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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   7737 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.

If you don't want to fall prey to politics, don't let your institution get stacked by political actors.

Most long lived institutions have to learn this. Universities used to understand it. And then they didn't. Here's the outcome.

It doesn't matter that Tao's smart, it doesn't even matter that his work is useful to humanity. Universities aligned themselves with one side of the friend-enemy distinction, that side lost, therefore they must suffer. There is no other way that this can go. This isn't me saying that it is good that this happens, merely that it is a law of nature.

Next time, fight the militants that are trying to use your university for political ends and win. Defeat has consequences.

They won't understand it, because they're convinced that this doesn't count as 'politics' but as the principle of basic human dignity, or some BS like that.

You have been warned repeatedly to stop putting words in other peoples' mouths. Especially when it comes to low-effort dismissals like this. Or like half of your comments over the last month.

Three day ban.

Without “some BS” this seems like a clearly true and factual statement. I can certainly dig up a number of “‘political correctness’ is just basic decency” quotes.

Yes, there were a number of things he could have done to make his comment more accurate, charitable, or defensible.

People understand it's political. That's why the claim is often that science is always political so you're either for good things or for bad things.

But simply stating "I thought we were on the verge of a thousand year woke reich and would never face consequences (but I certainly would if I defected)" is unflattering.

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