By Art Padilla

WRIGHTSVILLE BEACH (May 10, 2025) – In his multi-volume A Study of History, Arnold Toynbee argued that civilizations die from “suicide” and not from “murder.” Decline comes from internal rot, not from external conquest. Toynbee wrote that collapse comes when civilizations lose their moral fiber, when they commit stunningly stupid acts.

The brutally indiscriminate attack on US universities, including the overnight obliteration of the nation’s scientific muscle, may prove to be America’s pivotal “suicide” moment.

Decimation of our scientific advantage

Before the 1940s, most scientific Nobel Prizes went to Europeans, principally in the UK, Germany, and France. Since World War II, however, the overwhelming number of Nobel medals have been won by Americans and nearly all of the winners served as professors of US universities. Since 2000, most prizes in the sciences (about 150) have gone to American scholars, an important measure of the scientific prowess US universities developed during the 20th century.

This is no coincidence. The development of the atomic bomb by Oppenheimer’s group was a government-university collaboration that intensified after Russia launched Sputnik in 1957. The internet, MRI technology, GPS, DNA fingerprinting, recombinant DNA, plasma TVs, Bermuda grass hybrids on golf courses, car seat belts, pap smears, baseball catcher’s masks, and many other innovations and medical breakthroughs emerged from university inquiry. 

An attack on science is an attack on our best universities.

American universities recently have been guilty of myriad excesses, including administrative bloat, excessive administrator salaries, out-of-control college sports, contemptible ideological tests of conformity, and the risible “Latinx” and preferred pronouns. This is reflected in an unprecedented decline in the public’s trust for higher education.

Ironically, even though professors are often blamed, there’s genuine faculty concern about these recent idiocies within the academy. It’s the administrators and trustees who have looked the other way as teaching and research took a back seat. Despite many victories, particularly during the last several decades, universities have diverged from what made them successful. It has made one of our nation’s most envied resources vulnerable to external criticism and susceptible to attack.

Today, as I write this, the National Science Foundation (NSF), celebrates its 75th anniversary. Founded on May 10, 1950, the NSF is the world’s greatest instrument for the promotion of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) research. Its relatively modest staff, which administers the competitive and peer-reviewed scientific awards previously approved by the US Congress, is being wiped out. Over 1,400 university science grants have been chaotically and non-transparently eliminated. The even larger National Institutes of Health, which administers medical and health research grants and projects, has been similarly devastated.

And for what? To reduce the federal deficit by an infinitesimal fraction of one percent? To punish university professors for the DEI screwups of the university administrators and for the absence of trusteeship by trustees? To combat non-existent fraud and corruption? To throw the tub and the bath water out with the baby (until the next election)?

Projects eliminated under the guise of wiping out DEI are in fact valuable initiatives to attract young Americans into careers in science and engineering. Half of our Ph.D degree recipients on temporary visas are from India and China; it’s even higher than that at the less distinguished graduate programs in regional institutions. America needs to encourage more of its citizens, especially gifted minority kids and young women, to study science. This is not politically correct nonsense: it’s common sense.

Breathtakingly raw animosity

Trump assistant Russell Vought, the architect of this scientific slaughter and former staffer of the rightwing Heritage Foundation, has explained the obliteration over which he is presiding in disconcerting and bizarre manner:

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Vought said in a video last October.

“When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down … We want to put them in trauma.”

Where this mind-blowing hostility originates is a question for psychotherapists.

Where is the outrage, the indignation, over these suicidal inanities? As far as I can discern, not one of the 25 members of the National Science Board, the nation’s presidentially-appointed advisory panel on science, has resigned in protest or publicly denounced the insanity. Democratic congressional members of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology have written a letter asking about how decisions are being made. Maybe they will hold their breath until the elections of 2026.

European science “super grants”

One predictable consequence from Russell Vought’s and Elon Musk’s unhinged assaults, aside from the demoralized workforce they sought, is a world-wide raid on American talent.  The European Union has announced a billion-dollar initiative to recruit our scientists using the European Research Council’s “super grants.”

Many of America’s best scholars, including our young science “superstars,” may soon head to Cambridge or Paris or Berlin to work with well-funded research teams studying artificial intelligence, quantum theory, or gene therapies where their talents are appreciated by thoughtful nations.

Poor Harvard

Not many shed tears for Harvard University when Trump threatened to cut its funding. Harvard has a $53 billion endowment and admits only 3.5% of undergraduate applicants. Like other universities, it has crumpled under pressure from leftwing activists. 

Roland Fryer, a young Harvard professor, reminds us about Harvard’s abridged due process for students accused of sexual misconduct after coercion from Obama’s administration or its failure to distinguish between racial disparity and racial bias during Black Lives Matter or the “context-dependent” equivocation when Jewish students were threatened. 

Ideological conformity tests from the left or from the right are equally toxic. Now, maybe, Harvard will resist intimidation from both conservatives and liberals. 

But America will also realize you can destroy excellence much faster than you can attain it. 

Dr. Art Padilla splits his time between homes in Wrightsville Beach and Raleigh. He served as a senior administrator at the University of North Carolina System headquarters and later at NC State, where he was chairman of the Department of Management. He has taught at UNC-Chapel Hill, NC State, and the University of Arizona, winning several teaching awards and recognitions, including the Holladay Medal, the highest faculty honor at NC State. He recently completed the 2nd edition of his book Leadership: Leaders, Followers, Environments.