On August 2, local time, Fields Medal winner Terence Tao posted several posts saying that the US government recently suspended almost all federal funding to his University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) through agencies such as the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and his research team was also affected.
"The suspension of my personal funding has had some impact on me, particularly as my summer salary is now in limbo (which I had previously deferred in order to support several of my graduate students with previously awarded NSF funds), leaving me with few resources to continue supporting my graduate students," Tao wrote.
According to Science magazine, on July 31, local time, the NSF notified UCLA that nearly 300 of its grants would be suspended "until further notice."
Terrence Tao is the real deal, perhaps the smartest person alive at the moment, at least in mathematics. I will not question the importance of his research nor stamp my foot about what the practical applications of it might be. It's math, Jake. Practical applications lie dormant for decades and then change everything in a decade. So I waive any objection there. I wouldn't understand the explanations anyway. Yet there is a missing piece in his argument, amplified rather than corrected by the reporting on his complaint. He is working for an establishment that is breaking the law WRT discrimination, openly and defiantly.
I don't think it pays to be an absolutist. Terrence Tao is not responsible for everything his university does wrong. In a large workplace, we all have had occasion to shake out heads and think "I wish they wouldn't do that. They're going to get caught some day and there will be hell to pay." OTOH, when that hell comes to pay, it might splash over on to you, and the question of whether you were an innocent bystander, morally negligent, an abettor, or even an accomplice to the act. There were always things going on at my hospital where I wondered whether I should be minding my business - which people will always say I should - or reporting misconduct - which other people will always say I should. OTOOH, at what point does it kick in that you are a simple machinist doing your job, but it's fixing the trains that send people to the Gulag? UCLA is not the Gulag, nor are they just ignoring parking tickets. I dislike being sold the idea that the infractions are so unimportant that people who work there bear no responsibility.
I don't know where Tao's complicity falls in this situation and I will not even attempt to figure it out. I can notice things, however. When an agency is looking at money or power being taken away, they put the most sympathetic causes forward. There they go taking money away from the most vulnerable among us again. I have an automatic suspicion about this now. What are they spending money on that they aren't mentioning? No, there's no communists here, boss. No one here but us agrarian reformers. Tao could work wherever he wanted. UCLA's deal must have been the best on offer. And perhaps all the R1 universities are so compromised that there is no real choice in terms of corruption. But at what point do the all-stars use their celebrity to effect changes?
3 comments:
If he's like some of the people I knew, he knows little or nothing about university malfeasance, and the bulk of what he knows about the U or the state comes from his traditional news programs. Researching past the headlines takes time away from their passion (and the boring grant applications).
Very easy to understand, and we do rely on their perseverance/obsession. But eventually we get to the Manifesto of the 93 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifesto_of_the_Ninety-Three
True. Both that manifesto and the counter-manifesto smell of people who believe what they're told without investigation.
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