DEI critic Professor Jeffrey Flier decries Trump administration cancel culture. They've "taken an atomic bomb to the notion." Plus, insights on the sudden NIH cuts.

Professor Jeffrey Flier is an interesting person. He started his career as a researcher at the NIH campus in Maryland before coming to Harvard, where he rose to become the Dean of Harvard Medical School from 2007 to 2016. Along the way, he did early work on GLP-1s (the molecules which later became Ozempic, Mounjaro, and Zepbound) in the 1990s, which was abandoned by Pfizer, an object lesson in how complicated research can be.

But perhaps his most public splash was as an outspoken critic of certain aspects of DEI efforts on university campuses over the last decade. While I think Professor Flier has made important points in that debate, that doesn’t mean I agree with some of his stances—though, they are admittedly well-argued. That’s why when I saw him absolutely slamming the Trump administration on its latest attack of our medical research system—the sudden cap of “indirect costs” in federal research grants at 15%, announced by the NIH on Friday—I thought we needed to hear his views on the methods behind the madness. Professor Flier was kind enough to join me to discuss these topics in a video interview…

The sudden NIH funding debacle (Start – 11:19).

We started our conversation with the NIH, because that’s where the most recent news is. (Since we spoke, 22 states have filed a lawsuit seeking to block the action and a judge has temporarily stopped the change from going into effect.) Long story short, while tweaks and changes to our nation’s medical research system are warranted, Flier believes the approach that the administration has taken is dangerous, unserious, and threatens to gravely diminish our ability to do great biomedical research. "The inmates are running the asylum. There is no intelligence. There is no seriousness,” he told Inside Medicine.

On cancel culture from the Right (11:20 – End).

We then turned to a conversation about how the Trump administration has pursued its anti-DEI ideology. I was especially interested to hear Professor Flier’s views on the sudden and extreme cancel culture coming from the Right, after he spent years criticizing what he perceived as overzealous censorship (i.e., ideological intolerance) coming from the Left. I found his answers in our conversation to be ideologically consistent—a rarity these days. (And if you have time, I encourage you to watch until the end because, if anything, that’s where we delved into a pretty fascinating area on policies and unintended consequences.)

Please check out our conversation and then share your reactions by joining the conversation in the Comments section.

(Closed captions (㏄) and a transcript option (📄) can be found beneath the video playback control bar.) Note: The views reflected are our own, and may not reflect those of Harvard or our hospitals.