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Comment by kashunstva | Hacker News Reader

If this administration had an actual plan for priorities in science, I suppose I could understand shuffling grant funding among them. But there is no plan other than to destroy.

While I no longer live in the U.S. and would never return, I grew up there & did benefit enormously from access to public academic institutions and to the Federal grants in science research that allowed them to thrive. Seeing this whole apparatus dismantled and sold-off for scrap is beyond sad. Finally the party that has striven for so long, since at least the late 1950s, to eliminate public education - and perhaps the whole academic enterprise is on the verge of achieving results beyond its wildest imagination. I hope that they are satisfied now; but doubt they are.

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It’s just plain old antiintellectualism.

The strategy is to destroy an opponents centres of power. This is the result of the liberalisation of academia over the last 40 years.

The spread of opinions in a mathematics department on social issues should reflect the general populations. Yet the few foolish enough to express conservative views can expect to be terminated.

I hope the next generation of institution builders keep this lesson in mind: you need buy in from all tax payers when you're spending their money.

Edit: Responses in this thread give me little hope for American academia correcting course before it is destroyed. One can hope something better comes from its ashes.

What ‘conservative views’ are being terminated in mathematics departments?

Presumably it's the fault of mathematics departments for not admitting more dunces who could be taken in by the flag-draped anti-Americanism of talk radio, and then coddling them with kid gloves to avoid hurting their feelings.

The claims of the liberalisation of academia are part of a propaganda campaign from the people currently destroying academia - that narrative is totally disconnected from my experienced reality as someone who worked through an MA and a PhD. There's always been lefties in the Humanities, and there's been little change there over the last 50 years that I've seen. There used to be more Communists than there are now.

If people are allowed to make their own life choices, you are unlikely to get equal representation of various demographic groups.

For example, conservatives tend to prioritize wages and stability when making career choices. Liberals are more likely to choose jobs that are inherently interesting but don't pay that well relative to the risk. If you let people make their own choices, liberals are more likely to try to become professors. And once a profession becomes associated with a particular group, people outside the dominant group may be reluctant to enter it, as they may be afraid they wouldn't fit in.

If you find that problematic, you could try to fight it with regulation. For example, you could institute quotas. Maybe 40% of all software engineers in every company must be female and 40% of all nurses in every hospital must be male. That may even work if there are enough qualified candidates available. But if the pool of candidates is already skewed, quotas can be a recipe for disaster.

If regulation is a too blunt tool, you may get better results with programs that encourage underrepresented groups to enter a field. You could have support networks for conservative professors, female software engineers and male nurses. You could have outreach programs targeting kids in those groups. And you could prioritize them in education and recruitment.

>american academia correcting it course

The only course that need to be corrected is the one destroying it right now, any other issue you pointed out is straight up anti-intelictualist

I'm not American and I find it hard to believe that there is actually no strategy behind this whatsoever?

I get that it's what media are screaming at the top of their lungs (orange man bad etc), but there must be more behind this, no?

Then again, they did put JFK jr. in charge of making infectious disease research impossible. I couldnt think of a worse person for that or politics in general.

Talk to employees working at Federal agencies.

If there were a plan, one would hope they would have shared it?

This is my frustration - there is clearly no plan, but smart people will assume that there must be one, because they bring their own biases of how they approach problems and project that onto trump.

Trump has always been a terrible executor even when getting the initial idea correct. See all his failed businesses. In this case, along with the tariffs, his frame of reference is 40+ years out of date. He thinks that people will do whatever they have to in order to work with US. That the best and brightest won’t leave. That other countries will bow down to his will. That’s not the world today, even if a lot of Teslers are made in the US.

There hasn't been time for any kind of coherent review of the programs. A few programs receive enough outrage, and they're restored almost immediately.

So no, I don't think there is any kind of strategy beyond "cut any budget item that my constituents don't care about, especially if it makes liberals angry".

There no strategy. They put rfk Jr in charge of public health. Orange man is bad. Or more specifically he's a selfish corrupt liar who doesn't really care that much if he destroys the country. To the extent that he'd prefer to be a king or dictator he'd prefer economy and military to be strong while he's in control but even that falls to his whims and instincts which are authoritarian, racist and conspiratorial. He's too intellectually lazy to learn how things work. Of course some of his subordinates are far right true believers but even then flattering Trump corruption and incompetence rule the day more then ideology.

To answer your question -- they say "to save money".

The question is still open whether it actually saves the announced sums, or whether it saves anything at all.

The benefits of education on a country are decades long to fully see the positive outcomes. How do you expect differently by destroying said institutions? Your kids or likely kids kids will be feeling the decision of today as the beginning of the dark ages (at least in the US). Without innovative people able to achieve great progress, where does society, , hell humanity go? At the very least from a here and now position, it's a strong signal to continue pulling money out of the US and into countries that have better long term outlook.

> The guidance said that in the event of a request that “violates or doesn’t follow proper procedures”, employees were to contact Dorothy Aronson, the NSF’s chief information officer. “Do not give any indication that the request will be denied,” the guidance statement noted. Two members of DOGE, Luke Farritor and Zachary Terrell, were quickly given complete access to NSF grant-management systems despite statements in the guidance to staffers that they should initially receive read-only access.

I feel like “don’t make them follow policy” and “we’re going to lie about the access they have” is pretty telling as to whether there’s more behind this

“orange man bad” is a pretty good example of a thought-terminating cliche (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3...).

No, there is no more to this. They fucking eliminated grants for studies on transgenic mice because they thought that was the same thing as transgender. That’s the level of thought and care put into this.

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