5 thoughts on ““An Indefensible Embarrassment””

  1. Lack of comment on the Obama administration indicates, to me at least, that American academics have become so monolithic and partisan in their thinking that they have lost most of their utility to the country.
    Clearly there is a crying need for a title IX for conservatives in academia, and soon.

  3. One of the things that has bothered me about modern academia is its stifling of creative thought. Here, we have an example. Huge political science issues are being roundly ignored by a supposedly serious conference on the matter. If they’re ignoring it, then who’s doing their job instead? I wonder if we’re on the way to leaving a sort of golden age of human thought and freedom. For example, I ran across this remarkable article while googling for the percent of scientists who are still living.

    Basic research is a common good for two reasons: it helps to satisfy the human need to understand the universe we inhabit, and it makes new technologies possible. It must be supported from the public purse because it does not yield profits if it is supported privately. Because basic research in science flourishes only when it is fully open to the normal processes of scientific debate and challenge, the results must be available to all. That is why it is always more profitable to use someone else’s basic research than to support your own. For most people it will also always be easier to let someone else do the research. In other words, not everyone wants to be a scientist. It follows that in order to serve the need of satisfying human curiosity we scientists must find a way to teach science to non-scientists.

    That job may turn out to be impossible. The frontiers of science have moved far from the experience of ordinary persons. Unfortunately, we have never developed a way to bring people along as informed tourists of the vast terrain we have conquered, without training them to become professional explorers. If it turns out to be impossible to do that, the people may decide that the technological trinkets we send back from the frontier are not enough to justify supporting the cost of the expedition. If that happens, science will not merely stop expanding, it will die.

    Let me finish by summarizing what I’ve been trying to tell you. We stand at an historic juncture in the history of science. The long era of exponential expansion ended decades ago, but we have not yet reconciled ourselves to that fact. The present social structure of science, by which I mean institutions, education, funding, publications and so on all evolved during the period of exponential expansion, before The Big Crunch. They are not suited to the unknown future we face. Today’s scientific leaders, in the universities, government, industry and the scientific societies are mostly people who came of age during the golden era, 1950 – 1970. I am myself part of that generation. We think those were normal times and expect them to return. But we are wrong. Nothing like it will ever happen again. It is by no means certain that science will even survive, much less flourish, in the difficult times we face. Before it can survive, those of us who have gained so much from the era of scientific elites and scientific illiterates must learn to face reality, and admit that those days are gone forever.

    I don’t buy his assertion that basic research should be funded by the public purse. But I think the last part is interesting. Academia is basically functioning on an assumption of exponential growth that has long been gone. That’s how the PhD programs are set up – to train substantially more researchers and teachers than currently exist – even though the need for those people may not be there in the quantities produced.

    1. The can do attitude of that period (1950-1975) is gone. People are being taught to like being [mind] controlled. The movie Divergent probably represents a subconscience acknowledgement of this. But there will always be some people that are drawn to science and liberal (not ref. to political) thought.

  4. IT’s all of a piece:

    Give people power, remove the consequences of abusing it, and they will most often misuse it.

    Professors have extreme power over the lives of their students via academic scores. There are no consequences for misuing that power.

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