There’s a famous quote that’s often attributed to Albert Einstein – “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” I don’t know whether Einstein actually said this, or whether it’s attributed to him because it’s a very smart and very wise thing to say. Regardless, I think it’s not only smart and wise, but also vitally important in the present moment of crisis facing science, research, healthcare, higher education, and basic humanity. Our imaginations are more important than knowledge for finding our way out of this moment of crisis, and I believe our imaginations are failing us.
Here’s an example of what I mean. At many of the leading medical research institutions in the U.S., the main ingredient in the fuel for the research engine is NIH dollars in the form of grants, contracts, cooperative agreements, and other funding tools. At many of these institutions, NIH dollars dwarf other sources of research support on the balance sheet. Make no mistake, I think there’s a ton of good that comes from major investment of public dollars into medical research via NIH grants! We need that!!! But, the situation that has evolved over many years is one that can lend itself to institutions and institutional leaders being fairly unimaginative.
In effect, many institutions have functionally outsourced their decision making about hiring, promotion, and tenure of medical research faculty to NIH processes. It was very clear at my institution that, for a physician-scientist, a K award (a grant intended to support early career folks) meant appointment as a tenure-track assistant professor, an R01 (the mainstay of research project grants issued by NIH) meant likely promotion to associate professor with tenure, and ongoing NIH funding meant that you got to keep getting paid (i.e., paying yourself). Note that this isn’t me inferring, this is a compilation of nearly verbatim quotes that I will not attribute to any one person.
When I proposed a different career path that involved a wider array of activities, a more diversified collection of funding streams, specific milestones for turning revenue positive under varying assumptions of success rates (being $1M per year net positive after about 1-2 years even under the most pessimistic success projections), and options for sustainability and scalability, the proposal went exactly nowhere. There was not only a lack of will, there was a lack of imagination for seeing what a different model could look like and for trying it out.
I had proposed that different career path because I was deeply dissatisfied with the one I was on, so I left for other opportunities. But don’t worry. The institution was just fine, until early 2025. I don’t know the specifics at my former institution (though I do know they have laid off hundreds of people), but I do know what has been happening at basically all similar institutions across the country this year. The choking off of federal research funds has revealed a major point of failure in many/most research institutions’ operations. Would the ability to imagine, create, and support a wider array of paths to success in the near past have minimized the damage in the present and near future? I think it would, though that’s merely conjecture. But what worries me is the possible impact of a continued lack of imagination to meet the present crisis.
About 5 months into 2025, I was at an international conference. Naturally, many of the discussions both on the stages and in the hallways were about what has happened to biomedical research and public health in 2025. As I listened to institutional leaders talking about how to respond, I was surprised by two things:
There were a shocking number of institutional leaders who thought the situation was temporary, that it would mostly right itself, and that they could continue to use the career paths yoked to NIH operations the way they’ve done for a long time.
Many, many institutions had arrived at exactly the same initial responses – increase philanthropic efforts, increase clinical effort, and halt graduate admissions.
This wasn’t 5 weeks in, this was 5 months in. As I’ve continued to observe institutional responses to the admittedly chaotic and shifting landscape, unfortunately I feel like I continue to see lots of creative energies being left on the table. Different departments, schools, and other units within universities are often not talking to one another about integrated institutional response plans. Pre-existing separations between finances, established workflows and processes, and other long-standing separating factors within the institution are treated as nigh insurmountable barriers that are encoded in natural or divine law. At a time when we are rightly worried about “brain drain” due to our best and brightest leaving science or leaving the country and due to the world’s best and brightest not able to come to the U.S., I see a lot of calcification in job offers and career trajectories. The fact that it looks pretty much the same for a lot of folks right now as when I was a new assistant professor is distressing indeed.
I see all of this as a failure of imagination. If institutional leaders cannot imagine or will not commit to imagining something different than what exists, it will never come to be. However short one’s imagination might fall, solutions are likely to fall even shorter. In science and higher education, I think this kind of failure of imagination is especially problematic in the current moment of crisis for two reasons.
The first reason is that the stakes are incredibly high right now. There are multiple very real existential threats to the current and future health of the research enterprise in the United States. WE REALLY COULD LOSE BIG! Failure is very much a possibility. This is not a time to hold back or to cling to processes and approaches that are optimized for a context that doesn’t exist.
The second reason is that the public should be able to look to scientists and universities and scholars to be the leaders in imagining and executing creative solutions. THAT’S LITERALLY THE JOB! A failure of imagination is an abrogation of responsibility to society, and society will notice. If we intend to be trustworthy – and we most assuredly must be – then it is incumbent upon us to use the full measure of our imaginations to lead ourselves and to lead society out of the present crisis and to the better world that could be.
I’ve been picking on universities and university-based science a fair bit here, but the phenomenon is definitely not limited to them. What manifests as risk aversion in the private sector can be directly rooted in a failure of imagination. Without imagination, it is not possible to see the opportunities just over the horizon. It’s also not possible to see the risks that are there, too. Not engaging imagination and falling back on established processes and practices can feel safer and more comfortable in the short term, but it misses opportunities to maximize gains and mitigate risks in the future.
To give a firm example, I see a lot of companies in the pharma and biotech space being very unimaginative in how they are planning for the workforce gap that is going to hit them in something like 5ish (if you’re asking me) to 10ish (if you’re asking the CEO of a mid-size publicly traded biotech to whom I recently spoke) years. And that’s if they’re planning for it at all. This is especially problematic because it is something that needs to be addressed now. There won’t be a ready point-of-realization solution in 5-10 years, at least not one that’s anywhere close to what could be achieved by acting now. The best time to plant a tree….
Imagination is how we see beyond what is right in front of us, and how we chart a course past where we can see. The biggest problems we face *should* stretch our imaginations! Using our imaginations costs no dollars. It takes willingness, openness, safety, creative energy, time, and community. Those are all things we should have in our organizations anyway. If we don’t, that’s probably a sign of deeper problems. What if we took an imagination-first approach to reforming healthcare, or to getting closer to social justice, or to bridging the divides into which we find ourselves repeatedly falling politically and ideologically?
Can you imagine???
All very true. The challenges of the current situation are made worse by not only a lack of imagination, but also an inability to admit some priorities might have been mistakes and an inability of leadership to admit that they don’t have the answers.
https://profkap.substack.com/p/deans-club