Senaste sökningarna
Sökalternativ
1. For the past thirty years I've had the best job in the world.
I've had the opportunity to follow my curiosity; explore the workings of nature and society; mentor students and junior colleagues in the same process; and teach generations of students about it all.
Curiosity-driven research isn't just fun; it led us to develop tools that thousands of scientists use to find meaningful patterns in massive datasets (e.g. www.mapequation.org).
Separately, I've had the opportunity to be part of the largest collective intellectual effort in human history.
In 2020, the scientific community came together—remotely, by necessity—in response to the COVID pandemic, to understand how this disease spreads and what that it does to people, to find of returning life to a semblance of normal amidst a pandemic, to develop a vaccine in record time.
And I've been able to teach 1000s of students. I've written a popular textbook about evolution; developed a class and book about critical thinking that is used around the world; and most recently launched a humanities course about LLMs that will be taught at scores of schools in the fall.
But right now my job doesn't feel like the best job in the world. Targeted attacks on university funding have put every US institution into a severe crisis. As of now, there is no way we will be able to continue doing the biomedical research, the conservation science, etc. that we always have.
2. Nor is there any way we will be able to continue teaching our students with the individualized attention and care that has been a hallmark of our department for decades.
Every day brings new deliberations about how to handle catastrophic cuts and make the best of a terrible situation.
My colleagues are afraid. Our work is scrutinized for forbidden words like "gender" and "climate". The pipeline of talent has been cut off. We can no longer train graduate students and postdocs. These are individual dreams crushed, causing collective damage that will take generations to undo.
In short, we feel under attack.
I think daily about Russell Vought's plan for bureaucrats. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down…We want to put them in trauma.”
And Chris Rufo’s plan for universities: "A medium- or long-term goal of mine is to figure out how to adjust the formula of finances from the federal government to the universities in a way that puts them in an existential terror."
This is the reality of being an academic in the United States today.
But Vought and Rufo are missing something.
We aren't cowards.
And we know we are not the enemies of the American people either, much as these ideologues might like to claim that.
3. Attacks like Vought describes may make cowards and grifters of his ilk want to stay home, but they make us all the more determined to show up and fight.
Science is bigger than Chris Rufo.
It's bigger than Russell Vought.
It's bigger than Elon Musk.
It's bigger than Donald Trump.
It's bigger than the United States of America.
Like art, music, philosophy, and literature, science is literally part of humanity's heritage.
My colleagues and I have had the amazing opportunity to be part of something vastly larger than ourselves, with meaning that transcends any state, regime, or generation.
They can't take that away.
And anyone who has been part of this grand humanist tradition is someone who will not lie down and cower before these sad bullies.
I don't know what happens to science in the US over the next four years, but I have no doubt as to where the arc of history bends.
We aren't going anywhere.
fin
If the US is so incredibly stupid, there will be others who will do the science and harvest the profit and power from that.