“Taxpayer-funded” Bites Back
Authoritarian-curious politicians are testing the argument as a way to attack university independence
OA advocates have justified much of the movement with the idea that government funding of research means the public must have unfettered access to the peer-reviewed and editorially selected, upgraded, and vetted reports generated by private enterprises.
It has never made sense, as the idea threatens private property and other rights. The Constitution and specific laws prevent using the argument because doing so constitutes a governmental “taking” — but the idea that taxpayers can have control of others based on funding has been widely and consistently celebrated, giving it the veneer of legitimacy.
Unfortunately, ideas — especially bad ideas — are malleable.
Indeed, the taxpayer-funded argument seems poised to bite back at higher education in the next few years, unless the political winds switch dramatically in the coming months.
In the US, the more extreme wing of the GOP has long been assaulting science and educated elites, raising religious fundamentalism to dangerous levels, and working to take us backwards as a society. Today, those extremists are no longer fringe — they have become the GOP, and they are increasingly gaining access to institutions that once protected rights and fought for freedoms.
The insidious nature of the taxpayer-funded idea is on display in Florida, where a lawyer is arguing that what public university professors say in classrooms “is the government’s speech” and that the government can “insist that professors not offer — or espouse, I should say, and endorse — viewpoints that are contrary to the state’s.”