'Cancel culture' colleges could soon see money targeted by Trump's NIH pick: report

President-elect Donald Trump’s choice to lead the National Institute of Health is ready to settle a score – and he’s revving up a fight against campus culture at elite universities, according to a new report.

And that could mean Stanford professor and economist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya uses the power of his position to leverage tens of billions of dollars in scientific grants to exact revenge on what he sees “as a culture of conformity in science that ostracized him” over his views on COVID-19, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday.

Bhattacharya, an anti-lockdown doctor, "is considering a plan to link a university’s likelihood of receiving research grants to some ranking or measure of academic freedom on campus," sources told the Journal.

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But he isn’t yet sure how to measure academic freedom, the report added.

He has looked at a nonprofit with a blueprint for scoring universities in its freedom-of-speech rankings called the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, according to the Journal.

It noted that the pushback Bhattacharya experienced over his disapproval of the government’s COVID-19 response "has informed his plans for overhauling the NIH and its grant-making," people familiar with his thinking told the publication.

And the academic-freedom prerequisite floated by Trump’s nominee is just one of the proposals he is mulling to revamp the NIH "and its billions of dollars in grant-making that Bhattacharya would pursue if the Senate confirms him," the Journal reported.

"Among Bhattacharya’s other plans are funding studies to replicate the work of other scientists to help root out scientific fraud," the report stated. "He would also create a scientific journal that would publish studies alongside comments by named reviewers, to encourage more open discussion of scientific ideas."

But, former director of the National Cancer Institute Ned Sharpless told the Journal about the NIH director job: "It’s much more complicated than it appears from the outside."