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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   6259 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 18, 2025

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Terence Tao: I’m an award-winning mathematician. Trump just cut my funding.

In just six months, the United States has seen a wholesale assault on the scientific infrastructure that helped make it a world leader in innovation. Grants have been cancelled mid-project, fellowships for the next generation of researchers gutted, and federally funded institutes stripped of the resources they need to operate. These decisions are not the result of scientific review or Congressional debate, but of abrupt political directives that bypass long-standing norms, disrupt multi-year projects, and erode the independence of our research ecosystem.

In that time, I have seen first-hand how sustained federal investment—channeled through agencies like the National Science Foundation (NSF)—powers the collaborations that link universities, government laboratories, and industry. At UCLA's Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM), where I now serve as Director of Special Projects, those collaborations have laid the groundwork for both theoretical breakthroughs and practical technologies. My own research at IPAM, for instance, helped lead to the algorithms that now cut MRI scan times by a factor of up to 10. This is the America I chose as my adoptive home: a place where science is valued as a public good, and where researchers from around the world come to contribute their ideas and energy.

It is therefore stunning and devastating to discover that the new administration, in just its first six months, has deliberately attacked and weakened almost all the supporting pillars of this ecosystem. Executive actions have cancelled or suspended federal grants with unprecedented scale and speed, with billions of dollars worth of ongoing research projects and experiments disrupted. This is not because of a negative scientific assessment of the work, but instead by seemingly arbitrary justifications. Critical funding has been pulled for as insignificant a reason as the presence of a key word in the original proposal that is retroactively deemed unacceptable.

Federal support is, of course, a privilege, not a right; and Congress has the constitutional authority to set the budgets and rules for any expenditure of public funds and resources. But many of these executive actions have not waited for either explicit or implicit Congressional approval, and in some cases have even directly ignored past Congressional mandates for appropriations. Relative to the sheer size of the federal government as a whole, the amount allocated for supporting science is not massive. The NSF mathematics and physical sciences (MPS) directorate, for instance, is the largest of the subdivisions of the NSF, and has an annual budget of approximately $1.7 billion. This looks significant until one realizes that it amounts to about five dollars per US citizen per year, and less than a tenth of a percent of the federal budget as a whole.

He seems to be referring to how the admin took an axe to science funding by ctrl+F-ing for 'woke' dictionary terms: underrepresented, minority, diverse, etc. The problem is that the effects seem to be about indiscriminate regardless of whether you were a true believer or merely box checking. Will we see upgraded diversity science pledges in the next democrat admin? Researchers might have to carefully consider the political leanings of their funding proposals in election years.

The main grant for IPAM is already unsuspended anyway (possibly because UCLA bent the knee).

Further, the grant DID fund DEI programs in the past, such as (from the latest annual report):

“PUNDiT: (P)racticum for (Und)ergraduates (i)n Number (T)heory” is a 2-day intensive program which will showcase number theory broadly interpreted at the introductory level. A goal of this program is to expose Southern California students traditionally underrepresented in number theory (such as women and historically marginalized minorities) to the beauty of the subject.

And as tracingwoodgrains points out, Tao already chose a side His complaints about "political directives" ring hollow.

Isn't UCLA's math department built on ancestral and unceded land violently stolen from the Tongva by white settler colonialists? By actually dismantling oppressive structures instead of just giving lip service, Trump is implementing the woke program.

I'm a bit more sympathetic to Tao: he lives and works in a milieu where not signing that letter would have made many of his colleagues and students (maybe even his wife) shun him; and if he didn't, he would absolutely have been hounded and targeted to to make some statement because of his stature. He still had more agency in the matter than most, but it's a mitigating factor. Do we condemn Kolmogorov?

I'm a bit more sympathetic to Tao: he lives and works in a milieu where not signing that letter would have made many of his colleagues and students (maybe even his wife) shun him;

"Letter? What letter? Oh there was an email? I must have missed it. Can you send it again I'll definitely put it at the top of my queue for sure."

Academics are absolute masters at ghosting and dodging, as everyone who has set foot in a school can attest to. And I'm 100% confident that there are plenty of other UCLA professors who didn't sign the letter. So given that he didn't just ignore it, he's fully responsible for the consequences of signing that letter.

Edit: I'm not going to bother checking the entire list, but the very first 2 professors in the math department aren't on the letter: https://web.archive.org/web/20200807214114/https://www.math.ucla.edu/people/ladder

That's pretty convincing that he wasn't merely coasting along but more enthusiastic (or, at least, more hopeful of positioning himself for more spoils) than the average. Quite disappointing: I had a recollection of him speaking against the new equity based California math standards, which improved my opinion of him, but I can't find that anywhere so I must be misattributing. Sad.

I don't see anybody in my field there, either.

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