The Looming Decline of the Public Research University
20th October 2017
Federal funding for basic research—more than half of it conducted on university campuses like this one—has effectively declined since 2008, failing to keep pace with inflation. This is before we take into account Trump administration proposals to slash the National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Institutes of Health (NIH) budgets by billions of dollars more.
Unexplained: Why it’s the job of the Federal government (i.e. the Federal taxpayer) to fund all of this stuff — other than vague handwaving about ‘an economy more dependent on it that most people understand’ (i.e. you ordinary people are dump while we journalists are smart).
Unmentioned: The conversion of ‘public research universities’ into indoctrination camps for left-wing political causes, starting with ‘climate change’ right the way down to ‘gender and queerness studies’. (Also unmentioned is how much of this ‘basic research funding’ goes to stuff like ‘queering‘.)