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A quick report from the world of science and academia.
Strange times indeed. Grant proposals my lab has been working on for months have disappeared. I’m seeing and hearing of several nodes in my network which are in federal positions just disappearing.
I also advise students who are building software products for clients, and of both clients that are government agencies, NASA and US Forest Service, today I have learned that one has essentially cancelled the project at its end stages and the other has been MIA for weeks (Ironically, the cancelled product was a system that would significantly improve the efficiency of a key NASA analysis workflow).
Today I see news that the NSF research experiences for undergraduates, which trains undergraduates to conduct real research and which I personally credit with making me into a scientist, is being shuttered across much of the country.
The grant I’m relying on to complete my PhD is on shaky ground according to people close to the problem, and I fear that funding cuts could affect the only backup plan I have, which is continuing working as a teaching assistant. (A luxurious $15k per year + tuition remission). The key expert on my committee in the tech I’m using is at NASA and I fear for the longevity of his position.
Feels like the government is just dismantling the world I’ve spent my life working to become a part of, and I can’t say that I quite understand why.
I’m in a hard science field with direct applications to societal benefits. I believe that what I’m working on is something many would recognize as important. And I also think there’s a pretty clear link between training people who do this sort of thing (STEM generally) and national wellbeing and competitiveness.
I could understand this all better if it was just Trump doing it alone. Sort of a lower class rebellion against the educated class. But what really has me confused is the fact that it’s being spearheaded by Musk and “tech” people.
When DOGE was first announced I thought, great! I deeply dislike Trump but maybe this will make it actually be quite worth it in the end if we can fix the behemoth of government and make it more efficient. Maybe the country will be able to start to build things again, like the tech guys say, it’s time to build! But what we got was quite different from that hopeful version of me had in mind. SV types spearheading the dismantling of the US institution of science. That was not on my bingo card! Why was this the first move of DOGE? Noah Smith argues that it’s an ideological purge rather than an attempt at efficiency, and I guess that makes sense. Ultimately science funding is quite small potatoes in the federal budget. So why is it among the first major target of the administration and DOGE?
I don’t want to catastrophize here. Science in the US is being weakened and downsized, and somewhat purged for touchy topics, but it’s not being destroyed. I’ll probably be able to pull through and finish my program, at least that’s my current hope.
Yet it seems quite obvious to me that these moves are going to significantly weaken the US against competitors such as China. Science has its flaws, but it’s still the secret sauce of western societies’ success and a key part of the economic engine. I’ve always thought of Elon Musk as a big picture, long term thinker who understands the role of science and technology in human advancement. So I’m at a loss for why he would direct focus onto weakening science in the US as among his first moves if his interest really is with the medium to long term success of the US.
I think you should take the responses and general lack of sympathy here as a wake-up call about what exactly right-wing rule in the US means for you these days. I've found this forum to be a very good representation of the substantive ideas underlying what becomes right-wing politics/the mindset of people pushing those ideas.
In this case: anything, no matter the cost, as long as it hurts the woke! Scientific progress? I don't care about your fake tears and sad puppies.
I’ve come to realize this about this movement, yes.
Essentially, the US can’t be my home anymore if things go on like this for much longer.
The attitude that causes someone to shout at Zelenskyy, “why don’t you wear a suit? Do you even own a suit?”.. that’s what’s in charge and their ire extends to me.
The best historical analogy I know of is the cultural revolution in China where the intellectual class was persecuted.
They’re not that violent, of course, but I also don’t want to give them the chance to be.
I understand that Trump and Vance may not be high on niceties. They are right that Europe is too stifling, too much limiting freedom of speech. I give them that.
And yet when Zelensky allowed himself to express freely, suddenly it was all outrage and he was quickly thrown out of the White House. We don't see that in Europe where people may be shocked about Trump and Vance and yet remain civilized. And for Zelensky it might even be just a problem of English as a second language which he hasn't mastered well.
So, I don't buy these excuses that it is just the US culture to be more open and direct that European have problem with the US leaders right now. I think that yesterday showed that they were liek petulant children and trying to enforce their pettiness on others. I don't know if it qualifies as cultural revolution but it is revengeful and classless act nevertheless.
Read what I posted below + what Rubio said. Basically they had already talked about what the deal was and this was perfunctory. Then Zelensky tried to litigate his position (that they basically had agreed to shelve) in front of the media which rightly pissed off the WH.
This isn’t a free speech issue. Zelensky can say whatever he wants. But it isn’t correct to agree to forum X for Y purposes and explicitly not Z and then do Z.
Also, I think that Vance's critique about Europe lacking free speech is overrated. It is true that Europe has some issues. But the US has even bigger issues. During covid pandemic it was twitter and other social networks censured correct scientific information, apparently due to the pressure from the White House. Also, the US had very strict vaccine mandates that were completely unjustified. Even the UK managed to largely avoid them (with some exceptions).
The US probably has even stringer free speech restrictions that Europe but they frame them differently. I am not free speech absolutist and understand that sometimes free speech can be limited and the discussion is more about grey area what is and is not unacceptable. But the US is a leader in social networks and have much greater impact on limiting free speech than Europe, respectively it has more power to restrict and most probably it uses it more than Europe.
The US has to have a diffuse and informal public-private alliance on censorship because the First Amendment blocks the most direct route for the government. As we can see now, those companies can adjust if circumstances change while laws are writ in ink.
It doesn't really say much about European virtue that they don't have as strong a version of this system given that a) they can just censor speech directly and b) they don't have the same density of indigenous social media sites.
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I don’t know about bigger. The point is those censorship attempts were considered wrong and there is a strong political backlash on one side against them. Do we see that in Europe?
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I don't understand you. It IS a free speech issue. Yes, if Trump considered it wrong, he could have refused to sign a deal. I am not saying that free speech should free one from consequences. That I can understand. But be so much against Zelensky speaking his mind that you have to thrown him out immediately? It seems to be overreaction and signal that free speech is for me and not for you!
This is silly—no one is stopping Zelensky from saying anything. But using the WH as his forum to say X when he was invited to say not X but sign a document isn’t a free speech issue.
We have gone through this many times. No one stopped Berenson to tell that covid vaccines don't stop infection. It is just that twitter was not the right forum for this. Yet, such limitation (orchestrated by the WH) is 100% of free speech issue.
The same happens here, except that happens in the WH. And even without all these legalistic details, this is simply a case when the WH doesn't want to hear something. Nothing else.
If you can’t tell the difference between Berenson on Twitter and negotiations between two countries at the WH, then I don’t know what to say.
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People seem to misunderstand the suit comment. It's not like Zelenskyy cannot afford a suit. It's not a class commentary.
World leaders dress to send a message. Zelenskyy knows this, it's why he has been wearing his black outfit since the start of the invasion. The black outfit shows that he is a wartime president, fighting an existential threat to the last man.
Trump doesn't want the Ukraine to fight to the last man. He wants a peace. Suits are the clothing of negotiations and treaties.
The clothing is one of many things that caused yesterday to break down.
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I'm going to be equally honest here and say please, do not move to the US. I've known you for years, and in all that time on reddit you were fine with the cultural revolution, sometimes actively prosecuting it yourself.
You have me mixed up with someone.
I’m a very infrequent commenter and I’m from the US.
I know you were up around Maine or NH at one point, right? I remember the leopardsatemyface post about the cod fisherman. But I thought you were from Canada originally or something, my bad.
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Probably because it was hinted in their last meeting that Zelensky should wear a suit next time he is meeting Trump. Being underdressed means you are the most powerful person in the room or you have no business being there. Zelensky decided he was the former.
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You've looked at the past 10 years and stood by, and this is the moment that makes you say "this is just like the cultural revolution"?
A working class revolt against the educated class, yes
I can see why maybe you felt that previous years were like the cultural revolution, you probably felt censored and I can get that.
I never really had opinions I felt I had to censor that much under wokeness, but I am fresh off of scrubbing all mentions of “climate” from my research proposal and changing every instance of “diversity”, even though I was talking about the diversity of water availability among forests
Suppose senior members of the Academy violated federal law by using taxpayer money to develop a novel pathogen, leaked that pathogen out into the world, caused a pandemic killing somewhere around seven million people and uncounted trillions in economic damage, conspired to cover this fact up, and then coordinated the largest, most widespread and most egregious violation of human rights in at least the last fifty years, based on fraudulent scientific claims that their colleagues refused to oppose them on. In this crazy hypothetical scenario, what would the impact of these events be on your cost/benefit analysis of what's currently happening?
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Ah, struggle sessions are tolerable, as long they're led by the aristocracy, I guess.
Well then, if you did nothing all these years because you never felt censored, why exactly should anyone that did, show you any sympathy now?
Finding a synonym for "diversity" and doing a search and replace seems like a pretty low cost to me, compared to witch hunts that went off during the last decade. Dodging those was a lot harder than CTRL+H.
Despite what you think, the point is there weren't struggle sessions in math/hard-science departments. As the OP said, all you ever had to do was write in your grants about how things you liked anyways, like organizing events where older and younger graduate students could meet each other and become friends, also helped "underrepresented groups" sometimes. You could extremely easily just not be interested in politics and ignore everything outside of writing this paragraph.
Also, if you were upset about what was happening in humanities departments, you didn't really have any option except getting in bed with the creationists and Obama-birther conspiracy theorists.
The chaos and funding issues the administration is creating is not at all the same thing. Now you have to desperately scrub every appearance of links to crazies like Tema Okun and Robin DiAngelo just because they're associated with the same industry as you. It's not even clear which buzzword in which random context sets the censors off.
We already had the discussion on reddit about how your institution was using diversity statements to filter out 80% of applicants solely by the DEI office, before the actual hiring committee even got to see their resumes.
You can pretend to have been secretly against this now, but you can't pretend to be ignorant of it because we told you.
Could you be more specific here/give some kind of link? I don't recall this conversation (this forum being reddit was a while ago).
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You happen to have a link to that conversation?
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The diversity statements applied just as much to math as to gender studies.
The grants went to people who said the right things, which at the time were diversity.
You're wrong.
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As I have been told many times, if you welcome crazies into your ranks people will think you are crazy. I would have thought you would be upset that industry related crazies were given positions of power and influence in the first place, not that you now have to try to get rid of them.
As I was commenting below, where in the world did you get the impression that DiAngelo and Okun were welcomed and not forced on us by general university politics?
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Is one of the fathers of DNA getting stripped of his awards not a struggle session, or is biology not a hard science? There was absolutely no affirmative action in maths departments, cross your heart and hope to die?
So all these people who totally were not in favor of DEI struggle session somehow couldn't be bothered to actually oppose it in any way, to the point where the only opposition were Obama-birther conspiracy theorists?
Was Sokal an Obama-birther conspiracy theorist, by the way?
I still want to know why I should be bothered by this, given that these people were unbothered by what was going on in the last 10 years.
I specifically mentioned math and hard sciences (excluding biology) because that's what I could speak about authoritatively. Maybe the Watson stuff really was a struggle session, or maybe there was some more stuff going on behind the scenes. In math, I've known of old professors who've said similar things without much consequence. Generally, the line is that political views are fine, but unambiguously treating colleagues and particularly younger students/postdocs badly because of these political views is not---when I say some stuff going on behind the scenes, maybe Watson was crossing the line. Yes, most will say that there should be censure for crossing the line and fine, if just wanting colorblind and gender-blind meritocracy is what you call hopelessly woke, then you win the argument. Many on this forum explicitly do not want colorblind and gender-blind meritocracy, so.....
The affirmative action point is similar. I've explained before what affirmative action I've seen in math departments: e.g. people would realize that graduate students in some group do disproportionately well post-graduation and conclude that the admissions process must be missing talent in that group. They then implement a brute-force hack to give people from that group an extra leg up in the admissions process and calibrate the magnitude until outcomes are around the same. You can argue that this clumsy shortcut isn't a good idea, but it's still for the sole purpose of achieving meritocracy.
and how the hell do you know that people weren't unbothered? It was so easy to get people to denounce Okun and DiAngelo by pointing out the right perspectives. I guess people didn't reorient their entire career towards nasty political fights in other departments instead of doing the science that they were much more interested in so screw them, right? You can't expect everyone to be willing to expose themselves to all the nastiness Sokal got. Unless you're doing that serious work to build your own groups, yes, your only choice is to join a coalition that's already there, with the creationists and birthers and all.
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