The United States spent more than two centuries becoming a world leader in science and humanities research, but we’re quickly losing that title as universities face federal funding cuts and global competition intensifies. China is now the global leader in several critical fields, including engineering, the physical sciences and agriculture.

To understand how we got here and what we can do about it, we need to look back at how America constructed its intellectual leadership, what chipped away at it, and how the values that first made us leaders in research can guide a renewed commitment to investing in ideas. 

After World War II, the United States embraced the belief that open-ended exploration in the sciences and humanities without the promise of immediately exploitable knowledge would elicit breakthroughs. And it did.

Where we choose to place our funding dollars for research is a value judgment on what forms of knowledge are worthy of pursuit. When federal funding constraints or political agendas influence intellectual inquiry, scholars lose the agency to pursue what drew them to the work. Instead, they shape their ideas around what institutions consider fundable. As a result, that narrows not just our curiosity and creativity, but also the space for wider discovery. That space to discover and experiment is critical for us to move forward.

What W.E.B. Du Bois has in common with discovery of penicillin?

For example, sociologist and civil rights leader W.E.B. Du Bois needed to transcend the confines of disciplines to........

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