RESPONSES TO TWO COMMENTS

Opaque asks, “What is the most influential force contributing to the dominance of STEM funding? Is it a historically enacted policy? Is it just the most marketable aspect of any university in today's higher education industry? Who does it appeal to and where do the expected returns come from? Immigrant and middle class families with bourgeoise values hoping their kids will make more money than they did? Or is it an international force of "new money" coming from students overseas hoping to get an American education? Why STEM in particular?”

An interesting series of questions. I am not sure I can answer all of them, but I can offer the following remarks based on my observations over the past 60 years or so. So far as I can see, there are three reasons why the STEM fields command the attention of university administrations. First, the STEM fields bring in outside grant money which, especially when it comes from the federal government, brings with it very large sums of overhead money which then go into the general university coffers. This is, by and large, soft money, which is to say money that can be used in a variety of different ways. The second reason is that there is a constant demand in the corporate world for graduates of the STEM fields. The third reason is that more and more, professors in the STEM fields have monetized their laboratory discoveries by forming companies to profit from them, and universities have been quite successful in compelling the professors to share their profits with their home institutions.

Let me tell you one lovely story about how things work in the other direction on occasion. For a long time, MIT turned out engineers who went on to get good jobs in corporate America. But about 50 years ago, the MIT administration realized it had a problem. Their graduates would do quite well in their new jobs, rising through the ranks, until about 10 years in they ran into a stone wall because when they became eligible to ascend from the engineering specialties to management, their lack of polish acquired in the humanities and social sciences made them less attractive candidates than their counterparts from schools like Harvard or Princeton or Yale. So MIT decided that it would buy itself some humanists and social scientists and require engineering students to spend little time getting culture. Being MIT, when it went looking for an economist it chose Paul Samuelson, and when it went looking for a linguist, it chose Noam Chomsky. I know about this because my first wife, a literary scholar, got a job teaching at MIT. I guess it worked, because to this day, MIT requires its undergraduates to spend little time a outside the laboratory.

Jerry Fresia remarks:  “Republicans have to be thinking...if Trump dropped out and we Repubs nominated a halfway sane "moderate"....Sleepy (I prefer "Creepy") Joe would suddenly be in trouble, given his baggage and his charisma-challenged campaign ability.”

That occurred to me also, but then I reflected, if Trump drops out it will be extremely important to him that whomever the Republicans choose to replace him should fail because if that replacement were to win the election, it would brand Trump as the loser. I will make a little bet: if Trump drops out, claiming that the election is rigged or whatever, he will do whatever he can to take his followers with him, telling them not to vote in a rigged election. If he were to do that, even Joe Biden, with all his faults, would win.