I grew up right next to Cambridge, living and breathing academia, especially science academia, and remember in high school sitting on the bus near Harvard/MIT with my friend, talking about how all the Indian aunties and uncles wanted to push me toward science, but I didn't want to go into it, etc. This woman turned around and told me never to go into science -- she was ~30 and had a PhD in biology but was making nothing and wished she had done something else. IMO, it's not just administrative expansion, although it is that; it's that no industry will attract decent people with abysmal wages and little-to-no job security and little-to-no geographic flexibility (and a great deal of ideological rigidity that makes normal people feel like they're walking on eggshells), especially not all at the same time.
Jason Locasale, PhD
Jason Locasale, PhD27.7. klo 21.21
The prevailing narrative—that scientists are departing academia due to funding cuts—reverses the actual causality. In reality, many universities chose to divert research funds toward administrative expansion and ideological programming well before any budget reductions occurred. As laboratories faced resource constraints, offices dedicated to messaging, branding, and identity-based initiatives proliferated. These were not unintended side effects but deliberate reallocations of institutional priorities. The erosion of scientific capacity is not the result of external scarcity, but of internal decisions to privilege bureaucracy over inquiry. Scientists are not leaving because there is no money—they are leaving because the institutions no longer prioritize science.
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