"In a nearly daily barrage, President Trump and his MAGA forces heave fireballs at science and higher education. In the last weeks alone, the administration has been busy hurling a demand for a billion dollars from the University of California, Los Angeles; axing proven mRNA vaccine research; and demanding colleges submit expanded sex and race data from student applications, among other startling detonations. Amid the onslaught of these unsettling developments, it would be easy to miss the decisive change in conventional scientific and scholarly practice, one so vast that it threatens to overturn our revered American research achievements."
"It took my breath away, suddenly realizing how completely threatening the new order is to the very foundations of the democratic practice of research and scholarship. As Victor Ambros, Nobel laureate and co-discoverer of microRNA, aptly put it, the order constitutes a "a shameless, full-bore Soviet-style politicization of American science that will smother what until now has been the world's pre-eminent scientific enterprise.""
The administration has engaged in multiple actions undermining science and higher education, including forcing financial demands on UCLA, cutting mRNA vaccine research, and requiring expanded sex and race data from student applications. An Aug. 7 executive order removes more than a half century of peer review for federal scientific grants and makes funding contingent on political assent. Grant approval authority shifts from expert reviewers to political appointees who must align awards with presidential priorities. The change effectively renders peer review advisory and risks politicizing research decisions in a manner that could erode democratic research foundations and U.S. scientific leadership.
Read at Inside Higher Ed | Higher Education News, Events and Jobs
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]