The US has the strongest university and research system in the world. Wrecking that will be one of the worst acts of self-harm ever.
As part of the curriculum, there were distinct lessons (in this hard-science course) on feminist design, avoiding white-savior rollouts, and cultural relativism -- with much room to expound on their importance, and little room to critique.
I happened to agree with lots of the mindsets of these lessons a priori, but I was definitely acutely aware the whole course that there was an ideological bent, even in STEM.
The networking stack obviously had no viewpoint, but the course teaching it certainly did.
In neuroscience there have been studies showing that the methods developed may not be effective for all races or sexes https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-022-01046-0
Historically studies have had an overrepresentation of white men as subjects. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1761670/
The problem is that the people who have seen and who have experienced this will never tell you. I and many like me I've talked to will simply never tell their actual beliefs to a colleague who believes like this.
Cannot tell you how many countless meetings I've been in where I have a differing opinion and say nothing because of backlash and loss of softpower.
The truth is that there are huge numbers of your coworkers, bosses, and employees who have different thoughts that don't align with the current ideology. These people have learned to say nothing. I myself being one of them.
I have on multiple occasions just straight lied to a liberal coworker about my beliefs because me telling what I actually think would make it very difficult to work with them.
I used to work in academia and was involved in NSF and DOE grants. I’ve been in industry (IC then manager) since then.
My sense is that grant funding was less merit based than industry funding. I’m not saying it’s so corrupt that it should be completely torn down, but there’s just less accountability in academia - you can get a grant, fail to deliver on what you promised, and still get another grant after that and that can be your whole career if you know how to play the academic social game and are good at writing proposals.
Of course that can be gamed, and of course we need good faith oversight, but if none of the research projects we're funding were to ever fail, that would be evidence that we're being massively too conservative in the avenues for new discoveries that we're investing in exploring.
The last time I checked when I worked at a Stanford biomedical university department that was substantially NIH-funded, there were 2 full time employee grant writers who had to supply the government grant process with a laundry list of specific data with each carefully-worded proposal because they were regularly competing with other universities to win a specific grant.
Also, if nepotism and favoritism are the criteria for removal, let's start with the Executive branch.
Insiders right fucking here are insisting they have not experienced that.
Which insiders are right?
Guess what, it's both! America is 350 million people. Most things have been experienced by someone. That does not allow you to generalize usefully.
Meanwhile the women and non-white insiders are still experiencing straight up racism and sexual harassment and sexism so....