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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.
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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