"Should we defund academia?"
March 18, 2025
Sabine Hossenfelder doesn't argue we should close all the universities. She doesn't argue we should stop all funding of academic research. But she does argue that we should cut government funding of a lot of academic research and replace it, if the research is sufficiently valuable, with private funding. She also argues that the arguments often advanced for why government funding is "necessary" are weak. (20-minute YouTube.)
RELATED: As you might well imagine some folks were not happy with Ms. Hossenfelder's video. So she posted a tweet. It begins this way:
I'll tell you something about the psychology that is going on here.
The content of my video is taking the 5 most common arguments that people in academia make for tax-paid research and explain why they are bad arguments.
Everyone who has previously made these arguments is now embarrassed, so they lash out at me.