Tell Congress to KEEP NSF funding for the Social Sciences
From the Atlantic (mostly):
Beginning last year, the National Science Foundation ended its support for doctoral-dissertation research in Social and Behavioral sciences. That means political science, economics, sociology, anthropology, linguistics, psychology, and the interdisciplinary research that connects them are going to be eliminated. Congress will need to approve these changes. Last year, Congress rejected similar cuts, but Trump fired all 22 members of the NSF board in April and they have not been replaced.
White House spokesperson Kush Desai told the (Atlantic) author in an email that the administration “is committed to cementing America’s dominance in cutting-edge technologies of the future—innovation that is being driven by advancements in hard sciences, not in ideologically-driven ‘social sciences’.”
Yet, plenty of NSF-funded social science has turned out to have concrete benefits. In the 1990s, NSF funded economics research was used to create a far more efficient national kidney-donor-matching system. U.S. families now save more for retirement because an NSF-funded study by a tax researcher discovered the right tactics to nudge them. Results from NSF research on polling and forecasting are routinely used to inform consequential business decisions.
A coalition of about 40 organizations representing hard-science disciplines, led by the Computing Research Association, recently told Congress that losing the SBE division could lead to “long-lasting, potentially permanent” damage to national research as a whole. The stickiest barriers to progress in areas that the administration wants to prioritize—AI, biotechnology—are “fundamentally human,” the organizations argued.
ACTION:
Sign the petition at the Consortium of Social Science Associations
The Battle for SBE and Science Funding: What You Can Do
The Trump Administration Is Done With Social Science
This is from the Atlantic, I’ve tried sharing as a gift, it may still be paywalled, apologies if that’s the case
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