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.

The author (and Nature) pretends like those aren't real problems and that scientists should get unconditional support. That's never been the case.

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.

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.

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.

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.

So, if they're teaching all these are pure evil, they are not doing a very good job.

You don't need a list. You need to research the subjects on which you care to be informed.

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.

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.

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.

Really? I don't think that's true at all based on the swing voters I've talked to.

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.

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.

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).

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.

- 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.

(Folks claim that college teaches 'critical thinking' but there's weak, if any, empirical support for that claim.)

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.

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...

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.

I don't think this is true. I think academia is still pretty good (not great, but pretty good) at not taking sides. I don't see a ton of overly-ideological academics (if anything, Academia skews unnaturally conservative, simply out of fear).

I think the 'problem' is that science is moving forward and settling debates that previously weren't settled, and therefore lived in the realm of "political opinion". But because people don't like the mostly-objective scientific results, and because it's being debated politically, they're simply accusing academia of 'taking sides', because that's how they picked their political views.

Examples exist with things like Global Warming, or Human Rights, or LGBTQ+, or Vaccines, or so on.

Global Warming is an obvious one -- while there's always more to learn, and we can't perfectly predict everything -- the base science has been 100% settled for decades now -- the earth is warming, human pollution is the primary cause, we know what we're doing to cause it, and our refusal to stop causing it is changing environments. We can argue about how much, or how long, or how badly, or the accuracy of models and projections and so on -- but there is no factual argument that Global Warming isn't happening, or that humanity isn't directly contributing to it.

But people simply don't like that answer, despite it being true, so they debate it anyway -- and then flip around and accuse academia of 'picking a side' when Academia didn't pick or choose anything.

If any academic could, in good faith, prove "yep, air pollution isn't causing global warming, in fact, Earth's orbit is falling into the Sun at a rapid rate, we can prove this with astrological/radiological measurements" or whatever, they'd be rushing to demonstrate this. They aren't, because they can't -- it's simply not true.

I'm not saying it never happens, or that no one abuses academia to push political views (it does sometimes happen). But most academics aren't "picking" their stance on these issues, science and research is uncovering facts or evidence on a continuous basis, and academics usually just stick to what's been discovered or observed (and -- for the parts still unknown or missing -- make theories or educated guesses that are supported by science and do not contradict the objective discoveries. If new results or evidence arrives, they revoke or adjust their theory to fit with the new discovery).

Some humans simply refuse to accept the things that have been discovered or learned through science. It requires a person to be willing to change their mind based on something they have learned, and a lot of people simply hate doing that ever (so much so, that their answer to hating objective results of science, is to simply defund all the science)

From this principle the educational department has policy that if a school has political activities, such as inviting political representatives, they must only do so under objective terms equal to all political parties. They explicitly write that selecting the invitation on the basis of excluding someone is not allowed. They can also not base the criteria in order to exclude certain political views.

During a time when a controversial right-wing party gained popularity, some schools decided to stop doing political activities with students as a result. Others allowed any party to join in the discussions with students, as suggested by the policy.

The Average Joe graduates with enormous student debt and ends up in a low paying job, one that's entirely unrelated to their degree. They never experienced the benefits of education nor research. In fact, they feel quite ripped off by the whole affair, so this point holds no stock for them.

> So... Burn down academia with no replacement? Shutter and board research and leave America with no future?

This is a bit of a hysterical reaction to "budget cuts." Academia isn't going anywhere and probably won't change much, it's just going to have less money. In fact, k-12 education is seeing far more severe budget cuts as part of the bill, but there are fewer prophecies of doom in its honor. Academics argue passionately for their own bread, but not for those who are starving. (They also send their kids to private school)

This definition captures academics, university administrators, journalists, writers, analysts and other talking heads on TV, Hollywood screenwriters, many kinds of civil servant, people rich enough to be philanthropists, and frequently but not always politicians. Those are the classes of people that are usually being handwaved towards when the word elite is used.