President Donald Trump’s administration is moving to sever the link between academia and government by freezing billions of dollars in federal grants to top research institutions. This act may score political points among those accustomed to understanding academia as a left-leaning “ivory tower” insulated from ordinary Americans and private enterprise. But it reflects a dangerous misunderstanding of how the United States became militarily and commercially dominant in the first place. Research universities have long undergirded, in particular, the country’s national security through defense research, and they continue to train the pipeline of talent that powers both government and industry. Practically speaking, cutting their support does not represent a principled political stance—it is a friendly-fire assault on U.S. national security. …

Universities, for their part, converted U.S. taxpayers’ dollars into innovations that made the country prosper. Nowhere was this more evident than at Stanford, where federal defense contracts and research funding supported a culture of innovation that helped create Silicon Valley. Faculty members such as Frederick Terman, who aggressively expanded the university’s statistics and engineering departments to win more Defense Department grants, encouraged students to commercialize their research, enabling the founding of companies such as Hewlett-Packard and Fairchild Semiconductor that would become cornerstones of the computing revolution.

While many other countries, such as France and the United Kingdom, continued to direct government funding for scientific research mainly toward government labs, the United States built a decentralized research system anchored in its universities. This decentralized system not only accelerated technological progress but also helped defense-related innovations flow into private commerce, giving U.S. industry a clear edge that the Soviet Union struggled to match, despite its extensive investments in technical education. By the end of the twentieth century, this system of federally funded university research had become the backbone of the United States’ global leadership.