Opp Now contributor/NIH head nominee Dr. Jay Bhattacharya aims to take on "Cancel Culture" Colleges
His critique of COVID-era lockdowns have been vindicated. And the university censors that tried to silence him have been defeated. The irrepressible (and Opp Now contributor) Dr. Jay Bhattacharya now considers linking academic freedom performance at universities and medical schools with potential NIH grants. Liz Essley Whyte reports for the WSJ.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford physician and economist, is considering a plan to link a university’s likelihood of receiving research grants to some ranking or measure of academic freedom on campus, people familiar with his thinking said.
Bhattacharya, a critic of the Covid-19 response, wants to counter what he sees as a culture of conformity in science that ostracized him over his views on masking and school closures.
He isn’t yet sure how to measure academic freedom, but he has looked at how a nonprofit called Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression scores universities in its freedom-of-speech rankings, a person familiar with his thinking said.
The nonprofit scores schools based on a survey of students’ perceptions of factors such as whether they feel comfortable expressing ideas. Schools are also penalized if their administrators sanction faculty for opinions or disinvite a speaker from a campus event after a controversy.
The academic-freedom prerequisite is among several proposals for overhauling the NIH and its billions of dollars in grant-making that Bhattacharya would pursue if the Senate confirms him, the people said
Among Bhattacharya’s other plans are funding studies to replicate the work of other scientists to help root out scientific fraud. He would also create a scientific journal that would publish studies alongside comments by named reviewers, to encourage more open discussion of scientific ideas.
He has proposed dialing back the amount of NIH grant money that pays for publication in journals. And he would seek to pause so-called gain-of-function research that engineers viruses with new, potentially dangerous, traits to study them.
Bhattacharya is a professor of medicine and health policy at Stanford. During the pandemic, he criticized the Covid-19 response, helping write the Great Barrington Declaration that called for ending lockdowns and isolating the vulnerable so that young, healthy people could get infected and build up immunity in the general population.
The pushback he experienced over his criticism of the official Covid-19 response has informed his plans for overhauling the NIH and its grant-making, the people familiar with his thinking said.
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