Doing less with less

I wrote an opinion piece in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel expressing my view that attacks on science funding and international students are bad. This will probably not be very controversial to readers of this blog. But I do think it’s worthwhile to say this in public, because I do think science is in general pretty popular and well-liked, certainly more so than politicians. “Does anybody really care what’s published in local papers?” I’ve been told, again and again, that yes, people do care. And my own experience with gerrymandering is that it really did make a difference, in the long term, that gerrymandering went from something very obscure to something people had heard of and generally agreed was kind of scummy. Long slow work of letters to the editor and public conversations were part of that. As Bryna Kra just reminded me, the actual financial situation of NSF and NIH is not determined when the President signs a bill; it has a lot more to do with the messy, political, hard-to-predict appropriations process, which has months to go still. So it’s far from too late to be talking about this — I encourage you to write your own!

Science Homecoming is an interesting project in this vein, asking scientists, wherever they now work, to write letters to their hometown papers. Click on the county you grew up in, it’ll suggest papers to submit to. (But don’t you already know what your hometown paper is? Sadly, if you’re around my age, your memory of what newspapers exist in your county of birth may be out of date.)