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>Before we go any further, let me be clear: this isn’t about sides or ideologies. Support for education and research should be as fundamental as clean air or sa

>Before we go any further, let me be clear: this isn’t about sides or ideologies. Support for education and research should be as fundamental as clean air or safe roads. It is part of the shared infrastructure that holds society together. When that foundation cracks, the consequences ripple far beyond the lab. Acknowledging that I was supported by an NSF graduate research fellowship, so I benefitted from the thing I malign, but NSF, academia, and the whole federal government pissed off a good chunk of the country with DEI initiatives, codified by affirmative action, extra grant requirements, and ideological purity statements. Some anti-science folks tapped into this anger and now we’re here, reading this Op-Ed. I do fear this is the end of America’s post-WW2 STEM hegemony, but at the same time, it feels a little good

ceejayoz 1y ago
Authoritarian regimes tend to build power precisely that way - making it "feel a little good". They're hurting the people you don't like... at first. It's the whole point of that "first they came for the Jews/commies/unions" poem. The "feels pretty bad" bit comes much later.
searine 1y ago
What possibly could feel good about entering a new dark age?
- bilbo0s 1y ago
  To be fair, it likely will not be a dark age. The reality is that our companies will still be able to hire scientists from foreign universities. There's still Tsinghua. The Germans rolled deep at a Harvard get together I was at and nearly all of them were from TUM or Mannheim. And the brightest was actually out of Ludwig Maximillian. So humanity's capacity to push the boundaries of science forward is safe with or without us. Now, do we want to be a part of the leading edge of that? My answer would be an enthusiastic yes! But it's perfectly right for other people to feel differently.
  - ceejayoz 1y ago
    > The reality is that our companies will still be able to hire scientists from foreign universities. If we let them in. https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/2025/05/new-visa-policies-put-america-first-not-china/ https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20... "Under President Trump’s leadership, the U.S. State Department will work with the Department of Homeland Security to aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields. We will also revise visa criteria to enhance scrutiny of all future visa applications from the People’s Republic of China and Hong Kong." Or we might arrest them when they come. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/25/science/russian-scientist-harvard-smuggling-deportation-petrova.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/25/science/russian-scientist... "Ms. Petrova was detained on Feb. 16, when she returned from a vacation in France carrying samples of frog embryos from an affiliate laboratory in Paris at the request of her supervisor at Harvard. She then spent more than three months in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center, eventually drawing attention from scientists around the world. Her defenders have condemned the government’s pursuit of her as draconian, conveying a chilling message to noncitizen academics." As a result, they're already nopeing out. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01636-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01636-5 "Several academic and scientific conferences in the United States have been postponed, cancelled or moved elsewhere, as organizers respond to researchers’ growing fears over the country’s immigration crackdown."
    - bilbo0s 1y ago
      Mmmmm... ok. You got me there. But to be fair, that's a different problem. And even if we in the US want to institute policies rooted in various ideologies of superiority, (most of which border on imbecillia).. humanity in the rest of the world would still push forward the boundaries of science. That was my material point. But yeah, you make a point that really does kind of demolish my assertion that we would benefit from that global effort.
tech_ken 1y ago
> it feels a little good Revanchism typically does, but it's a highly destructive path. Hope you're enjoying the high now, the lows could be quite ugly.
UltraSane 1y ago
This comment has some real "cut off my nose to spite my face" energy.
jvanderbot 1y ago
Before we gang up and downvote for the last statement, it's absolutely worth recognizing that the majority of the voting public (Or at least their candidates) seem to have made 2024 an indictment against these kinds of policies. Even I, a staunch dem, have to admit that the alleged purity statements got a little too close to being real. On one research grant I led for NASA, the grant reviewer asked me to count the number of minority students on the team, from their picture displayed on one of my slides. That's just the kind of information I didn't gather because I was trying to run a research task and had employed the entire lab a professor led. That's fine, but we should also recognize how weird it is.
- epistasis 1y ago
  > seems to have made 2024 an indictment against these kinds of policies Really? I don't think that's true at all based on the swing voters I've talked to.
  - jvanderbot 1y ago
    Perhaps its untrue. Maybe a better way of saying it is "The leading politicians and their buddies" have. Also, you know real swing voters? Like people who vote for more than one political party? I do this sometimes, but feel so bad about it I can hardly admit it!
  - mdorazio 1y ago
    Swing voters are not the majority of the voting public that the parent comment referenced.
    - scarface_74 1y ago
      The swing voters in the swing states are all that matter because of the electoral college. Getting more democratic votes in red states won’t make a difference.
  - tech_ken 1y ago
    Yeah I think people are way over-indexing on culture war stuff when the simple fact is that massive inflation makes the sitting president super unpopular. 2024 was primarily determined by the price of bread and eggs, with everything else being cents on the margin.
mapt 1y ago
"As long as it hurts the people that irritate me slightly (based on things that Fox News told me but which I don't have any firsthand experience with), I don't care if I'm hurting myself with the same action. It's too satisfying to hurt those other people. Taste their tears. Strike back!"
- bad_haircut72 1y ago
  This is the kind of purity test OP is talking about. Theres no chance (in your mind) they might have a point or valid feelings, theyre just evil for being against the group mentality. Exactly the kind of politics that plays out everywhere across academia, its not to everyones taste and has several inefficiencies - otherwise successful startups would be run by committees
  - mapt 1y ago
    I'm having trouble decoding this. The human emotion of spite is an attitude, not a permanent trait we call "evil". I've felt spite. You've felt spite. I've never killed a national institution out of spite like these people are trying to do with academia. But I yearn to someday eliminate the Forbes 500 list. Does that make me evil? That's a judgement call. How much do you need the Forbes 500 list? How essential is it to your future well-being that those people keep on existing at their current level of wealth? Compare with academia.
  - scarface_74 1y ago
    People don’t like “government run health care”. But will fight tooth and nail for Medicare, Medicaid etc. These are the same people who didn’t like “ObamaCare” but want subsidies for their ACA coverage
    - Redoubts 1y ago
      People like “science” and “research”, but then fight tooth and nail for removing evidenced backed pedagogy like tracking and gifted programs or phonics; or forcing bad economic ideas like rent control. Good thing all these absolutely terrible ideas only exist in one party.
duxup 1y ago
Acting out always feels good. But we resist those kinds of behaviors for good reason.
pfdietz 1y ago
I think it has less to do with DEI and more to do with "what is this doing for the US, rather than the world as a whole?" Accumulation of scientific knowledge is a positive externality, and the current administration doesn't care about benefits to other countries. Or costs to other countries, for negative externalities as from CO2.
advisedwang 1y ago
What DEI initatives do you mean? The rhetoric - both from those starting DEI intiatives in the last few years and from the reactionaries acts as if it's world changing. But 99% of DEI is BS like rainbow branding or 1hr click through trainings. None of that warrents this kind of reaction. In fact, it's just a pretext for rightwing leadership to do things it wants to do for other reasons.
bbor 1y ago
Do you have any... sources? > the whole federal government pissed off a good chunk of the country with DEI initiatives, codified by affirmative action, extra grant requirements, and ideological purity statements Certainly there were affirmative action programs within the NSF, yes, but I think it's trivially obvious that they only affected a small minority of applications. RE:"ideological purity statements", I'm assuming this means stuff like affirming the vague concept of social equality and civil rights? If so, that's a goofy framing; the scientific process is seriously endangered by entrenched biases, which every human necessarily has on some level or another: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-epistemology/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-epistemology/ Regardless, I seriously question the idea that "a good chunk of the country" was actually "pissed off" by these things (much less anything at all involving the NSF and NIH programs, which most voters are only vaguely aware of). Lots of privileged people in this country continued to voice the exact same oppositions to social change that they have since the ~~1960s~~ 1860s, sure, and perhaps they have some valid points -- this isn't the place to really litigate that. But on an objective level, I find the idea that this is some justified reaction to post-2008 wokism to be fundamentally incorrect.
scarface_74 1y ago
I am a 51 year old Black male who has been in tech professionally since 1996 and I’ve worked at 10 jobs and those have been everything to boring old enterprise companies, startups to BigTech. If you said that corporate America is no place for DEI and everyone should be hired based on merits alone, I would agree. I don’t think the reason for the lack of US citizen minorities being underrepresented in tech is because of systemic racism and when I did do my stint at Amazon post 2020, I found the performative “allyship, DEI initiatives moan worthy at best and considering that Amazon is the shittyist employer in BigTech, I found it laughable”. Yes I knew that going in and it was a remote position. I went in with my eyes wide open. But on the other hand, if it is a pipeline problem, where should initiatives happen to give opportunities in tech if not in academia and who should do it if not the government? That being said, it would be a lot more palatable to voters if it was based on economic background than race. I can’t say with a straight face that had less opportunities as a minority when I went to private school from k-8th and came from an upper middle class background and had up to date computers where I taught myself how to program ever since the mid 80s. And the sane party that decries putting people in positions they aren’t qualified for nominated RFK to head the DHHS and other unqualified people to be heads of other agencies. Not to mention the shit show of DOGE.

ceejayoz 1y ago

Authoritarian regimes tend to build power precisely that way - making it "feel a little good". They're hurting the people you don't like... at first. It's the whole point of that "first they came for the Jews/commies/unions" poem. The "feels pretty bad" bit comes much later.

searine 1y ago

What possibly could feel good about entering a new dark age?

bilbo0s 1y ago
To be fair, it likely will not be a dark age. The reality is that our companies will still be able to hire scientists from foreign universities. There's still Tsinghua. The Germans rolled deep at a Harvard get together I was at and nearly all of them were from TUM or Mannheim. And the brightest was actually out of Ludwig Maximillian. So humanity's capacity to push the boundaries of science forward is safe with or without us. Now, do we want to be a part of the leading edge of that? My answer would be an enthusiastic yes! But it's perfectly right for other people to feel differently.
- ceejayoz 1y ago
  > The reality is that our companies will still be able to hire scientists from foreign universities. If we let them in. https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/2025/05/new-visa-policies-put-america-first-not-china/ https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20... "Under President Trump’s leadership, the U.S. State Department will work with the Department of Homeland Security to aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields. We will also revise visa criteria to enhance scrutiny of all future visa applications from the People’s Republic of China and Hong Kong." Or we might arrest them when they come. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/25/science/russian-scientist-harvard-smuggling-deportation-petrova.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/25/science/russian-scientist... "Ms. Petrova was detained on Feb. 16, when she returned from a vacation in France carrying samples of frog embryos from an affiliate laboratory in Paris at the request of her supervisor at Harvard. She then spent more than three months in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center, eventually drawing attention from scientists around the world. Her defenders have condemned the government’s pursuit of her as draconian, conveying a chilling message to noncitizen academics." As a result, they're already nopeing out. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01636-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01636-5 "Several academic and scientific conferences in the United States have been postponed, cancelled or moved elsewhere, as organizers respond to researchers’ growing fears over the country’s immigration crackdown."
  - bilbo0s 1y ago
    Mmmmm... ok. You got me there. But to be fair, that's a different problem. And even if we in the US want to institute policies rooted in various ideologies of superiority, (most of which border on imbecillia).. humanity in the rest of the world would still push forward the boundaries of science. That was my material point. But yeah, you make a point that really does kind of demolish my assertion that we would benefit from that global effort.

tech_ken 1y ago

> it feels a little good Revanchism typically does, but it's a highly destructive path. Hope you're enjoying the high now, the lows could be quite ugly.

UltraSane 1y ago

This comment has some real "cut off my nose to spite my face" energy.

jvanderbot 1y ago

Before we gang up and downvote for the last statement, it's absolutely worth recognizing that the majority of the voting public (Or at least their candidates) seem to have made 2024 an indictment against these kinds of policies. Even I, a staunch dem, have to admit that the alleged purity statements got a little too close to being real. On one research grant I led for NASA, the grant reviewer asked me to count the number of minority students on the team, from their picture displayed on one of my slides. That's just the kind of information I didn't gather because I was trying to run a research task and had employed the entire lab a professor led. That's fine, but we should also recognize how weird it is.

epistasis 1y ago
> seems to have made 2024 an indictment against these kinds of policies Really? I don't think that's true at all based on the swing voters I've talked to.
- jvanderbot 1y ago
  Perhaps its untrue. Maybe a better way of saying it is "The leading politicians and their buddies" have. Also, you know real swing voters? Like people who vote for more than one political party? I do this sometimes, but feel so bad about it I can hardly admit it!
- mdorazio 1y ago
  Swing voters are not the majority of the voting public that the parent comment referenced.
  - scarface_74 1y ago
    The swing voters in the swing states are all that matter because of the electoral college. Getting more democratic votes in red states won’t make a difference.
- tech_ken 1y ago
  Yeah I think people are way over-indexing on culture war stuff when the simple fact is that massive inflation makes the sitting president super unpopular. 2024 was primarily determined by the price of bread and eggs, with everything else being cents on the margin.

mapt 1y ago

"As long as it hurts the people that irritate me slightly (based on things that Fox News told me but which I don't have any firsthand experience with), I don't care if I'm hurting myself with the same action. It's too satisfying to hurt those other people. Taste their tears. Strike back!"

bad_haircut72 1y ago
This is the kind of purity test OP is talking about. Theres no chance (in your mind) they might have a point or valid feelings, theyre just evil for being against the group mentality. Exactly the kind of politics that plays out everywhere across academia, its not to everyones taste and has several inefficiencies - otherwise successful startups would be run by committees
- mapt 1y ago
  I'm having trouble decoding this. The human emotion of spite is an attitude, not a permanent trait we call "evil". I've felt spite. You've felt spite. I've never killed a national institution out of spite like these people are trying to do with academia. But I yearn to someday eliminate the Forbes 500 list. Does that make me evil? That's a judgement call. How much do you need the Forbes 500 list? How essential is it to your future well-being that those people keep on existing at their current level of wealth? Compare with academia.
- scarface_74 1y ago
  People don’t like “government run health care”. But will fight tooth and nail for Medicare, Medicaid etc. These are the same people who didn’t like “ObamaCare” but want subsidies for their ACA coverage
  - Redoubts 1y ago
    People like “science” and “research”, but then fight tooth and nail for removing evidenced backed pedagogy like tracking and gifted programs or phonics; or forcing bad economic ideas like rent control. Good thing all these absolutely terrible ideas only exist in one party.

duxup 1y ago

Acting out always feels good. But we resist those kinds of behaviors for good reason.

pfdietz 1y ago

I think it has less to do with DEI and more to do with "what is this doing for the US, rather than the world as a whole?" Accumulation of scientific knowledge is a positive externality, and the current administration doesn't care about benefits to other countries. Or costs to other countries, for negative externalities as from CO2.

advisedwang 1y ago

What DEI initatives do you mean? The rhetoric - both from those starting DEI intiatives in the last few years and from the reactionaries acts as if it's world changing. But 99% of DEI is BS like rainbow branding or 1hr click through trainings. None of that warrents this kind of reaction. In fact, it's just a pretext for rightwing leadership to do things it wants to do for other reasons.

bbor 1y ago

Do you have any... sources? > the whole federal government pissed off a good chunk of the country with DEI initiatives, codified by affirmative action, extra grant requirements, and ideological purity statements Certainly there were affirmative action programs within the NSF, yes, but I think it's trivially obvious that they only affected a small minority of applications. RE:"ideological purity statements", I'm assuming this means stuff like affirming the vague concept of social equality and civil rights? If so, that's a goofy framing; the scientific process is seriously endangered by entrenched biases, which every human necessarily has on some level or another: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-epistemology/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-epistemology/ Regardless, I seriously question the idea that "a good chunk of the country" was actually "pissed off" by these things (much less anything at all involving the NSF and NIH programs, which most voters are only vaguely aware of). Lots of privileged people in this country continued to voice the exact same oppositions to social change that they have since the ~~1960s~~ 1860s, sure, and perhaps they have some valid points -- this isn't the place to really litigate that. But on an objective level, I find the idea that this is some justified reaction to post-2008 wokism to be fundamentally incorrect.

scarface_74 1y ago

I am a 51 year old Black male who has been in tech professionally since 1996 and I’ve worked at 10 jobs and those have been everything to boring old enterprise companies, startups to BigTech. If you said that corporate America is no place for DEI and everyone should be hired based on merits alone, I would agree. I don’t think the reason for the lack of US citizen minorities being underrepresented in tech is because of systemic racism and when I did do my stint at Amazon post 2020, I found the performative “allyship, DEI initiatives moan worthy at best and considering that Amazon is the shittyist employer in BigTech, I found it laughable”. Yes I knew that going in and it was a remote position. I went in with my eyes wide open. But on the other hand, if it is a pipeline problem, where should initiatives happen to give opportunities in tech if not in academia and who should do it if not the government? That being said, it would be a lot more palatable to voters if it was based on economic background than race. I can’t say with a straight face that had less opportunities as a minority when I went to private school from k-8th and came from an upper middle class background and had up to date computers where I taught myself how to program ever since the mid 80s. And the sane party that decries putting people in positions they aren’t qualified for nominated RFK to head the DHHS and other unqualified people to be heads of other agencies. Not to mention the shit show of DOGE.