The first does a lot of relative low mark-up contract work requested by governmental agencies. Governments and all of us would like to see cancer and Alzheimer disease cured.
The request for “bids” (aka grant applications) from NIH, DoD (now DoW) and NSF is what has greatly expanded research-focused universities and msde the USA the greatest source if cutting-edge science since WW2 (now relative success is shifting rapidly to China).
The recipients of these small but numerous contract to big medical schools usually are totally agnostic about politics—at least at work.
Turns out even autocratic-leaning politicians and the public are almost universally interested in learning how to live a long healthy life.
In contrast, the humanities are not a bread winners for universities. These faculty are ultimately paid by tuition or red or blue state support. These much more socially saavy and interested faculty mainly teach, and if they are lucky, have some modest time to think, read, and write. They are not beholding to government funds. They can speak truth to power.
So if a university like Columbia is brought to heel by the administration it is mainly due to the addiction of university administrators for the relative modest overhead they receive for NIH compared to that any corporation would accept for the same work.
And the ultimate source and cause of that addiction of administrators now willing to bend the knee to retain their federal funding overheads is the hard and intense work of their research scientists.
