Trump restricts federal research funding, a lifeblood for colleges

[Ikari]

Trump restricts federal research funding, a lifeblood for colleges

After decades of partnership with the U.S. government, American colleges are facing new doubts about the future of their federal funding.

apnews.com

President Donald Trump’s administration has been using the funding spigot to seek compliance with his agenda, cutting off money to schools including Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania. All the while, universities across the country are navigating cuts to grants for research institutions.

The squeeze on higher education underscores how much American colleges depend on the federal government — a provider of grants and contracts that have amounted to close to half the total revenue of some research universities, according to an Associated Press analysis.

It adds up to a crisis for universities, and a problem for the country as a whole, say school administrators and advocates for academic freedom. America’s scientific and medical research capabilities are tightly entwined with its universities as part of a compact that started after World War II to develop national expertise and knowledge.

“It feels like any day, any university could step out of line in some way and then have all of their funding pulled,” said Jonathan Friedman, managing director of free expression programs at PEN America.

Trump trying to use funding to force his ideals and agenda. This central-planning commie bullshit is dangerous, particularly when you look into the world of academia and research. A lot of base scientific and engineering research is done at the University level. This is because fundamental research in science, math, etc. is often prohibitively expensive for private enterprise and there's no guarantee that some breakthrough leading to an engineerable and marketable product will result. Plus these grants drive admission into graduate programs. Academia is important to protect as a bastion of competing ideas, of a concrete seat of research and development that can then be taken by private sector to turn into products, etc. Additionally, these programs educate and graduate scientists and engineers who can then go on to work at our government laboratories or other government agencies like NIST. We need that, we need continued technological advancement and growth of our knowledge base to remain competitive and stay on the bleeding edge of tech and science.

Removing grants and funding will fundamentally restrict how Universities can recruit, fund graduate programs and research programs, and staff. For instance, when I went to University for graduate school, I didn't pay for it. I got some small amount of funding (it was maybe like 20k/yr) and either had to TA (which you did in the first few years of grad school) or RA (which you did after quals and such to begin thesis work). We paid this out of grants and public funding (DARPA funded a lot of my grad research), and it is important because the fundamentals of math and science are explored predominately at University.

There's a reason why places like Bell Labs no longer exist. Not just that the large monopolies like Ma Bell don't exist (because Corporate Oligarchy now does), but because what we need to study across the disciplines is best addressed and handled through academia. Trump seems to have a War on Science, a War on Knowledge, a War on Education going on; and this is a dangerous path to take. We cannot maintain dominance by shuffling through this life ignorant, stupid, and uneducated.

 

[Slartibartfast]

I work in helping develop ML models for disease and diagnosis classification and this is causing a lot of employees to be reclassified to direct labor costs and a shedding of contractors which cannot be reclassified where I work.

It’s really stupid because it means my work will be less helpful towards saving lives.

Luckily while I work at a university (a famous one too) much of the funding for my role comes from the private sector it also means some of the publicly funded data stores at going to be harder to get to for curation. ML often works better if you have more data.

 

[Greenbeard]

Trump is choking off American scientific research.