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The Academic Pipeline Stall: Why Industry Must Stand for Academia

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146 points MaysonL | 4 comments | 12 May 25 02:34 UTC | HN request time: 0.941s | 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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eli_gottlieb ◴[12 May 25 05:37 UTC] No.43959942[source]▶
Can you show that the left-wing politics added up to 55% of the NSF's total budget and stretched across all 37 of its directorates? Because those are what's getting cut.
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fallingknife ◴[12 May 25 07:42 UTC] No.43960521[source]▶
Is that your standard here? It has to be 55% to be a problem? If someone working for me diverted 1% of their company budget to political nonsense then that would be their last act as an employee. If you are mandated to spend taxpayer money on science and you spend any of it on garbage like that, you are stealing from the public.
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anonymousDan ◴[12 May 25 08:26 UTC] No.43960768[source]▶
So people with a Latin background are not part of the public?
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tristor ◴[12 May 25 18:44 UTC] No.43966259[source]▶
> So people with a Latin background are not part of the public?

Hispanic people don't like being called "latinx" so anything with that word in it is pretty much automatically invalidated as being credulent, especially if it is purporting to be helping people when they're colonizing their language.

The person you're responding to is way overplaying their case, though, most of the funding that was cut wasn't DEI related, but let's also be serious people here.

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ModernMech ◴[12 May 25 21:37 UTC] No.43967694[source]▶
I don't think it's so cut and dry.

  Program Manager: Alicia Santiago Gonzalez
  Veronica Garcia-Luis (Principal Investigator)
Moreover you're assuming a lot from just a title.
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tristor ◴[12 May 25 21:40 UTC] No.43967722[source]▶
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latinx#Among_US_Hispanics/Lati...

It's language colonization. The correct term, if there is even a need for an alternative for "latino" is "latine", which has existed in Spanish for thousands of years.

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ModernMech ◴[12 May 25 22:11 UTC] No.43967932[source]▶
"language colonization" sounds pretty woke to me, I think I've lost the plot. I thought we were trying to get rid of woke. Now we are getting rid of "language colonizers" because their terms are wrong?

I thought we were going back to a meritocracy, where people are judged on the merits of their ideas. You read a word and concluded a lot.

It's interesting -- I was in a thread with someone else lamenting it's so hard to get funding if you go against the establishment. Now you're telling me this research shouldn't have been funded because it uses a term that goes against the established term. I think that really highlights the challenges in science funding.

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1. tristor ◴[13 May 25 15:17 UTC] No.43973886[source]▶
I think you are incorrectly assuming that I am somehow supporting cutting science funding and/or that I am "anti-woke" (I am a little bit, but more because I think it's unhelpful than because I think the goal of helping people who are underrepresented in society is wrong).

The "ideas" are bad when they start from forcing something on a people that doesn't align to their linguistic or cultural experience coming from an outsider using their wealth and power to directly influence outcomes for those people. The use of the word "latinx" is a perfect example of exactly the wrong way to approach trying to help people, which honestly if you are as cynical as I am you see as the point. I don't often believe people who say "I was only trying to help" as they actively seek to destroy other people's cultures and languages.

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2. ModernMech ◴[13 May 25 16:10 UTC] No.43974496[source]▶
You're assuming all of that from just a word. To support your position you would need to cite the proposal, which you haven't read, but are assuming its contents. All you can do is cite the title and conclude it's defacto bad. Most people don't agree that we should base funding decisions on titles of proposals, that's why we have them write a full proposal.
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3. tristor ◴[13 May 25 16:34 UTC] No.43974758[source]▶
I am not saying the proposal is bad, I'm saying I automatically don't trust the authors because they use the term "latinx" in something that's theoretically intended to help the Latin American community. Additionally, the fact our funding climate is such that people feel they have to insert coded language for white academic elites into their proposals for them to be accepted for a grant is part of the problem in at least 3 layers, and probably more than that, of this very complex social issue.
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4. ModernMech ◴[13 May 25 20:36 UTC] No.43977425{3}[source]▶
That's fine if you don't trust the title of this proposal, or this researcher, but that's why you're not in charge of funding science. Typically people who are in charge of funding science reserve their opinions about the efficacy of something until after actually reading the details of the proposal.

All I know from our several back and forths is that you don't like the term latinx and some other people don't, and therefore this proposal, of which you cannot even articulate the details, is a priori defacto harmful. If that's all you have than I think I've learned all I can from exchange.

> people feel they have to insert coded language for white academic elites

Assumed; there's no proof that happened here. You're inventing the genesis of this proposal in your mind.

> this very complex social issue.

Agreed, and that's why we shouldn't draw conclusions (like "they actively seek to destroy other people's cultures and languages") from a single word or a title, and why we usually rely on panels of domain experts who understand the nuance to fund such complex social research. Which is what happened in this case.