How to Navigate Challenges to the University

We appreciate the excellent summary and assessment offered by Robert A. Brown and Bruce R. Guile in “How the American Research University Survives” (Issues, Spring 2026). The current climate for US research universities calls for a shift in attention, focus, and priorities by leaders. That said, while the authors accurately provide context for the situation facing universities, they offer few actionable suggestions.

To augment their article, we offer specific steps that US research universities can take.

The 2025 Critical Technology Tracker from the Australian Strategy Policy Institute confirmed a milestone the American research community has long feared: China has established a dominant research lead in 69 out of 74 critical technologies. China’s lead is not merely a result of capital; it is the product of a coordinated, state-directed fusion of research and industrial scale. The American antidote is not to mimic this central command, but to execute a radical redesign of the American research university. Academic leaders must pivot to a strategy of institutional responsivity.

Institutional responsivity is the fundamental reengineering of the university’s operating system to sense, adapt, and scale in real time. Where the twentieth-century university was designed as a static repository of knowledge, the responsive university is a dynamic knowledge enterprise. It replaces bureaucratic silos with agile, mission-driven clusters capable of synchronizing with the rapid “cycle time” of global technological shifts.

To regain America’s footing, institutional responsivity must be applied across three critical fronts:

1. Eliminate the translation gap. The fundamental vulnerability in the US innovation ecosystem is the distance between a high-impact publication and a domestic production line. A responsive research university must now host the “lab-to-fab” infrastructure. This requires moving beyond theoretical discovery to include on-campus pilot plants where hardware and materials can be prototyped at a pre-commercial scale. By co-locating corporate R&D teams directly within their facilities, universities create a frictionless feedback loop. The objective is to anchor high-value intellectual property in regional industrial hubs before it can be replicated or offshored.
2. Accelerate IP velocity. The legacy university technology transfer office often acts as a bureaucratic brake on competitiveness. To counter the speed of state-backed adversaries, universities must prioritize speeding up the creation of intellectual property. For technologies vital to national success, research institutions should adopt a “zero-friction” licensing model. The university’s primary metric of success must shift from royalty collection to the speed of domestic commercialization.
3. The “trusted intelligence” moat. A responsive university system is uniquely positioned to develop “trusted AI” systems that prioritize transparency and operational autonomy. Decentralized research networks as they exist in the United States can produce AI systems that are more adaptable to complex global environments. Developing a global standard for AI that industry and allies can trust is a strategic advantage that cannot be easily replicated by an autocracy.

Finally, at the national level, the United States must implement a policy that dramatically increases the number of American graduates in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics and effectively “staples a green card” to the diplomas of the world’s top doctoral graduates in STEM. Providing an environment of intellectual freedom combined with a direct path to entrepreneurship turns the world’s best minds into an expanded foundation for American industrial resilience.

Michael M. Crow

David V. Rosowsky

Robert A. Brown and Bruce R. Guile provide valuable prescriptions for the current challenges facing research universities. We might additionally consider the opportunities created by AI’s profound transformation of the research enterprise. Artificial intelligence is accelerating the pace of university discovery, augmenting the work of human researchers and in some cases even substituting them altogether. The most valuable researchers in the AI age will therefore be those who harness and direct these capabilities while doing what AI cannot: invent new theories, frame the right questions, interpret results and their implications for society, apply them to variable contexts, and direct further investigations.

While university researchers commonly receive industry contracts, we can deepen these partnerships while incentivizing faculty who might otherwise decamp for new opportunities. One step would be to remove barriers to long-term joint appointments with the private sector, allowing academics to hold such positions and vice versa. To encourage innovation further, universities can promote the incubation of start-ups within their walls. Our objective should be the seamless alignment of university expertise and talent with societal and practical goals.

Northeastern University’s experiential PhD provides an illustrative model of how such alignment might function. These programs place doctoral students in structured assignments with industry partners where they are co-mentored by academic and private-sector scientists. In their most integrated form, working professionals also pursue a PhD while remaining full-time employees, conducting their dissertation work on problems aligned with their employer’s business. This produces graduates who combine rigorous academic training with real-world problem-solving experience, while giving partner organizations a pipeline to talent and access to faculty expertise.

Government continues to play a key role in funding research. By launching moonshot partnerships between academia, government, and the private sector, we have the opportunity to fund new research and accelerate existing discovery in priority areas. Indeed, such initiatives are taking off. The Department of Energy’s Genesis Mission may offer a blueprint of how such collaborations could operate in the future, but we should not limit our horizons—or be limited by borders. Research is an international enterprise, and universities should also be at the forefront of forming new mechanisms to engage with global partners.

In their essay, Brown and Guile call for rethinking strategies for university research. In the AI era as in the past, the success of those strategies will rely on the strength of our partnerships.

Joseph E. Aoun

Robert A. Brown and Bruce R. Guile provide compelling analysis on why higher education leaders need to craft new strategies in light of precarious federal funding, declining enrollment, and global competition. At the same time, university presidents and boards should also develop regional visions and practices. Such initiatives and programs can expand collaborations with companies, research institutes, nonprofit organizations, and other universities to advance research, education, and service that meets critical local needs within and among the states.

It is no longer sufficient for higher education institutions to focus so intently on national rankings and global standing. While such efforts have created strong worldwide reputations and draws for foreign students and scholars, universities also need to address growing economic and societal disparities closer to home. In addition, they have to work on general perceptions that the sector appears out of touch and removed from practical training and solutions for local problems.

While the challenge looms, the solution is readily available. The playbook for regional strategies can develop in ways that are already familiar to universities. To begin, institutions should assemble focused yet broad stakeholders—leadership, faculty, students, staff, and outside voices from industry, government, and community organizations. The result of these efforts should emerge as immediate and near-term activities benefiting home states and surrounding areas.

Implementation presents challenges that become easier with other entities involved. State governments and companies should provide grant funding and similar support, and nonprofits should also engage in collaborations and related activities. Institutions should further measure and evaluate their regional contributions over time, resulting in a new regional ranking system addressing meaningful criteria such as alumni local employment, technology transfer and start-ups, utilization of open datasets (e.g., for agriculture, energy, and water metrics), and improvements to area health and environmental factors.

Collegiate athletic conferences offer a longstanding instance of regional engagement by universities. They provide friendly collaboration and competition among institutions, and strongly resonate with the general public. Universities should consider similar regional research enterprise conferences, to provide both “wins” and “school spirit” for their broader surrounding communities.

There are, of course, organizations and programs already working in university regional engagement. The Georgia Institute of Technology has developed a Community Connect portal to partner researchers with area-serving partner organizations. STEM-NET builds scientific and technical research collaboration among the 23 California State University campuses, with a focus on statewide workforce development.

Other entities can offer insights to further university regional strategies, such as the Western Governors Association, which develops policy priorities among the 22 states in the western United States. The Innovation and Economic Prosperity Program of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities has developed an assessment and certification system for institutions to measure and improve their connections to economic and community development.

University leaders now have a clear choice: to better understand and engage with their regions for mutual benefit, or risk further isolation and stagnation.

Eion Lys

It has long been the quest of many university presidents and institutional boards to grow their overall research enterprise by maximizing awards across as many disciplines as possible—“a thousand flowers blooming”—in order to boost their respective position in various national and global rankings pertaining to research activity. Often this included redirecting substantial subsidies from other revenue sources and other parts of the academic enterprise, largely from tuition and fees.

This model was already under pressure as changes in national demographics (fewer age 18–24 individuals as birth rates decline) and outmigration from certain states with high concentrations of higher education institutions (California, Illinois, New York, and the New England states more broadly) continues to intensify. Concurrently, ever-declining public trust and confidence in the “ROI”—return on investment—of a postsecondary education has led to reduced belief in the value and importance of higher education. With the advent of the current administration’s attack on research funding sources, the pressure to adjust course has now become unavoidable, as Robert A. Brown and Bruce R. Guile articulate.

Focusing on what institutions do very well (and discontinuing marginal or unprofitable pursuits) is the order of the day. Of particular note, exploring strong, multiyear enduring partnerships with industry is a strategy that needs greater focus. Examples of this exist across American higher education that can be used a models. Such connections focus the institution on academic programs and a research agenda that are linked to industry, providing a destination for the talent that the university develops and for intellectual property that results from research collaborations. The federal government is likely to be a fickle partner for many years to come, if not because of political considerations then because of the “crowding out” of the government’s ability to fund research from ballooning debt service, defense, and health care priorities.

All of the above demands a central institutional strategy to which the components of the academic enterprise must agree and support. In an environment where faculty governance means 99–1 is too often a tie, this can be a significant challenge to effectuate. Both authors have pursued this art across their careers and should be called upon more frequently to help counsel university presidents and boards on this strategy.

Cole Clark

Robert A. Brown and Bruce R. Guile have, like others, put the imperative for institutional change on the front burner. Clearly, the potential for elaboration in the existing paradigmatic structure of higher education is near exhaustion. The current structure is almost out of gas. It is not optimizing results for faculty and students, for society, or for other nations. New forms of knowledge won’t fit easily into outdated structures that become fetters on the growth and transmission of knowledge.

When ill-informed, ideologically driven government administrations get involved in creating “compacts,” bad things happen. New ideas for funding science and technology, as well as the arts, languages, history, and social sciences, by the federal government should originate at the nation’s universities. There is much that remains brilliant in older “compacts,” such as those created after a tussle between Vannevar Bush, an academic adviser to Presidents Roosevelt and Truman, and Harley Kilgore, a liberal US senator from West Virginia, which gave rise to a dramatically new structure and mission for the federal government’s support of university research. The government asked the universities at full-audited cost to do this work for the public good.

As much as the Trump administration’s actions have seemingly attempted to undermine the quality of the nation’s great research universities, Brown and Guile are, I believe, a bit too apocalyptic. Universities, like art, are made for the long run. Look downstream. Those universities that see which way knowledge is evolving and that are prescient enough will survive and do well. The question is how to repair recent damage and move forward. The authors give up too much—and yet don’t go quite far enough in suggesting new forms of universities built for a different type of society, while protecting at all cost the institutions’ autonomy and core values.

One size does not fit all, of course, and governing by rankings is absurd, but a return to the idea of selective excellence, popular in the 1990s, may not be the answer either. Let’s keep broad competition—the driver in knowledge growth. We can create new structures that facilitate the uses of discoveries that focus more on practical applications, without cutting out the heart of what propels science and technology.

Today, there are too many fetters and too few mechanisms facilitating university transformation. Decentralized budgeting, for example, may have been good idea for one era, but it is not the best model for an interdisciplinary university with linkages to knowledge networks and academic leagues. Also, universities need to find better ways of identifying and choosing their presidents, trustees, and regents. There is a paucity of truly creative leaders at the top research universities. The leaders in place may be very smart and able people, but few can introduce and implement needed structural change.

Finally, university leaders must regain public trust (and often internal trust) in our mission. That is earned by doing rather than merely genuflecting to the concept.

Jonathan R. Cole

Robert A. Brown and Bruce R. Guile argue that leaders of US research universities need to focus on crafting intentional survival strategies, and in that context the authors point out the need for flexibility on intellectual property approaches. For practitioners in the world of technology transactions, universities are on the whole notoriously inflexible on issues surrounding IP (to be fair, more than a few tech companies share that notoriety). But that inflexibility comes with a cost to universities in terms of loss of potential funding deals and opportunities to forward their mission through partnerships with industry and philanthropy.

Why does intellectual property get in the way in the university context? It may be because the IP structure created under the 1980 Patent and Trademark Law Amendments Act, better known as the Bayh–Dole Act, has been elevated from a particular legislative solution to a perceived problem (the lack of commercialization of government-owned patents arising out of federally funded research in the 1970s) into an overarching strategy. Bayh–Dole enabled the commercialization of one type of IP in one context: valuable patentable inventions arising out of federally funded research. The act’s mandatory statutory structure—put simply, “take ownership of IP, seek patents, license”—has become the model for most IP generated at universities, whatever the type of IP and whatever the source of funds. But absent other restrictions on the university, it doesn’t need to be that way, outside mandatory compliance with Bayh–Dole when and if it applies.

Experience over the decades of the patent-driven university technology transfer industry shows that financial success in technology transfer is generally limited to a small number of institutions. This is no surprise because it mirrors the value distribution of patents in general, and of patents on early-stage developments in particular: that most patents are of negligible value. Licensing early-stage patents is a highly speculative business.

Too often, too many sectors spend too much time arguing over ownership of IP covering products that do not yet exist—and that at the end of the day may be worthless. There are also situations where IP is simply not the point. Universities—and foundations as well—may be looking for publication early and often. Industry may wish to pursue precompetitive collaborations. Certain defense-related research may be entirely propriety.

Survival strategies should drive university IP strategy going forward, rather than the reverse. Strategy should not be limited by existing IP policies; rather, those policies should be flexible and enable the university to achieve its actual strategic goals, particularly when addressing collaborations with other universities, industry, philanthropy, and government. When looking at income opportunities, universities should look realistically at the low possibility of future IP royalties as compared with the current benefits of research funding or strategic gains.

Stephen Johnson

Peter L. Hoffman

Robert A. Brown and Bruce R. Guile provide a clear-eyed account of the research university’s predicament. Their diagnosis of institutional sameness is exactly right, and bracingly put: research universities are “carbon copies of each other,” their decentralization not a strength but the absence of strategy. On the problem, we do not disagree. We disagree about what one number means, and where the repair can happen.

The number is the 46 cents. Brown and Guile report that between 2013 and 2023, internal university funding of research grew from 38 cents to 46 cents per federal dollar, and read that growth as the institution subsidizing research. But a cost recorded against a university is not always a cost the university bears. Follow research spending down to where it happens—individual salaries, individual effort reports, individual grants—and some meaningful share of that “subsidy” is not the institution absorbing a cost. It is the institution shifting one: onto federal awards charged for work they did not receive, and onto faculty and staff doing real work that no budget line ever captured. This is the difference between statutory and economic incidence—who a cost is assigned to on paper versus who actually pays it. The subsidy figure measures the first and assumes it equals the second.

And it rests entirely on institutions’ own accounting. No one has independently tested whether those reported losses survive a different way of counting, or audited whether the costs attributed to research were caused by research rather than assigned to it. The claim that research is a loss leader is repeated at the highest levels and has never been examined as the argument it is. How much of that subsidy is real, and how much an artifact of how the books were kept, I do not know—and neither, I would suggest, does anyone.

The second disagreement is about altitude. Brown and Guiles’s prescription lives at the top: presidents and boards crafting strategy, portfolio maps, a renegotiated federal compact. All worthwhile. But the authors themselves supply the reason most efforts will not land when they note that “positive organizational transformation of such a decentralized enterprise is very, very hard.” Strategy set at the top is a plan and an announcement; the work happens far below, in hundreds of departments—and in most universities the two run on separate tracks. A portfolio decision a president announces changes nothing until the departments carry it out—and whether they do, faithfully or not at all, is what separates a functioning research unit from a broken one under identical strategy and identical rules.

That is where the agency the authors are looking for actually lives. The department is the largest level at which the people who carry out the rules are in the same room, and so the level at which change is possible rather than proclaimed. This is not a smaller ambition than theirs; it is the missing floor beneath their building.

Brown and Guile are right that hope is not a strategy and the good old days are gone. I would add only that the survival they describe will be won or lost one department at a time, and that any strategy that never reaches that layer is another plan for the drawer already holding the last one.

Sarah M. Trimmer