The current uncertainty surrounding federal research funding means universities must explore opportunities to expand private sources of support, Purdue University President Mung Chiang told a tech industry group in Indianapolis on Tuesday.
Chiang was one of the keynote speakers at the SEMI Expo Heartland, a two-day semiconductor conference that kicked off Tuesday morning. More than 1,100 people registered to attend the event, organizers said.
Since the end of World War II, Chiang said, the backbone of America’s university research funding has been the support of federal entities such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.
But now, Chiang said, “the American public wants to explore a new social contract where federal tax dollars assume a smaller portion of the financing equation for research carried out at these universities.”
It’s too early to tell, Chiang said, where things will settle: “Academia might not be going back to the same good ride of the past 75 years, and a new equilibrium for university research could emerge.”
Chiang did not mention President Donald Trump or his administration in his remarks, and a Purdue spokesman did not clarify whether Chiang’s remarks were in reference to the administration when asked by IBJ. The university president is not making himself available for interviews during the conference, the spokesman said.In February, Trump specifically called out a $70 million federally funded, Purdue-based program as an example of projects with which he took issue, according to Based in Lafayette. Trump did not name the program, but his description of it “lines up with LASER PULSE, an acronym for an array of USAID-funded work called Long-term Assistance and Services for Research-Partners for University-Led Solutions Engine,” Based in Lafayette reported.
Purdue is also in the midst of its most ambitious fundraising campaign in the school’s history: $4 billion in five years. A Feb. 28 letter from university leadership said that campaign will have a “special focus on research facilities, professorships, Ph.D. fellowships and other support for academic excellence throughout the university.”
A Purdue website, titled 2025 Government Transition, includes specific updates on presidential executive orders, federal agency directives and other information pertaining to funding freezes for research grants. It does not specify how much funding would be in jeopardy under recent cuts and freezes.
Last August, Purdue announced that it had secured a record $647 million in research funding during its 2023-24 fiscal year. That funding, 70% of which was from federal sources, supported about 3,500 different research projects, the university said at the time.
Chiang highlighted the work that Purdue is already doing with private partners, including Indianapolis-based Eli Lilly and Co., Greenfield-based Elanco and others. And a Microsoft lab on the Purdue campus achieved a topological quantum computing breakthrough just last month, Chiang said, with the help of a physics professor who serves as a part-time Microsoft consultant.
Shifting from government funding to private funding will require some new processes, Chiang told the SEMI Expo group, because “industry and academia are naturally misaligned and misfitted in many dimensions.”
As a few examples, Chiang said corporations must focus on financial objectives, shareholder interests and industry competition in a way that federal funders do not. Private companies also move much more quickly than government and academia.
At the same time, the Purdue president said, it’s essential that universities maintain “curiosity-driven education,” intellectual independence and “preservation of fundamental research that most companies might not support.”
Chiang highlighted a few ideas that do not have direct connections to private industry, though he also said that none of them are yet satisfactory.
Those ideas include profit-sharing arrangements in which for-profit spinoffs based on university research could share a percentage of their profits with universities. Another model might be focused on online learning, which represents a high-margin revenue source for universities, Chiang said. Under this arrangement, if companies pay for online learning for employees, a portion of that money would go to university research.
“Appreciation for research results still lingers in society,” Chiang said. “But universities need to get creative in architecting new pathways.”