President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the National Institutes of Health wants to take on campus culture at elite universities, wielding the power of tens of billions of dollars in scientific grants.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford physician and economist, is considering a plan to link a university’s likelihood of receiving research grants to some ranking or measure of academic freedom on campus, people familiar with his thinking said.
Bhattacharya, a critic of the Covid-19 response, wants to counter what he sees as a culture of conformity in science that ostracized him over his views on masking and school closures.
He isn’t yet sure how to measure academic freedom, but he has looked at how a nonprofit called Foundation for Individual Rights in Education [FIRE] scores universities in its freedom-of-speech rankings, a person familiar with his thinking said.
The nonprofit scores schools based on a survey of students’ perceptions of factors such as whether they feel comfortable expressing ideas. Schools are also penalized if their administrators sanction faculty for opinions or disinvite a speaker from a campus event after a controversy...
Full story at https://www.wsj.com/health/healthcare/jay-bhattacharya-national-institute-health-grants-cancel-culture-645101f5.
In case you are wondering, here is what FIRE says about UCLA, which it ranks as #220 (out of 258):
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