Periods of disruption, however unsettling, often open us to new possibilities. The current effort to dismantle the federal support for research in the United States is as cynical as it is misguided; cynical because it uses research infrastructure as a leverage of pure control, misguided because it cuts the very engine of human progress and growth.
In the late winter of 2025, as it became clear that the current federal administration would weaponize the federal funding for university research that has made the United States a leader in science, technology, the arts, and humanities, the HuMetricsHSS team began considering the opportunity this presents for us to rethink the manner in which research assessment functions across higher education.
We captured the signature of our thinking in the recently posted essay on the LSE Impact Blog entitled “Is federal funding still a viable research assessment indicator in the age of Trump?” At the heart of our argument is that when the government turns federal research funding into an instrument for ideological control, it loses its capacity to serve as a primary indicator of academic excellence. This is how we put it in the essay:
For generations, federal research funding has been distributed on the basis of the quality of the research proposed as discerned by the leading researchers in a given field. Now, however, federal funding decisions are being shaped by the political, ideological and personal interests of those in power. Federal funding, once an indicator of research quality, is now becoming an indicator of ideological conformity.
However cynical and misguided this effort to destroy the university as the beating heart of a free society may be, it does uncover the limits of our reliance on federal funding as a primary indicator of research quality in the United States.
In the fog of this war on higher education, we cannot lose sight of the opportunity to imagine academic research assessment anew. We need to develop more sophisticated and resilient ways of recognizing excellent scholarship that align more closely to the core values and ideals of higher education.
In our essay, we point to some specific examples we have identified in our long-standing research into this issue. Chief among these is the Charting Pathways of Intellectual Leadership initiative designed to realign practices of tenure and promotion with the personal and institutional values that bring academic research to life. We outline additional specific recommendations for how to align research assessment practices with professed institutional values in our white paper, Walking the Talk: Toward a Values Aligned Academy.
As we argue in our LSE essay:
We must begin the process of reimagining the future of higher education now. At its heart, that future must align the values for which our institutions profess to stand with the indicators of excellence we hope to embody so we can live up to the promise of higher education to enrich society, advance democracy and pursue truth wherever it may lead.
In an effort to make good on this imperative to reimagine the future of higher education anew, the HuMetricsHSS team will host the inaugural gathering of the Values-Enacted Leadership Institute (VELI), which will together five teams of faculty, staff, and administrators who recognize that enduring change requires deep collaboration animated by a common purpose and rooted in shared values. May this inaugural VELI experience be the catalyst for wider, more enduring change as we cultivate a network of communities of practice committed to imagining higher education through values-enacted leadership.
