BY HANK REICHMAN Yesterday the welcome news arrived that scandal-ridden Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke would, as previously hinted, be departing his post by year’s end. The announcement came just days after release of a scathing 38-page report by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), Science under Siege at the Department of the Interior (DOI), which…
ДBY HANK REICHMAN A new survey of 63,000 scientific experts across 16 federal agencies, conducted by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) in cooperation with the Center for Survey Statistics and Methodology at Iowa State University, shows that the Trump administration continues to “sideline science.” According to the survey, government scientists report iissues including “censorship…
BY HANK REICHMAN Today the AAUP released a new report, “National Security, the Assault on Science, and Academic Freedom.” The report details troubling threats to academic freedom in the physical and natural sciences that have been exacerbated by the Trump administration’s hostility to science. International scientific exchange and, especially, the charging of innocent Chinese or…
BY HANK REICHMAN It has become something of a truism that the Trump administration and the Republican Party more generally have been dismissive of and even hostile to the findings and methods of scientific research. The Union of Concerned Scientists this summer released an exhaustive report, Sidelining Science Since Day One, that documents how in…
BY MARTIN KICH If poetry is at its core the effort to give expression to the inexpressible aspects of our experience, then science is often a kind of poetry, or at least provides a complement to the poetic impulse. For science provides both a fundamental challenge to all simplistic notions about our existence and a…
BY HANK REICHMAN Readers of this blog may be familiar with the regular National Public Radio (NPR) feature “Science Friday.” Last week one 35-minute segment, “Science in the Crosshairs,” focused on governmental and other threats to the academic freedom of scientists. It began with fetal tissue research: After furor erupted over a video seeming to…
For nearly a decade under Conservative rule, the Canadian Prime Minister’s Office exercised tight control over the release of information. Since Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s swearing-in on Wednesday, however, things seem to be changing. One Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) producer requested an interview with Navdeep Bains, the new minister of innovation, science and economic development. She heard…
By now it is a cliché, the math or science professor whom no one can understand. If one complains one might be accused of being culturally insensitive or racist. Or told to be open-minded and listen more carefully (I suppose the mind and ear are connected). Or worse, and commonly, “Well, we couldn’t find…
In American political discourse, there is a failure to distinguish between persuasion and argument that extends to the media coverage of politics and that distorts, sometimes grossly, the public understanding of and response to the issues of the day. Any student in a composition course that covers persuasion and argument learns that argument is a…
Last year, Paul Broun, a congressman from Georgia, was the featured speaker at a Sportsman’s Banquet at a Baptist church. I’m not sure what the keynote speakers at those banquets usually talk about, but Broun used his time at the microphone to observe, infamously, that embryology, evolution, and the Big Bang Theory are “lies straight…