As AI wealth drains academia, a statistician asks what stories we tell about scientific progress
JessicaHullman · x · 2026-08-25
Statistician Jessica Hullman essays on the future of US academia in the AI era. The NSF will award the fewest new grants in four decades; targeted visa policy is hurting universities' ability to attract foreign talent; OSTP appointees without research backgrounds are redesigning the PhD as an industry partnership; and Silicon Valley has created a generation that can retire young on AI wealth.
The prestige ranking of R1 faculty jobs over top industry research positions (at least in CS) may be inverting. The gap between what frontier AI labs can do and even the best-resourced academic is now immense, and Hullman keeps hearing of academics leaving for AI companies. Faculty meetings now revolve around helping laid-off tenure-track colleagues and stretching shrinking funding runways.
She interrogates the fragility of the postwar "basic research fuels applied breakthroughs" social contract for science — a story that was always incomplete. Some argue AI progress no longer needs universities, but she contends universities still uniquely provide the conditions for scientific judgment, and draws lessons for defending them now.
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