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.
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.
> 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 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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.)
>>>>> 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.
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.
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!
> 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!
"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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
>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
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.
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!
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.
"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
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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 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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
>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.
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.
Scientific research is NOT "elite".
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.
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.
> 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.
Im split minded about this.
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 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.
Both can be true.
Whenever I hear a critique of the US academy I'm reminded of Rodney Dangerfield and Sam Kinison's bit in Back to School: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeeL-U7cbpE
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?
Ronny Chieng actually breaks down the larger problem quite nicely: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/i1Hi_hacvN4
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.
(1) https://education.ec.europa.eu/education-levels/higher-educa...
(2) https://www.jstor.org/stable/24118541
(3) https://sciencebusiness.net/news/universities/deepening-coll...
America is mostly a service based economy. Same with Silicon Valley. I don’t think anything is manufactured there.
All this is to be expected in a service based economy.
SV only started looking like a service-based economy, from a taxation perspective, after IRC section 174 changes came into effect.
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.
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.
crazy that this kind of OP-ED pices even have to be written...
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.
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.
Many things are both flawed and worth of preservation.
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.
As the apocryphal Churchill quote goes, "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others."
The same may be true for science.
> 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.)
>>>>> 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.
>as clean air or safe roads
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.
In lieu of a thorough argument I'll post this old clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xcQIoh3FQQ
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…
The NSF grants the article is talking about don't fund education, they're supposed to fund research.
Research and education have always been intertwined because graduate education involves working on funded research projects. My physics PhD was funded by the NSF.
But pro-education is an ideology. It always was.
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.
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.
> promoted by one side while they were in power
Presumably this is in reference to the years 1993-1995, 2009-2011, and 2021-2023...? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divided_government_in_the_Unit...
> 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!
> 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.
Another good argument against our subsidy of education (although maybe not against research) is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education
I don't really agree, and I am surprised there are people here who would argue against funding research.
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!
The costal vampire empires rob those towns of youth and future
"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)
> How so?
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.
Because there are people who believe we don't need new things. What is research to them?
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.
No. It is about spiteful ignorance vs science and rationality.
Pretty funny plan, outsource all the manual labor, shut down rnd and then get rid of academia.
.
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.
Academia is not the only place to learn.
>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.
> Every day at class I would keep a tally of how many lies and incorrect statements and explainations would get made every day.
In your computer science classes? What/where were you studying?
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.
Now the student is going to walk away thinking 0x1234 means 0<unspecified things>1234, in decimal. That's crazy, man. That is not good teaching.
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.
Your computer /science/ class taught source control? Wild.
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.
I wonder what that is at the expense of
I would love to see a list of those lies. I may have picked them up at university too and could be naively believing them myself.
Or you could be naively believing the list you receive attributes them correctly.
You don't need a list. You need to research the subjects on which you care to be informed.
I wasn't taking them seriously, I just thought the list would be entertaining.
> Every day at class I would keep a tally of how many lies and incorrect statements and explainations would get made every day.
If you were smarter than all of your professors you either went to a very bad college or you are experiencing something like Dunning Kruger
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.
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.
Knowledge is not one dimensional. And I'm not saying I would be able to have done a better job of teaching the material.
Would academia likewise stand for industry?
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?
Academia provides the benefits listed in the article. The relationship is pretty clear.
Applications to graduate school typically surge during times of economic downturns when industry is on its back foot. So...yes?
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2009/feb/17/rise-appli... (16 years ago) and more recently https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-12/grad-scho...
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'm guessing most executives and scientists at oil companies, Monsanto, banks, etc are educated at these same (often elite) universities.
So, if they're teaching all these are pure evil, they are not doing a very good job.
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.
What does this mean?
The article points out that industry benefits from academic funding.
Are you implying that a) academia does not benefit from industry or b) if industry’s survival were threatened academia would not care?
Academia benefits hugely from industry and would/does stand to protect those benefits.
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.
> Would academia likewise stand for industry?
Yes, but academia doesn't have the money to be of help for the industry.
Does industry hire people straight from the womb?
Only Apple in third-world countries.
many downvotes for asking a question without any implications. I wonder what it means
>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
> it feels a little good
Revanchism typically does, but it's a highly destructive path. Hope you're enjoying the high now, the lows could be quite ugly.
Acting out always feels good. But we resist those kinds of behaviors for good reason.
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.
> seems to have made 2024 an indictment against these kinds of policies
Really? I don't think that's true at all based on the swing voters I've talked to.
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?)
Not sure I really follow your point. Why would a political bait-and-switch not be high profile?
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!
Swing voters are not the majority of the voting public that the parent comment referenced.
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.
"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
I'm having trouble decoding this.
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.
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.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/05/22/okla...
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”.
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.
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.
What possibly could feel good about entering a new dark age?
To be fair, it likely will not be a dark age.
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.
> The reality is that our companies will still be able to hire scientists from foreign universities.
If we let them in.
https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20...
"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."
Or we might arrest them when they come.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/25/science/russian-scientist...
"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."
As a result, they're already nopeing out.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01636-5
"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."
Mmmmm... ok. You got me there.
But to be fair, that's a different problem.
And even if we in the US want to institute policies rooted in various ideologies of superiority, (most of which border on imbecillia)..
humanity in the rest of the world would still push forward the boundaries of science. That was my material point.
But yeah, you make a point that really does kind of demolish my assertion that we would benefit from that global effort.
What DEI initatives do you mean?
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.
This comment has some real "cut off my nose to spite my face" energy.
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.
Not to mention the shit show of DOGE.
Do you have any... sources?
> 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.
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 "feels pretty bad" bit comes much later.
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.
> research universities have billions of dollars in buffers.
Where is this myth coming from?
Harvard has a $53 billion endowment.
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).
Harvard is renowned for being an extreme outlier on endowments, too.
Research universities typically have essentially zero endowment, and what they do have are not applicable to funding the research.
Endowments aren't meant to be spent on operational expenses.
> 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.
In 2024, Harvard's endowment grew by about $5bn.
During the same period, it received about $1bn in "Research: Federal and Non-Federal sponsored revenue".
I'm not sure paying that $1bn from its endowment would be an existential threat.
And in some years it grows less, or even shrinks.
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.
20% of Harvard's endowment is unrestricted.
There's plenty of waste in Harvard's budget, which taxpayers subsidise both directly and indirectly.
Interesting analogy. I suppose this is why I should be able to receive iPhones free from Apple too?
Their value grew tremendously yet we as consumers of their phones still have to keep paying them!
> Mostly developed to the same extent
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'
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.)
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.
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.
So one houses humans nicely, the other houses humans horribly - and you support the horrible option?
>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.