By Peter Hans

President, University of North Carolina System

RALEIGH (May 1, 2025) – For more than 70 years, federal funding for university research has been a patriotic bargain and a core driver of national strength.

Coming out of World War II, American leaders recognized that dominance in emerging fields is key to national power. The whole world had just seen the starring role that scientific advancement played in winning history’s largest conflict, and policymakers rightly believed that the United States should be at the leading edge of discovery across a wide range of disciplines.

The question was how to support such a far-reaching goal without creating some immense, centralized bureaucracy that would trample traditional American values of free enterprise and open competition. We needed a strategy to harness national resources without the drag of central planning.

The solution was distinctly American, drawing on the diverse network of universities scattered across every part of the country. Instead of writing five-year plans and letting Washington try to decide the future of science, we embraced competitive grants, awarded to individual researchers, spread across independent universities that were, themselves, competing for prestige and progress. We trusted the academic marketplace of ideas to test things out and determine the most promising pathways for new knowledge.

“Scientific progress on a broad front results from the free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice, in the manner dictated by their curiosity for exploration of the unknown,” wrote Vannevar Bush in 1945, laying out the case for this open and competitive approach in Science, the Endless Frontier. His vision shaped a uniquely American model of progress: one where liberty, freedom, and open-minded exploration provided fertile soil for economic growth, medical advances and national security.

The competitive grant system aligned the structure of American science policy with the country’s broader commitment to pluralism and free thinking. Just as our economy thrives on decentralized innovation—on countless entrepreneurs and firms testing new ideas—its scientific enterprise thrives when many minds pursue many different questions. It was a deliberate, pointed contrast to the command-and-control system of Soviet science, where apparatchiks made the key decisions about scientific investment.

The American vision has worked brilliantly, keeping the United States at the forefront of global competition in everything from agricultural production to artificial intelligence. It made us a magnet for talent from across the world and turned higher education into one of the few major sectors where the United States runs a consistent trade surplus, bringing in ambitious students from abroad who want to participate in a free and open system.

That was the federal side of the bargain — competitive funding, awarded on the basis of academic merit, without ideological strings attached. The university side of the bargain, which Bush and his colleagues took pains to emphasize, was to maintain a true marketplace of ideas and recognize a responsibility to the public interest. “It is chiefly in these institutions that scientists may work in an atmosphere which is relatively free from the adverse pressure of convention, prejudice, or commercial necessity,” Bush wrote. “At their best, they provide the scientific worker with a strong sense of solidarity and security, as well as a substantial degree of personal intellectual freedom.”

Both universities and the federal government have strayed from that original vision in recent years, and both must return to it. At the University of North Carolina System, we have done difficult and important work to keep up our end of the bargain and preserve an environment of genuine intellectual freedom. We recognized that ideological pressure can come from within the academic community as well as from outside, and we’ve made concerted reforms to protect students and scholars from conformity of all kinds.

Scholars should not face political litmus tests from anyone — not from an accreditor, not from a campus administrator, and not from a federal agency. “Research thrives best in an atmosphere of academic freedom,” Bush declared, and that’s the atmosphere we want for the UNC System.

The patriotic compact that made American universities into the world’s most productive engines of discovery and national strength can work again. But it requires a recommitment, from the federal government and from our universities, to Bush’s original ideal of open-minded exploration. It’s a fundamentally American value — and a foundational strength for higher education.

Peter Hans is the President of the University of North Carolina System.