alling Oppenheimer “one of
the best movies of the century” might be damning it with faint praise,
but it reminds us of what scientists can do if they're freed from the
limitations of university bureaucracy. Those guys at Los Alamos
changed history. Imagine what could happen if all science were conducted
that way.
In The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom described how science felt immune from the decay of the universities. He says Joshua Lederberg of Rockefeller University “lets us know that in this sea of democratic relativism natural science stands out like Gibraltar.”
The closest we get to science in Oppenheimer is orange sparks. Where are all the bureaucrats? The diversity statements? The backstabbing? All proof that this is not a university. And why are the sparks orange instead of blue? This orange is something incandescent, not radioactive
That has now changed. The revolutionaries are inside the walls.* Anyone who reads this blog or pays attention to the alternative media knows that science is in deep trouble. I could make a list, but in this article I'll spare you those depressing details and focus on some hopefully less-depressing solutions.
A standard maxim is that what the government pays for, the government gets more of. Scientists do what they have to do to stay employed, but in so doing they risk becoming what libertarian David Boaz calls “court intellectuals” whose job is not to solve problems but to provide an intellectual justification (and scientific data) to support whatever the government says it wants, whether it makes sense or not.
1. Reform the way government funds science
Most faculty members whom I know spend more time writing grants—begging for money—than doing research. Their task is to identify what the government wants and to spin their research to fit, regardless of the extreme torsional stresses involved. The permissible topics and methods are spelled out in great detail by un-fireable civil service workers in public documents called Program Announcements, or PAs. Government bureaucrats then transfer funds to their fellow bureaucrats at a school, who take a third of it to pay their own salaries and the electric bills. They're also free to throw the entire amount away if they need an excuse to eliminate the applicant's department and take their space.
This system practically begs scientists to be dishonest. I've heard of cases where the PA called for a study on protein X, which was some important gene product. A research group had a drug D that affected proteins Y and Z. Before writing the grant they tested whether it also affected X, knowing that it wouldn't. But they now had data of the effect of D on X and sent in a grant to study it. Quite often, unless a grant review panel notices the deception, they get away with it.
On my most recent project I worked 60 hours a week for three months writing the grant. Every word was scrutinized to ensure that the work would fulfill the requirements of the announcement, which the agency treated as a contract. It was a success: it ended up in the top 10% and got funded on the first try. But it did not address the most important scientific question in the field—no funding agency sounded interested in that—and it was not what I really wanted to do. But there is no choice.
In recent years, many PAs, especially for K training grants, have changed into prescriptions intended to further social goals, typically “diversity.” This is NIH's way of discriminating on the basis of race: even people who just arrived from East Asia and South Asia recognize this and don't apply, knowing they are not “diverse.”
Changing society, even if it were done legally, is not the job of science. The government should eliminate its entire list of PAs, FOAs (Funding Opportunity Announcements), and NOSIs (Notices of Special Interest) and replace them with broad categories. Active researchers, not civil service employees, are better positioned to decide which topics are most likely to advance their field, even if those employees have advanced degrees. Make everything a Manhattan Project: give scientists a general objective, shoot any bureaucrat who tries to interfere, then get out of the way.
2. Continue supporting research, but preferentially at bigger schools
In smaller schools, working conditions range from dreadful to horrible. New researchers often work in isolation in empty rooms where water drips from the ceiling onto their experiments. Their only equipment is what they can build in their spare time. Collaborations are next to impossible to establish. There are often good reasons why the schools are small, ranging from a reputation for employee abuse to an undesirable zip code, but also because expensive research equipment comes with enormous maintenance costs which they can't handle. Bigger schools already get far more funding than small ones. With their smaller class sizes, small schools are better suited to teaching instead of trying to do research just because it makes them feel important.
More science in Oppenheimer. Don't blink. And those equations . . . are you sure they're right? It looks like maybe some of Teller's stuff
3. Start moving science off campus
Unfortunately, confidence in big schools has been damaged by their recent display of raw antisemitic hate and advocacy of genocide. The government's plan to “forgive” the $1.63 trillion student debt will only make things worse. But that's the schools' problem. Science's problem is that it just doesn't belong there.
There are too many things wrong with universities to list here: the requirement to have an active grant before a school will interview you, which discriminates against younger researchers; the requirement to pay the university a bribe of hundreds of thousands of dollars from your grant before they will hire you; the need to submit a diversity statement documenting how you really, truly believe in racial discrimination and how you practiced it your whole life, and that you are not just getting one from ChatGPT, cross your heart; the antisemitic divestment (BDS) policies; and the requirement to agree with whatever wacky thing the activists dream up in any given week.
What that means is that the system is screw-upped, as a friend of mine used to say. The best solution is to take research away from universities and put it someplace else, maybe nonprofit institutes, as far away from a university as it's possible to get.
It needs to be started now. If we keep science in that environment, it won't take long before it's overrun with political activists. They will still call it science, but it will be nothing like the science portrayed in Oppenheimer. It will be ideology masquerading as science. Get science out of there and let the universities destroy themselves in peace.
* Yes, I know being ‘inside’ a wall doesn't make sense, but neither does ‘within’ a wall. Blame whoever invented the cliché.
dec 29 2023, 4:54 am. edited for brevity dec 29 2023, 4:18 pm. last updated dec 30 2023, 9:59 am
