What Broke University Science?

What Broke University Science?
by Jason Locasale at Brownstone Institute

I became a scientist because I was drawn to difficult questions. As a child, I searched for patterns and tried to uncover the deeper logic behind everyday phenomena. That instinct carried me into chemistry and physics, then into a PhD at MIT, where I worked at the intersection of biophysics, engineering, computation, and early AI. 

Biology pulled me in because it was full of unresolved problems. It offered a way to answer questions that touched human health in a meaningful way.

When I entered biomedical research at Harvard, I believed science operated on a simple principle: knowledge mattered. I built a research program around metabolism—how nutrients and the environment shape health, cancer, and chronic disease. 

My lab developed technologies capable of measuring hundreds of molecules simultaneously, revealing how cells allocate nutrients and make decisions and shaping research directions in many fields. 

Over nearly 20 years I published over 200 papers, becoming one of the world’s most highly cited scholars, received teaching awards, collaborated across disciplines, contributed to biotechnology, and advised the National Institutes of Health.

I also assumed—naively—that scientific accomplishment offered a degree of protection. If you did good work, if you advanced understanding, institutions would support you. There were early warning signs: jealousy from senior colleagues when my research outpaced theirs; the creeping politicization of academia; hiring and leadership decisions that elevated people for their symbolic value or personal relationships rather than their expertise. But I did what most scientists do: I focused on the work and ignored the noise.

It took far too long to understand how misplaced that belief was. My awakening came through something ordinary: an authorship dispute between two members of my lab at Duke’s medical school, where I was a tenured professor. These disagreements happen in every lab and are typically resolved with a straightforward conversation. But this dispute unfolded when universities were reframing their missions around social-justice narratives about power imbalances, recasting accomplished scientists as oppressors and others as oppressed.

What should have been a simple mentoring moment instead became the pretext for a sprawling administrative intervention—something the university could present as vigilance, morality, or progress.

The process quickly detached from reality. Administrators launched what they called a culture review, claiming they needed to assess whether I was aligned with Duke’s values. In practice, investigators interrogated people for hours, attempting to elicit any negative phrasing that could be stitched into a narrative. 

I was banned from campus, prohibited from discussing my research or what was happening to me, and placed under legal and financial scrutiny. My grants were reassigned to senior administrators who had long been jealous of my accomplishments.

After a couple months of interviews, audits, and surveillance, the investigation concluded with no findings of misconduct. But the damage had already been done. Years of work were disrupted, the careers of my trainees derailed, and student protests about my treatment ignored—even as other forms of activism were eagerly embraced. Eventually I was pressured to sign a compact containing conditions and monitoring requirements that would have made any serious research impossible.

What happened to me was not unique. Variations of the same pattern were unfolding on campuses across the country. Colleagues told me to ignore it, to keep my head down and focus on my work. But opportunities disappeared; whispers filled the void where facts should have been; and I was quietly blacklisted from positions elsewhere. It became clear that something deeper had been happening inside biomedical academia for years: scientific merit and truth had lost their institutional value.

Universities—especially medical schools—underwent a profound structural shift. They no longer functioned as communities of scholars. They had become corporate enterprises.

As NIH budgets grew and academic hospitals expanded into multibillion-dollar regional systems, the administrative culture of large hospital corporations—risk management, marketing, HR-driven oversight—migrated directly into the medical school. Over two decades, layers of bureaucracy accumulated. 

Roles that were once part-time service positions for accomplished scientists became full-time managerial jobs occupied by people with little or no scientific background. Decision-making moved away from faculty and into opaque administrative bodies insulated from accountability.

This bureaucratic expansion coincided with a complete reordering of financial incentives. The medical-school industrial complex emerged: NIH’s expanding budget and the rising revenue of academic hospitals fueled parallel growth in medical schools. 

At many institutions, NIH grant money effectively supported over 70% of medical school operations—not only research, but administrative offices, debt-financed buildings, and the hospital centers attached to the university brand. Universities pursued grants not because they believed in the intellectual merit of the work, but because grants functioned as revenue streams.

This created a reward structure detached from scientific progress. Fields that generated fundable work—cancer immunotherapy, HIV, genomics, certain molecular biology niches—drew disproportionate attention. Meanwhile, areas essential to public health but underprioritized by NIH—nutrition, metabolism, toxicology, environmental exposures, disease prevention—withered, not because they lacked scientific importance, but because they didn’t produce the revenue institutions depended on.

NIH peer review absorbed the distortions it was meant to prevent. Review panels, diluted in quality and plagued by poor incentives to participate, increasingly punished risk-taking and rewarded safe, packaged incrementalism and consensus to the mediocre. Proposals had to sound bold while remaining conventional. The most original ideas were often unfundable by definition. Entire fields such as toxicology were gradually phased out of medical schools because their work didn’t align with lucrative research categories.

The distortion went deeper than funding. As institutions adopted corporate logic, they elevated communicators and performers over the scientists actually moving knowledge forward. 

Gurus with marketable narratives became the public symbols of entire fields, while highly technical, careful researchers were ignored because they lacked the right branding. This helped fuel the reproducibility crisis: universities rewarded hype because hype attracted money and prestige.

Meanwhile, dissent, disagreement, or unconventional ideas were treated as liabilities. Administrative power—not scientific judgment—became the supreme value. Faculty learned quickly that the safest path was sycophancy or silence. Those who cared most about scientific integrity were often the most vulnerable, because they were the ones willing to ask difficult questions.

A system organized around administrative stability rather than discovery cannot correct itself. It grows comfortable with inefficiency, welcomes waste, and maintains the appearance of progress while hollowing out the substance. Public narratives diverge entirely from internal realities.

The consequences extend far beyond the university. Journals and scientific societies, beholden to the same incentives, reflect the same distortions. Chronic disease rates continue to rise because the scientific areas most relevant to prevention have been neglected. Basic research in nutrition, metabolism, environmental exposures, and physiology is decades behind where it should be, hampering progress in aging and public health.

Public trust erodes as institutions preach transparency while operating opaquely. The gap between what science could be and what it is continues to widen.

Reforming this system requires more than ideological shifts or incremental adjustments. The policies governing scientific institutions must be restructured so they are not beholden to an administrative class.

Indirect costs and overhead and project centers must be capped, limiting the incentive for universities to treat grants as revenue streams. Grants must become portable, awarded to scientists rather than institutions. Administrative bodies that operate in secrecy but are publicly funded must be made transparent and accountable. 

Nondisclosure agreements and gag orders must be abolished in academic life. Disciplinary processes must follow clear due-process standards, not anonymous whispers or informal tribunals. Faculty governance must be restored, with scientific judgment returned to scientists, not managers. The role of administrators must be limited to operational support, not cultural policing or scientific supervision.

These are not radical ideas. They are merely a return to what universities once were.

I did not enter science to write essays about institutional decay. I entered it because I loved discovery—because I believed science could improve the human condition. That belief remains intact. But it cannot flourish in institutions that have forgotten their purpose.

If universities and their medical centers want to regain public trust, they must demonstrate that knowledge and learning—not image management—are once again the point of academic life. If they fail, new institutions will rise to take their place.

Science will continue somewhere; curiosity will find a home. The only question is whether our universities will remain worthy of it.

What Broke University Science?
by Jason Locasale at Brownstone Institute – Daily Economics, Policy, Public Health, Society