Posted on 01/26/2026 8:57:59 AM PST by karpov
Over the past year, a number of common tactics have emerged from the opposition to what is widely referred to as the Trump administration’s “defunding” of education. One of these is to decry the ostensibly catastrophic harm that will result from Trump’s moves, particularly in the areas of public health and scientific research. “American science and innovation should not be subject to the political winds of the day,” the Center for American Progress (CAP) intoned in a piece published over the summer. According to the authors, a would-be despotic, right-wing administration is “targeting” higher education for “political retribution.” “Higher education, research and development, and science at large are under attack,” they declare—and “no institution is safe.”
There’s a point to be made here, but it’s almost certainly not the one that CAP thinks.
Certainly, many college- and university-affiliated research projects have been negatively impacted by Trump administration policies. But if there is a problem here, it has far less to do with the so-called defunding of higher education than with the fact that our universities are such powerful players in the science and innovation arenas in the first place. This is especially true given the poor track record of many of these institutions when it comes to providing students with a sound education and safeguarding their constitutionally guaranteed civil rights.
The current situation has come about because of the uneasy marriage of two related but ultimately distinct missions: the traditional mission of the university to transmit knowledge and mold character and the mission of the academy to discover, produce, and test that knowledge.
(Excerpt) Read more at jamesgmartin.center ...
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Much of the so called ‘research’ coming out of Universities is crap.
There are a couple of guys who make up bogus social science papers and get them accepted and published in major journals. They are simply gobbledegook using woke language. It is very funny. They have a YouTube channel. I don’t have the link right now.
Probably nearly 100% of social “science” research is unrepeatable and basically fraud.
With AI, it’s only going to get worse.
Like Elena Ceausescu.
Elena Ceausescu: Greatest Scientist Ever — except she was a fraud
https://paperpile.com/blog/elena-ceausescu-scientist-fraud/
If the university teachers are hired primarily for research funding and paper writing, and if the academic publishers are primarily leftists who'll print nothing but leftist dogma, then the people doing the university teaching are the people who think in those terms. But if we do as the article suggests and separate the university teaching centers from academic centers, then the teachers may have less of a mindset of advancing leftist dogma (like the academic writers do).
I (a PhD in molecular and cell biology, and a graduate of MIT and Harvard) am the inventor of two well-cited patents in cancer research, which I developed as a university professor. This work was funded by NSF.
I also developed and taught a graduate course in cell biology, which was attended by students from industry as well as from our university. So much for “downgrading teaching” by faculty researchers!
America must keep NSF and NIH strong, and must keep its research universities strong! If we do not, world-class research will move to China! Since communist China is the enemy of humanity, such a move will hurt every human being on this planet. The Chinese communists will use their research and teaching for their evil purposes, as they are now already doing. They have already stolen some of our leading researchers, in some cases as the direct result of Trump policies.
However, it is not good what universities are doing to the humanities and social sciences, especially always favoring women over men for faculty appointments, and harboring leftist ideologues who push woke agendas over sound scholarship.
Despite being a scientist, I had a sound education in the humanities back in the day, taught by mainly white male professors. I’ve also attended lectures by excellent women professors in this field, so they do exist. But excluding male professors several hurts the humanities, so this policy must be reversed—the sooner the better!
... the poor track record of many of these institutions when it comes to providing students with a sound education and safeguarding their constitutionally guaranteed civil rights.
There is a serious amount of bona fide research in STEM subjects occurring at universities. We have seen the denial of access to University classrooms, offices and laboratories of Jewish students and researchers by pro-Hamas terrorists and sympathizers after the Hamas massacre of October 7.
National scientific power might necessitate moving these research projects to universities not dedicated to the racist bigotry that we have seen at Harvard, MIT and Columbia. There are likely numerous institutions in other parts of the country that would welcome these scientists and their projects. Some projects end up having commercial or military applications.
As Muslims often chant "first the Saturday people, then the Sunday people". Christians should realize they are also on the list for oppression.
As with every Harvard PhD candidate, I had a thesis defense. But since I did my research right and communicated with my thesis committee, it all went very smoothly. My colleagues even prepared a big party to celebrate my achievement!
I knew of some graduate students at Harvard whose thesis defense did not go well. Bur they knew beforehand that they were in trouble, and should have done what their advisor said to avoid the negative result!
I took a lot of ribbing for being a very active Lutheran Christian when I was at Harvard graduate school—for attending Sunday liturgy and auditing theology courses. But I worked hard at my research and obtained my PhD. Even the atheists celebrated my degree in the end!
Back then, Jews faced no problems, and were essentially in control, although many were atheists. (However, Harvard Divinity School was then run by Lutherans. That is not true now, because the Lutherans ruined things for themselves!) Perhaps if current Jewish students concentrated on their research, they might have as positive a result as I had. But I don’t really know if that is true.
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