Professor Jay Bhattacharya

The Trump NIH Pick Who Wants to Take On 'Cancel Culture' Colleges

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 and Expression 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.

Universities that are leading recipients of NIH grants but have poor FIRE rankings include the University of Pennsylvania ("very poor"), Columbia University ("abysmal") and the University of Southern California ("very poor"). Schools with top scores in FIRE's most recent rankings are the University of Virginia, Michigan Technological University and Florida State University.

The academic-freedom prerequisite is among several proposals for overhauling the NIH and its billions of dollars in grant-making that Bhattacharya would pursue if the Senate confirms him, the people said.