Science and Technology

Biden’s victory means a reboot of US higher education policy

John Aubrey Douglass
Richard Edelstein
2020

Joe Biden’s election as the next president of the United States will fundamentally alter the destructive higher education policies pursued over the past four years under Donald Trump.

The Trump administration pursued increasingly restrictive visa policies, dampening the ability and interest of international talent to come to American universities, repeatedly proposed large-scale cuts in student financial aid as well as funding for science, invoked anti-immigrant policies that affected students, and reduced restrictions on largely predatory for-profit tertiary...

Federally Funded Research, the Bayh-Dole Act, and the COVID Vaccine Race, by John Aubrey Douglass, CSHE 3.21 (February 2021)

John Aubrey Douglass
2021

This essay discusses the world of federally funded intellectual property (IP) before and after the Bayh-Dole Act and its impact on the world of science and commerce, before then exploring the complicated debates over ownership of the science behind the life-saving COVID-19 vaccines that will bring normalcy back to the world. Before 1980, federally funded science in the U.S. was largely focused on meeting the Cold War national defense needs of a nation in a science and technology race with the Soviet Union. The 1980 Bayh-Dole Act initiated in earnest the recognition that the advancement of...

SCIENCE AND SECURITY: Strengthening US-China Research Networks Through University Leadership by Brad Farnsworth CSHE 11.21 (September 2021)

Brad Farnsworh
2021

This paper describes the current criticisms of academic research collaboration between the US and China and proposes a university-led initiative to address those concerns. The article begins with the assertion that bilateral research collaboration has historically benefitted both countries, citing cooperation in virology as an example. The paper continues with a discussion of the criticisms leveled by several US government agencies against the Chinese government, especially with regard to the Thousand Talents Program (TTP). A close examination of publicly available appointment letters...

Institutional and Cultural Parameters Affecting Women’s Participation in the Fields of Chemistry, Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science Around the World

2012

How women enter higher education, attain degrees, and work in chemistry, mathematics, statistics, and computer science is essentially regulated by the different cultures within their national societies. These express social, economic, and political values about the role of women in society, and shape the values of academic institutions. The latter are sometimes contradictory and burdened with a historical legacy inimical to the full participation of women in science. At the same time, an increasing international consensus about the practice of science tends to be much more supportive of...

Science and the Entrepreneurial University, by Richard C. Atkinson

Richard C. Atkinson
2010

The current and still-evolving role of the American research university has been shaped by four key developments in the past sixty-five years: the historic decision to establish a comprehensive postwar federal science policy, described in Vannevar Bush’s 1945 report, Science, The Endless Frontier; the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980; economic analyses from the 1950s onward that have validated the central role of knowledge in economic growth and influenced government and university policy on industry-university research; and various experiments with such research that have led to an increasing...

Science and Its Discontents: An Evolutionary Tale, by Donald Kennedy

Donald Kennedy
2008

This paper analyzes the roots and implications of conflict between the conduct of science and government predilections in the United States, including the security state and neoconservative control of Washington. Three major conflicts are discussed: the emergence of new security and secrecy regimes that seek control of science; religiously derived moral viewpoints that seek to limit scientific research; and the purposeful shaping and censoring of scientific findings for political gain. All three policy issues, argues the author, have their roots in a growing public mistrust of...