NIH & The Attack on American Research Institutions 🏛️

​The ongoing attack on America's research institutions in the name of efficiency, market forces, and meritocracy reveals an increasingly popular modern ideology. The NIH's budget cuts and eradication of DEI programs are the first steps in this new ideology.

​Is this an attack against enlightenment principles, or has academia lost its way and deserved a wake-up call?

Having been fed a steady diet of media stories about academic waste, elitist brainwashing, and corporate dynamism, the public has no foundation from which to formulate an argument. Meanwhile, students often find it difficult to articulate the purpose of science but are aware of the stories of the most successful entrepreneurs and the VCs in the vicinity.

Our elected arbiters of public virtue aim to dismantle research from the ivory tower to relocate responsibilities to the corporate boardroom, maintaining this represents progress. Regardless, even at MIT we couldn't acquire the computing to compete with private research anyway.

​The goal is to exchange one bureaucratic system for another, albeit one draped in the respectable ideals of profit-seeking enterprise. One would be naive not to suspect more attacks to come.

​In this event, we aim to examine how we got here with first principles, analyze who is impacted, and question what grounds the narratives that got us here.

Join us in ideating a third system and wrestle with our social, political, economic, and technological superstructure.