Dear Aza, Thank you so much for publishing this and for the helpful edits on this article.

I left academia a few years ago because I became fully convinced that it’s anathema to intellectual freedom — and structurally so. Actually, Senator Fulbright (the namesake of the Fulbright scholarships) noted that in the 1960s in The Arrogance of Power. He argues that when universities take research funds from government agencies, especially for military research, it loses them their independence of thought. Unless that stopped, he predicted, universities will become subservient to power.

By 2019, I had spent three decades at universities, so I knew exactly how the system works. I’ve worked with government agencies and knew how government grants are distributed. So I did the math. The universities of today depend way more on research grants from the military-industrial complex than at any other time in history. Half of all university faculty are temporary faculty hired on annual contracts contingent on this research funding. There is no intellectual freedom. For the whole 30 years I spent at universities, I couldn’t work at all on what I wanted, but on what the research grants wanted.

Quitting my university career was a liberating moment. I regard the income lost as the price I pay to purchase my intellectual freedom.

If we want free universities, every researcher should be given the same amount of money, guaranteed. None of that merit-based BS, peer-reviewed grants (total conflict of interest situation), or government agencies and foundations micromanaging what research gets done.