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121 sats \ 1 reply \ @SimpleStacker 15 Mar \ on: 'We Are Witnessing a New Brain Drain' as Scientists Flee America for France science
You can tell from the comments how little sympathy many Americans have for their academics.
It's a tricky thing because I know how these Americans feel. Even within academia, a lot of the professors in the more traditional disciplines were getting fed up with the political activism of professors, usually in the humanities. I remember the chair of my department in grad school, who himself is a Democrat voter, was complaining about how crazy the professors in the humanities were, and how university committees couldn't get any business done because of their focus on micro-grievances.
So when all these academics complain about Trump and say they're moving to France, I can't tell if it's the same crazy activists, or the ones I would have considered "real researchers." I know that many real researchers are affected, due to the uncertainty and holds on grant funding, so I'm sure many are fed up. But with stories like these, it's hard to tell the scale of the issue.
It is quite striking, indeed.
I've always experienced this kind of polarization between STEM and social science departments in all the institutes I've worked in, but it usually was just a matter of very different efficiency: STEM professors would complain about the utter lack of efficiency and focus when annoying university policies had to be implemented. E.g., the implementation of the Bologna reforms in Europe. It's annoying, but the STEM approach was just to, let's get it over with by just acting quickly. The humanity approach was to discuss, discuss some more, form workgroups, have meetings, discuss, delay, etc... and in the end, when they had to act, they'd just copy whatever the STEM playbook had achieved 2 years earlier.
It never looked as polarized as what seems to be the case in the US. And much less ideological or politically flavored.
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