From NeuroTribes: a Public Library of Science Blog
Why the GOP Hates the National Science Foundation
By Steve Silverman
Yesterday in Washington, amid great fanfare, the Republican senator from Oklahoma, Tom Coburn, released a 73-page report called The National Science Foundation: Under the Microscope. The report – deemed “scathing” in an “exclusive” by ABC News, and widely touted by other news organizations, particularly those owned by Rupert Murdoch — purported to expose a culture of waste, fraud, and mismanagement at the NSF.
“This report identifies over $3 billion in mismanagement at NSF,” the authors intoned ominously. “This includes tens of millions of dollars spent on questionable studies, excessive amounts of expired funds that have not been returned to the Treasury, inadequate contracting practices that unnecessarily increase costs, and a lack of metrics to demonstrate results.”...
The problem is that, as with most GOP initiatives, the closer you look, the more the worldview of Coburn’s report seems deliberately and blatantly skewed in ways that support overlapping GOP narratives. One of the wastes of hard-earned tax money described in Coburn’s report is described as “a study on whether online dating site users are racist in their dating habits.” Well, that sounds PC enough to make any red-meat Republican senator’s blood boil, raising the specter of egghead academics sponsored by Obama’s nanny state spending their expensive hours scrutinizing the kinks of OKCupid habitués.
Predictably, Coburn’s synopsis of this research — led by Andrew Fiore and Coye Cheshire at the UC Berkeley School of Information — is as superficial as McCain’s crusade against Drosophila research turned out to be. The scope of the research in question was not just determining whether or not dating sites are infested with potential KKK members, but how the advent of social media is affecting awareness of race in social interactions. In an email to me, Fiore explained:
The key question our study examined is whether we perceive people online in the same way as we do offline. What if interpersonal perception is different enough online that we prefer different types of people than we would if we met them in an offline context? Where the choice of romantic partners is concerned, the implications are significant: People may be meeting, marrying, and having children with different types of partners than they would have chosen had these mediating technologies not been available.
Considering the sheer number of people who search for romantic partners and spouses online these days (one-third of all couples surveyed by researchers at Stanford and the City University of New York in 2009 met online; I’m happily married to a science teacher I met on Usenet 16 years ago), the changing racial dynamics of these interactions seem worthy of investigation, not mere fodder for easy ridicule.
I found it interesting that my call to Berkeley researcher Coye Cheshire yesterday was the first he’d heard of the Senator’s report, though his study is cited as a particularly egregious example of NSF mismanagement; an email from one of the Senator’s interns might have yielded additional perspective on the research.
But that’s, like, looking for “data” that can only cause trouble. The truth is, the current incarnation of the GOP, frozen in its pose of perpetually indignant outrage, doesn’t want additional perspective, more data and nuance, and — Heaven forbid — dissenting voices. The impulse to marginalize, condemn, ridicule, and finally choke off dissenting voices is not only what’s behind Senator Coburn’s war on the NSF, it’s behind the GOP-sponsored culture war that has sucked much of the oxygen out of the national discourse for more than a decade now....