Alaska’s scientists despair over plan to shrink state universities | Hacker News Reader

Alaska’s scientists despair over plan to shrink state universities

nature.com

It is a little buried in there, but it is worth noting that the cut in funding is going to have a major impact on some important climate change research groups and facilities.

It should not be a surprise that the governor who scrapped the funding is a Republican. This isn't just a part of an anti-government or even anti-education strategy, it is a part of the war on science (specifically regarding climate change).

I found this link via https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/carnage, which includes another link to a bomb-shell of a piece on the 'consultant' who's spearheading this effort: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/meet-the-right-wing-consu...

For those who did not click, this consultant is "the itinerant grim reaper of state budgets who has for more than twenty years been going from state to state when a new Republican governor comes into power cutting state spending down to the bone and making way for tax cuts for the wealthy."

For some of these people, I honestly have a hard time telling just how much they actually believe in these policies, and how much it happens to serve their other ideological interests by proxy even though they know full well that their economic policies of choice are a load of malarkey. I mean, history has shown a trail of bodies from these kinds of moves.

> This isn't just a part of an anti-government or even anti-education strategy

Big corporations should be paying way more taxes. It would be a good way to avoid creating such undemocratic centers of power. Education is a human right: Article 26. (1) Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.

* https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/

Uneducated population doesn’t understand the repercussions of their choices and can be easily controlled through FUD. There have been regimes (e.g. Portugal’s military dictatorship) who made lack of education an official policy.

This implies educated people can't also be easily controlled. It may require different specific tactics, but I see little evidence that they can't also be controlled, generally speaking.

Your post sparked curiosity in me, and I googled it... but according to Wikipedia, the Portuguese dictatorship expanded literacy to cover most of the population, and also made a:

> strong investment in secondary and university education, which experienced in this period one of the fastest growth rates of Portuguese education history to date. [1]

So, it seems like Wikipedia contradicts your statement...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estado_Novo_(Portugal)#Educati...

While that is true in this specific instance, history is pretty rife with dictators slaughtering entire classes of educated people. Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge are the first example I have off the top of my head.

The above claim comes from this article: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/05/portugals-radic...

More specifically (quoting relevant paragraph):

In truth, there was a lot of ignorance back then. Forty years of authoritarian rule under the regime established by António Salazar in 1933 had suppressed education, weakened institutions and lowered the school-leaving age, in a strategy intended to keep the population docile. The country was closed to the outside world; people missed out on the experimentation and mind-expanding culture of the 1960s. When the regime ended abruptly in a military coup in 1974, Portugal was suddenly opened to new markets and influences. Under the old regime, Coca-Cola was banned and owning a cigarette lighter required a licence. When marijuana and then heroin began flooding in, the country was utterly unprepared.

That said, you are correcting wikipedia says the exact opposite which is interesting.

Did the UN declare that we are obligated to provide free post-secondary education, or am I misreading that?

The UA system does a lot of unique research.

Similar cuts hit (say) UNC or Berkely would be a tragedy too, but a lot of the people and projects could move to Duke or Stanford pretty easily.

Not many places have icebreaker research vessels like the RV Sikuliaq, herds of reindeer and muskoxen (UAF's large animal research station), or giant RF transmitters for studying the ionosphere (HAARP--and no, it doesn't control the weather).

> (HAARP--and no, it doesn't control the weather)

Or your mind. The first time I ever heard of HAARP was a wonky conspiracy theory that it was being used for mind control, purposely dumbing down the masses, no less.

Once I discovered what it actually is, I found it quite interesting.

I've been to UAF and stayed in the dorms -- it's gorgeous.

Ted Stevens channeled tons of federal funds into his state over the years. [1]

I can't pretend to understand Alaska's budget situation, but, in my opinion, it's a goddamned shame to cut off your state's future.

[1] https://www.dermotcole.com/reportingfromalaska/2018/9/1/mcca...

There’s an NPR podcast called Midnight Oil that goes into detail about a lot of Alaska’s modern history revolving around oil extraction and the associated wealth fund that generates the PFDs (dividends that get handed out every year)

https://www.npr.org/podcasts/532251021/midnight-oil-the-big-...

All to increase the yearly state handout to Alaskans and yet folks decry socialism ... how ironic.

I would imagine the universities contribute quite significantly to their local economies, this could harm them quite a bit.

Not as much as oil sadly

Just a side note: this was #1, as it should be, and a few right-wingers very very obviously flagged it for political reasons and knocked it entirely off the front page. Which should be actionable.

It might not be exactly political. We seem to get about a dozen articles per day on climate change and that just gets tiresome. Dedicated climate change blogs are elsewhere. When I look at the new articles just now, 3 out of 30 are obviously about climate change. That's 10%, which is absurd. I probably missed several, because I just looked at headlines. Of course people are going to play whack-a-mole with that.

Flipping your judgement around, did you like the article for political reasons? We could equally well say this: "a few left-wingers very very obviously upvoted it for political reasons and spammed it on to the front page. Which should be actionable." We're not supposed to be doing political battle on Hacker News.

There were other articles that could have been used, without beating a dead horse. Here is one, with an insightful comment section, that doesn't needlessly push the climate guilt trip: https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2019/07/16/university-of-alas...

Even better would be an article that actually lists the degree programs being kept and cut. There should be some concern about the loss of research that would help with petroleum extraction and mining, or a confirmation that those important programs are safe. There could be some mention of HAARP.

I'm afraid that's not accurate. (Isn't it fascinating how something that didn't happen can be "very very obvious"?) Rather, a moderator downweighted it because this story has had several major discussions on HN recently:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20383708

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20479471

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20548701

No important story ever feels like it gets enough discussion on HN, because frontpage space is the scarcest resource here: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme.... It's important to avoid repetition because the goal of the site is to gratify curiosity. When there's an ongoing story, one test we apply is whether there is significant new information in a new submission: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme.... In this case I don't think the bar was met.

Thank you for taking all that time to clarify this for me.

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