How the United States Gave Up Being a Science Superpower(steveblank.com) |
How the United States Gave Up Being a Science Superpower(steveblank.com) |
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umberto-eco-ur-fasci...
It's by design.
Aand of course this submission gets flagged.
Carring on with this too blantly and over time, it seems self-undermining.
I'd guess Science died the day it was born as "Science". So being a Science superpower really means being a gatekeeping Science-containment Superpower. Antiscience?
I think to certain people, this is viewed as a necessary trade-off to curb the political power and influence of the so-called "Professional Managerial Class" in the United States, due to fears that a version of James Burnham's prediction[1] would come true. When this discourse comes up on sites like Twitter, and people ask why we're doing it, supporters of these cuts ultimately lay the blame at the feet of two camps: Campus protesters and the response to COVID (Masking, vaccine mandates, etc). I think for some people, those things were so traumatic the entire system needed to be torn down. I think the former is mostly harmless and the latter was necessary, but the faction in power doesn't see things that way - and the dissolution of scientific power in the US is how they're going to feel secure again.
When that was all laid bare during the pandemic the reaction was to demand that "we" take back the power to control the system. For some this meant quietly covering the system back up, for others it means tearing it down and rebuilding it.
Of course that isn't to excuse the system, or blame the trauma. Traumatic reactions to mass death, dislocation, and disruption are expected. The system is also very far from perfect. However typically rational and effective solutions don't come from responses like we're seeing.
We've seen this movie before, when Germany destroyed the world's leading research university system in the name of control and ideology. Most people would not want to repeat that, while it seems some in power feel differently.
They have so much money they dont think anything can ever happen to them save for having their money taken away by some boogeyman. Everything else is a problem for the poors.
Colleges need to get back to their mission and ditch the sports, drinking, non-academic facilities. Get back to teaching, standards and research and stop ripping off students to backbreaking loan debt.
Can you explain how cutting research funding achieve these goal? Especially since many of the schools most impacted by these cuts are very much not party or college sports schools.
Those most impacted are R1 schools: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_research_universities_...
That's not really what the current Trump/GOP/Desantis policy, if you could call it that, is about.
It's about weaponizing funding to exert direct government control on what is taught and how it operates. Government approved speech only.
The current admin's letter to Harvard demanded governmenr direct control over department operation, course materials and teaching staff
They pitch this to thir base as revenge on "woke", because they've primed their base, the majority of whom have never attended college, or have not stepped foot on a campus in decades, to distrust educational institutions.
It seems that this dude had a huge influence on the shape of our society.
This is a weird statement. Researchers -- everyone, really -- must communicate that eliminating whole areas of research because the current administration deems them "ideologically objectionable" is suicidal. What is this, a dictatorship?
It was also not how the war against Japan was won, that was merely the coup d'grace against an already defeated Japan (in American storytelling, it was also a way to minimize casualties during the last moments of the war; this view isn't widely held in the rest of the world though).
The correlation seems to work the other way, based on MBA program rankings: https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-business-sc...
It's a dual-edged sword.
I'm not sure if this was intentional or not, but I bet a fair bit of metallurgy was learned producing a better sword.
Now, do you have to cut research in order to cut administration? Research takes a lot of administration, but that should be paid for by the research, not by the students.
You don’t get the professional managerial class investing in world class research labs, they spend more on sports!
>> Colleges need to get back to their mission and ditch the sports, drinking, non-academic facilities. Get back to teaching, standards and research and stop ripping off students to backbreaking loan debt.
> Can you explain how cutting research funding achieve these goal?
It doesn't, but I think there's a real connection there. The cutting funding is a backlash, and the correct response to that is to change to achieve a more secure societal position that doesn't invite a backlash. The current cuts to research funding are the direct result of universities allowing themselves to become identified as elements of a particular political faction. But the universities have been weakened and have few allies to call on, because they're now widely perceived to be expensive rip-offs, etc.