you started a university with a clean piece of paper today, would it look the way we look? The answer is no. Some of my friends at Carnegie Mellon are going to do that in Miami. My understanding is that they’re not going to try to recreate CMU in Miami; it’ll be much more focused and integrated than the Pittsburgh campus.

Can you do that with an existing university? It’s very hard to carve a space out for a new discipline or something that’s truly interdisciplinary in a university that has strong departments. We create more disciplines as we go, and the university gets increasingly fractionated. Most of the problems that are interesting that we work on do not have disciplinary boundaries, yet our universities still do.

At the same time, knowledge is becoming more ubiquitous. I mean, I can get knowledge today off the internet or with my friend Claude at a rate that was unimaginable when I was a student, and I can get knowledge about anything.

I am a big proponent of tenure; I don’t see a way around tenure. The challenge is that your faculty turns over so slowly, which is an issue with AI because that slow turnover is going to make adoption of new pedagogy very difficult. I don’t have any idea how that’s going to work.