I very much agree with Scott's analysis of how federal science funding has undermined the very mission it was intended to support. That said, we should be clear that the rot that created the Big Science Cartel was not exclusively or even predominantly a product of government...but rather results from the corrupt culture of academics and university faculty themselves. It was university faculty that abandoned a system in which academic freedom was protected and nearly all faculty had the protections of tenure to create the system of academic apartheid where only certain faculty get the benefits of tenure and access to the massive federal research trough which is then used to control hiring. It was faculty who began making hiring for tenure track positions dependent on the massive grant funding rather than simply hiring the best minds or best instructors regardless of their access to the cartel's grants. This is why the same problems you see rotting science are also found in the liberal arts and humanities where federal funding is just a trickle. So...getting federal money out of science will help address misuse of federal funds and reduce the influence of federal DEI and other political nonsense in academic science....but it won't solve the underlying problems that really threaten academic scholarship both in and out of science. The problem is, and has always been, the corruption of the faculty themselves. The faculty are not capable of reform from inside...but need to be turned out of their positions for the good of society and replaced with faculty who have not been corrupted by the cartel and elitist progressive mafia that run academia.
You hit the nail on the head about the importanc eof money over scientific truth seeking.
How can science be defined as a search for truth when it is based on a culture of lies.
As you wrote: "To quote an anonymous colleague: I will lie about my most deeply held beliefs or convictions on paper in order to get funding."
To quote one of my colleagues who wants to move beyond whether something is true or false, fact or fiction: "We can talk about the role of mindset in building an inclusive culture, and perhaps find some shared values that are not about fact or fiction, true or false, but about recognizing the role we can each play in ensuring an equitable future – for ourselves, our colleagues, and our students.”
The AAAS is the prime example here, which has become a lobbyist organization with little attention left for the advancement of science. Same for the "lesser" (more discipline-oriented) societies.
Dean also points out a difficult demographic problem. For probably the first two generations of academic science following 1950, the ethic of discovery was carried forward by the scientists who had themselves come of age prior to the war. But the ethic of production has set up a suite of perverse incentives that have shaped the careers and attitudes of younger cohorts of scientists, who are now the academic "leaders", who see no reason to change. That will be a very hard nut to crack from within, as Dean says. One solution is for scientists still motivated by the ethic of discovery to leave the universities and establish Independent Science Faculties. It could work!
When I first started my career back in the 1970s, the idea that government supported applied, long-term research for the public good; industry supported short-term applied research for potential profit; and universities supported basic, curiosity-driven research was still prevalent, even though it was fast dying. By about 1991, that idea had been entirely discarded, and around the time of the establishment of the Broader Impacts criterion for NSF grants, the very notion of curiosity-driven research was actually derided.
I read the full report, and it is impressive. But can the needed reform actually happen? As documented in the report, there are already models (e.g., ISFs) for some of the needed reforms. But here is what really jumped out at me: "It has now become academic scientists themselves who have shaped their careers around the ethic of production, and who see no reason, nor can conceive of any reason, to return to an ethic of discovery, and who have diminishing patience for colleagues who insist on following the ethic of discovery." In the past several years, as I've attended conferences and perused the literature, I have been having the sinking feeling that the very understanding of what good science is, at least in the US, has been diminished so much that we can never go back. It pains me to see young scientists laboring away at research that is not really pushing back the frontiers of understanding but merely filling in the blanks dictated by the Big Science Cartel.
Can the needed reforms actually happen? It's a question that plagues me, too! At my most optimistic, my hope is that there are enough scientists motivated by the ethic of discovery that they will begin the hard work of taking the sciences back, regaining control of their professions. I'm not sure that can still be done in the universities, but I think there may be other means of doing so. Or maybe changing the landscape of incentives just as was done (to perverse effect) in 1950.
But then, I, as you, JUdy, attend conferences, and my optimism evaporates.
Part of the problem is tied in with the whole question of what science is? Science as a public good, is perfectly fine in a science-oriented government science agency. But should university science be a public good? I argue in the report that it shouldn't, it should be motivated by curiosity, which cannot be held to political and commercial interests to "produce" or deliver a specific useful product. By allowing government to dominate academic science funding, it has converted university science to a public good, where in that context, it should not be.
I could not agree more. But as you might have gathered from my timeline, I'm no longer in a position (nor do I have the energy) to do much to effect that change. 1991 was a significant year because it's about when the science of climate change became, irreversibly, as it turned out, completely politicized. I saw it at NSF, I saw it at the USGS. There are times when I wish I had made a full-out effort then to stem that tide, but I'm not that skilled politically, whereas I am a good scientist and doing science was my happy place. Having lived through numerous protests against the Vietnam War, I had become jaded about the influence a single person could have, and felt my contributions to science might be more important in the long run. In one sense, that feeling has been borne out. Some of my papers, decades old, are still required reading in classes! They should have long been superseded. Some have been, but the fact that my science is still regarded as that relevant actually makes me sad.
At that time, I also was deeply involved in climate change science. I gave over 500 interviews to media worldwide. I met all the main players.
Then, I noticed it was being politicized. The prominent Democrats refused to fund certain kinds of data collection, over and over, which gives you sort of a clue as to what is going on. So, I left the field, even though it still interests me.
I decided we have to sever our ties to the activists and the governments with one sort of agenda or another, and generate our own funding for this work. So that is what I am pushing ahead with.
As scientists, we should not be dependent on these lunatics and politicians for our funding. We should set the course, not these fools with their dopey agendas.
This is a very nice article. I do intend to read your group's more extensive report.
Over my career, I have watched STEM deteriorate, with things going from bad, to worse. The "hangers-on" and leeches in the system seem to have all the power, and investigators and "worker-bees" seem to have less and less, contrary to the Haldane Principle (now law in the UK).
My friends who are still stuck in the system report that more and more of their time is consumed by bureaucratic nonsense, or "yak-shaving" exercises. No one has time to think anymore.
Even working at an FFRDC, which supposedly frees the technical people from all this burden, turned out to be just pointless running on a "hamster wheel", at least for me. Our government STEM colleagues (our "customers") have the lowest morale figures of any US federal agency. They have been stuck there for decades. The main reason, in my opinion? Their complete lack of control over their careers and the problems they work on, to the detriment of the entire enterprise. But the leeches and hangers-on have ALL the power, and no one is allowed to question them. And even though the contracts in place mandate a very different kind of work environment, the managers implement something else entirely, legal contracts be damned. The system is far less productive than it was meant to be, or could be.
Now that I "work for myself" I am infinitely more productive. All the ideas that I had to put on the back burner, I can now pursue. Interestingly, my honed professional intuition which was long derided by assorted incompetent managers, is now being borne out. All the stuff that was poo-pooed by people who had NEVER produced anything, their entire careers, actually works, if one is able to focus and pursue these ideas diligently.
So, I am imagining a different kind of R&D entity. And I am working towards that end.
"Complete lack of control over their careers." How true.
In our report, we propose that scientists organize into LLC-like corporations we call Independent Science Faculties (ISFs). This would shift the balance of power between scientists and universities, fro being subordinate faculty employees to being independent contractors. It would be a variation on the usual research institute, but which would include teaching.
There's already precedent for this. The colleges of Oxford and Cambridge are organized as independent corporations. The university administrations of Oxford and Cambridge have to do a lot of persuading, and the colleges are better able to thwart hare-brained administrative ideas. Maybe something like that could be done over here?
I read your longer report and made notes. I sent it around to my "posse", who are helping me plan this new sort of R&D entity. I like a lot of the suggestions you made, including the ISFs.
Our main goal is not teaching, particularly, although of course there will be some mentoring and mentorship and apprenticeship roles. Our main goal is research and development in a more suitable environment than currently exists in the US, possibly a variant on what the Weizmann Institute and the IST in Austria offer.
At some point, we might contact you to pick your brain. Right now I am buried in product prototype generation.
Professional societies, where most active researchers are dues-paying members, strongly push for maintaining and further increasing federal science dollars. These societies have hired many administrators and bureaucrats in recent years and have become much more influential than individual scientists. Things always tend toward these monolithic organizations, along with the government agencies, becoming more powerful. It's not clear what individual scientists can do to counteract this, unless they spend much of their time pursuing private donors, which is also not ideal.
t was the case that universities pursued the private dollars. They can do so again, as long as they're not busy hustling federal money. The private dollars usually won't tolerate the high overheads universities charge for federal grants, on the order of 50% DC. Private money I've pursued limit overheads to 10% max. Many private donors are eager to to fund science, as long as they don't think the universities are taking advantage of them. We address this in the Rescuing Science report.
Money seems to corrupt everything. And government money is the worst, without proper scrutiny, and a host of systems to game. So they all get gamed. This goes to my assertion that the only role of government is government, i.e. legislature, judiciary, and executive functions. The national debt is further evidence that our present systems will ruin the country. Further, our government incentivizes bad character and dependency. National bankruptcy of character will eventually cause financial bankruptcy.
First, I'm not a researcher, though I've been involved in government grants in other areas. I'm not sure about all of this. I wonder about statements like: "By any objective measure, federalizing the academic sciences has been a failure." How would one objectively measure whether government investment in research has been a failure? What objective measurements is the author referring to?
I'm alive today because universities with federal grants, together with pharmaceutical companies, have developed medications for the cancer I have- which 20 years ago would have been fatal.
I've talked to my oncologists, who are mainly researchers, but do some clinical work, and they tell me the federal cuts have hit cancer research pretty hard. They've also told me that while funding cuts have had immediate impacts, to a large extent, those impacts won't really show up for 8-10 years, when the researchers who've been let go- the youngest, would have been hitting their stride.
I understand I'm speaking about one small area and I don't know enough to speak to the larger issue, but at a minimum, I think the author is painting with too big of a brush. Surely there's much good that's come from gov't funded research. Would we have had the same results with only private investment? I don't know. I do know my cancer is very rare, and private companies alone are going to be reluctant to fund research on medications for rare disease and that don't have widespread use.
The case for failure is laid out more comprehensively in the Rescuing Science report, but in a nutshell, it is the proliferation of irreproducible scientific findings, the conversion of the scientific paper into grfor promotion and tenure (rarely does the intellectual merit of a candidate's T&P dossier matter, while the metrics are prime), the politicization of merit review criteria in grant funding, and the recent finding by Park et al, that the incidence of "disruptive" or breakthrough papers has been on a steady decline since 1950. The failure is in whether the experiment of federalizing basic research has promoted discovery. It has not. This is not to say that discovery is not happening. It is. It's just that the premise of the experiment - that federal funding of basic research would promote discovery - has not panned out. There is still discovery happening, but its incidence and pace has nothing to do with federal funding. What promotes discovery is not funding but the creativity of discovery-oriented scientists,which cannot be bought, but needs to be cultivated which the federal science bureaucracy has failed to do.
Thanks for your reply. It compelled me to read the entire report, which I should have done before commenting. Further, in taking just a few minutes to look at the issue replication of results (which I'd been aware of, but didn't and still don't have in depth knowledge about), I learned it's not limited to government funded science, it's also an issue in the private sector. And that it's particularly bad in biosciences. This surprised me- I thought the issue was more within the "social sciences," and mostly having to do with our universities.
I might also mention that at least as a nonbiomedical specialist, my impression is that it was Howard Hughes' personal donations of massive sums to cancer research that finally embarrassed the US government to start its "War on Cancer". This huge investment of both private and public funds is now beginning to bear fruit and make startling advances at an increasingly rapid rate.
However, it has taken over 50 years for the seeds that were sewn to actually start to yield results. The lead time on "breakthroughs" can be many years and even decades.
There is a lot of evidence that the US R&D system is less efficient than it once was. Having worked inside it for a few decades, I have watched the decay personally. My friends and I have many anecdotes about its deterioration.
Since you mentioned healthcare, perhaps I might recount a subjective personal anecdote. I was hired as an outside consultant by a major US pharmaceutical company, along with several of my friends and colleagues. A lady was taking over a division of this company, and wanted to improve their return on investment (ROI).
I spoke for hours to the MD/PhDs who worked developing new products and treatments in the laboratories. I was shocked to discover that these scientists were literally punished for innovating, which of course was what they were hired to do. This all came out in our presentations at the end. I am not sure what action, if any, this new administrator took.
I was quite shocked at the time. However now, years later, I have seen this sort of attitude in action at numerous other organizations over my career. Therefore I am more accustomed to this nonsense than I was when I was younger.
Do we still manage to make progress in R&D? Yes, of course we do. However if we organized ourselves better we might be far more productive than we currently are. The R&D system might be less wasteful, faster and more reliable and more cost-effective if we were following some other models.
It is not a bad idea for us to occasionally take stock of what we are doing, to see if we could improve the situation.
There are problems, but I would not call the funding of science a failure. Not remotely.
This "failure" is why China has imitated us, and is now pulling ahead doing better science. Russia hopes to, but Russia's greatest failure in this century has been abandonment of science funding. Why? Because it fuels medicine (yes even those weird little projects), and it fuels technology. It's why the USA has been a leader.
The failure lies in the humanities and the acquisition of everything from psychology to teaching of law by Marxists and jihadists funded from Qatar and other nations bent on overthrow of our nation. Some of that has penetrated into science. And, yes, there are hangers-on and I have met scheming professors. That rot lies in administration and corruption networks. Much of that corruption has come from developing nations where corruption is simply how life works.
But all systems have corruption. The key change to root it out is to move Office of Research Integrity over to DOJ, and remove the reporting and response system from universities themselves. Grad students usually know exactly where the bullshit is, but grad students are systematically ignored.
Another area of corruption is in journals. I remember discussing with the EIC of Nature various issues with what a rich and famous scientist was saying. He told me, "I... don't... care." The metric is... the metrics. They want to rise in standings. That doesn't always mean reality is involved.
And EICs at journals today often value guarding their journal's articles from criticism over everything else. The want a "good journal" that never makes a mistake. And professors support each other in little gangs quite often---literally just like gangsters in order to ensure advancement. This goes to the extent of saying, with a straight face, absolute garbage and supporting even math that a high school kid should find embarrassing.
See my reply to Mark's similar claim that the experiment has not been a failure. To the extent that China is imitating discoveries coming from American laboratories, it is due to the inherent creativity and intellectual freedom that marks the classical and distinctive American approach to science, emphasizing curiosity, innovation, discovery. These things are clearly happening in American universities and laboratories, but these essential qualities are being crushed under the system of federalizing basic research. Discovery is happening despite the tens of billions of federal funding, not because of it.
"By any objective measure, federalizing the academic sciences has been a failure." And the evidence is...? Is a "trillion dollars" over 75 years a huge amount? (Actually Gemini says NSF "has allocated well over 100 billion totally for research, equipment, and education"). Does the article compare the "radical experiment" in the US with how science had been and is financed by its main competitors - the Soviet Union, and now China? Have other countries invented less wasteful ways to advance science? What are alternative ways to engage the enormous research potential of universities, especially in experimental sciences? Has the US fallen behind in Nobel Prizes? in industrial innovation? Does the criticism of the grant system apply equally to all subject areas? No answers...
So, I am sorry, but the article merely expresses the typical ignorant suspicion of the general public toward science, a suspicion additionally fanned by the current (also scientifically ignorant) US administration and its social base. The phenomenon is eternal, and was mocked already in the early 19th century in a classical Russian fable "A Hog under an Oak":
Yes, actually we do make those comparisons. And yes, American science prior to World War II flourished. And yes, we lay out ideas to better engage the enormous research potential of scientists, which differs from the "enormous research potential of universities", a research potential that is largely unrealized because universities no longer respect the conditions needed for that enormous potential to be realized.
I do take vigorous issue with the claim that we are expressing the "typical ignorant suspicion of the general public to science." Many of the comments in this thread say otherwise, and I myself recently retired fro a decades-long academic research career.
To the contrary, the American public attitude to science is not motivated by ignorant suspicion. Until recently, science enjoyed a great deal of public trust. What suspicions they presently have are not motivated by ignorance, but by a sense of betrayal, for which we scientists bear a large share of the blame.
Scott, who are "we", and where in your article do you make such comparisons?
- America before WWII was a scientific province. (13% of Nobel Prizes before 1940 vs. >60% in the last decade.) American professors taught many hours a day like high-school teachers, and doing research was not among their primary duties. The center of sciences - primarily chemistry, physics and mathematics - was Europe, first of all Germany. The "hero" who made the US the scientific center of the world was Hitler - through the need for the Manhattan project and other military technologies, and through the expulsion of Jewish scientists. (It is to them you owe the low teaching load you enjoyed throughout your tenure.)
- The comments in this thread are made mostly by people who have already subscribed to the dogma of "science betrayal". The ignorance of this belief is obvious from its indiscriminate, "interdisciplinary" character, as if the state of affairs could be the same in all subject areas.
I am a mathematician, and can attest that the state of this area is spectacular. In the math section of the preprint arXiv, it would be hard to find any vacuous submissions - almost any article contains a little intellectual miracle. Does NSF play a big role in math? Not really, but the grants are important for supporting graduate students and research institutes such as MSRI.
Experimental physics, as far as I know, is also flourishing - as does astronomy and cosmology (JWST discoveries) - where NSF's funding of expensive instruments is indispensable.
I don't know how efficient is NSF support of biology, but genetics and MCB in general is obviously at its peak (Genome project, CRISPR-Cas9).
The same can be said about CS including AI and quantum computing, as well as all kinds of engineering (including robotics). NSF and other federal agencies prioritize these fields because of their military importance.
I've heard (though cannot confirm) that in economics, research projects often look "phony", but NSF's record in supporting Nobel-winning research in this area is particularly strong.
Research projects are certainly phony in the area of education, but the departments of education are to be blamed for this, not NSF.
NSF is and should be criticized for politically motivated grant programs (which factor DEI into the award criteria) but such programs constitute a tiny part of the budget, and outlawing them solves the problem.
- The "betrayal" by the universities the public should legitimately be concerned about concerns the ideological brainwashing of the students. But this is done by the humanity departments and courses, not in STEM, and generally speaking humanities don't enjoy NSF support.
Thus, I am afraid, your and the MAGA crowd's blaming of scientists for their "betrayal" falls well under the category described by the 19th century classic in that fable:
Well, American science wasn't European science, but it was hardly a provincial backwater. It was American science, after all, that brought the Manhattan Project to fruition. American science was also important for important technologies in other areas, like communications, control, materials science, and energy production and management. The transistor (perhaps the most significant scientific achievement of the 20th century) was American in origin. And while I agree that Hitler stupidly shot himself in the foot by expelling German-Jewish scientists, the flourishing scientific culture pre-WW2 was not entirely owing to Jewish expatriates from Germany.
I will repeat: I am not sowing doubt that outstanding science being carried out by American scientists. The question is whether the federal subsidies of of American science are responsible for it. We have concluded that it is not, and that the net effect on American science has been negative.
As I've mentioned elsewhere, there is a fuller case laid out in the full report we have produced. Our aim is to rescue science from the negative effects that federal subsidies have imposed.
While I agree with you that the political nonsense being imposed on science originated in the humanities, the "woke university" is indistinguishable from the "administrative university", which is a very expensive undertaking. What do you think has funded the growth? It has in fact been funded in large part by the extravagant indirect costs levies that universities have imposed on scientific research grants. While scientists might be sensible and competent, academic science has paid for this growth by the extravagant indirect costs levies that universities impose on research grants. This is just one of the many perverse incentives that have been built into the federal support of basic science. Our intent is to reverse those perverse incentives. The inexorable logic of the situation will mean ending the federal subsidy or transforming it dramatically.
NSF and other federal science agencies (the NIH being the largest funder) have made adherence to favored political ideologies an explicit requirement for funding. Education schools didn't do that: science agencies, universities, and increasingly scientists themselves did. We needn't attribute bad motives: the behaviors are incentivized by our current systems of federal science funding. Whether incentivized or not, they are nevertheless perverse. We want to remove the perverse incentives and re-orient the incentives toward discovery.
I'm not sure why you keep bringing MAGA into this. I don't think it adds to your argument. Disagreement is not evidence of ignorance.
Can you apply critical thinking to the statements you make?
- "We have concluded that ... federal subsidies are not responsible [for success of US scientists]" To conclude this you need to compare the status quo with the non-existing scenario when the US science prospered even more than it did but without federal subsidies. (BTW, China spends more than the US.)
- "Woke university is indistinguishable from administrative university". Really? I bet that over the span of your career the supporting staff of your department grew many-fold, but none of them was involved in ideological enforcement.
- "[The growth] has in fact been funded in large part by the extravagant indirect costs." What a ridiculous statement to make! A university's revenues consist of students' tuition, financial aid grants, state funds, research grant funds, private donations, profits of investment, etc. etc. How do you know which part of it pays for staff salaries?
BTW, the X University in your Report receives only 3.5% of its revenues from research grants - which makes it an absurd example to test whether universities would survive Trump's indirect cost cut - but by the same token the 1% revenue from indirect costs cannot explain the rise of "administrative university".
- How do you decide which indirect cost rate is "extravagant"? Why is 15% appropriate and 53% not? Just because Trump says so? After all it is just a part of university's budget, the bigger part the more successful the faculty is in research.
Doesn't this set the right incentives and checks: the university administration is interested to hire most successful researchers whose success is determined by independent expert opinions collected by the federal agency?
Maybe your Big Science Cartel is the same sort of fiction as the Judo-Mason conspiracy? Are you a member of that Cartel? I am neither.
- "NSF ... has made adherence to favored political ideologies an explicit requirement for funding". Nope! Only some DEI-motivated programs did. As far as I could observe, most NSF awards were made on purely scientific merits of the proposals.
It is just that a large portion of the society is infected with certain ideological dogmas, and universities are not exempt from the virus. But suggesting that STEM faculty are particularly guilty in its spread seems very far-fetched.
Some parts of physics are in trouble, from unrelated issues that are longstanding.
Physics and mathematics are currently under massive assault, but not from "Maga". Perhaps you do not notice that, however.
One of the founders of Heterodox STEM is Dorian Abbot. He is an applied mathematician working in planetary science, a branch of the physical sciences. His own experiences, which were well publicized, should give everyone pause.
Mathematics and physics are not immune to the corrosive forces of the woke mind virus. I have observed it myself, at close hand. My colleagues and I have been affected. Perhaps you have not yet seen any evidence of this, but if the current processes in play continue, you undoubtedly will. And by then, it will be too late.
Math and physics as intellectual endeavors are immune to any ideological influence - that's why math was strong in the Soviet Union. Mathematicians and physicists individually and as a community are not immune to it. It has a slow-going but clearly deteriorating effect on the quality of "workforce" (via hiring policies and brain-drain), and more immediate deteriorating effect on education programs, college admission, etc. These are reasons for serious concern.
But there is an infinite distance between such concerns and the sweeping claim that "federalizing the academic sciences has been a failure" - by any objective measures it has been 75 years of most spectacular success.
MAGA cannot possibly assault math and physics because this kind of crowd doesn't distinguish between the two and, say, Near Eastern Studies. But I don't know what assaults and from what sides you are talking about. Is it about cancelling Algebra I in 8th grades in CA, or about Sabine Hossenfelder's critique of the particle physics community?
Yes, that's what I wrote. Scientists individually and as a community are not immune (but I hope you understand that the links you provided contain no contribution into science per se), and NSF used to have specific programs supporting ideologically motivated goals (so, good they are closed now), but this is not the same as to say that allegiance to the ideology was a requirement for all funding.
I might also mention that one of my first mentors was an applied mathematician and physicist who had escaped from the USSR. He had plenty of horror stories about what it was like to work under the conditions that were prevalent there.
We might be creating our own version of the same nightmare here in the West. Woke ideology is essentially just a cover for communism. It was created by the same characters and has the same ends. Read the mathematician James Lindsay for someone who makes this comparison more vividly. However, there are other mathematicians who contribute here to Heterodox STEM and they seem to be in accord with those of us sounding the alarm.
I could respond, but perhaps this forum is not the correct place to have this discussion.
If you think the woke mind virus is completely innocuous, then I do not think you understand what we are facing. The hordes want to make it illegal to be a white male in STEM. The mob wants to get rid of white boards because they are signs of white supremacy. The great unwashed think SETI is bad because the acronym includes the word "intelligence", which is viewed as a slur against black people. These examples are just the tip of the iceberg. The people holding these views have power, and they are punishing those who do not agree or submit.
You have not noticed this? Really? My own graduate institution is a mere shell of what it once was. The faculty are afraid to visit their offices for fear of physical attack by the rabble that has replaced the student body.
The current situation is not that different than what was unleashed on the Islamic World after the publication of Al Ghazali's book "The Incoherence of the Philosophers" in the 11th century. Libraries were burned, as were laboratories and observatories. Many scholars were dispatched. Islam has not recovered yet, after many centuries.
So you can sneer all you like. However, there is trouble afoot, whether you notice it or not.
Yes, the American system might work better than some competitors. That does not mean it has not deteriorated. That also does not mean it is currently optimal.
Simulations run by this group in the least attention-getting part of their 2018 paper show that our winner-take-all competition for grant dollars captures fewer ideas.
I agree that the grants treadmill idea may not garner the attention it deserves, but Yuji is absolutely right that the scramble for grants has swamped the ability to think, freely and contemplatively, and creatively, about the nature of nature, which should be academic science's prime motivator. And Yuji is also absolutely correct that there has been a demographic selection process at work that has utterly transformed the culture of academic science, and not for the better. That's why I think reform will be a generational project. Can we sustain such a thing? Possible, but it will begin with scientists recognizing the need to take back control of their professions. I think there are enough colleagues that recognize the problem, but worry that there are not enough to pull it off.
I very much agree with Scott's analysis of how federal science funding has undermined the very mission it was intended to support. That said, we should be clear that the rot that created the Big Science Cartel was not exclusively or even predominantly a product of government...but rather results from the corrupt culture of academics and university faculty themselves. It was university faculty that abandoned a system in which academic freedom was protected and nearly all faculty had the protections of tenure to create the system of academic apartheid where only certain faculty get the benefits of tenure and access to the massive federal research trough which is then used to control hiring. It was faculty who began making hiring for tenure track positions dependent on the massive grant funding rather than simply hiring the best minds or best instructors regardless of their access to the cartel's grants. This is why the same problems you see rotting science are also found in the liberal arts and humanities where federal funding is just a trickle. So...getting federal money out of science will help address misuse of federal funds and reduce the influence of federal DEI and other political nonsense in academic science....but it won't solve the underlying problems that really threaten academic scholarship both in and out of science. The problem is, and has always been, the corruption of the faculty themselves. The faculty are not capable of reform from inside...but need to be turned out of their positions for the good of society and replaced with faculty who have not been corrupted by the cartel and elitist progressive mafia that run academia.
Dear Scott,
You hit the nail on the head about the importanc eof money over scientific truth seeking.
How can science be defined as a search for truth when it is based on a culture of lies.
As you wrote: "To quote an anonymous colleague: I will lie about my most deeply held beliefs or convictions on paper in order to get funding."
To quote one of my colleagues who wants to move beyond whether something is true or false, fact or fiction: "We can talk about the role of mindset in building an inclusive culture, and perhaps find some shared values that are not about fact or fiction, true or false, but about recognizing the role we can each play in ensuring an equitable future – for ourselves, our colleagues, and our students.”
https://jonathanturley.org/2022/08/26/cornell-professor-objects-to-declaration-that-the-university-perpetuates-colonialism-indigenous-dispossession-slavery-racism-classism-sexism-transphobia-homophobia-antisemitism-and-ableism/
Truth has become a casuality in science. I hope we can restore it!
thanks,
randy
The AAAS is the prime example here, which has become a lobbyist organization with little attention left for the advancement of science. Same for the "lesser" (more discipline-oriented) societies.
Dean also points out a difficult demographic problem. For probably the first two generations of academic science following 1950, the ethic of discovery was carried forward by the scientists who had themselves come of age prior to the war. But the ethic of production has set up a suite of perverse incentives that have shaped the careers and attitudes of younger cohorts of scientists, who are now the academic "leaders", who see no reason to change. That will be a very hard nut to crack from within, as Dean says. One solution is for scientists still motivated by the ethic of discovery to leave the universities and establish Independent Science Faculties. It could work!
When I first started my career back in the 1970s, the idea that government supported applied, long-term research for the public good; industry supported short-term applied research for potential profit; and universities supported basic, curiosity-driven research was still prevalent, even though it was fast dying. By about 1991, that idea had been entirely discarded, and around the time of the establishment of the Broader Impacts criterion for NSF grants, the very notion of curiosity-driven research was actually derided.
I read the full report, and it is impressive. But can the needed reform actually happen? As documented in the report, there are already models (e.g., ISFs) for some of the needed reforms. But here is what really jumped out at me: "It has now become academic scientists themselves who have shaped their careers around the ethic of production, and who see no reason, nor can conceive of any reason, to return to an ethic of discovery, and who have diminishing patience for colleagues who insist on following the ethic of discovery." In the past several years, as I've attended conferences and perused the literature, I have been having the sinking feeling that the very understanding of what good science is, at least in the US, has been diminished so much that we can never go back. It pains me to see young scientists laboring away at research that is not really pushing back the frontiers of understanding but merely filling in the blanks dictated by the Big Science Cartel.
Can the needed reforms actually happen? It's a question that plagues me, too! At my most optimistic, my hope is that there are enough scientists motivated by the ethic of discovery that they will begin the hard work of taking the sciences back, regaining control of their professions. I'm not sure that can still be done in the universities, but I think there may be other means of doing so. Or maybe changing the landscape of incentives just as was done (to perverse effect) in 1950.
But then, I, as you, JUdy, attend conferences, and my optimism evaporates.
Part of the problem is tied in with the whole question of what science is? Science as a public good, is perfectly fine in a science-oriented government science agency. But should university science be a public good? I argue in the report that it shouldn't, it should be motivated by curiosity, which cannot be held to political and commercial interests to "produce" or deliver a specific useful product. By allowing government to dominate academic science funding, it has converted university science to a public good, where in that context, it should not be.
I could not agree more. But as you might have gathered from my timeline, I'm no longer in a position (nor do I have the energy) to do much to effect that change. 1991 was a significant year because it's about when the science of climate change became, irreversibly, as it turned out, completely politicized. I saw it at NSF, I saw it at the USGS. There are times when I wish I had made a full-out effort then to stem that tide, but I'm not that skilled politically, whereas I am a good scientist and doing science was my happy place. Having lived through numerous protests against the Vietnam War, I had become jaded about the influence a single person could have, and felt my contributions to science might be more important in the long run. In one sense, that feeling has been borne out. Some of my papers, decades old, are still required reading in classes! They should have long been superseded. Some have been, but the fact that my science is still regarded as that relevant actually makes me sad.
At that time, I also was deeply involved in climate change science. I gave over 500 interviews to media worldwide. I met all the main players.
Then, I noticed it was being politicized. The prominent Democrats refused to fund certain kinds of data collection, over and over, which gives you sort of a clue as to what is going on. So, I left the field, even though it still interests me.
I decided we have to sever our ties to the activists and the governments with one sort of agenda or another, and generate our own funding for this work. So that is what I am pushing ahead with.
As scientists, we should not be dependent on these lunatics and politicians for our funding. We should set the course, not these fools with their dopey agendas.
This is a very nice article. I do intend to read your group's more extensive report.
Over my career, I have watched STEM deteriorate, with things going from bad, to worse. The "hangers-on" and leeches in the system seem to have all the power, and investigators and "worker-bees" seem to have less and less, contrary to the Haldane Principle (now law in the UK).
My friends who are still stuck in the system report that more and more of their time is consumed by bureaucratic nonsense, or "yak-shaving" exercises. No one has time to think anymore.
Even working at an FFRDC, which supposedly frees the technical people from all this burden, turned out to be just pointless running on a "hamster wheel", at least for me. Our government STEM colleagues (our "customers") have the lowest morale figures of any US federal agency. They have been stuck there for decades. The main reason, in my opinion? Their complete lack of control over their careers and the problems they work on, to the detriment of the entire enterprise. But the leeches and hangers-on have ALL the power, and no one is allowed to question them. And even though the contracts in place mandate a very different kind of work environment, the managers implement something else entirely, legal contracts be damned. The system is far less productive than it was meant to be, or could be.
Now that I "work for myself" I am infinitely more productive. All the ideas that I had to put on the back burner, I can now pursue. Interestingly, my honed professional intuition which was long derided by assorted incompetent managers, is now being borne out. All the stuff that was poo-pooed by people who had NEVER produced anything, their entire careers, actually works, if one is able to focus and pursue these ideas diligently.
So, I am imagining a different kind of R&D entity. And I am working towards that end.
"Complete lack of control over their careers." How true.
In our report, we propose that scientists organize into LLC-like corporations we call Independent Science Faculties (ISFs). This would shift the balance of power between scientists and universities, fro being subordinate faculty employees to being independent contractors. It would be a variation on the usual research institute, but which would include teaching.
There's already precedent for this. The colleges of Oxford and Cambridge are organized as independent corporations. The university administrations of Oxford and Cambridge have to do a lot of persuading, and the colleges are better able to thwart hare-brained administrative ideas. Maybe something like that could be done over here?
I read your longer report and made notes. I sent it around to my "posse", who are helping me plan this new sort of R&D entity. I like a lot of the suggestions you made, including the ISFs.
Our main goal is not teaching, particularly, although of course there will be some mentoring and mentorship and apprenticeship roles. Our main goal is research and development in a more suitable environment than currently exists in the US, possibly a variant on what the Weizmann Institute and the IST in Austria offer.
At some point, we might contact you to pick your brain. Right now I am buried in product prototype generation.
Socialized science, like socialized government and socialized medicine leads to inferior results, inbreeding, and corruption.
Perversely, we basically adopted the Soviet system of science funding in 1950.
Professional societies, where most active researchers are dues-paying members, strongly push for maintaining and further increasing federal science dollars. These societies have hired many administrators and bureaucrats in recent years and have become much more influential than individual scientists. Things always tend toward these monolithic organizations, along with the government agencies, becoming more powerful. It's not clear what individual scientists can do to counteract this, unless they spend much of their time pursuing private donors, which is also not ideal.
t was the case that universities pursued the private dollars. They can do so again, as long as they're not busy hustling federal money. The private dollars usually won't tolerate the high overheads universities charge for federal grants, on the order of 50% DC. Private money I've pursued limit overheads to 10% max. Many private donors are eager to to fund science, as long as they don't think the universities are taking advantage of them. We address this in the Rescuing Science report.
Money seems to corrupt everything. And government money is the worst, without proper scrutiny, and a host of systems to game. So they all get gamed. This goes to my assertion that the only role of government is government, i.e. legislature, judiciary, and executive functions. The national debt is further evidence that our present systems will ruin the country. Further, our government incentivizes bad character and dependency. National bankruptcy of character will eventually cause financial bankruptcy.
First, I'm not a researcher, though I've been involved in government grants in other areas. I'm not sure about all of this. I wonder about statements like: "By any objective measure, federalizing the academic sciences has been a failure." How would one objectively measure whether government investment in research has been a failure? What objective measurements is the author referring to?
I'm alive today because universities with federal grants, together with pharmaceutical companies, have developed medications for the cancer I have- which 20 years ago would have been fatal.
I've talked to my oncologists, who are mainly researchers, but do some clinical work, and they tell me the federal cuts have hit cancer research pretty hard. They've also told me that while funding cuts have had immediate impacts, to a large extent, those impacts won't really show up for 8-10 years, when the researchers who've been let go- the youngest, would have been hitting their stride.
I understand I'm speaking about one small area and I don't know enough to speak to the larger issue, but at a minimum, I think the author is painting with too big of a brush. Surely there's much good that's come from gov't funded research. Would we have had the same results with only private investment? I don't know. I do know my cancer is very rare, and private companies alone are going to be reluctant to fund research on medications for rare disease and that don't have widespread use.
The case for failure is laid out more comprehensively in the Rescuing Science report, but in a nutshell, it is the proliferation of irreproducible scientific findings, the conversion of the scientific paper into grfor promotion and tenure (rarely does the intellectual merit of a candidate's T&P dossier matter, while the metrics are prime), the politicization of merit review criteria in grant funding, and the recent finding by Park et al, that the incidence of "disruptive" or breakthrough papers has been on a steady decline since 1950. The failure is in whether the experiment of federalizing basic research has promoted discovery. It has not. This is not to say that discovery is not happening. It is. It's just that the premise of the experiment - that federal funding of basic research would promote discovery - has not panned out. There is still discovery happening, but its incidence and pace has nothing to do with federal funding. What promotes discovery is not funding but the creativity of discovery-oriented scientists,which cannot be bought, but needs to be cultivated which the federal science bureaucracy has failed to do.
Thanks for your reply. It compelled me to read the entire report, which I should have done before commenting. Further, in taking just a few minutes to look at the issue replication of results (which I'd been aware of, but didn't and still don't have in depth knowledge about), I learned it's not limited to government funded science, it's also an issue in the private sector. And that it's particularly bad in biosciences. This surprised me- I thought the issue was more within the "social sciences," and mostly having to do with our universities.
Learn something new every day......
I might also mention that at least as a nonbiomedical specialist, my impression is that it was Howard Hughes' personal donations of massive sums to cancer research that finally embarrassed the US government to start its "War on Cancer". This huge investment of both private and public funds is now beginning to bear fruit and make startling advances at an increasingly rapid rate.
However, it has taken over 50 years for the seeds that were sewn to actually start to yield results. The lead time on "breakthroughs" can be many years and even decades.
There is a lot of evidence that the US R&D system is less efficient than it once was. Having worked inside it for a few decades, I have watched the decay personally. My friends and I have many anecdotes about its deterioration.
Since you mentioned healthcare, perhaps I might recount a subjective personal anecdote. I was hired as an outside consultant by a major US pharmaceutical company, along with several of my friends and colleagues. A lady was taking over a division of this company, and wanted to improve their return on investment (ROI).
I spoke for hours to the MD/PhDs who worked developing new products and treatments in the laboratories. I was shocked to discover that these scientists were literally punished for innovating, which of course was what they were hired to do. This all came out in our presentations at the end. I am not sure what action, if any, this new administrator took.
I was quite shocked at the time. However now, years later, I have seen this sort of attitude in action at numerous other organizations over my career. Therefore I am more accustomed to this nonsense than I was when I was younger.
Do we still manage to make progress in R&D? Yes, of course we do. However if we organized ourselves better we might be far more productive than we currently are. The R&D system might be less wasteful, faster and more reliable and more cost-effective if we were following some other models.
It is not a bad idea for us to occasionally take stock of what we are doing, to see if we could improve the situation.
There are problems, but I would not call the funding of science a failure. Not remotely.
This "failure" is why China has imitated us, and is now pulling ahead doing better science. Russia hopes to, but Russia's greatest failure in this century has been abandonment of science funding. Why? Because it fuels medicine (yes even those weird little projects), and it fuels technology. It's why the USA has been a leader.
The failure lies in the humanities and the acquisition of everything from psychology to teaching of law by Marxists and jihadists funded from Qatar and other nations bent on overthrow of our nation. Some of that has penetrated into science. And, yes, there are hangers-on and I have met scheming professors. That rot lies in administration and corruption networks. Much of that corruption has come from developing nations where corruption is simply how life works.
But all systems have corruption. The key change to root it out is to move Office of Research Integrity over to DOJ, and remove the reporting and response system from universities themselves. Grad students usually know exactly where the bullshit is, but grad students are systematically ignored.
Another area of corruption is in journals. I remember discussing with the EIC of Nature various issues with what a rich and famous scientist was saying. He told me, "I... don't... care." The metric is... the metrics. They want to rise in standings. That doesn't always mean reality is involved.
And EICs at journals today often value guarding their journal's articles from criticism over everything else. The want a "good journal" that never makes a mistake. And professors support each other in little gangs quite often---literally just like gangsters in order to ensure advancement. This goes to the extent of saying, with a straight face, absolute garbage and supporting even math that a high school kid should find embarrassing.
See my reply to Mark's similar claim that the experiment has not been a failure. To the extent that China is imitating discoveries coming from American laboratories, it is due to the inherent creativity and intellectual freedom that marks the classical and distinctive American approach to science, emphasizing curiosity, innovation, discovery. These things are clearly happening in American universities and laboratories, but these essential qualities are being crushed under the system of federalizing basic research. Discovery is happening despite the tens of billions of federal funding, not because of it.
"By any objective measure, federalizing the academic sciences has been a failure." And the evidence is...? Is a "trillion dollars" over 75 years a huge amount? (Actually Gemini says NSF "has allocated well over 100 billion totally for research, equipment, and education"). Does the article compare the "radical experiment" in the US with how science had been and is financed by its main competitors - the Soviet Union, and now China? Have other countries invented less wasteful ways to advance science? What are alternative ways to engage the enormous research potential of universities, especially in experimental sciences? Has the US fallen behind in Nobel Prizes? in industrial innovation? Does the criticism of the grant system apply equally to all subject areas? No answers...
So, I am sorry, but the article merely expresses the typical ignorant suspicion of the general public toward science, a suspicion additionally fanned by the current (also scientifically ignorant) US administration and its social base. The phenomenon is eternal, and was mocked already in the early 19th century in a classical Russian fable "A Hog under an Oak":
https://sumizdat.com/homepage/verse/krylov.pdf
Yes, actually we do make those comparisons. And yes, American science prior to World War II flourished. And yes, we lay out ideas to better engage the enormous research potential of scientists, which differs from the "enormous research potential of universities", a research potential that is largely unrealized because universities no longer respect the conditions needed for that enormous potential to be realized.
I do take vigorous issue with the claim that we are expressing the "typical ignorant suspicion of the general public to science." Many of the comments in this thread say otherwise, and I myself recently retired fro a decades-long academic research career.
To the contrary, the American public attitude to science is not motivated by ignorant suspicion. Until recently, science enjoyed a great deal of public trust. What suspicions they presently have are not motivated by ignorance, but by a sense of betrayal, for which we scientists bear a large share of the blame.
Scott, who are "we", and where in your article do you make such comparisons?
- America before WWII was a scientific province. (13% of Nobel Prizes before 1940 vs. >60% in the last decade.) American professors taught many hours a day like high-school teachers, and doing research was not among their primary duties. The center of sciences - primarily chemistry, physics and mathematics - was Europe, first of all Germany. The "hero" who made the US the scientific center of the world was Hitler - through the need for the Manhattan project and other military technologies, and through the expulsion of Jewish scientists. (It is to them you owe the low teaching load you enjoyed throughout your tenure.)
- The comments in this thread are made mostly by people who have already subscribed to the dogma of "science betrayal". The ignorance of this belief is obvious from its indiscriminate, "interdisciplinary" character, as if the state of affairs could be the same in all subject areas.
I am a mathematician, and can attest that the state of this area is spectacular. In the math section of the preprint arXiv, it would be hard to find any vacuous submissions - almost any article contains a little intellectual miracle. Does NSF play a big role in math? Not really, but the grants are important for supporting graduate students and research institutes such as MSRI.
Experimental physics, as far as I know, is also flourishing - as does astronomy and cosmology (JWST discoveries) - where NSF's funding of expensive instruments is indispensable.
I don't know how efficient is NSF support of biology, but genetics and MCB in general is obviously at its peak (Genome project, CRISPR-Cas9).
The same can be said about CS including AI and quantum computing, as well as all kinds of engineering (including robotics). NSF and other federal agencies prioritize these fields because of their military importance.
I've heard (though cannot confirm) that in economics, research projects often look "phony", but NSF's record in supporting Nobel-winning research in this area is particularly strong.
Research projects are certainly phony in the area of education, but the departments of education are to be blamed for this, not NSF.
NSF is and should be criticized for politically motivated grant programs (which factor DEI into the award criteria) but such programs constitute a tiny part of the budget, and outlawing them solves the problem.
- The "betrayal" by the universities the public should legitimately be concerned about concerns the ideological brainwashing of the students. But this is done by the humanity departments and courses, not in STEM, and generally speaking humanities don't enjoy NSF support.
Thus, I am afraid, your and the MAGA crowd's blaming of scientists for their "betrayal" falls well under the category described by the 19th century classic in that fable:
"An ignoramus in defiance
Is scolding scientists and science,
And all preprints at lanl_dot_gov,
Oblivious of his partaking fruit thereof."
Well, American science wasn't European science, but it was hardly a provincial backwater. It was American science, after all, that brought the Manhattan Project to fruition. American science was also important for important technologies in other areas, like communications, control, materials science, and energy production and management. The transistor (perhaps the most significant scientific achievement of the 20th century) was American in origin. And while I agree that Hitler stupidly shot himself in the foot by expelling German-Jewish scientists, the flourishing scientific culture pre-WW2 was not entirely owing to Jewish expatriates from Germany.
I will repeat: I am not sowing doubt that outstanding science being carried out by American scientists. The question is whether the federal subsidies of of American science are responsible for it. We have concluded that it is not, and that the net effect on American science has been negative.
As I've mentioned elsewhere, there is a fuller case laid out in the full report we have produced. Our aim is to rescue science from the negative effects that federal subsidies have imposed.
While I agree with you that the political nonsense being imposed on science originated in the humanities, the "woke university" is indistinguishable from the "administrative university", which is a very expensive undertaking. What do you think has funded the growth? It has in fact been funded in large part by the extravagant indirect costs levies that universities have imposed on scientific research grants. While scientists might be sensible and competent, academic science has paid for this growth by the extravagant indirect costs levies that universities impose on research grants. This is just one of the many perverse incentives that have been built into the federal support of basic science. Our intent is to reverse those perverse incentives. The inexorable logic of the situation will mean ending the federal subsidy or transforming it dramatically.
NSF and other federal science agencies (the NIH being the largest funder) have made adherence to favored political ideologies an explicit requirement for funding. Education schools didn't do that: science agencies, universities, and increasingly scientists themselves did. We needn't attribute bad motives: the behaviors are incentivized by our current systems of federal science funding. Whether incentivized or not, they are nevertheless perverse. We want to remove the perverse incentives and re-orient the incentives toward discovery.
I'm not sure why you keep bringing MAGA into this. I don't think it adds to your argument. Disagreement is not evidence of ignorance.
Can you apply critical thinking to the statements you make?
- "We have concluded that ... federal subsidies are not responsible [for success of US scientists]" To conclude this you need to compare the status quo with the non-existing scenario when the US science prospered even more than it did but without federal subsidies. (BTW, China spends more than the US.)
- "Woke university is indistinguishable from administrative university". Really? I bet that over the span of your career the supporting staff of your department grew many-fold, but none of them was involved in ideological enforcement.
- "[The growth] has in fact been funded in large part by the extravagant indirect costs." What a ridiculous statement to make! A university's revenues consist of students' tuition, financial aid grants, state funds, research grant funds, private donations, profits of investment, etc. etc. How do you know which part of it pays for staff salaries?
BTW, the X University in your Report receives only 3.5% of its revenues from research grants - which makes it an absurd example to test whether universities would survive Trump's indirect cost cut - but by the same token the 1% revenue from indirect costs cannot explain the rise of "administrative university".
- How do you decide which indirect cost rate is "extravagant"? Why is 15% appropriate and 53% not? Just because Trump says so? After all it is just a part of university's budget, the bigger part the more successful the faculty is in research.
Doesn't this set the right incentives and checks: the university administration is interested to hire most successful researchers whose success is determined by independent expert opinions collected by the federal agency?
Maybe your Big Science Cartel is the same sort of fiction as the Judo-Mason conspiracy? Are you a member of that Cartel? I am neither.
- "NSF ... has made adherence to favored political ideologies an explicit requirement for funding". Nope! Only some DEI-motivated programs did. As far as I could observe, most NSF awards were made on purely scientific merits of the proposals.
It is just that a large portion of the society is infected with certain ideological dogmas, and universities are not exempt from the virus. But suggesting that STEM faculty are particularly guilty in its spread seems very far-fetched.
Some parts of physics are in trouble, from unrelated issues that are longstanding.
Physics and mathematics are currently under massive assault, but not from "Maga". Perhaps you do not notice that, however.
One of the founders of Heterodox STEM is Dorian Abbot. He is an applied mathematician working in planetary science, a branch of the physical sciences. His own experiences, which were well publicized, should give everyone pause.
Mathematics and physics are not immune to the corrosive forces of the woke mind virus. I have observed it myself, at close hand. My colleagues and I have been affected. Perhaps you have not yet seen any evidence of this, but if the current processes in play continue, you undoubtedly will. And by then, it will be too late.
Math and physics as intellectual endeavors are immune to any ideological influence - that's why math was strong in the Soviet Union. Mathematicians and physicists individually and as a community are not immune to it. It has a slow-going but clearly deteriorating effect on the quality of "workforce" (via hiring policies and brain-drain), and more immediate deteriorating effect on education programs, college admission, etc. These are reasons for serious concern.
But there is an infinite distance between such concerns and the sweeping claim that "federalizing the academic sciences has been a failure" - by any objective measures it has been 75 years of most spectacular success.
MAGA cannot possibly assault math and physics because this kind of crowd doesn't distinguish between the two and, say, Near Eastern Studies. But I don't know what assaults and from what sides you are talking about. Is it about cancelling Algebra I in 8th grades in CA, or about Sabine Hossenfelder's critique of the particle physics community?
Well, not immune:
For physics:
https://medium.com/@chanda/decolonising-science-reading-list-339fb773d51f
For math:
https://www.lms.ac.uk/sites/default/files/inline-files/LMS_Education_Day_Decolonising_PresentationMay2023.pdf
All federal science funding agencies have programs for DEI in all funding areas.
Yes, that's what I wrote. Scientists individually and as a community are not immune (but I hope you understand that the links you provided contain no contribution into science per se), and NSF used to have specific programs supporting ideologically motivated goals (so, good they are closed now), but this is not the same as to say that allegiance to the ideology was a requirement for all funding.
I might also mention that one of my first mentors was an applied mathematician and physicist who had escaped from the USSR. He had plenty of horror stories about what it was like to work under the conditions that were prevalent there.
We might be creating our own version of the same nightmare here in the West. Woke ideology is essentially just a cover for communism. It was created by the same characters and has the same ends. Read the mathematician James Lindsay for someone who makes this comparison more vividly. However, there are other mathematicians who contribute here to Heterodox STEM and they seem to be in accord with those of us sounding the alarm.
Thomas, I am one of the mathematicians who sounded the alarm (see e.g. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2401.06701 or its expanded version https://sumizdat.com/homepage/merit.pdf ), including here, at the Heterodox STEM https://hxstem.substack.com/p/do-what-you-ought-come-what-may . And the connection between the woke ideology and communism is quite obvious to everyone who grew up (like me) in the SU. But I doubt that propagating cheap conspiracy theories about American science is helpful in battling the ideology.
I could respond, but perhaps this forum is not the correct place to have this discussion.
If you think the woke mind virus is completely innocuous, then I do not think you understand what we are facing. The hordes want to make it illegal to be a white male in STEM. The mob wants to get rid of white boards because they are signs of white supremacy. The great unwashed think SETI is bad because the acronym includes the word "intelligence", which is viewed as a slur against black people. These examples are just the tip of the iceberg. The people holding these views have power, and they are punishing those who do not agree or submit.
You have not noticed this? Really? My own graduate institution is a mere shell of what it once was. The faculty are afraid to visit their offices for fear of physical attack by the rabble that has replaced the student body.
The current situation is not that different than what was unleashed on the Islamic World after the publication of Al Ghazali's book "The Incoherence of the Philosophers" in the 11th century. Libraries were burned, as were laboratories and observatories. Many scholars were dispatched. Islam has not recovered yet, after many centuries.
So you can sneer all you like. However, there is trouble afoot, whether you notice it or not.
I agree, but unfortunately there is more than one trouble.
Yes, the American system might work better than some competitors. That does not mean it has not deteriorated. That also does not mean it is currently optimal.
Simulations run by this group in the least attention-getting part of their 2018 paper show that our winner-take-all competition for grant dollars captures fewer ideas.
http://www.pluchino.it/talent-vs-luck.html
I touch on this in a short article just out last week.
https://www.utopiasciencefiction.com/product-page/march-2026-issue
I agree that the grants treadmill idea may not garner the attention it deserves, but Yuji is absolutely right that the scramble for grants has swamped the ability to think, freely and contemplatively, and creatively, about the nature of nature, which should be academic science's prime motivator. And Yuji is also absolutely correct that there has been a demographic selection process at work that has utterly transformed the culture of academic science, and not for the better. That's why I think reform will be a generational project. Can we sustain such a thing? Possible, but it will begin with scientists recognizing the need to take back control of their professions. I think there are enough colleagues that recognize the problem, but worry that there are not enough to pull it off.