Apparently, some 75 percent of U.S. scientists are planning to emigrate to Canada and Europe “in light of President Donald Trump’s sweeping changes to federal science policy.” Is this a joke or just a bad poll? According to my omniscient AI “Copilot,” the U.S. spends 3.4 percent of GDP on science and Canada only 1.8 percent. Is Canada really a better deal for scientists?
Of course, we need to know more details. What kind of science do these two nations favor? Who are those scientists who are threatening to leave? How bad for science are the Trump policies?
Is this a joke or just a bad poll?
How bad? Well, “National Institutes of Health has terminated scores of research grants that ‘no longer effectuate agency priorities’,” according to the letters researchers have received. The agency also deemed some of the grants “antithetical to the scientific inquiry.”
Perhaps a third of federal funding seems to go not to actual science but to projects that are frankly political.
Is that legitimate? Perhaps a third of federal funding seems to go not to actual science but to projects that are frankly political. A couple of years ago, for example, two ladies at Duke University got a $9.9-million grant entitled (in part) “A Collective Impact Approach to Broadening Participation in Computing,” basically an effort to get more women into computer science. This was part of a much larger NSF program along similar lines. The awarded amount could have funded a dozen or more of the typical single-investigator research grants for which NSF was once famous and for which the hit rate now hovers at around 15 percent.
I was puzzled when I saw that news. Why are more women needed in CS? Is there currently discrimination against women in science? This seems unlikely, given that women dominate most of the major scientific societies. See, for example the American Institute of Biological Sciences or even the National Academy of Sciences.
So: No evidence that women are discriminated against in science. Perhaps they are just more gifted than men in CS and should thus be sought out? Even Copilot can find no evidence for that.
Still puzzled, I wrote as politely as I could to one of the principal investigators on the $9-million Duke grant to ask why there was a need for more women in CS. She wrote back a very nasty note, the substance of which was, “You’re not black or female, so shut up!”
Clearly a substantial portion of federal science funding is going to support one variety or another of identity politics, not science. Perhaps the Trump administration is not entirely wrong to cull some of the money going to NIH and NSF.
As for the potential migration of scientists, just which scientists plan to go? If it is the cohort now being supported by the identity-politics wing of the federal science establishment, then we should wish them well as they depart.
John Staddon is James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Professor of Biology Emeritus at Duke University. He was profiled in the Wall Street Journal in January 2021 as a commentator on the current problems of science. His book Science in an Age of Unreason (Regnery) came out in 2022, and Scientific Method: How Science Works, Fails to Work, and Pretends to Work (Taylor and Francis, 2nd Edition) came out in 2024.
This article was originally published at jamesgmartin.center
