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The Academic Pipeline Stall: Why Industry Must Stand for Academia

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146 points MaysonL | 2 comments | 12 May 25 02:34 UTC | HN request time: 0.421s | source
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gotoeleven ◴[12 May 25 04:01 UTC] No.43959536[source]▶
I didn't look at every one on the list of these 1000 NSF grants that were cancelled:

https://airtable.com/appGKlSVeXniQZkFC/shrFxbl1YTqb3AyOO?jnt...

but I think if you skim the titles you can sense a theme.

Here's the very first one: "Cambio: A Professional Development Approach for Building Latinx-focused Cultural Competence in Informal Science Education Institutions" for a whopping 2.8 million dollars.

This is not basic research, this is not important research, this is left wing politics parasitically attached to scientific institutions.

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userbinator ◴[12 May 25 04:19 UTC] No.43959617[source]▶
Besides the usual DEI stuff, some of those titles sound like the output of a stochastic generator trained on buzzwords:

"HSI Implementation and Evaluation Project: Using Peer-Enhanced Blockchain-Based Learning Environments to Promote Student Engagement and Retention"

"Blockchain-Based Learning Environments". That's my WTF of the day.

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1. lumost ◴[12 May 25 05:43 UTC] No.43959970[source]▶
I wonder how much of this is “don’t hat the player, hate the game.”

As a society, we decided that academics must get funding outside of their department. We also chose that funding bodies liked blockchain for reasons unknown. There is probably a professor somewhere who is working on peer incentives to support education, and realized the work would get funded if they stored the incentives in a blockchain rather than a database. If this professor had stronger professional ethics - someone else would have the same realization.

Is it the professor, the department, or the funding agencies fault?

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2. huijzer ◴[12 May 25 05:52 UTC] No.43960014[source]▶
> Is it the professor, the department, or the funding agencies fault?

Like so many things that are being turned upside down nowadays, I think the author already answers it:

> Before we go any further, let me be clear: this isn’t about […] ideologies.

The author did not give arguments for this claim.