Canada Hires 48 Scholars Away from Top U.S. Universities
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
before it was Germany - but then nazism took hold. & researchers left starting from 1925/30. Slowly now Germany is recovering their place in science.
such a tragedy - with the dismantling of NIH etc - smart people might say, the U.S made progress without the NIH. The issue is the US was able to invite a lot of immigrants, then even raid those ones with blemished records e.g during Operation Paperclip.
100 years of work, going to waste. It will likely take another 100 years to recover.
Here's another example: I regularly read quality publications in my field from researchers at the University of North Texas. In 2024, UNT ranked 170th in the country by R&D expenditure. Until I start seeing excellent work from other countries' 170th-ranked universities, I'm not worried about them poaching a few researchers from us now.
We don't appreciate how good the research ecosystem is in the U.S. The arsonists in power are trying to set fire to the house, and everyone will be poorer for it in the future, but we can still mitigate the damage.
But can you see their work in the usual places you look? Do your favorite science publications include european or chinese research articles?
Academia was on fire a long time ago, as evident in the reproducibility crisis.
A core cause is publishing pressure: Journals give peer reviewers almost no time to approve new works, and a professor who fails to approve what he reviews can jeopardize his own ability to publish, turning the process into a frenzied rubber stamp.
Lack of actual peer review means significant errors and even fraud gets published without question.
I've seen the pressure to publish cause a professor to cover up protocol lapses in rat studies. The professor was made aware that the control group had been mishandled, invalidating the findings, but he published anyway because failure to publish something after receiving grant money could harm his career. Even in harder sciences like chemistry I've seen papers with glaring errors in the equations.
The current state is that the majority of academic output is not reproducible -- you cannot depend upon it for building toward future results. This is a house that needs to burn until the truth matters again.
If those 48 scholars meet the following three criteria, then you should be concerned: Top university && Top researcher && Important field.
> Their hiring is paid for through a Canadian government investment of more than > 500 million Canadian dollars (about $364 million) in research fields that are > strategically important, from global warming to artificial intelligence.
Agree it's not clear from the article, but I'd expect that a lot of that is research funding, not necessarily salary. IOW, this is money that might have been spent on this anyhow, getting access to additional scholars is icing on the cake.
I have a friend who is participating in this, and at one point he told me the numbers. My recollection is that maybe he said they were offering $2M CDN per year for 5 years? Or maybe it was $1M CDN for each of the next 5 years, with an option to renew for 5 more?
And I think there was something about a hardware budget, but I don't recall if that was included in the numbers are separate. In any case, while they are offering competitive salaries for Canada, the money offered is definitely not all going for the salary of just the recruited academics.