cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/39625050
American universities were buoyed for decades by the fact that every talented person in six continents competed for a position at even mid-tier U.S.-institutions.
Now higher education is fundamentally a profit machine that floats on predatory student loans, and investments in research and researchers have not kept up. Also, U.S. is a significantly less attractive place to move to.
The leopards are eating the faces.
The part about funding being an issue is definitely true. My partner is a professor, and she’s constantly worried about writing grants looking for funding.
The recent NCAA conference kerfuffle proves money was only part of the problem, though. While there certainly have been declines in state support and endowment revenue, they’ve also spent decades prioritizing things like sports, facilities, and coaches over research and academic programs. And we can’t even justify it by claiming that Universities need to prioritize revenue-generating entities to support non-revenue generating entities, because sports lose a stupid amount of money each year. They’ve lost track of what Universities are supposed to be doing, which is education, and they’re doing it in a way that keeps them trapped in a financial doom loop.
As an example, UW Madison which has a fairly large and profitable athletics program generated 12 million in profit last year. They aren’t the largest athletics program in the country, but it is bigger than many. Sits around the middle.
The patents and IP owned by the university provided $134 million in grants and support. Again, the school has a large STEM component, but it isn’t a top tier university. Again, sits around the middle. The organization providing this funding manages its investments carefully and intends to provide this level of funding year after year.
Research departments generated more revenue and the funding is likely more reliable.
when i was working in technology research we had low trust on Chinese publications, they have to gain in quality more than quantity
China is a publication mill. What’s on the paper isn’t as important as how many papers have your name.
It’s funny just reading the headline… Experts warn that Chinese research is getting good? Like, is that a bad thing, or why do we have to be warned about it xD isn’t research in general just good
Not just that China’s research is increasing, but that the USA’s is declining. Context clues indicate that there isn’t one worldwide condition that would explain the decline in USA science, because China is still succeeding and even growing in science… So the decline of USA’s science research indicates a problem in the USA. That is a problem, wouldn’t you agree?
Problem for the USA
The article is from a publication literally called “Scientific American”. Whom do you suspect the intended audience is?
Yup, Beijing has some of the best bioengineering papers I’ve seen lately regarding gene editing and microbiology, even some biochemistry. Chinese medical philosophy trends towards holistic systems, versus Western medicine which looks at discrete conditions. So China has made a lot of advancements in areas where this flexible thinking is benefiting them and is a more accurate way of looking at biology.
Holistic medicine. Do you mean mixing nonsense with actual medicine. Every scientific endeavor of merit is composed entirely of discrete units designed to be testable so we can add one more block to the pile which is used to work our way to a slightly larger understanding of reality.
I do not mean mixing pseudoscience with science. I mean that traditional Chinese medicine, which modern Chinese medicine is based on, if you would bother to do even the tiniest bit of research on the history of medicine, is based on a system of give and take, ying/yang, of flow, and with Qi. This philosophical basis means that they are less binary with their definitions and allow for more gradient thinking. Given that living is a delicate neurochemical and microbe balance, a give and take - it seems much more of an accurate view of the body and this has benefitted them a lot. They cured HIV and herpes with CRISPR-CAS9. It’s genuinely incredible.
China, India, Arabic countries, and then finally Greece and Western countries all influenced each other with medicine because they were on the silk road. The first medical compendiums ever made were made by Arabic scholars over hundreds of years, because they were in the center of all of this information. They also invented the first hospitals, and due to Islam’s values with charity, were meant to be free to use. These are valid scientific endeavors that enabled more research and a greater variety of case studies. It’s why hospitals to this day have wings for roughly each area of the body - eg doctors who read the section of the compendium on eyes would be eye doctors in the eye wing. It wasn’t expected in Arabic medicine that every doctor would treat every condition because the literature was so vast.
The body doesn’t discretely separate out organs though. It doesn’t say “oh well that’s a kidney issue so I can’t hurt the heart.” Western medicine tends to inappropriately segment the body into discrete parts which are actually related. I have personally made connections in the medical field knowing that this is the blind spot in Western medicine, and when I look at studies to confirm my hunches - China did the research. This is what I mean about them having an advantage. We’d have to bring real philosophy back into science if we want to catch up.
Science is captured by corpos… They pay for a bulk of it and they get results they need.
Who carws if it is fake, we won’t find out for 10 years but corpos get the PR when they need it.
