As we mark the 80th anniversary of two events that profoundly altered the course of history, the memory of them is a grim tribute to American ingenuity and technology. In August 1945, the Enola Gay, a U.S. B-29 Superfortress bomber, dropped Little Boy, a uranium-based atomic bomb, on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, followed by the detonation of Fat Man, a plutonium-based bomb, over Nagasaki. The importance of technology in national defense has only continued to grow, and we forget that at our peril.
For instance, in a recent article, we argued that a dramatic revision of unwise climate policies is needed to handle the assimilation of artificial intelligence into our defense infrastructure. AI’s enormous demand for electrical power is a pressing challenge, and the yearslong diversion of money to ineffective, ideological, or symbolic climate programs has exposed a national dereliction in setting priorities.
Our private technology sector is finally awakening to the security threat from China. Several venture capital investors, including Sequoia Capital, perhaps the paragon of the industry, have backtracked on commitments to Chinese venture investing. They and other firms that have established affiliates in China are effectively severing ties despite their profitability. But it may be too little, too late.
Following the U.S. model, China now has a domestic technology-funding program that mimics the startup culture of Silicon Valley. The country has figured out how to do this within its domestic authoritarian constraints. Also, companies such as Apple have trained vast numbers of Chinese manufacturers and their personnel at huge expense over many years. In retrospect, that money and training could have gone to domestic locations starved for manufacturing jobs.
The VC industry has only recently warmed to early-stage companies that view the Department of Defense and the aerospace industry as potential customers. This was a big hurdle because, historically, military procurement processes were dauntingly complex and drawn out, and the DoD was not prepared to trust small companies. SpaceX played a big role in broadening the DoD’s mindset by offering inexpensive turnkey products for space that exposed shortcomings in the cost and speed of traditional prime contractors. Anduril is another domestic success story that helped to build momentum.
We cannot squander this progress. It is long past time for universities to purge their ranks of all technology students, fellows, and faculty from the People’s Republic of China and other hostile nations. The law in the PRC obligates every citizen to cooperate with the People’s Liberation Army and the Chinese Communist Party. Schools cannot continue to be willfully blind to the realization that Chinese nationals are obligated to steal our technology. Chinese students risk losing their government subsidies for tuition or living costs, or being punished. The leakage of American secrets, know-how, and data is already immense.
Just as the thinking of tech investors has evolved, our universities must wean themselves from the addictive flow of full-tuition payments from students who have other loyalties. The stakes are already high and growing by the day. Whether it is expertise in military AI, cryptography, materials science, computer science, astronautics, nuclear engineering, or dozens of other fields, we cannot afford to gift knowledge to China during this rapid evolution to new and more advanced technologies.
This means that universities must radically reduce the overhead bloat that contributes to the hunger for these full-tuition students. Inflated administrative costs also fuel a voracious appetite for federal funding. A decade or two ago, there were multiple academic staff for every administrator, but that ratio has now flipped to nearly the opposite. This is both absurd and unsustainable.
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Bloated staffing and costs misallocate resources and create inflexibility in making strategic choices. It may also impair the culture of merit and achievement by retaining underachievers. We have sufficient Americans and friendlies to fulfill a university’s primary mission: creating knowledge, new systems, data, and productive graduates.
This problem is not just about Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford, or other elite schools. It applies widely in American universities and their affiliate institutions. Admissions processes need to be rethought with our national interest in mind, and operating efficiency is essential to relieve dependence on funding from questionable sources. These changes are long overdue.
Andrew I. Fillat spent his career in technology venture capital and information technology companies. He is also the coinventor of relational databases. Henry I. Miller, a physician and molecular biologist, is the Glenn Swogger Distinguished Scholar at the Science Literacy Project. They were undergraduates together at M.I.T.