First they came for the evolutionary biologists...
and I didn't speak out, because I'm not an evolutionary biologist. Then they came for the cosmologists... and the climatologists...
Anyway, it's now reached forestry as well. Publishing a paper in Science with a conclusion contradicting one of the Bush administration's pro-business positions leads to getting your grant pulled for violating a clause "that prohibits using any of the funds to lobby Congress" — wtf??
Comments:
2006-02-08T01:18:36Z
Sometime back in the 50s there was a political movement and suddenly all academic work must be in-line with the philosophy of the ruling party. Many fields got "cleansed" but math and other theoretical subjects survived since math *was* more or less immune to political interpretation.
Hopefully TCS won't have this "we cut your funding if we don't like your results" problem. My adviser has been very reassuring, "Don't worry. We didn't get any funding from them anyway."
2006-02-08T01:27:22Z
Yeah, and we got told horrible stories about how in that country you needed an id to travel anywhere and the government was always watching you and they tortured people and sent them to camps without trial for political reasons and the newspapers only printed what the government told them to and we thought we were so much better here for being free. What happened?
2006-02-20T15:46:31Z
JUST LIKE OUR SO CALLED DEMOCRACY IN ENGLAND THEN!
STROW