Crackdown coming?

Writing in the journal Conservation Biology recently, I called attention to
a looming conflict. Here's a segment from the article, "Science Policy for True Believers,"

"American society is now engaged in a range of policy debates in which
standards of critical thinking and public debate are often sacrificed to
crass calculations about who wins and who loses. In this process, many
who hold power in government and business are strongly attracted to
patterns of thinking and talking more compatible with classic “closed
societies” than with open, democratic political systems. The underlying
sentiment is all-too-clear: Just win, regardless of cost. Partisans of this
insurgence feel compelled to promote corporate interests, “conservative”
social agendas and unilateralist foreign policy objectives, even when
prominent scientific findings cast doubt on the wisdom of actions favored
within the prevailing groupthink.

Attempts to dominate the content of information and ideas in ways that
advance a particular agenda to the exclusion of all others -- such
projects are evident in many key domains of social life. A notorious
example is the almost total absorption of AM radio by right wing talk
show hosts who harangue national audiences with uniform, angry talking
points hour after hour, cutting off callers who dare offer any different
views. Much the same influence is visible on cable television news and
news/talk programs in which the spectrum of opinions voiced has
recently narrowed to include only the hand picked “moderate” and
“conservative” voices favored by corporate media managers.
Widespread public unrest about these developments is evident in the
protests about relaxation of government regulations governing the
concentration of media ownership. The increasing uniformity of cable
news and news/talk programming, the penchant for cleansing discussion
of annoying dissent, looms as a major problem for the long term health
of our democracy.

Now science itself looms as a convenient target, just another
communications channel ready to be adapted to the dictates of a rapidly
moving, power-hungry social movement. Will scientists and scholars
yield to this aggressive onslaught, taking their research grants and laying
low? Or can we hope for a more positive, more hopeful, more forceful
response?

[Conservation Biology, Page 866, vol. 18, no. 4, Aug. 2004]

My expectation has been that a Bush victory would lead to further steps
in the ongoing attempt to establish a hegemony of message content at all
levels of American society. Just before the election, I predicted to my
class of first years students in an American politics class that there
would be "a crackdown on dissidents in major institutions." I was
thinking of NPR, PBS, and the country's colleges and universities, for
starters.

Now we see the first wave of hand wringing and argument that could lead
to the ideological cleansing that, I believe, is near the top of the
far right "conservative" agenda. George Will's article, "Academia, Stuck
to the Left," begins to lay out the case.

"Academics, such as the next secretary of state, still decorate
Washington, but academia is less listened to than it was. It has
marginalized itself, partly by political shrillness and silliness that have
something to do with the parochialism produced by what George Orwell
called "smelly little orthodoxies."

Many campuses are intellectual versions of one-party nations -- except
such nations usually have the merit, such as it is, of candor about their
ideological monopolies. In contrast, American campuses have more
insistently proclaimed their commitment to diversity as they have
become more intellectually monochrome.

They do indeed cultivate diversity -- in race, skin color, ethnicity, sexual
preference. In everything but thought."

* * * * * * * * *
Wills' claims are both ludicrous and pernicious. The best, extended
critique I've read is one by Juan Cole, historian at the University of
Michigan. He begins with the allegation that universities have few
conservatives in teaching positions.

"There are all sorts of social-science problems with this allegation. First,
what is the population that is being studied? Is it all tenure-track
teachers in all universities in all schools and departments? Are we
including two-year colleges? Four-year ones? Are we including
Economics Departments, Business Schools, Medical Schools,
Engineering schools?

If that were the pool, then academics probably mirror the general
American society pretty closely. There are about 1.1 million post-
secondary teachers in the United States. A lot of the ones in the Red
States are conservatives, and a lot of the ones in the engineering schools
everywhere are. So it simply is not true that "universities" are bastions of
the political left. Moreover, there are almost no leftists in any major
economics department in the United States, in contrast to Europe."

Cole's piece runs in his blog, Informed Comment, 11/28/04 (in the archives).

Coming to a campus near you: the thought police.

Note that in my comments above I've put "conservative" in quotation
marks. When I run into people who tell me they are conservative these
days I say, "Oh, that's interesting. What are you conservering?"
Embarrassing moments of silence usually follow.

Best estimate of civilian casualties due to the Iraq war -- 100.000

A Reuters summary of a recent report from The John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
contains some especially dreary, but not unexpected news. Other figures I've read now count from
13.000 to 15,000 plus Iraqi casualties in the war. The Hopkins study looks at "excess deaths" over
an eighteen month period, concluding that 100,000 is a reasonable estimate. These figures and the
human realities behind them are simply tragic.

Our national tendency is, of course, to ignore such data in favor of triumphalist high patriotism.
Even publicizing the number of American troops killed in combat (now well over 1,100) is
considered suspect. In the little village of Chatham, New York, near where I live, the mayor ordered
removal of a billboard and small yellow flags memorial that gave daily updates on deaths of U.S. soldiers.

Which of these deaths -- American, Iraqi, and others -- should we remember, mourn and honor?
If the answer is not "All of them," I'd like to know the reason why.

Jobs for U.S. programmers evaporate

During the presidential debates G.W. Bush held out the promise of community
college education for those who had lost jobs to foreign competition.
Remedies of this kind have long been preferred by American politicians and
businessmen, mainly because it places responsibility for economic pain on individuals,
(the victims) and deflects attention from more basic structural causes. Just upgrade
your skills, folks. Maybe become a computer programer rather than a factory
worker and you'll be fine. What such arguments overlook, of course, is that
the competition U.S. workers now face extends to job categories across a broad
spectrum, including what are often taken to be fairly sophisticated technical
vocations.

Here's a story, "Endangered Species," by David Francis of the Christian Science
Monitor about the jobs in question.

"Say goodbye to the American software programmer. Once the symbols of hope
as the nation shifted from manufacturing to service jobs, programmers today
are an endangered species. They face a challenge similar to that which shrank
the ranks of steelworkers and autoworkers a quarter century ago: competition
from foreigners. ....

"Since the dotcom bust in 2000-2001, nearly a quarter of California technology
workers have taken nontech jobs, according to a study of 1 million workers
released last week by Sphere Institute, a San Francisco Bay Area public policy
group. The jobs they took often paid less. Software workers were hit especially
hard. Another 28% have dropped off California's job rolls altogether. They fled
the state, became unemployed, or decided on self-employment. ....

"Although computer-related jobs in the United States increased by 27,000 between
2001 and 2003, about 180,000 new foreign H-1B workers in the computer
area entered the nation, calculates John Miano, an expert with the Programmers
Guild, a professional society. "This suggests any gain of jobs have been taken by
H-1B workers," he says.

"H-1B visas allow skilled foreigners to live and work in the US for up to six
years. Many are able to get green cards in a first step to citizenship. Another visa,
L-1, allows multinational companies to transfer workers from foreign operations
into the US. ....

"H-1B and L-1 visas are "American worker replacement programs," says the
National Hire American Citizens Society."