Gautam Mukunda: Universities may offend you. That’s how innovation works.

Nearly every story about an American university could start with the caveat: “Most of the people mentioned in this article are either teenagers or at least somewhat crazy.” But, to borrow the parlance of Silicon Valley, higher education’s embrace of oddballs and their out-of-the mainstream ideas isn’t a bug – it’s a feature.

Colleges have always been hothouses of activism that create hostility in some of those outside the campus gates, particularly on the right. This is exemplified in a 2021 speech by Yale Law School alumnus JD Vance titled “The Universities are the Enemy,” and has culminated in the Trump administration’s move to suspend hundreds of millions of dollars in research funding to Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania, with many more cuts expected soon.

American universities generate enormous economic and social returns; weakening them will have costs. A recent study by the Education Data Initiative calculated that the average bachelor’s degree has a 681.5% ROI. College graduates also display “improved critical thinking skills, enhanced social and civic engagement, and better health outcomes” according to a Chicago Federal Reserve study. These findings help explain why increasing the number of universities in a region leads to an increase in GDP per capita growth.

Beyond education, U.S. universities fulfill two other critical roles. First, they are the foundation of American innovation. A report by the National Academy of Sciences found that since the 1930s, roughly three-fifths of all Nobel Prizes were awarded to scholars at American research universities. Work done at U.S. schools played a key part in the development of technologies ranging from jet propulsion and the atomic bomb to the laser, MRIs, DNA fingerprinting and the algorithm underlying Google’s search engine.

But why can’t universities innovate while getting rid of that irritating tendency to annoy and even offend? That’s down to the role we haven’t tackled yet, the one which explains why research done at universities is so unique: They provide a home for people too contrarian, difficult or just downright odd to function in the rest of society. (As someone who’s served on the faculties of Harvard University and Yale University, I can tell you some stories.) Colleges welcome people who reject the mainstream consensus. They’ve even created structures like tenure to protect and encourage those people.

There’s good reason to do so. The most important discoveries are the ones that tell us that something important that we thought we knew is wrong. Most research is what the great philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn called “normal science.” It works within established paradigms. That’s valuable work. Doing it well is rewarded with the esteem of your peers.

Revolutionary research, in contrast, overturns old paradigms. It destroys accepted consensus. That’s hard. People, even scientists, tend to react poorly when someone tells them they’re wrong, and they often reject the ones who do it.

Judah Folkman, for example, was chief of surgery at Boston Children’s Hospital. He theorized that tumors only become dangerous when they mutate to emit a protein that causes capillaries to grow into and feed the tumor. The cancer research community, believing his work a waste of resources, pushed back so hard that Children’s Hospital forced him to resign. Protected by tenure at Harvard, however, he continued his work for decades until he proved his theory and revolutionized our understanding and treatment of cancer.

Folkman was an extraordinarily brilliant scientist and an equally kind and gentle person (I was lucky enough to spend some time with him before profiling him in my first book). But he was also willing to buck consensus despite decades of ostracism. People like that are rare. They need places that welcome them and give them freedom. Unfortunately, you don’t get to pick and choose only the weird ideas (and people) that will end up changing the world. Criticizing professors and researchers for being different or holding beliefs you disagree with is missing the point. Weaken universities or make them less willing to shelter those who reject popular opinions, and you’ll lose the revolutionary discoveries that only people like Folkman can produce.

In fact, the best criticism of universities is precisely the opposite. Modern higher ed is highly professionalized. It doesn’t embrace strange ideas enough. Katalin Kariko, for example, played an important role in the development of mRNA-based therapeutics, which includes most COVID-19 vaccines. Most of biology rejected her approach, leaving her dependent on the intermittent support of more prominent researchers. She spent years at Penn, but when she couldn’t get funding, the school demoted her. Her decadeslong struggle undoubtedly slowed her work by years. If she had been supported, mRNA research would certainly have moved faster, and the COVID vaccine might well have been produced sooner. How much would that have been worth?

Crazy ideas can pay off. We need more of them, not fewer. And weird people at universities are, most of the time, the ones who come up with them.