Roger, are you a member of Heterodox Academy? Certainly seems that you should be.
I think the origin of the problem goes back farther, to the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War. They engendered a belief in activism. Within academe, there was a gradual takeover of the humanities and some branches of the social sciences by an activist leftist perspective. It filtered into the hard sciences later. At first, hiring of Marxist-ish profs added to thought diversity, but because they tended to only support their own, over time it has had the opposite effect.
As with the previous post, there's a lack of rigor that makes the argumentation speculative. The correlations with scicomms and misinfo research are just that, correlations. Many other relevant correlations exist, e.g. social media rise in the early 2000s, and the accelerating backlash to globalization that led to Occupy Wall Street, Brexit, and Trump. There's plenty of potential drivers for the increasing lack of trust in science, and you do not present any rigorous arguments or data for any causal effects, for any of them.
On the impact-issue, this is indeed a problem. While well-meaning (accountability etc) it's not only hard to measure and predict, but also often left ill-defined by funders, leaving researchers at loss as to what to consider and argue. Nevertheless, this is a funder-related issue. And funders are the drivers of by what metrics researchers/institutions are evaluated on, so why not seek change there? Researchers/institutions adapt to metrics and funding not the other way around.
The impact-aspect has also been implemented far beyond the US, which begs the question what the drivers have been for that, and potentially if those same drivers could contribute to lack of trust in science by completely different causal links.
I have not critiqued the idea with this series. And your thesis/hypothesis is valid. What I've critiqued is your arguments and the extent to which your data, while not false (at least I've no reason to doubt them), do not convincingly support your thesis/claims (and I've explained why I think so). Brief answers to your questions:
1) academics' voting patterns may have shifted, but that doesn't equate with research en masse being politicized - I've made this point before.
2) surveys have limitations, which I've pointed out before; also, people displaying varying trust depending on fields (which also has time-correlations with events, e.g. pre vs post-pandemic; pandemic fall-out was one of the drivers of lack of trust I suggested as alternative/complementary explanation to yours)
3) define significant; in my view, it's significant because of their reach through social media + amplifications in various mainstream and so-called independent media. In terms of absolute numbers, my intuition is that it's fringe. Happy to reconsider if you show me hard data.
4) reflective of what? What direction of causality?
And thanks for the link to your earlier post, being a relatively new subscriber, I'd not read it. I have now. While it doesn't speak to a general/systemic issue (it's disciplinary/topic-specific, which is likely where a fair bit of our disagreement stems from), I whole-heartedly agree with your points there.
A fundamental problem with universities today is that their clientele, i.e. the students who largely fund the system, has radically changed in nature in recent decades. Universities were originally designed to cater to a small elite who spent a year or two there largely to meet other members of the elite, together with a leavening of academically gifted scholars who were given free tuition. Today this has changed into a free-for-all in which universities will take more or less anyone as a student as long as they bring with them absurdly bloated fees for the privilege. The problem is that the universities have not clearly articulated their purpose in all of this, apart from making money, and this lack of purpose tends to bleed into the research side of things.
I would offer a suggestion as to what the real purpose of universities should be. A few decades ago Britain’s Royal Air Force decreed that all fighter pilots should henceforth have university degrees. I asked a senior officer at the time why fighter pilots needed degrees. He answered “They don’t, but most nineteen-years olds are far too immature to be allowed anywhere near a very lethal and expensive aircraft, and spending a few years at university is as good a way as any of warehousing them for a few years while they mature.”
Many, if not most, teenagers graduating from high school today are too immature to enter the workforce in any meaningful fashion. Perhaps the real purpose of universities today should be to assist in the maturing process and turn out responsible citizens as an end product. Converting innocent teenagers into left-wing protest machines does not seem to be a useful way of achieving this end.
I would amend the "students who largely fund the system" to the government that funds the students largely fund the system . . . I hope the government gets out of the student loan business altogether
Engineering takes years to master, we even have to put graduates threw intensive training for a couple of years after graduation before they do really useful work.
In the book you may write, please consider three other aspects.
• The shifting of the "social compact." Originally, as you indicate, the compact was intended to be between the researcher and the public at large. That has gradually – and somewhat subtly – changed. The compact has substituted "government" for the "public."
• "Cherchez le buck." The shift in the social compact was largely driven, I believe, by a shift in the funding of science. Up until WWI, there was relatively little government funding of research, and much of that focused on government researchers (in USDA, for example). During that war, governments mobilized science and industry to do what we would now call "applied science" to support the war effort. This resulted in "arranged marriages" between academics and industry. After the Great War, government funding largely dried up, but many of the arranged marriages endured. Many in industry (e.g. DuPont) realized the value of research and increased their support – backing their belief with their dollars. WWII forced governments to once again mobilize science, but now the scope of the government-funded research enterprise – and the funding available – went from thousands to hundreds of thousands. The Manhattan Project is the exemplar of this.
However, once the war was over, funding for science was reduced, but it remained much higher than pre-war levels. There were sufficient funds for academics to fund the creation of more academics. Research centers became ubiquitous. However, these developments also meant that more and more funding was necessary to maintain the cycle of research funding creating more researchers requiring even more funding. The amount of funding increased but not enough to fund this cycle. This led to an environment where the competition for funds became an essential time sink for many researchers. When I left academia in 2005, something like one in ten proposals were funded in my field. Many researchers literally were spending half their time writing proposals.
The result of this was a pernicious form of Darwinian natural selection, where the best funded (hence, most successful) researchers were those who could best market themselves to the sources of funds. In other words, scientific success became tied to advocacy. Coupled with the shifting social compact of science, this has resulted in scientists becoming advocates for positions which support the goals of the agencies which are supporting them.
• Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy. The sudden ramping up of scientific funding during the world wars demanded new organizations to manage the funding. The decades since have seen these organizations become balkanized bureaucracies, each competing for Congressional funding. As Jerry Pounelle put it: "In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control." Thus, the funding bureaucracies themselves also must become marketeers – advocates, bent on their own survival.
I would add Bell Labs as a key research lab starting in the 1920s. Their list of inventions is stellar: transistor, laser, modern solar cell, information theory, Unix operating system, and C programming language. People working for Bell Labs have received 8 Nobel Prizes. What made this possible was the surfeit of funds flowing from the monopoly of AT&T. Clearly Bell Labs successfully created a fertile environment for research. It is an interesting conundrum that so much good came from a monopoly.
Very interesting context, Roger. Thank you. I think scientists and other professionals should stay in their lane. Turning scientists into political actors has done no favors to science and none to the scientists themselves as we see thousands of papers withdrawn and a lack of trust in science generally. Do we want our engineers to be political actors? Our doctors? Our courtrooms? Our military? Insisting on subjective criteria diminishes any undertaking. If you’re a scientist who wants to save the world, fine. Carry a sign on your weekends or adopt a puppy.
I took early retirement from university in 1996, and have been surprised by the changes since. At that time I did not sense any politization, but it clearly exists now. At that time, most researchers worked alone with their graduate students, but now large groups are the norm.
When I got my PhD in 1994, focused on science and technology policy, the kind of political advocacy most scientists and faculty wanted was advocacy for larger science budgets in their area of expertise.
By 2005 that had morphed into more explicit political and policy advocacy.
Roger, the weekend Wall Street Journal has an excellent article (p. A11 Dec. 7-8 WSJ) about Jay Bhattacharya's time spent as a "non-person" and subsequent rise from the ashes to be nominated for head of NIH. His story vividly illustrates the dangers of the politicization of universities and scientific institutions. Bhattacharya's university "investigated" him for "conflicts of interest" to cast doubts about his research proving that COVID was a great deal less deadly than public-health authorities were claiming. "Progressive" authority figures thought that fact had to be suppressed because the CDC and NIH apparatchiks believed it was a virtue to panic the population about COVID so people would submit to control and loss of liberty. Government bureaucrats will do that sort of thing; the shame of it was that Bhattacharya's university went along and actively connived at smearing Bhattacharya's reputation for political goals. Bhattacharya was consistently right on issue after issue about which the CDC and NIH were completely wrong, but JB's voice was suppressed at a time when the nation very much needed to hear it. I suggest you have a look at the article; I thought it was highly relevant to the dangers of politicized groupthink in those claiming to "represent science" (Fauci's words).
Both COVID and climate change, as presented to the general public, have very little to do with science as such, and everything to do with politics. H.L. Mencken said it all about a hundred years ago:
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary"
I was investigated by my university 3 times. Once at the request of a member of Congress who alleged I was taking cash for my Congressional testimony (I was not). Once by an overly enthusiastic department chair who accused me of obtaining a federal research grant outside university procedures (Of all the false accusations to conjure up, this one, really?). And once for telling colleagues about this investigation (lol).
All three were ridiculous and wound up consuming a lot of my time, a lot of university resources, and causing me a lot of stress and professional harm. But I guess that was the point. Nothing came of any of them, well, I guess they collectively contributed in some way to my retirement at 56 ;-)
Thanks Roger for the pointer to the UM report, which makes for somewhat encouraging reading. I was struck by this part:
"Subcommittee Three was asked to consider “[w]hether the University should adopt some form of the University of Chicago’s Kalven Principles, which establish ‘[a] heavy presumption against the University . . . expressing opinions on the political and social issues of the day.’” Subcommittee Three answered “in the affirmative.”
If only the major scientific societies could likewise be convinced to stop issuing position statements. The American and Canadian Economic Associations are both constitutionally forbidden from doing so. By contrast the AGU, AMS, AAAS etc. long ago gave in to the temptation with all the negative repercussions noted in the UM report. On your dad's blog many years ago I wrote a guest post on this topic and the then-president of the AMS joined in the comments to respond (needless to say I didn't convince him). I guess the leaders of these groups thought that by issuing position statements on climate change they would change public opinion. They were right, but in their hubris they misunderstood what the resulting change would be.
Yes, I also found it encouraging. Most universities are light years away from such self-awareness, I'm afraid.
I've come to think that institutional statements on climate change are much less about actually trying to convince the public of anything, but instead, means of signaling in-group affinities.
I read the post as suggesting that the 1997 NSF evaluation criteria change has changed incentives (highly plausible) and that this has, over time, contributed to the politicization observed (plausible, too). Three observations on this:
1. It would be interesting to get a better understanding of the mechanism at work (this is not a suggestion that Professor Pielke provide that better understanding although his views would be of great interest). Clearly, it is not just that people write the grant proposals differently; they presumably also do their research differently than they otherwise would have. Most importantly, what I think can be observed is that this is not just strategic behaviour (in the wording of grant proposals and research design and so on) accompanied by a cynical stance along the lines of "Oh well, if this is what I have to do to get funding, alright, I'll just do it." Something much more fundamental seems to have changed: academics' beliefs about the objectives of their activity, their views on "traditional" principles and values of scientists etc. Huxley's quip "The tragedy of science: A beautiful hypothesis slain by an ugly fact." would presumably be considered inacceptable by large sections of the professoriate today. Asking about the mechanism is really about tracing the causal effects from the NSF rule change to something very fundamental that has happened in the minds of many thousands of the most intelligent individuals in society.
2. Somehow I cannot fathom that NSF rule change being something "exogenous" (for lack of a better term). My hypothesis is that (i) such a rule change is itself driven by much deeper factors and, more specifically, that (ii) this probably cannot be separated from other developments that have occurred in parallel - e.g., the politicization of the media where, painting with a very broad brush, something similar has happened. In the sincere view of many practitioners, journalism is no longer and should no longer be about reporting facts; it really is fairly indistinguishable from activism. Just last year, a journalist writing for Germany's "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung" (which used to be a respectable, even slightly conservative quality newspaper that could fairly be described as having a role similar to the New York Times in the US as a "paper of record") explicitly stated in that paper that in the view of the existential threat posed by climate change, journalistic neutrality needed to be a thing of the past. I have not really wrapped my head around these developments, but at the very minimum, it seems clear to me that the politicization of the American university is not something that has happened in isolation.
3. Related to the second observation: The politicization of academia is not a phenomenon limited to American universities. There have been similar developments in Britain, France, and Germany and that's only the countries where I follow events from afar. I have not checked whether there have been similar changes in the funding rules in these jurisdictions, but even allowing for the NSF rule change to have some impact elsewhere (because of international cooperation that aim to tap NSF funding together with US universities, for example), it does not seem plausible that a rule change in the US would have the impact observed elsewhere.
At any rate, many thanks for the post - I am now really looking forward to the gory details in part 04!
I'd argue that the 1997 second review criterion was both (a) a response to the then-new demands for greater accountability of research to societal and (b) also then a cause of increasing incentives to respond to such demands with political advocacy.
And I definitely agree that this is not just a US story, but that is the story I'm focused on in this series.
Anyone else think the post war boom in post secondary enrollment due to the GI Bill and resulting competition for academic positions had a role? Alvin Kernan's memoir, "In Plato's Cave" is a fascinating personal memoir.
I moved to Canada in 1967 and the overflow washing into Canadian universities was striking and the initial influence has continuing to grow ever since.
Roger, are you a member of Heterodox Academy? Certainly seems that you should be.
I think the origin of the problem goes back farther, to the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War. They engendered a belief in activism. Within academe, there was a gradual takeover of the humanities and some branches of the social sciences by an activist leftist perspective. It filtered into the hard sciences later. At first, hiring of Marxist-ish profs added to thought diversity, but because they tended to only support their own, over time it has had the opposite effect.
I am. They do good work👍
As with the previous post, there's a lack of rigor that makes the argumentation speculative. The correlations with scicomms and misinfo research are just that, correlations. Many other relevant correlations exist, e.g. social media rise in the early 2000s, and the accelerating backlash to globalization that led to Occupy Wall Street, Brexit, and Trump. There's plenty of potential drivers for the increasing lack of trust in science, and you do not present any rigorous arguments or data for any causal effects, for any of them.
On the impact-issue, this is indeed a problem. While well-meaning (accountability etc) it's not only hard to measure and predict, but also often left ill-defined by funders, leaving researchers at loss as to what to consider and argue. Nevertheless, this is a funder-related issue. And funders are the drivers of by what metrics researchers/institutions are evaluated on, so why not seek change there? Researchers/institutions adapt to metrics and funding not the other way around.
The impact-aspect has also been implemented far beyond the US, which begs the question what the drivers have been for that, and potentially if those same drivers could contribute to lack of trust in science by completely different causal links.
Yes absolutely
Rather than critiquing the idea of this series I invite you to critique where specific arguments are wrong or data is false.
Has US academia not shifted to the far left overall?
Has that not been identified in polls of the public as a reason for the loss of confidence in universities?
Have a significant number faculty not chosen to become partisan warriors online?
Isn’t science communication and misinformation research reflective of these trends?
Make the case
When you write …
“Researchers/institutions adapt to metrics and funding not the other way around”
… we seem to be in complete agreement
And while this series does not go past the US borders, there is also evidence that these issues are indeed broader
https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/does-climate-research-have-an-anti
I have not critiqued the idea with this series. And your thesis/hypothesis is valid. What I've critiqued is your arguments and the extent to which your data, while not false (at least I've no reason to doubt them), do not convincingly support your thesis/claims (and I've explained why I think so). Brief answers to your questions:
1) academics' voting patterns may have shifted, but that doesn't equate with research en masse being politicized - I've made this point before.
2) surveys have limitations, which I've pointed out before; also, people displaying varying trust depending on fields (which also has time-correlations with events, e.g. pre vs post-pandemic; pandemic fall-out was one of the drivers of lack of trust I suggested as alternative/complementary explanation to yours)
3) define significant; in my view, it's significant because of their reach through social media + amplifications in various mainstream and so-called independent media. In terms of absolute numbers, my intuition is that it's fringe. Happy to reconsider if you show me hard data.
4) reflective of what? What direction of causality?
And thanks for the link to your earlier post, being a relatively new subscriber, I'd not read it. I have now. While it doesn't speak to a general/systemic issue (it's disciplinary/topic-specific, which is likely where a fair bit of our disagreement stems from), I whole-heartedly agree with your points there.
A fundamental problem with universities today is that their clientele, i.e. the students who largely fund the system, has radically changed in nature in recent decades. Universities were originally designed to cater to a small elite who spent a year or two there largely to meet other members of the elite, together with a leavening of academically gifted scholars who were given free tuition. Today this has changed into a free-for-all in which universities will take more or less anyone as a student as long as they bring with them absurdly bloated fees for the privilege. The problem is that the universities have not clearly articulated their purpose in all of this, apart from making money, and this lack of purpose tends to bleed into the research side of things.
I would offer a suggestion as to what the real purpose of universities should be. A few decades ago Britain’s Royal Air Force decreed that all fighter pilots should henceforth have university degrees. I asked a senior officer at the time why fighter pilots needed degrees. He answered “They don’t, but most nineteen-years olds are far too immature to be allowed anywhere near a very lethal and expensive aircraft, and spending a few years at university is as good a way as any of warehousing them for a few years while they mature.”
Many, if not most, teenagers graduating from high school today are too immature to enter the workforce in any meaningful fashion. Perhaps the real purpose of universities today should be to assist in the maturing process and turn out responsible citizens as an end product. Converting innocent teenagers into left-wing protest machines does not seem to be a useful way of achieving this end.
I would amend the "students who largely fund the system" to the government that funds the students largely fund the system . . . I hope the government gets out of the student loan business altogether
https://nces.ed.gov/whatsnew/press_releases/7_26_2023.asp
Engineering takes years to master, we even have to put graduates threw intensive training for a couple of years after graduation before they do really useful work.
Roger:
In the book you may write, please consider three other aspects.
• The shifting of the "social compact." Originally, as you indicate, the compact was intended to be between the researcher and the public at large. That has gradually – and somewhat subtly – changed. The compact has substituted "government" for the "public."
• "Cherchez le buck." The shift in the social compact was largely driven, I believe, by a shift in the funding of science. Up until WWI, there was relatively little government funding of research, and much of that focused on government researchers (in USDA, for example). During that war, governments mobilized science and industry to do what we would now call "applied science" to support the war effort. This resulted in "arranged marriages" between academics and industry. After the Great War, government funding largely dried up, but many of the arranged marriages endured. Many in industry (e.g. DuPont) realized the value of research and increased their support – backing their belief with their dollars. WWII forced governments to once again mobilize science, but now the scope of the government-funded research enterprise – and the funding available – went from thousands to hundreds of thousands. The Manhattan Project is the exemplar of this.
However, once the war was over, funding for science was reduced, but it remained much higher than pre-war levels. There were sufficient funds for academics to fund the creation of more academics. Research centers became ubiquitous. However, these developments also meant that more and more funding was necessary to maintain the cycle of research funding creating more researchers requiring even more funding. The amount of funding increased but not enough to fund this cycle. This led to an environment where the competition for funds became an essential time sink for many researchers. When I left academia in 2005, something like one in ten proposals were funded in my field. Many researchers literally were spending half their time writing proposals.
The result of this was a pernicious form of Darwinian natural selection, where the best funded (hence, most successful) researchers were those who could best market themselves to the sources of funds. In other words, scientific success became tied to advocacy. Coupled with the shifting social compact of science, this has resulted in scientists becoming advocates for positions which support the goals of the agencies which are supporting them.
• Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy. The sudden ramping up of scientific funding during the world wars demanded new organizations to manage the funding. The decades since have seen these organizations become balkanized bureaucracies, each competing for Congressional funding. As Jerry Pounelle put it: "In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control." Thus, the funding bureaucracies themselves also must become marketeers – advocates, bent on their own survival.
I would add Bell Labs as a key research lab starting in the 1920s. Their list of inventions is stellar: transistor, laser, modern solar cell, information theory, Unix operating system, and C programming language. People working for Bell Labs have received 8 Nobel Prizes. What made this possible was the surfeit of funds flowing from the monopoly of AT&T. Clearly Bell Labs successfully created a fertile environment for research. It is an interesting conundrum that so much good came from a monopoly.
An excellent article. Thanks.
Misinformation.
As the last few years have shown without a doubt, institutions are actively suppressing true but unhelpful information by calling it misinformation.
Censorship.
These people are the threat to democracy.
Very interesting context, Roger. Thank you. I think scientists and other professionals should stay in their lane. Turning scientists into political actors has done no favors to science and none to the scientists themselves as we see thousands of papers withdrawn and a lack of trust in science generally. Do we want our engineers to be political actors? Our doctors? Our courtrooms? Our military? Insisting on subjective criteria diminishes any undertaking. If you’re a scientist who wants to save the world, fine. Carry a sign on your weekends or adopt a puppy.
I can’t wait for part 4 professor. I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time.
I took early retirement from university in 1996, and have been surprised by the changes since. At that time I did not sense any politization, but it clearly exists now. At that time, most researchers worked alone with their graduate students, but now large groups are the norm.
Ted Dixon
When I got my PhD in 1994, focused on science and technology policy, the kind of political advocacy most scientists and faculty wanted was advocacy for larger science budgets in their area of expertise.
By 2005 that had morphed into more explicit political and policy advocacy.
This is really exactly on point in my view. Well done.
Roger, the weekend Wall Street Journal has an excellent article (p. A11 Dec. 7-8 WSJ) about Jay Bhattacharya's time spent as a "non-person" and subsequent rise from the ashes to be nominated for head of NIH. His story vividly illustrates the dangers of the politicization of universities and scientific institutions. Bhattacharya's university "investigated" him for "conflicts of interest" to cast doubts about his research proving that COVID was a great deal less deadly than public-health authorities were claiming. "Progressive" authority figures thought that fact had to be suppressed because the CDC and NIH apparatchiks believed it was a virtue to panic the population about COVID so people would submit to control and loss of liberty. Government bureaucrats will do that sort of thing; the shame of it was that Bhattacharya's university went along and actively connived at smearing Bhattacharya's reputation for political goals. Bhattacharya was consistently right on issue after issue about which the CDC and NIH were completely wrong, but JB's voice was suppressed at a time when the nation very much needed to hear it. I suggest you have a look at the article; I thought it was highly relevant to the dangers of politicized groupthink in those claiming to "represent science" (Fauci's words).
Both COVID and climate change, as presented to the general public, have very little to do with science as such, and everything to do with politics. H.L. Mencken said it all about a hundred years ago:
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary"
Please go back to using "global warming"
Thanks, I'll have a look
I was investigated by my university 3 times. Once at the request of a member of Congress who alleged I was taking cash for my Congressional testimony (I was not). Once by an overly enthusiastic department chair who accused me of obtaining a federal research grant outside university procedures (Of all the false accusations to conjure up, this one, really?). And once for telling colleagues about this investigation (lol).
All three were ridiculous and wound up consuming a lot of my time, a lot of university resources, and causing me a lot of stress and professional harm. But I guess that was the point. Nothing came of any of them, well, I guess they collectively contributed in some way to my retirement at 56 ;-)
The process is the punishment
Again.
This is the link for the Bhattacharya piece: https://www.wsj.com/opinion/the-man-who-fought-fauci-and-won-trump-nih-nominee-jay-bhattacharya-covid-cancel-culture-4a0650bd?st=f7DPKP&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
I first read about your travails in the piece by Donna Laframboise at GWPF.
Thanks Roger for the pointer to the UM report, which makes for somewhat encouraging reading. I was struck by this part:
"Subcommittee Three was asked to consider “[w]hether the University should adopt some form of the University of Chicago’s Kalven Principles, which establish ‘[a] heavy presumption against the University . . . expressing opinions on the political and social issues of the day.’” Subcommittee Three answered “in the affirmative.”
If only the major scientific societies could likewise be convinced to stop issuing position statements. The American and Canadian Economic Associations are both constitutionally forbidden from doing so. By contrast the AGU, AMS, AAAS etc. long ago gave in to the temptation with all the negative repercussions noted in the UM report. On your dad's blog many years ago I wrote a guest post on this topic and the then-president of the AMS joined in the comments to respond (needless to say I didn't convince him). I guess the leaders of these groups thought that by issuing position statements on climate change they would change public opinion. They were right, but in their hubris they misunderstood what the resulting change would be.
Yes, I also found it encouraging. Most universities are light years away from such self-awareness, I'm afraid.
I've come to think that institutional statements on climate change are much less about actually trying to convince the public of anything, but instead, means of signaling in-group affinities.
I read the post as suggesting that the 1997 NSF evaluation criteria change has changed incentives (highly plausible) and that this has, over time, contributed to the politicization observed (plausible, too). Three observations on this:
1. It would be interesting to get a better understanding of the mechanism at work (this is not a suggestion that Professor Pielke provide that better understanding although his views would be of great interest). Clearly, it is not just that people write the grant proposals differently; they presumably also do their research differently than they otherwise would have. Most importantly, what I think can be observed is that this is not just strategic behaviour (in the wording of grant proposals and research design and so on) accompanied by a cynical stance along the lines of "Oh well, if this is what I have to do to get funding, alright, I'll just do it." Something much more fundamental seems to have changed: academics' beliefs about the objectives of their activity, their views on "traditional" principles and values of scientists etc. Huxley's quip "The tragedy of science: A beautiful hypothesis slain by an ugly fact." would presumably be considered inacceptable by large sections of the professoriate today. Asking about the mechanism is really about tracing the causal effects from the NSF rule change to something very fundamental that has happened in the minds of many thousands of the most intelligent individuals in society.
2. Somehow I cannot fathom that NSF rule change being something "exogenous" (for lack of a better term). My hypothesis is that (i) such a rule change is itself driven by much deeper factors and, more specifically, that (ii) this probably cannot be separated from other developments that have occurred in parallel - e.g., the politicization of the media where, painting with a very broad brush, something similar has happened. In the sincere view of many practitioners, journalism is no longer and should no longer be about reporting facts; it really is fairly indistinguishable from activism. Just last year, a journalist writing for Germany's "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung" (which used to be a respectable, even slightly conservative quality newspaper that could fairly be described as having a role similar to the New York Times in the US as a "paper of record") explicitly stated in that paper that in the view of the existential threat posed by climate change, journalistic neutrality needed to be a thing of the past. I have not really wrapped my head around these developments, but at the very minimum, it seems clear to me that the politicization of the American university is not something that has happened in isolation.
3. Related to the second observation: The politicization of academia is not a phenomenon limited to American universities. There have been similar developments in Britain, France, and Germany and that's only the countries where I follow events from afar. I have not checked whether there have been similar changes in the funding rules in these jurisdictions, but even allowing for the NSF rule change to have some impact elsewhere (because of international cooperation that aim to tap NSF funding together with US universities, for example), it does not seem plausible that a rule change in the US would have the impact observed elsewhere.
At any rate, many thanks for the post - I am now really looking forward to the gory details in part 04!
Thanks! I think we are in good agreement here.
I'd argue that the 1997 second review criterion was both (a) a response to the then-new demands for greater accountability of research to societal and (b) also then a cause of increasing incentives to respond to such demands with political advocacy.
And I definitely agree that this is not just a US story, but that is the story I'm focused on in this series.
Excellent work Roger.
Anyone else think the post war boom in post secondary enrollment due to the GI Bill and resulting competition for academic positions had a role? Alvin Kernan's memoir, "In Plato's Cave" is a fascinating personal memoir.
I moved to Canada in 1967 and the overflow washing into Canadian universities was striking and the initial influence has continuing to grow ever since.
Your dead right.. no one is to be trusted any more..
Woke ideology has made us lose our way.. and couple this with the funding being driven by the politics that has subjugated the science community.
So we have scientists being told to make the science fit the political narrative even if its not true.
The biggest subjugation area is climate change as it’s the power play for control of the population.
The impact of corporatism on science especially in the medical world is also worth a review.
All this has suppressed honesty and free thought and we need to get back to a separation of science from politics.