Postscript to the preceding

This deserves a proper quote, regarding the decline of US academia:

Some of this was foreseeable. The high school graduate demographic is shrinking, and college and university tuition rates were growing unsustainably. But Trump’s personal attacks on Harvard and other elite universities are erasing the old social contract between the government and academia. On top of that, Trump’s attack on immigration is discouraging foreign student enrollment, and these students were paying full tuition, subsidizing tuition for domestic students. The US higher education brand is tarnished by Trump policies and may never recover. US talent—graduate students, postdocs, faculty—are looking abroad and will take their intellectual capital with them.

Not much can be done about the decreased number of available high school grads (still our major source of students at most universities and colleges). The same thing occurred after the Baby Boom generation reached their college years. Give it a generation and there will be another increase in available potential traditional students, assuming there are sufficient colleges and universities left in the US by then. The unsustainable tuition rates are definitely an own-goal by our politicians starting approximately during the Reagan era onward. Don't even get me started on the student loan bubble. Trump does manage to make things worse, and I say that knowing that some of my readership will be offended. So it goes. The reputational damage is something that I am not sure can be undone. I am usually optimistic, but I don't really see how US higher ed comes back from what will be a catastrophic four years. Once universities begin obeying in advance, allowing a White House occupant (of any party, but for now since it's Trump we'll keep our focus there) to extort them, they simply become institutions that are not to be trusted. Fear and expedience are not acceptable excuses, and those administering these once-fine institutions will not be remembered fondly, to put it politely.  

The end of the golden age of higher ed...some thoughts

Joel Eissenberg, who is one of several writers for the Angry Bear blog, posted today on the end of the golden age of academia. The trigger for the post was undoubtedly an article on academic layoffs at colleges and universities that appeared in the Boston Globe (Joel links to that article if you are interested - I usually don't bother with the Boston Globe due to paywall, and my own paycheck can only sustain a small handful of subscriptions). 

Joel is a professor emeritus, and his experiences are worth reading about. To an extent, what he experienced as a student tracks with my own. Going to Cal State Fullerton was dirt cheap when I was an undergraduate. In-state students paid some nominal fees, but no tuition, although those fees got steeper around the time I graduated with my BA. Funding for public colleges and universities began to dry up as the 1980s progressed. In California, part of the problem was the passage of a series of initiatives that limited the state's ability to collect revenue, which meant that public education took a hit. You could say that by the time I became a college student, the golden age of academia in the US was already in the rear view mirror. Many of us would not have noticed at the time as facilities were still being maintained, a wide variety of courses and degrees were still being offered - including in the traditional liberal arts that are often derided here in the US. If the student government wanted to fund a Henry Rollins band concert, it could without a problem. Heck, Cal State Fullerton had Olympic-quality men's and women's fencing teams (I was friends with a few members of the women's team). 

Austerity took its toll, and into the 1990s (I stuck around to get my MA in Experimental Psychology) I noticed a decline in maintenance and upkeep (overflowing trash cans became the norm for my last couple years) and a decline in cultural, sports, and academic offerings began. My own funding for my MA degree came from a grant awarded to Ron Riggio, Tom Mayes, and Carolyn Kubiak to study the role of internship experience on managerial skills (individual and group decision-making, interview skills, etc.) above and beyond classroom education. At the time the grant began, there was an understanding that the PIs could apply for an extension beyond the three years they were awarded. That made sense as many of the students that made up Cal State Fullerton's population were non-traditional students who may only have been going to school part-time. In the middle of my second and last year of my MA, we got the bad news that the pot of federal money that made that particular grant possible was going away and that we would have to wrap up sooner than the PIs had hoped. If nothing else, that did motivate me to work around the clock to get my thesis successfully defended. I had good reason to believe there might not be enough money to fund my position much beyond that second year. I managed to get full funding at Mizzou for my PhD, but as we ended the 1990s, the vibe I was getting was that the days of funding students beyond year five were over. Thankfully, I was done with my dissertation before I could find out what no funding looked like. Increasingly, it became difficult to fund doctoral students unless there was grant money to fund them. The US government was no longer interested in funding the land grant institutions and the states weren't necessarily motivated either. We've seen what that means for tuition (my youngest daughter is living that dream right now). But those who advised me were optimistic about higher ed's prospects as the new century approached: surely a boom in student enrollment (which did happen) would lead to an increase in state and federal support. Yeah, that never really happened. 

I've spent my entire career as a full-time professor witnessing the decline of the university as a viable place to study and work. Even the small universities where I've made my living once upon a time offered a full range of degree offerings and handled all custodial and maintenance of the physical plant in-house. Budget cuts led to outsourcing, and layoffs of those staff members, even as student enrollment increased or at least remained steady. I get the feeling that at least on the surface the flagship public universities and elite private universities were able to maintain some semblance of "the golden age" as long as the grant money flowed enough and as long as there were plenty of international students who viewed our graduate and professional degree programs as the gold standard. I'd say those days are truly over. And in reality, the financial pressure for grad students in an era where full funding could not be assured as tuition continued to increase to a greater degree than the inflation rate was taking a toll. Grant funding was getting harder to come by, especially as the Tea Party era took hold in the 2010s. And then came Trump. Now the rule is that funding is only given contingent on being sufficiently "non-woke" (whatever that might mean), and international students are no longer welcome in the eyes of the current federal government. Losing international students will end not only individual research programs, but likely whole degree offerings and the careers those degree offerings sustained. 

I am not optimistic about the prospects for higher ed going forward. Even if the US survives the next few years, the damage to the reputation of our education system will be done. We are already seeing the beginning of a brain drain in the US, and that will likely continue. As someone in the sciences (social sciences specifically), I am still optimistic about how the sciences will progress. The US government can end a lot of the scientific work that universities once did without interference, but there are universities in other nations that will no doubt pick up the slack. It just means that aspiring scientists in the US will want to do their graduate training outside the US and will want to look for career opportunities outside the US. And depending on one's ideological perspective, the response might be "who cares?" By relinquishing its role as a leader in scientific research, US citizens will no longer get to benefit directly from new advances. Their counterparts in China, India, and the EU (which seem well-positioned to hire the very scholars the US no longer wants) are already swooping in to hire scholars who would have otherwise remained in the US. Americans will get used to no longer being first in line. They have no choice. 

A few musings

At some point, I need to re-read Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind. It was a timely critique of higher education when it was published back in 1987 (that book was a surprise Christmas gift from my parents back in the day), and perhaps is more urgent today. Actually, there are a lot of books that would fall under the "cultural criticism" category that deserve a re-read as time permits.

 I won't try to summarize Allan Bloom's book for this post, as I would be drawing on a nearly 40 year old memory, and that's not something I wish to endeavor, but I can discuss a few things I think need to be reformed if higher education is still going to meet our needs as a society. 

Let's start with one elephant in the room: the K-12 system in the US has been in decline for the duration of my adulthood. Think about this: none of my grandparents ever graduated from high school. They either worked small family farms or did manual labor. And yet, they had a better grasp of the arts, philosophy, and literature than the typical college graduate of today. What happened? Too much to mention in a short blog post. But I have noticed a general trend away from teaching critical thinking and more and more teaching to the test. The George W. Bush era arguably accelerated the descent of K-12 education. Note that I am not saying that our instructors are sub-par or about to make some crackpot claim about schools being too "woke" or any other moral panic verbiage. Our nation simply does not offer the educational opportunities that even my age cohort would have taken for granted. By the time one graduates high school, one likely has never been to an art gallery on field trip, or to a local symphony (assuming one still exists), or to a play put on by a local community theatre company. Maybe the kids get exposed to some Shakespeare, but that's hardly a given. If asked to evaluate the merits of an argument, my impression is today's high school graduate is probably going to parrot talking points from a podcaster, peers, or perhaps extended family rather than independently look at the claims made on each side of the argument and offer an informed evaluation. The sort of reflective thinking that these nascent young adults are perfectly capable of demonstrating has been left to go to seed. 

I used to say that my job was undoing the damage caused by the K-12 system, as that system is overwhelmed with all sorts of metrics and standardized tests - none of which have much of anything to do with the sort of reflective thinking we once expected beginning college students to have. Of course, higher education is also in decline in the US, and is probably going to get worse at least for the short and medium term. I am part of that last generation who went to college not just to learn the ropes before finding that entry level managerial gig, but to actually get a well-rounded education (and yes, of course to party as well - social skills are fundamental). The very degree programs that made all that possible are increasingly on the chopping block. I will accept the claim that getting a philosophy degree is not exactly "practical" in terms of getting that first job after graduation, but the skills learned are crucial on their own merits, and have the fringe benefit of making one a better employee to the extent that a job requires critical thinking skills. Majoring in a language may not seem like the obvious strategy for a job where you will work in a cubicle, but one learns in the process not only a different way of thinking but also a knowledge of a culture or set of cultures one would have been ignorant of otherwise. Faculty in higher education aren't exactly reinforced for educating their charges in critical thinking. We're busier than ever completing paperwork to justify our own existences based on some metrics devised by some political appointees that are tangential to education at best.

Institutions of higher education in the US have turned their backs increasingly on the expectation of excellence. Oh, don't get me wrong. There is tons of lip service given to professional development. Just don't count on support for your efforts if you end up on faculty. You'll be reinforced for looking "good enough" based on whatever metrics are used as evaluation and nothing else. The system reinforces mediocrity, especially for those of us who make our lives nurturing our undergraduate students. I have certainly learned the hard way that the sort of ambition that leads to advances (however minor) in our respective fields is unwelcome. Ambition to become an administrator is possibly more accepted. Ambition that leads to errors and fraud are also apparently okay as long as nobody looks to closely. That's just the way it is anymore, as I see it.

We didn't get to this already low point overnight, and I am not sure I am the best person to talk to regarding how to improve the educational system so that it at least continues to function in the service of further developing our global civilization. Education needs to be valued. It's a fundamental need. That means as a society we need to do something radical: fund education from preschool all the way to colleges and universities. At all levels of education, age-appropriate experiences that foster critical thinking, that provide a basic understanding of how our society works (government, civil society, etc.), and foster a genuine appreciation of the arts and humanities as well as the sciences are a must. A student graduating from high school with some basic knowledge of Plato and Aristotle as well as Lao Tzu and Sun Tzu would be a good start. A student graduating high school who understands that the anime they were watching referenced a specific work of art or a play would be a good start. With more funding comes greater expectations, and we as a society need to be up to the challenge. But to get there, so that I can actually do my job the way I intended when I began teaching full time about a quarter of a century ago, we need a massive cultural shift toward valuing what educators do, encourage educators and students to express independent views (whether popular or not), and funding the institutions charged with that task. W do that and we might just have some hope of surviving as a society for the duration of at least this century. On our current path, we'll be lucky to have taught a generation of students how to craft AI prompts to generate reports that have no substance. I don't see how we survive as a society under that dystopian set of circumstances. I wish I could be more optimistic.

How to lie with statistics: ICE edition

When anyone makes a claim that assaults on ICE agents have increased roughly 400% to 500% above last year, that will raise some eyebrows. As framed, it's no wonder these individuals would feel the need to hide their identities and faces. But what if there were less to the story than meets the eye? Techdirt has the dirt (pun intended) on the government's claim. It turns out that for the first half of 2024, there were 10 alleged assaults on ICE agents. For the first half of this year, that number is 79 alleged assaults. Keep in mind that just because an assault is claimed does not mean it was actually an assault (sometimes the DOJ just makes stuff up - I swear these folks would have had productive careers as social psychologists). Even if we take the DOJ claims at face value, the raw number of alleged assaults is really minuscule when we factor in the thousands of encounters ICE agents within each of those time periods have with the public and we would want to factor in that there may have been more encounters this year so far. In other words, once we start factoring in the baseline data for assaults and the sheer amount of ICE agent activity in a given year or half year as is the case, this "dramatic" increase in alleged assaults looks more like statistical noise. This is also my friendly reminder that when public officials use numbers like these to outrage or frighten you, it is important to look under the proverbial hood, kick the tires a bit, and really dig into the data to determine if these officials are being truthful or if they are trying to manipulate you by lying. I'm pretty jaded regarding politicians and political appointees, so often my default is to not believe them until they show verifiable receipts. 

Reckless Disregard for the Truth

I've been following Andrew Gelman's blog for a while. It is typically worth my while. Although he refers to this particular post as a rant, as rants go, it's quite substantial. It's not a purely scientific post, but it is one in which Gelman makes a connection between various sectors of society (science/academia, medical, and law enforcement/political) when it comes to various actors engaged in a reckless disregard for the truth. In each case, Gelman outlines how the individuals involved stretched the truth to the breaking point, often with minimal repercussions. Misleading spin on research results? That's just "normal science", right? Testimony as an expert witness that makes you look idiotic or dishonest? The paycheck will more than cover the ding to one's reputation. ICE "agents" (there are much more accurate words, although they will sound derogatory) claim being "assaulted" by elected officials when every bit of recorded evidence screams the opposite? The White House is above the law, apparently, so that's also business as usual. As Gelman notes, "the scandal isn't that it's illegal, but rather that it is legal." 

So, that's the world we've been living in. Doesn't mean we have to accept it, right? Think of the repercussions to what we're going to call a reckless disregard for the truth. In my own line of work, one can publish findings that are obvious bovine fecal matter, but as long as it gets through peer review that's good enough, we're told. Here's the thing: some people will actually believe what is published and they will go off and use those dubious findings to guide their lives and policy decisions, leading them to take some wrong turns along the way. In other words, the outcomes are not necessarily no harm no foul. To the contrary, the outcomes could be more nefarious, as the actors in the scenarios Gelman laid out muddy the waters, blurring the bounds between fact and fiction, leading to zombie ideas spreading, harming the population at large in the long run. He's also right that we can't stop folks from recklessly disregarding the truth, but we don't have to stand by and tolerate it.  

What are the odds this scholar remains in the US?

After four months in ICE detention facilities, a researcher who fled Russia, Kseniia Petrova, has been released. What did she allegedly do to deserve the revocation of her visa? She transported harmless samples as requested by her supervisor at a Harvard lab (pro tip: those of us who have ever worked for a principal investigator at a major university do not say no to requests to do something legitimately within the scope of the lab's research if we wish to keep working for that particular lab - trust me on that). Once her visa was revoked, she got to spend several months in US gulags. She decided, understandably to fight the deportation (as that would involve her ending up in another gulag in Russia for speaking out against the Russo-Ukraine war), and then got slapped with criminal smuggling charges. In other words, what was at most a minor paperwork blunder could potentially land her a couple decades in prison or worse. For the time being, she is not cleared to go back to work at her lab (unless she gets her visa reinstated), and she is still facing those smuggling charges, even though any sensible judge would likely throw that case out on its merits. Will she stay in the US long enough to face those charges? I seriously doubt it. She is already looking at options to continue working outside of the US. In other words, the US will lose a promising scientist because of a very hardline xenophobic approach to non-citizens working in the US. She is not the only international scholar to get placed in one of the US's ICE gulags. And that is a reminder that the US is no longer a place for promising scholars to start their careers. In the case of Kseniia Petrova, I doubt she'll be in the US any longer than it takes to pack up her belongings and take the next research job available. I don't blame her. 

What the US is losing

I just read this article on Pro Publica that I think every concerned US citizen and resident should read: Science Shattered. Although the focus of this article is on NIH grants and the politicized freezing of many of those grants, it is safe to say that something similar applies to other US grant funding agencies (e.g., NSF). To put it bluntly, the current White House "administration" (if you can call it that) has politicized the grant funding process, defining what is and what is not "scientific" based upon some ideological litmus test or perhaps sheer disdain for the work scientists do. As you read through this article, really spend some time digesting the stories these affected scientists tell. The termination of their grants obviously has negative implications for the careers of the principal investigators, their post-docs and graduate students, and any support staff involved, not to mention any third party vendors. But get past that for a moment and think of what those of us living in the US lose: basic research that could lead to medical breakthroughs or insights on human behavior that may have implications for therapeutic interventions. In this current regime, any research project with a word such as "gender" so much as mentioned is on the chopping block for being too "woke". In other words, if your research does not follow the current ruling party line, it has no place here.

Once those grants are gone, the luckier labs will find an alternative source of funding and continue to do their work in the US. Others will find their research programs snuffed out for good, thus ending careers of scientists at all levels from those who are principal investigators all the way to post-docs and graduate students depending on that funding for their own related work, including theses and dissertations. Many affected scientists will simply leave the US and continue their work elsewhere. The implications for the public are dire. The work affected discussed in the Pro Publica article will impact public health, and not for the better. Work that could have led to more equitable health outcomes, once abandoned, will ultimately lead to a loss of lives that was entirely avoidable. Then again the ruling party not only does not prioritize such research but has shown a doctrinaire opposition to the work being carried out at all.

The reality is that we have had federal grant funding through NIH, NSF, etc. for as long as I can recall. These agencies have objective criteria for awarding grants that are divorced from partisan politics. These agencies fund projects where the principal investigators have demonstrated that their work is going to be rigorous, doable based on the funding request, and will make a significant contribution to that specific scientific discipline. That's not to say that politics is not involved, as whoever occupies the White House and the composition of Congress certainly determines how much grant funding will be prioritized. Some years there is more funding available. Some years there is less. That said, under both Democratic and Republican administrations, at least until the Trump era, there has not been a political litmus test applied to projects in order to be funded. Some Congressional representatives have voiced skepticism about the value of specific funded research projects, but the general zeitgeist has traditionally been one of not dictating what can and cannot be funded - only the amount of funds to allocate for grant funding. My understanding of science that has to toe a particular ruling party line tends to be disastrous (see Trofim Lysenko and what came to be known as Lysenkoism during the Stalin era as a cautionary tale). The political appointee in charge of the Department of Health is well on the way of creating his own version of Lysenkoism. So we will lose out on new and more effective vaccines, better treatments or cures for any number of diseases, effective means of prevention when it comes to health and mental health problems, etc. 

For a long time I have told my students that mixing partisan politics with science is an awful idea, and that eliminating funding for research that might not be convenient for partisan reasons is nothing short of stupidity. The bad news in the US is that those of us who have to live here are going to lose access to research funding that we once could count on, and that ultimately it is the citizens and residents of the US who will suffer as a result. The good news is that the sciences, like nature itself, abhor a vacuum. If the US government has decided to embark on a self-imposed lobotomy (to use a phrase Carl Sagan once used to describe the waning days of the Roman Empire as it descended into a dark age), other nations will use the opportunity to fill the void. That means a lot of US scientists will end up moving to the EU, China, India, or wherever the funding exists for them to do their work. So in the long run, the sciences will be just fine. The bad news for any of us in the US is that we will find ourselves no longer first in line when a new discovery has tangible applications. Whoever discovers a cure for some form of cancer may well be located outside the US, and it is quite likely that those living in the US will never have a chance to benefit from that discovery, or if we do, only after a long wait. That will simply be the new normal.

Most Americans have been ignorant about what the sciences do for a very long time. Science education at the K-12 level has been a joke for decades. Science reporting has been dramatically scaled back since the 1990s. Americans live with the benefits of the discoveries made by scientists who had NIH funding (or NSF or equivalent federal agencies) without having any understanding of what was involved to make those discoveries or applications possible. Ignorance is not bliss. Instead, those who do not understand what they have been given and what they stand to lose are prime targets for demagogues, and we are experiencing the consequences as I write this. I have no doubt that some version of "science" will continue in the US, but it will become increasingly poorly funded and done in a way in which the answer is predetermined and the challenge is to create the "evidence". American science will become increasingly less trustworthy. I really want to be wrong here. I hope I am wrong. Regrettably, the only way to be wrong is if the US is able to successfully undo the damage that three and half more years under the current White House regime will do. I am not exactly optimistic that American politicians are up to that particular task. But hey, there's always the EU, China, India, UAE, etc. For scientists, these are all viable options. The US will no longer be a leader in the sciences. Maybe it was inevitable.