Chancellor’s Colloquium: Debate on Public Funding for Research

Watch Chancellor’s Colloquium: Debate on Public Funding for Research

The next installment in the Chancellor’s Colloquium Distinguished Speaker Series will be what organizers call a “robust but civilized” debate about whether scientific research should be publicly funded.

Tickets to the event are free and available now; it will also be livestreamed on YouTube.

The debate, organized by The Steamboat Institute, will put this resolution to a pair of economists: “Be it resolved, scientific progress is best achieved through publicly funded research initiatives.”

Arguing in favor of that viewpoint will be Jon Hartley, an economist specializing in finance, labor economics and macroeconomics who is a policy fellow at the Hoover Institution. 

Arguing against public funding for research will be John Early, a mathematical economist and adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. 

The debate is organized by the Steamboat Institute and is part of that organization’s Campus Liberty Tour. The Steamboat Institute is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that seeks to promote “America’s first principles” : limited government, limited taxation, free market capitalism, individual rights and strong national defense. 

The tour, which has included recent stops at universities including Princeton, Brown, Cornell and elsewhere, is meant “to bring respectful, robust and reasoned debates and dialogues to college campuses across America, encouraging critical thinking skills” with an “emphasis on civilized debate and discourse,” the institute says on its website. Previous debates have centered on topics like birthright citizenship, electric vehicles and national defense; this will be the first focused on publicly funded research, and comes as that type of funding is threatened at universities across the nation.

Audience members will have a role at the Feb. 17 event: Those who register for the colloquium will receive a link to submit questions for the debaters beforehand, and attendees at the event will be able to send in questions virtually — via a link distributed by text message and QR code — during the discussion. 

Attendees will also be polled about their feelings on the topic at the start and end of the debate.

“Even audience members who don’t change their minds on the resolution still leave with a richer understanding of their fellow Americans’ perspectives,” the institute said in a recent report about the series of events. 

The debate will be moderated by Carrie Sheffield, a senior policy analyst with the Independent Women’s Forum who was the 2021-22 Tony Blankley Fellow with the Steamboat Institute.