This feels like a spectator sport to me - elite classes fighting amongst themselves while ordinary people are caught in the crossfire.
Sure, I do feel bad for the well meaning professors, scientists, and researchers (some of whom are personal friends) that are losing their grant funding - techies of all people should be sympathetic to a sudden disruption in funding. But if the elites are asking us to take sides, they need to make a stronger case that they're really on _our side_ - that requires more than appealing to mutual self-interest. Academia must reconcile a litany of shortcomings and broken promises.
For the promise of education, we see a large and growing contingent of debt holders outweighing the number of available employment opportunities. Tuition is at an ATH, yet more and more students are walking away with worse outcomes. A grim forecast for the younger generation.
For the promise of research, we've seen a shift from truth-seeking to grant-seeking, a punitive culture of ideological conformity, and a pipeline to brain-drain the rest of the world, favoring foreign talent over local. Hardly the unbiased bastion of free-thought we've been taught is the foundation of good science.
As for ideology, I'm not sure the intelligentsia has ever been neutral, if that's even possible, or if neutrality itself isn't another ideology. As far as I can tell, this is just the pendulum swinging back. Academia is experiencing the consequences of its failure to live up to its promises to society and hold itself accountable for the negative externalities of its own agenda.
So... Burn down academia with no replacement? Shutter and board research and leave America with no future?
And, of course, not in even the guise of reform. But an outright and open political witch hunt to ban all those who oppose "dear leader" and dare allow opposing free speech, progressive anthropological research, and objective sciences in unpopular topics like climate change?
That's your preferred approach? That is what "academia deserves" for... What? Charging too much? And that's not even an objective statement - the market bears this cost! If the US government was actually worried, maybe they could put all this effort into an actual reform effort, or modernized scholarships / financing, or tightening accreditation requirements.
Not to mention, US education and research is still one of our strong points, drawing in the brightest minds from the entire world.
> US education and research is still one of our strong points, drawing in the brightest minds from the entire world.
The Average Joe graduates with enormous student debt and ends up in a low paying job, one that's entirely unrelated to their degree. They never experienced the benefits of education nor research. In fact, they feel quite ripped off by the whole affair, so this point holds no stock for them.
> So... Burn down academia with no replacement? Shutter and board research and leave America with no future?
This is a bit of a hysterical reaction to "budget cuts." Academia isn't going anywhere and probably won't change much, it's just going to have less money. In fact, k-12 education is seeing far more severe budget cuts as part of the bill, but there are fewer prophecies of doom in its honor. Academics argue passionately for their own bread, but not for those who are starving. (They also send their kids to private school)
Median student loan debt is about $25,000 dollars.
That's a lot, but not so much that it wouldn't be covered by a very modest increase in lifetime earnings.
The mean is closer to $40,000, which is still going to be covered by a modest improvement in earnings.
I think we should be working on changing things so that students graduate with less debt, and working on ensuring that time spent studying is worthwhile to the individual, but it's weird to treat extreme cases as if they are universal.
Your math is incomplete. The whole formula includes interest rates and total amortized cost as well as the average / median income, cost of living, time to employment, and employment rates of new graduates. Additional exercises for the reader: find the average TTL of full loan repayment (~20 years) and the percent of graduates where debt exceeds earnings (~20%).
This isn't to say that degree attainment isn't statistically better on average, much like paying off ransomware. The price of tuition seems to reflect the lack of reasonable alternatives more than the intrinsic value of the education.
> The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) froze all outgoing funding, including new awards and scheduled payments on active grants. Over 1,000 NSF research projects were abruptly canceled in a few days, resulting in roughly $739 million in halted research funding. The directive, issued with little explanation, has created chaos across the academic research ecosystem, part of a broader trend Nature described as an unprecedented assault.
Just normal budget cuts. Everyone, close your eyes and don't look at Columbia or Harvard or refusing foreign students (and requiring loyalty to the administration in your social media to be admitted) or deporting dissidents (now to South Sudan!)
And completely ignore that people are actively upset about the cuts to K-12, because it's not the focus of an article specifically about higher education. It's not like one of the top posts on HN when it happened was the announcement of killing the Department of Education. Or that the same people upset about the gutting higher education are upset about the voucher program designed to funnel taxpayer money to private and religious institutions while destroying the quality public education, furthering evermore the wealth gap.
You may even be shocked to find out that I also care about children and think they have an intrinsic right to food and that school lunches should be free and nutritious and tasty. If I don't include that in a footer on every post, will you accuse me of siding with Republicans - the party whose currently saying kids should get jobs while in primary school to pay for their food needs?
This is a very odd way to put this, as a battle between elites. Scientific research is a general benefit to the entire US economy, one of its greatest strengths that makes the US economy so much better than anywhere else in the world.
How does framing this as a competition between elites even affect the common person? Shouldn't I care about what helps the US the most? I don't give a damn about elites or taking sides or being on a side of that battle. I want what's best for the US.
> Academia is experiencing the consequences of its failure to live up to its promises to society and hold itself accountable for the negative externalities of its own agenda.
I'm sorry but could you explain any of this? There's a lot of assumptions in here that I can not even begin to unpack, and any possible meaning I can assign to your statements here are easily disproven with even a minimum of research, so I don't want to misunderstand you.
Feel free to unpack at your leisure, it's all in my original comment. I think it's both clear and concise, though you're welcome to be specific about what's left you feeling confused.
There's no great definition of elite but a reasonable approximation is the one often used for intellectual: people whose income or status in society depends on their production of ideas, without needing to test if the ideas actually work.
This definition captures academics, university administrators, journalists, writers, analysts and other talking heads on TV, Hollywood screenwriters, many kinds of civil servant, people rich enough to be philanthropists, and frequently but not always politicians. Those are the classes of people that are usually being handwaved towards when the word elite is used.
> people whose income or status in society depends on their production of ideas, without needing to test if the ideas actually work.
In general I'd agree -- but academic researchers (and the projects previously funded by the National Science Foundation) are not this. By definition, they are testing "if the ideas actually work", that testing is what the funding is paying for.
These folks aren't really "elite" -- not in perception, nor in class or wages. (they usually make less than the average programmer or CS graduate).
The definition of elite people seem to be using doesn't depend on wages. It's not a synonym for well paid.
There's no requirement to test if your ideas work if you're an academic. The funding pays for papers to get published, and that's all that's checked. To publish a paper you might need to at least pretend to test your ideas, maybe, but only in some of the better fields and journals. Nobody will check if you actually did test them though, so just making data up is a perfectly viable strategy. Worst case, you might get caught ten years from now if some random independent chooses to investigate and manages to go viral on social media. In very extreme cases you might get fired, but that won't stop you immediately getting another job doing exactly the same thing at another university (c.f. Brian Wansink).
But those are in the best, most scientific fields. In others you can just write papers all day that say all kinds of things, never test or even predict anything, and still have a successful career. That's how you get papers like the famous "feminist glaciology" paper [1], or thousands of COVID papers that present model outputs but never validate if the results matched reality, or thousands of string theory papers that don't make any predictions.
None of these problems will stop academics from being cited by journalists in high profile news outlets as if their ideas are already validated, nor being consulted by powerful politicians who then transcribe their policy demands into law, nor having their claims be automatically taken as gospel on forums like HN. If their ideas do become law and then cause a disaster, nothing will happen to them and they won't even suffer loss of reputation. For example, Einstein was a big supporter of Soviet-style planned economies, as were many academics of his era. That was a disastrous idea, and his supporting it - as late as 1949 no less - should have harmed his reputation for being a genius. But nobody remembers this today.
In these respects, they are the very epitome of what it means to be elite.
> you can just write papers all day that say all kinds of things, never test or even predict anything, and still have a successful career. That's how you get (snip) thousands of COVID papers that present model outputs but never validate if the results matched reality...
Disliking some papers is not really a fair or relevant metric by which to judge academia.
This would be like saying, "programmers are elite people, because they never have to test their work. Just look at the thousands of broken, shoddy-programmed repositories on GitHub full of junk code that's been abandoned! Half of it doesn't build, and isn't even testable. Why are we paying for hackathons just to get this garbage. Why do we hire interns and new CS grads, if they won't be seasoned veterans on day one".
A paper can be seen as kind of like the "pull request" of the academic world -- not every PR gets merged in, and a PR isn't always a waste just because it didn't get merged. Some number of bad papers does not mean "science" is "elite".
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> That's how you get papers like the famous "feminist glaciology" paper [1]
That's probably a bad example, because the feminist glaciology paper isn't even bad or wrong. (Did you actually read it? Or did you only read the "feminist" and "glacier" and then get outraged?).
A quick scan of the actual paper, and Carey's argument seems to be that geologists and historians have been neglecting or ignoring how glaciers impact women (both the women in science doing these studies, and the women whose lives have been impacted by glaciers, or melt flow, flooding, disaster recovery, etc).
That's...like objectively true? And very well sourced. This isn't some crackpot theory, this is 100% a "validated idea" whose "results match reality".
Carey is an Environmental Historian and Professor of History. His papers are research and recordings of history, they won't be "testable" (under your definition of rubric) because he's reporting on things that have already happened. And this title specifically represents one (1) single paper that focuses on the impact to women, out of the 25(+?) he's published on Glaciers, Climate Change, and Societal impacts, over the past two decades.
If you want to remove Sociology and History from Science, so be it. (That would be Wrong, but I won't argue the point). But it should probably be expected that if you fund an Environmental Historian, you're going to get a lot research on Geological History and its societal impacts -- that's kind of the whole point of History as a discipline.
Your argument is that elitism is good, not that academics don't fit the criteria. Getting paid by the government to write entirely subjective, untestable ideas about the interaction between glaciers and feminist ideology is a perfect fit for the definition. Pull requests, on the other hand, are not. Their correctness is often tested automatically!
> Before we go any further, let me be clear: this isn’t about sides or ideologies. Support for education and research should be as fundamental as clean air or safe roads.
That's pretty naive. The latter is not immune to ideology, and even if it were, you can't have an ideology-free way of setting both the total amount and the split between sciences/topics within.
The vision at the top of the ivory tower shouldn't be this clouded.
On the one hand, academia has been taking sides for a long time.
On the other, there are elements that should be non-controversial.
I wish academia were more rigorous about not taking sides. I feel like they’ve been injecting their own ideology unnecessarily for a while.
Am I supposed to ignore that?
The best approach is some kind of grand bargain, and carefully considered compromise.
I have experience in academia. I’ve heard how they talk. They see their mission as transforming society.
There are exceptions, but even the exceptions are under pressure to conform.
It’s hard to address two problems at once. And I feel there are two legitimate problems: an overly ideological academy, and the need for both support and independence.
Solving one problem is hard enough. Solving both is impossible. So we will probably go back and forth for a while.
My default is to look at foreign countries. But I don’t see anywhere else that’s solved these problems.
I would not called it a solved problem, but lets describe the Swedish approach. Any government or organization acting for the government (which schools and universities are included), must act under the principle of objectiveness and equallity.
From this principle the educational department has policy that if a school has political activities, such as inviting political representatives, they must only do so under objective terms equal to all political parties. They explicitly write that selecting the invitation on the basis of excluding someone is not allowed. They can also not base the criteria in order to exclude certain political views.
During a time when a controversial right-wing party gained popularity, some schools decided to stop doing political activities with students as a result. Others allowed any party to join in the discussions with students, as suggested by the policy.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I've read (I believe on this very forum though I can't find the link, but also see 1, 2, and 3) that the European universities are often closely aligned with local industries. A challenge here in the US: outside Silicon Valley, what are the manufacturing industries in the US cities with universities? What are the major industries in Kansas City? Are those companies funding research at UMKC? What are the major industries in Dallas? Are those companies funding research at Southwestern?
So now we do in fact have an incredible university system supported in part by a mess of underskilled labor in fly-over states that dropped out of college after saddling themselves with significant educational debt.
Wildly, the one industry that is a major economic driver in most cities is healthcare, which is a pretty dead-end industry in terms of economic output, that is, outside of certain world-reknowned institutions like the Mayo Clinic, healthcare doesn't really generate a significant exportable commodity.
While most the manufacturing work has left the US, the Midwest is full of engineering universities. It's not a coincidence that the big 3 auto companies were based in Detroit and Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania are full of top engineering colleges. There's still lots of nameless firms there designing all sorts of things that are manufactured across the globe, but they don't have the employee count to be massive drivers of a city's economy.
America is one of the largest manufacturers in the world. Literally second only behind China. Something like 18% of global manufacturing exports (in USD).
I feel like people forget this sometimes. We're in a tight spot and should reverse course in many ways, but we aren't these helpless little babies that do nothing but serve food and write software.
Maybe because it's very convenient to the rhetoric one side of the aisle uses.
I don't think it's that Academia is/has been taking sides, it's that the right has continued to become more and more insane in the past few decades. The right is now explicitly anti-science and anti-fact. They, quite literally, ARE ideologically opposed to clean air.
We've had decades of extremely strong pro-oil propaganda and what have you and it's caused this extremely tumultuous situation where people think there really is two sides to everything. But there just... isn't. There is no logic, no reasoning. It's all about making money and fucking over as many people as possible. That's it.
It doesn't matter what Academia does because even acknowledging the sky is blue is a threat to the right. They operate in an alternative universe of lies. No truth is safe, no matter how benign or obvious.
Right, but they're not. Because as stated, the reason we're in this situation is because we've let obvious falsehoods masquerade as legitimate opinions when those making the claims don't even believe them. You think the petroleum industry actually believes climate change is a hoax? Of course not. That doesn't stop the right from being ideologically opposed to clean air.
The problem here is people such as yourself, and other's, are far too forgiving. You're attributing more good will then you have any right to. These people are lying, they know they're lying, and they're doing it to make a quick buck. If we can't even acknowledge the situation we're in, then we have no hope of fixing it.
> I wish academia were more rigorous about not taking sides. I feel like they’ve been injecting their own ideology unnecessarily for a while.
I don't think this is true. I think academia is still pretty good (not great, but pretty good) at not taking sides. I don't see a ton of overly-ideological academics (if anything, Academia skews unnaturally conservative, simply out of fear).
I think the 'problem' is that science is moving forward and settling debates that previously weren't settled, and therefore lived in the realm of "political opinion". But because people don't like the mostly-objective scientific results, and because it's being debated politically, they're simply accusing academia of 'taking sides', because that's how they picked their political views.
Examples exist with things like Global Warming, or Human Rights, or LGBTQ+, or Vaccines, or so on.
Global Warming is an obvious one -- while there's always more to learn, and we can't perfectly predict everything -- the base science has been 100% settled for decades now -- the earth is warming, human pollution is the primary cause, we know what we're doing to cause it, and our refusal to stop causing it is changing environments. We can argue about how much, or how long, or how badly, or the accuracy of models and projections and so on -- but there is no factual argument that Global Warming isn't happening, or that humanity isn't directly contributing to it.
But people simply don't like that answer, despite it being true, so they debate it anyway -- and then flip around and accuse academia of 'picking a side' when Academia didn't pick or choose anything.
If any academic could, in good faith, prove "yep, air pollution isn't causing global warming, in fact, Earth's orbit is falling into the Sun at a rapid rate, we can prove this with astrological/radiological measurements" or whatever, they'd be rushing to demonstrate this. They aren't, because they can't -- it's simply not true.
I'm not saying it never happens, or that no one abuses academia to push political views (it does sometimes happen). But most academics aren't "picking" their stance on these issues, science and research is uncovering facts or evidence on a continuous basis, and academics usually just stick to what's been discovered or observed (and -- for the parts still unknown or missing -- make theories or educated guesses that are supported by science and do not contradict the objective discoveries. If new results or evidence arrives, they revoke or adjust their theory to fit with the new discovery).
Some humans simply refuse to accept the things that have been discovered or learned through science. It requires a person to be willing to change their mind based on something they have learned, and a lot of people simply hate doing that ever (so much so, that their answer to hating objective results of science, is to simply defund all the science)
There is a reason why meta studies that look at findings from different countries often has to account of cultural bias. Different objective truths can be found depending on how one look, including findings that give contradicting conclusions.
The existence of Global Warming, or Human Rights, or LGBTQ+, or Vaccines is not the topic which academia (or people in general) debate. Outside of some very fringe places, there is practically no discussion of it. The thing people debate is the strategies. Different ideologies will have different answers to which strategies works, are effective, and what costs they are allowed to have (and to whom). A common topic that the green movement discuss, and which often comes into global warming research, is fair wages for minorities and the impact of global warming on that demographic. People and politicians will discuss that and not the factual argument that Global Warming exist.
There is a similar argument over human rights as defined in Europe vs human rights as defined in the US. They both acknowledge human rights but with widely different interpretations. At a concept level, the idea of protected classes as a classification has very little to do with human rights as a theory but has everything to do with different strategies that involve human rights. Abolishing which demographic should be included, or including new demographics are hot topics of debate.
What people debates most heated over and get most emotional about is not when people disagree with the facts, but rather when both sides of an argument agree with the facts but disagree with the best strategy to go forward. That is when science becomes politics.
Okay but when people in the academy do bring up the difficulty of settling on objective, ideology-free truths people get even touchier (like try bringing up critical theory to someone who supports these NSF cuts and see how far you get). I think you have to accept certain things being settled when you’re performing public rhetoric.
It seems like no more than a year ago the prevailing narrative was problems with higher education and science: how predatory and insidious the student loan industry is, and how it traps people in a cycle of debt with special treatment from the government to not let them escape; the replication crisis revealing just how deeply flawed the incentives in science are, and how safeguards like peer review have failed to stop the slide.
And yet now that there's money at stake - not the money of those drowning in student loans, but those who benefit from the system - people come out of the woodwork to wax lyrical about the majesty of academia, championing its defense at all costs. Curious.
Science as a principle is beautiful and valuable, and is entirely worthy of preservation. The industry surrounding it, less so. They are not inseparable. The latter has proven a poor steward of the former, and it's the latter that's under threat right now. It's not a question of 'yes science' or 'no science', but whether the current version of it is truly a fitting use of the space it occupies.
I think they are way less separable than you do. Moreover, I would say that while the current stewardship has notable flaws they are far, far fewer and less grave than previous iterations. No iteration is worthy of the space it holds, but progress comes through honest introspection exactly like what has followed the replication crisis you described. Simply bulk-axing research grants that fail to properly kowtow to the current president’s political ideology is a much cruder tool, and one which seems unfit to really address the concerns you described in your original post.
> It seems like no more than a year ago the prevailing narrative was problems with higher education and science: how predatory and insidious the student loan industry is, and how it traps people in a cycle of debt with special treatment from the government to not let them escape; the replication crisis revealing just how deeply flawed the incentives in science are, and how safeguards like peer review have failed to stop the slide.
All that is true, and fewer people should be pushed into pointless colleges.
ACM SIGOPS/SIGARCH does not represent that. This is a group of people doing fundamental work on computing systems, microprocessors, etc. They are largely at very technical schools, and lamenting that they won't be able to pay for PhD students -- who do not take loans, debt, etc.
(CS PhD students are paid well enough and have amazing post-PhD/dropout-PhD opportunities. Happy to have that argument.)
Why is industry not properly paying for this work they are exploiting? They make up majority of the most valuable companies on market. Surely they have the money to pay for this work. Which I guess is often relatively cheaper than their average employees...
It's definitely sad. I'm all for the government investing in large ROI type projects and the majority of scientific research is in that category. It's doubly sad when the government is breaking up companies similar to what it did with Bell Labs.
>>>>> Before we go any further, let me be clear: this isn’t about sides or ideologies. Support for education and research should be as fundamental as clean air or safe roads. It is part of the shared infrastructure that holds society together. When that foundation cracks, the consequences ripple far beyond the lab.
Let me be clear: This is precisely about sides and ideologies.
Its really on the nose when these two examples has been anything but fundamental. There are many people out there that don't believe these things are worth working towards.
It is basically true but also devastating to admit that “pro-education” is an ideology. “We should fulfill some basic requirements for a functional society,” and other hardcore extremist positions…
Research and education have always been intertwined because graduate education involves working on funded research projects. My physics PhD was funded by the NSF.
In most walks of life they're separate. The bulk of all education takes place outside of PhD programmes, and private sector research isn't done for its educational value. It's only universities that conflate the two and only at the upper levels. You can be pro-defunding-the-NSF and pro-education, they're not contradictory positions, especially for people who believe universities aren't providing good educations to begin with.
Indeed, it seems like virtually everybody supports education reform. Of course we differ on the details. ;-) Private sector does play a role to some extent because they decide who they want to hire. They could stop requiring degrees, or define some other measure of educational attainment. If it would improve profit, they'd be rushing to try it. Meanwhile, a familiar refrain on HN is "hiring is broken."
I'm not a software developer, but companies have made an effort to hire self taught programmers who don't have college degrees. That seems like a good thing. But of course demand has its ups and downs, and we might be in a "down" period right now.
I'm thinking out loud here because I don't have an easy answer. For myself, I don't regret my education.
Yes, the software industry shows the way. It's possible because you can rapidly test programming skills in an interview room. Many other office jobs allow this in theory, but in practice hiring managers are inexperienced and don't know how to design rigorous interview processes. There's also a lot of ideology in the mix, some people think skills based hiring is immoral.
Still, private sector hiring is often more flexible than it looks. The stated requirements are just a way to filter out applications, but the hiring for important roles is done using networks.
In the past I designed the hiring process at a fintech startup selling into banking and insurance; a common refrain from our customers was "we just can't build a team of your quality". I hadn't done anything special there, just applied normal tech industry hiring processes, but those were hardly known amongst our customer base. I actually had one guy asked me in wild-eyed amazement, "is it really true you ask candidates to do the work in the interview itself?!?".
A lot of the hiring-is-broken crowd are upset because they got rejected, possibly as a false negative. That really sucks, I'd hate it too if I had experienced that. But it's a view based on personal experience, not on a cold-eyed evaluation of results vs other industries that use different hiring processes. There's a reason that we have a notion of a 'tech company' even though all companies use technology, and there's a reason other industries are scared of them. A lot boils down to different cultural approaches of hiring.
Its an ideology beyond a base level that is justified by reasonable cost benefit analysis. For example i am very much against the buzz sawing currently going on but i also see the mass overproduction of phds and replication crisis quality research going on in sections of academia and am very much for drastically cutting thise fields. I would want a bunch of analysis done and then very careful scaling back over several years not what is happening
I’m pretty sure everybody in academia is already aware of those problems (they are personally annoyed by them on a day-to-day basis). But the serious path to fixing them is not the buzz saw.
Like nobody enjoys giving up more than half of their grants to the school admin. But cutting it down 15% max all of a sudden is not a change that is going to stick around.
> everybody in academia is already aware of those problems (they are personally annoyed by them on a day-to-day basis). But the serious path to fixing them is not the buzz saw
What is the serious path to fixing them? I don't think academics are moving the needle with their current strat of a bit of handwringing followed by conceding to the system anyway.
Big picture—I think it is unreasonable to expect us to solve this problem that has plagued a giant community of pretty smart people, in a couple Hackernews comments. But, in the interest of conversation…
Replication problems—I guess this is sort of a social problem really, it isn’t seen as prestigious to just try and replicate research. Maybe we should start to hand out more grants for that (we get what we pay for, right?). Perhaps this could also help with “publish or perish,” we could stop using paper published as a figure of merit and start using number of papers reproduced. I would put this in the bucket of insufficient diligence applied by the grant issuers.
Overproduction of PhDs, I dunno, if lots of people want to go into research I don’t see that as a huge problem.
Rather than overproduction of PhDs, perhaps we have a problem of seeing grad students as cheap labor. I think it is widely understood that the hours that grad students bill are almost entirely bullshit (you spend way more time doing anything than your contract says), so maybe we need to police that better (it seems like the grad students’ and the NSF could easily have aligned interests here, in terms of making sure grad students get paid more). Pay them more, the university will have to employ fewer. However, we’ll probably need to hire more dedicated instructors at that point.
It's somewhat irrelevant to this thread because academic CS doesn't have a quality problem on the scale that other fields do, and the NSF cuts aren't directly motivated by paper quality anyway (you could argue the stated motivation traces to the same root causes).
But, "replication crisis" is a misnomer. The problem isn't replication, not really. A better name would be the scientific validity crisis. This comes up in every HN discussion of science and academia so I wrote a full explanation of why here:
... but tl;dr many papers that are scientifically invalid will replicate just fine. Even if academics suddenly started directing funding to replication studies on a huge scale, nothing would change and there would be no surge in trust in science.
> Let me be clear: This is precisely about sides and ideologies.
How so? It is, I suppose, pushing an ideology that everyone should support education, research, clean air, and safe roads, but any belief in some sort of universal good must rely on an ideology, if only circularly on the ideology that there is such a thing as a universal good.
I think there are credible arguments about investing less in education and research. At a really basic level, imagine if you are a retired couple in a small town. You pay a lot of taxes that goes to support a school you don't have any kids at and a university you didn't go to. That's something like the state of the world for a lot of voters in parts of the United States-- aging / dying rural towns and exurbs. When the greater good is the extreme wealth of coastal cities (and I think it is!) you can see there lots of places that really don't want to pay for it.
If this is what many people perceive, it does not actually align with what is going on in the United States today.
What's actually happening is that most of the wealth and tax revenue is generated by the coastal metropolitan areas of the US, which basically subsidize the rural inland regions of the country. Things like Medicare which those same rural folks vote against. This is because the amount of wealth generated by science and technology vastly outweighs what is being generated by rural areas of the country.
Now we cut off the pipeline and investment into those wealth generating areas so that long term, the nation will head into decline...
I agree with your argument that the metropolis (and the educated elite) creates the wealth that subsidizes the country. But if you are a politician in the non-metropolis you aren't going to frame it that way. No one wants to hear their region or lifestyle is unimportant. Also, regardless of the true economic value it is clear that lots of people in the US and the UK don't just vote their wallets, they vote their values. IMO Brexit was a populist self-own. It's hard to know what choice is going to make you better off in five years but pretty easy to know which choice makes you feel better about yourself. See: wars!
I used to think all these rural areas voted their values over their wallets, but I'm starting to not be so sure any more.
You see this in both Russia and the United States, where these rural and ethnic minority areas of seem to gladly send their children off to war. Liberals like to think this is some sort of quasi-genocidal policy when it applies to the Buryats or the Tuvans, but if you watch the videos of the guys shipping off to war, their happy and smiling.
They are happy because they are getting a paycheck! Same deal with illegal immigration in the United States. Christian values are to "do unto others as you would have done to yourself", but Christian conservatives all vote to brutalize immigrants and cut social services (which are all subsidized by California anyways!). Why is this?
It's because going to war is a way to get a paycheck in an arguably less shameful way than living off the dole, and kicking illegal immigrants out is kicking out the competition for low wage jobs.
People absolutely are voting for their wallets, but in such a way that they don't live with the shame of taking handouts.
The youth leave because there is no future in those rural and former manufacturing areas of the country. The solution by the current administration is to weaken the dollar, but this is basically robbing everyone... when the dollar goes down by 15%, its the same as torching 15% of everyone's money -- same as inflation.
The correct solution is to tax the disproportionately wealthy oligarchs of those coastal vampire companies... the tech monopolies which implicitly levy taxes on all online transactions (Google's 30% cut on android apps, Google's 70% cut on all advertising, Steam's 30% cut on all PC games, Amazon's cut on all online shopping transactions), then reinvest that money into rural industries to make manufacturing competitive. Instead the solution has been to levy a tax on all consumers over all trade, which tends to make local manufacturing less competitive over the long run.
"Everyone should support education" is an empty platitude, it doesn't help answer questions like "how much funding?" and "who gets funding and who doesn't?". That's where the sides arise.
The author (and Nature) pretends like those aren't real problems and that scientists should get unconditional support. That's never been the case.
It can be taken to be about sides/ideology when the cause of cancellation of certain high profile university's funding is over ideological / political disputes.
TFA seems to say "This is important and we shouldn't cut general funding", but also goes on to call on industry, in particular large tech company CEOs to push back against ideologically driven funding cuts. That toes the line of calling for political responses.
In the broad sense of ideology as "a system of ideas and ideals, especially one which forms the basis of economic or political theory and policy" (New Oxford American Dictionary)
There are currently existing ideologies in power in some countries (e.g. in Argentina, not everything is about the US!) that stand for de-funding health, education and basic science and research, and anything that is not of immediate use for businesses. It's a self-defeating ideology (because business do benefit from basic research in the long term), but it does exist today.
Let me be clear: it shouldn't be about sides or ideologies, but recently in some places it has been blatantly about ideologies, promoted by one side while they were in power, and this has enraged the base of the other side, who have brought their side into power, and they approve of their side applying maximum ideological fuckery, possibly dooming us all.
> recently in some places it has been blatantly about ideologies
I agree if we use the word "ideology" in an absolute, philosophical sense, but I think this it's missing the authors point entirely. To illustrate with a more familiar term: basically every part of social life is technically political, but when people say 'this isn't about politics', they're trying to communicate that it doesn't relate to the actively-debated divisions of the day among elected officials. US prosperity is something that no side will own up to opposing, and yet here we are, dismantling our soft power in the academic sphere and beyond at a breakneck pace.
nuclear destruction of civilization vs. not, it's all just sides and ideology. maybe humanity doesn't deserve to exist and we should be pushing for nuclear annihilation. There's two sides and both should be discussed and honored with equal value to society!
And I'm fine with it. We've got trillions of dollars worth of companies that do very little but leech off of the rest of us and utilize the vast wealth they've accumulated to degrade our society in order to perpetuate their own existence.
I'm not going to argue against the veracity of what you're saying, but I would caution against cutting off our nose to spite our face.
I think what we're seeing is that there is obviously a need to rein in some of those corporate excesses you're alluding to, and try to protect the research core that we need to move the nation, and humanity in general, forward.
> an assault on science and scientists anywhere is an assault on science and scientists everywhere
No, actually, it isn't, and that kind of hysterical catastrophizing hurts our case. I'll readily agree that science funding is good, necessary, and even a matter of national security, but you need rhetorical limits. Really, it's that kind of howling and shrieking that led to the whole mess and turns public opinion the other way. Talk like a scientist.
And yes I'm sure I'll get downvoted to heck on behalf of hysterical catastrophizing anyhow.
Your post is greyed out currently, which is a shame. I think you’ve sarcastically described a tech company here, like as a joke, right? The post is a good joke, I’m surprised people missed it.
>Before we go any further, let me be clear: this isn’t about sides or ideologies. Support for education and research should be as fundamental as clean air or safe roads. It is part of the shared infrastructure that holds society together. When that foundation cracks, the consequences ripple far beyond the lab.
Acknowledging that I was supported by an NSF graduate research fellowship, so I benefitted from the thing I malign, but NSF, academia, and the whole federal government pissed off a good chunk of the country with DEI initiatives, codified by affirmative action, extra grant requirements, and ideological purity statements. Some anti-science folks tapped into this anger and now we’re here, reading this Op-Ed.
I do fear this is the end of America’s post-WW2 STEM hegemony, but at the same time, it feels a little good
I think it has less to do with DEI and more to do with "what is this doing for the US, rather than the world as a whole?"
Accumulation of scientific knowledge is a positive externality, and the current administration doesn't care about benefits to other countries. Or costs to other countries, for negative externalities as from CO2.
Before we gang up and downvote for the last statement, it's absolutely worth recognizing that the majority of the voting public (Or at least their candidates) seem to have made 2024 an indictment against these kinds of policies. Even I, a staunch dem, have to admit that the alleged purity statements got a little too close to being real.
On one research grant I led for NASA, the grant reviewer asked me to count the number of minority students on the team, from their picture displayed on one of my slides. That's just the kind of information I didn't gather because I was trying to run a research task and had employed the entire lab a professor led.
That's fine, but we should also recognize how weird it is.
A slight majority of people who ended up voting in the last election did vote for people who also said they were against DEI, yes. But
1. That really has nothing to do with what's going on. I feel comfortable saying that it is a plain fact that the Trump administration is not just pushing back against woke language or affirmative action, they are dismantling the entire scientific infrastructure. It's up to you to infer why (maybe for a good reason!), but denying that it's happening is doing yourself a disservice. That's of course not even mentioning how "anti-DEI" seems to be awfully close to old-school segregation in practice...
2. I think you're mischaracterizing the basic mechanics of referrenda. Again, without getting too far into political particulars, I think it's objectively true that "stop the woke" was only a small part of Trump's campaign, even if we grant that that phrase logically implies what's happening now. He spent most of the final months denying P2025, hitting "no taxes on tips" and "Trump == Safety, Kamala == Crime" hard, associating Harris with Biden & The Deep State, and, above all, talking about inflation and the price of eggs and "a new American golden age". Of course all voters should read up on everything a candidate says, but we know that's far from the case.
Yeah I think people are way over-indexing on culture war stuff when the simple fact is that massive inflation makes the sitting president super unpopular. 2024 was primarily determined by the price of bread and eggs, with everything else being cents on the margin.
OK fair enough! But these large sweeping changes aren't about eggs, so I'm not sure why they are so high profile (except perhaps that egg prices aren't doing what we want them to?)
Perhaps its untrue. Maybe a better way of saying it is "The leading politicians and their buddies" have.
Also, you know real swing voters? Like people who vote for more than one political party? I do this sometimes, but feel so bad about it I can hardly admit it!
The swing voters in the swing states are all that matter because of the electoral college. Getting more democratic votes in red states won’t make a difference.
The reality is that our companies will still be able to hire scientists from foreign universities. There's still Tsinghua. The Germans rolled deep at a Harvard get together I was at and nearly all of them were from TUM or Mannheim. And the brightest was actually out of Ludwig Maximillian.
So humanity's capacity to push the boundaries of science forward is safe with or without us. Now, do we want to be a part of the leading edge of that? My answer would be an enthusiastic yes! But it's perfectly right for other people to feel differently.
"Under President Trump’s leadership, the U.S. State Department will work with the Department of Homeland Security to aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields. We will also revise visa criteria to enhance scrutiny of all future visa applications from the People’s Republic of China and Hong Kong."
"Ms. Petrova was detained on Feb. 16, when she returned from a vacation in France carrying samples of frog embryos from an affiliate laboratory in Paris at the request of her supervisor at Harvard. She then spent more than three months in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center, eventually drawing attention from scientists around the world. Her defenders have condemned the government’s pursuit of her as draconian, conveying a chilling message to noncitizen academics."
"Several academic and scientific conferences in the United States have been postponed, cancelled or moved elsewhere, as organizers respond to researchers’ growing fears over the country’s immigration crackdown."
I am a 51 year old Black male who has been in tech professionally since 1996 and I’ve worked at 10 jobs and those have been everything to boring old enterprise companies, startups to BigTech.
If you said that corporate America is no place for DEI and everyone should be hired based on merits alone, I would agree.
I don’t think the reason for the lack of US citizen minorities being underrepresented in tech is because of systemic racism and when I did do my stint at Amazon post 2020, I found the performative “allyship, DEI initiatives moan worthy at best and considering that Amazon is the shittyist employer in BigTech, I found it laughable”. Yes I knew that going in and it was a remote position. I went in with my eyes wide open.
But on the other hand, if it is a pipeline problem, where should initiatives happen to give opportunities in tech if not in academia and who should do it if not the government?
That being said, it would be a lot more palatable to voters if it was based on economic background than race. I can’t say with a straight face that had less opportunities as a minority when I went to private school from k-8th and came from an upper middle class background and had up to date computers where I taught myself how to program ever since the mid 80s.
And the sane party that decries putting people in positions they aren’t qualified for nominated RFK to head the DHHS and other unqualified people to be heads of other agencies.
The rhetoric - both from those starting DEI intiatives in the last few years and from the reactionaries acts as if it's world changing. But 99% of DEI is BS like rainbow branding or 1hr click through trainings.
None of that warrents this kind of reaction. In fact, it's just a pretext for rightwing leadership to do things it wants to do for other reasons.
"As long as it hurts the people that irritate me slightly (based on things that Fox News told me but which I don't have any firsthand experience with), I don't care if I'm hurting myself with the same action. It's too satisfying to hurt those other people. Taste their tears. Strike back!"
This is the kind of purity test OP is talking about. Theres no chance (in your mind) they might have a point or valid feelings, theyre just evil for being against the group mentality. Exactly the kind of politics that plays out everywhere across academia, its not to everyones taste and has several inefficiencies - otherwise successful startups would be run by committees
People don’t like “government run health care”. But will fight tooth and nail for Medicare, Medicaid etc. These are the same people who didn’t like “ObamaCare” but want subsidies for their ACA coverage
People like “science” and “research”, but then fight tooth and nail for removing evidenced backed pedagogy like tracking and gifted programs or phonics; or forcing bad economic ideas like rent control.
Good thing all these absolutely terrible ideas only exist in one party.
I was in a gifted program. But it ends up often being segregation by another name where the well connected can get there kids into them even if they aren’t “gifted” to keep their kids away from “those kids” and you end up giving funding and the best teachers to those kids.
Something similar happen to me. I was smart enough to be in gifted programs in high school. But I got into magnet school in middle school (which was supposed to be to be based on a waiting list) because my mom tutored the child of the admission officer years before.
It’s just like people being against affirmative action for college admission but never say a word about legacy admissions.
And it’s not liberals who oppose research based education, common core, etc. Trump just basically dismantled the department of education and conservative states are mostly concerned with getting rid of books that teach American history including the bad parts and forcing the 10 commandments to be posted and teach that the election was stolen in 2020.
Are you really trying to argue that conservatives want fact based education and not Christianity, Creationism, “The Lost Cause of the Confederacy and it wasn’t about slavery”.
> But it ends up often being segregation by another name
This is an outrageous claim, and you haven’t justified it at all, only suggested that you personally benefitted from nepotism; despite the fact that gifted programs have a history of greatly elevating minorities in this country.
And again, you’re ignoring evidence based pedagogy so you can feel better about yourself and chase a false equality
> Are you really trying to argue that conservatives…
Please call me when you’ve met a conservative more recently than 1990
Again let’s take two examples. I had the highest SAT score in my high school and the second highest in my county the year I graduated. Yes I was kind of smart. But I also had a parent who was not only a high school math teacher who never pushed me to study advanced math and do SAT prep in middle school. But as a person who proctored SAT tests, volunteered to do SAT training and had dozens of books about it before the Internet was a thing, don’t you think I had an advantage?
The second example is my stepson who raised his ACT scores enough to get into the college of his choice after we spent $100 per session for 10 sessions to be tutored one on one by an ex school teacher with a masters.
As far as modern conservatism, today there are states that forcing teachers to display the 10 commandments in school, the Florida education commission (where I live) wanted to teach that slavery was good for Black people.
But you can also look statewide - which states have worse education outcomes - Republican leaning states or Democratic leaning states?
I gave you a citation of one state that is pushing to teach that the election was stolen in 2020.
But again today the Republican administration has department of health and human services run by people with no medical background and are anti-vax.
I am looking at the evidence that you are ignoring.
And in your first reply you mentioned “rent control”. How is that any different from the president imposing tariffs and then telling companies like Walmart and car manufacturers to not raise their prices? That is a form of price control.
The human emotion of spite is an attitude, not a permanent trait we call "evil". I've felt spite. You've felt spite.
I've never killed a national institution out of spite like these people are trying to do with academia. But I yearn to someday eliminate the Forbes 500 list. Does that make me evil? That's a judgement call. How much do you need the Forbes 500 list? How essential is it to your future well-being that those people keep on existing at their current level of wealth? Compare with academia.
This attitude means the shared institutions go away since the group you don't like doesn't want them to begin with and are a very large (possibly majority) of the people you have to share them with.
The only way to fix this is to apologize for the things you think are actually important and correct the mistake.
Alternatively if you really do deeply want these things you could acknowledge we can't share them, find some way to separate yourself, and go build them with like minded people and without the rest of the country. But that probably means finding or creating a different state to do it in.
Authoritarian regimes tend to build power precisely that way - making it "feel a little good". They're hurting the people you don't like... at first. It's the whole point of that "first they came for the Jews/commies/unions" poem.
> the whole federal government pissed off a good chunk of the country with DEI initiatives, codified by affirmative action, extra grant requirements, and ideological purity statements
Certainly there were affirmative action programs within the NSF, yes, but I think it's trivially obvious that they only affected a small minority of applications. RE:"ideological purity statements", I'm assuming this means stuff like affirming the vague concept of social equality and civil rights? If so, that's a goofy framing; the scientific process is seriously endangered by entrenched biases, which every human necessarily has on some level or another: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-epistemology/
Regardless, I seriously question the idea that "a good chunk of the country" was actually "pissed off" by these things (much less anything at all involving the NSF and NIH programs, which most voters are only vaguely aware of). Lots of privileged people in this country continued to voice the exact same oppositions to social change that they have since the ~~1960s~~ 1860s, sure, and perhaps they have some valid points -- this isn't the place to really litigate that. But on an objective level, I find the idea that this is some justified reaction to post-2008 wokism to be fundamentally incorrect.
We in computer science departments are very happy to send our students to industry, whether or not they bother finishing their degree.
The article lists a bunch of old-timers, like Page and Brin. Right now, everyone is talking about the "$100M offers" from Meta, for people who completed (or dropped out) of their computer science PhDs.
What does "not standing for industry" mean to you?
Already does. Many PIs use their lab and facilities to spin out patents and startups. In either case it is where industry finds the trained talent they rely on to make money.
It bugs me that this is down-voted so much. I love education, academia, research etc. but it is clear to me that so much elite education hates factory farming, mining, manufacturing etc. It's good for independent voices to critique problems in these areas. But at some point you need to stand up and say these things have problems but our modern world needs them.
I see it in my elite educated children. The more productive (and I mean literally in terms of producing something) they look down on it. The ideal job is academia, government, politics, or the arts. I know I am over-generalizing, but its like college teaches them you are Satan if you work for an oil company or Monsanto and a saint if you work for the EPA or FDA. Both are flawed but you also need both.
I am not so sure. At the most elite institutions students go into finance, tech.. do they really go work for Monsanto? I see the CEO of Exxon went to Texas A&M. I don't think we are pointing the elites toward mining, manufacture or farming.
I'm in industry, academia is similarly standing up for industry all the time, in addition to feeding us all the basic science that we turn into products.
Academic labs are often very eager to partner with industry to bring things to market. At least from my view in cancer. Especially the NCI is very impactful in making sure that discovery makes it to patients as quickly as possible.
OP would be easier to take seriously if it made even a token attempt to paint a balanced picture.
It says "This is what system designers recognize as a pipeline stall." without acknowledging that research universities have billions of dollars in buffers.
It talks about talent pipeline without acknowledging that, for most students, colleges are mostly a gatekeeper (signaling device) and that, if the university system did not exist, the talents would still exist and mostly be developed to the same extent.
It talks about the transfer from basic research to industry, without talking about how industry has benefited universities.
It talks about the students who have gone on to do great things, without acknowledging that those students were pretty much forced by society to pay 5 or 6 figures to a top university, so that they could show an employer they are worth interviewing.
It doesn't talk about how top universities were found (by USSC) to have discriminated against applicants on the basis of race. There's credible evidence that (i) they're still doing this, and (ii) they've also done it during hiring and promotions.
IANAL, but AIUI it's illegal for the US government to fund institutions that discriminate based on race.
The right wing talking points assume that this is the same for every university. And that it's not earmarked. And that universities should destroy their long term stability so that billionaires can get a tax break (well, destroying universities future is a plus for them).
> without acknowledging that research universities have billions of dollars in buffers.
Endowments are "buffers" the same way one's equity in the home they live in is a buffer. Liquidating either is a sign of distress and will lead to worse outcomes. So they are less of a buffer, and more of a last resort.
The whole point of an endowment is that it is supposed to support the things that it was funded to support indefinitely. Most endowments, including Harvard's, already spend each year about as much as is they reasonably can while not putting its long term viability at risk.
Also, endowments are not one big pool that can spend on whatever the university happens to want. They are comprised of thousands of separate pools created by donations that were donated on the condition they be used for specific things.
E.g., some rich person leaves a bunch of money to a school to create the Milburn Pennybags Professorship of Antitrust. That money goes into its own pool in the endowment and its earnings will legally be restricted to funding that one professorship.
This is mostly a software engineering forum, but no... most actually important industries and scientific work, unlike building webapps or video games, work the same way as software.
John Doe straight of high school can go and make a photo sharing app with his laptop, but he is not going to be getting the same type of experience with non-trival research in his garage as at a research university.
To actually get to the point where people had laptops required years of largely academic research and creating markets which were almost entirely academic. Just like with vaccination, people forget the time when a young person (who wasn't named Bill Gates) could get experience on an actual computer was at a university.
You quoted me out of context. The full paragraph is below. I was specifically:
- addressing OP's point about students and talent development
- talking about 'most students'
It talks about talent pipeline without acknowledging that, for most students, colleges are mostly a gatekeeper (signaling device) and that, if the university system did not exist, the talents would still exist and mostly be developed to the same extent.
Today, it's rational for students to go to college because of the job application arms race. If universities did not exist, we could have a less costly (time and money) signaling mechanism, and talent development for the majority of students would be largely the same.
(Folks claim that college teaches 'critical thinking' but there's weak, if any, empirical support for that claim.)
I think this is an OK argument, but it assumes that in a magical world where universities ceased to exist, the alternative would actually be less costly.
Remember, universities have fulfilled different societal roles over time. In the US they started off as Bible college, some of them gradually turned into quasi trade schools at the turn of the industrial revolution, and our idea of elite research universities really only reached full stride from Vannevar Bush's influence during WW2. Along they way, some of them developed lucrative sports programs completely unrelated to studying the Bible or building nuclear weapons.
I would argue that if universities did not exist, they would be replaced by institutions that mostly do the same thing. The key question is whether the replacement institutions would cost as much.
If there are the same sort of federal subsidies and incentives, the replacement institutions that replace the key signaling aspects of the modern research university would cost the same or more because the high cost is driven by the perceived market value of a degree and government loan programs. For the majority of non-elite students, the cost to get into such institutions for training, credentialling, exposure will be high.
The real problem here is not universities but the fact that all majors are treated equally regardless of the expected economic outcome. An English major pays the same as an Engineering major despite drastically different ROI. This is an issue regardless of whether engineering and english departments are in the same institution or partitioned into separate non-university research institutions.
In the city where I live, the contrast is striking: the local state college boasts dorms and facilities that are remarkably luxurious—architecturally grand, stylish, and visibly well-funded. Meanwhile, the local NVIDIA office operates out of a building that looks decidedly unremarkable, even shabby by comparison. One is supported in part by public funds; the other is a profit-driven enterprise.
I absolutely believe in the value of academia and agree we should support it. But this administration has made it clear that reform is expected. I’m not convinced that message is being fully heard. Until we see meaningful changes—such as a leaner administrative structure and a shift away from spending on vanity infrastructure—I’ll pass.
I’m not an expert in academic financing, but how much money from NSF research grants went towards building nice dorms?
I went to an inexpensive state college and the infrastructure was horrible. I would guess that things like dorms are largely paid for from tuition. How much is tuition at the state college in your city?
NSF grants can’t be used to build dorms, it’s actually in their official guidance. The rules (from the Uniform Guidance, 2 CFR 200) explicity say that federal research money can’t go toward capital projects like housing. The only "facilities" costs they allow are indirect ones like basic maintenance or utilities for existing research building not new construction. So dorms are totally off limits.
Nvidia spent over $100M last year on ads & marketing itself, and it's an ongoing expenditure. The state college built those great-looking dorms once and sends pictures of them every year to prospective students, so they have ongoing marketing value, in addition to their normal utility. Think of it this way: those dorms are the college-equivalent of CUDA; and how much has Nvidia invested in CUDA?
Dorms are paid for by students. They have improved over the past 30 years due to market pressure.
Many of them are built and operated by private for profit companies that lease the land from the university and cooperate on programming and campus life.
>Meanwhile, the local NVIDIA office operates out of a building that looks decidedly unremarkable, even shabby by comparison.
And where do those NVIDIA employees live? In a van down by the river? Dorms are residential and need amenities, much like the pools and three car garages of those NVIDIA employees.
Even then, plenty of universities have old, decaying, buildings and run-down labs. I could just as easily point to the other bespoke and "remarkably luxurious-architecturally grand, stylish, and visibly well-funded" NVIDIA buildings. It seems like you have a grudge and any show of spending for a university is reason to criticize it.
I'm all for reform, but this vengeful callous destruction of science is not reform. It is revenge.
From my standpoint, this isn’t about revenge. It’s about accountability and alignment with broader realities. Over the past 18 months, we've seen over a million layoffs across the US tech sector alone. White-collar industries everywhere are tightening belts. The US government also had massive layoffs due to DOGE.
And yet, I haven’t seen a single example of administrative downsizing in our public universities—not one. Instead, I hear about professors losing grant funding and international students facing stress over visa uncertainty.
So when I say universities aren’t hearing the message, I’m referring specifically to the glaring lack of reform in their administrative structures. Until I see serious efforts to address this—starting with large-scale administrative layoffs—I'm not inclined to offer my sympathy.
You haven't seen examples of administrative downsizing, because it's rarely newsworthy. Universities routinely cut administrative and support staff according to their individual circumstances. Local news may take notice, but wider outlets rarely do.
My university has had several rounds of layoffs in the past couple of years. Now we apparently avoided one, as California reversed the proposed cuts to state funding. But I don't know how newsworthy that was either.
“Layoffs for layoffs’ sake” is cargo cult economics. DOGE is not “tightening the belt” it’s a slash and burn intended to bring the federal administration to heel for the current sitting executive. Tech layoffs yeah maybe a market correction to a tightening money supply, but higher ed is a very different world than consumer technology. It seems extremely myopic to compare them like you’re doing.
If the target of reform is admin and not researchers, then the "reforms" should target the admin and not the researchers.
What we see however is cancer research being cancelled and students careers being thrown in the dumpster. You've been fooled by right-wing propaganda that claims "reform", but it's not about reform for them, it is about crushing educated people so they cannot oppose their authoritarianism.
It’s more complicated than you’re implying. University capital expenditures are rational decisions when they’re competing for a national pool of students backed by cheap debt. Parents care about the student success initiatives, students care about the multibillion dollar rec center. Given the way the current higher ed market is structured, the bloated administration and vanity dorms are thus actually revenue positive. They attract top students, especially from out of state, and with them a fat stream of tuition revenue. Just cutting their funding from the top, without looking at the other half of their revenue generation, is missing the point entirely.
>The tech giants whose founders and engineers were trained in these institutions, whose core technologies were incubated in these research environments
There is a reason many of those founders dropped out than continue. It turns out that what you learn is useless and inefficient compared to picking up the knowledge externally. Practical experience is a much better teacher than the people at universities. Every day at class I would keep a tally of how many lies and incorrect statements and explainations would get made every day.
Also notice how those core technologies are not listed because it would weaken there point.
It's natural for universities to argue for why they are still relevant in the 21st century. They don't want to be disrupted.
I dropped out of college after a semester. I also didn't see the value in it. Because I was a stupid kid. Twenty years later its one of my biggest regrets. We don't need more self righteous "founders", convinced they know everything.
I had a professor tell the class, in response to a student's question, that the "0x" in the "0x1" memory address on the slide meant "a bunch of stuff that doesn't matter," like the "x" was a stand-in for some unimportant portion of the memory address that had been elided. I stopped attending that class. That professor was not significantly below the average at my school (University of Minnesota, late 2000s).
Blowing 4 years and a bunch of money at university getting a computer science degree is one of the biggest regrets of my life. Luckily I already had a software job during my 1st year, so those years weren't totally wasted.
Is it possible he said that because that wasn't the primary purpose of the slide, or the thing you should focus on?
Like, when I was in school we saw a lot of pointers and yeah, 99% of the time the actual memory address was more or less useless. What mattered is it was a pointer and it was over there, and it was part of some struct or whatever. The actual numbers of it's address didn't matter much and would actually change between runs.
I don't know, I see people miss the forest for the trees with this stuff constantly. They don't understand that absolute veracity and education are pretty much orthogonal. As in, your professor isn't trying to just say correct things, they're trying to teach you. And, actually, saying too many correct things makes it harder to teach you.
That doesn't seem better, I think lying to a student when asked a direct question is a pretty lame thing to do. Especially since the correct answer ("that indicates it's hexadecimal") is not complicated.
It's not lying IMO, it's prioritization. Because, again, saying more correct stuff doesn't mean you learn better, and it could actually make you learn worse.
Personally I don't think it's that big of a deal or evidence of much. Most stuff has to be focused otherwise we lose the plot, that's just how people are. It's the same reason why when you go to the doctor your doctor is going to not mention 90% of the stuff about your condition. It's not necessarily helpful and might actually be harmful.
Yes, and the rate was higher the more practical the content was. So for example explainations about git would have a lot and explainations about automata would have few.
Software engineering programs have come around in the past 5-10 years, but prior to that and probably still to this day at many schools, computer science is pretty much the only program for people entering industry to develop software. So, it's very common for them to teach the programming languages and tools that industry wants people to know.
Yes because amazingly enough, most people go to college to get jobs to support their addictions to food, clothes and shelter and most jobs want software developers and not “computer scientists”.
I think there's a third explanation, which is that computer science professors are made to teach computer programming courses to students who want to learn computer programming and not computer science. If you're a skilled computer programmer when you enter the course, you're probably already more knowledgeable about computer programming than the computer science people who are supposed to be teaching you.
I'm sure my professors knew their computer science niches just fine, but they knew very little about programming & software engineering. Programming was my main hobby growing up. In high school I was already using Linux, had written dozens of websites for myself and friends, had written a 3D platforming game from scratch, and had made and published several homebrew games for real video game hardware. Having to then spend a semester "learning" C++ and operating system basics, from someone who has spent their whole life in academia and never published any real software, was godawful. They barely knew what they were talking about and made all kinds of beginner mistakes. I definitely knew way more than my professors about the subject I was there to learn, computer programming.
Well you certainly sound _incredibly_ gifted and it’s truly a shame you pushed through a CS degree that was clearly beneath you. Any reason you didn’t change course once you clearly evaluated college was not for you?
Also, many many topics need to be taught in “layers” where early on you teach a simplified (and this a bit wrong) version. It’s not practical to start off with 100% fidelity.
Sure, I do feel bad for the well meaning professors, scientists, and researchers (some of whom are personal friends) that are losing their grant funding - techies of all people should be sympathetic to a sudden disruption in funding. But if the elites are asking us to take sides, they need to make a stronger case that they're really on _our side_ - that requires more than appealing to mutual self-interest. Academia must reconcile a litany of shortcomings and broken promises.
For the promise of education, we see a large and growing contingent of debt holders outweighing the number of available employment opportunities. Tuition is at an ATH, yet more and more students are walking away with worse outcomes. A grim forecast for the younger generation.
For the promise of research, we've seen a shift from truth-seeking to grant-seeking, a punitive culture of ideological conformity, and a pipeline to brain-drain the rest of the world, favoring foreign talent over local. Hardly the unbiased bastion of free-thought we've been taught is the foundation of good science.
As for ideology, I'm not sure the intelligentsia has ever been neutral, if that's even possible, or if neutrality itself isn't another ideology. As far as I can tell, this is just the pendulum swinging back. Academia is experiencing the consequences of its failure to live up to its promises to society and hold itself accountable for the negative externalities of its own agenda.