[…]at most universities, grad students play a crucial role within the research system: They perform the frontline work of science. Faculty members get federal grants, which are used to pay for doctoral students, who in turn serve as laboratory staff. Professors’ feeling of worth and productivity may be a function of how many doctoral students they advise—because that helps determine how many studies they can carry out, how many papers they can publish, and what sorts of new grants they can win to keep the process going. This endless competition is a major feature of the modern university—whether it’s an elite private school (such as Princeton or Duke), a public flagship (such as the University of Michigan or UC Berkeley), or a land-grant institution (such as Texas A&M or Virginia Tech).

A school like Amherst, though, which has no doctoral programs whatsoever, is free of the rat race of research productivity and expenditure. As these colleges like to point out, that’s good for undergrads, because faculty must focus on education. The lack of doctoral research programs also makes the schools more resilient to bullying from Washington. In 2025, the Trump administration made a point of suspending hundreds of millions of dollars in research grants to Columbia, Harvard, Northwestern, and other schools. It also threatened to impose a tighter limit on what are called “indirect costs”—the portion of each grant that covers all the broader costs of running a large enterprise for research. With so much funding endangered all at once, targeted universities had little choice but to negotiate—which is to say, to accede to some portion of the Trump administration’s demands.

At Amherst, this level of pressure simply couldn’t be applied. In 2024, the college took in around $3 million from all of its federal research grants put together. (For comparison: Washington University in St. Louis, where I teach, received $731 million that year from the National Institutes of Health alone.) Christopher Durr, an associate professor of chemistry, told me that his research is “designed to be done mostly in-house,” by which he means without external funding, and with the help of undergraduates. He studies biodegradable plastics in a lab that is mostly funded by the college itself, and he gets no research money at all from the federal government. Settling into an Eames-style chair in his office, I asked him what indirect-cost rate Amherst applies to its grants, and he said he didn’t know—an innocence that would be unheard of at a research university.

The research that can be done at a small liberal-arts college, with its more modest labs and equipment, is necessarily constrained. Even with Amherst’s generosity, Durr said “there’s a limit” to how far he can push his research. In truth, the most important scientific and medical discoveries aren’t likely to be made at a place like Amherst or Smith, the nearby women’s college, which tend to pay their own students to work on faculty research. But this need not be a limitation for undergraduates. The conditions that produce landmark discoveries are not necessarily the same ones that produce a serious education.