DecolonizeCatan [he/him]

This is probably the most common petty bourgeois fairy tale. It has nothing to do with material reality under late imperialism, where 500 colossal multinationals control most of the world economy.

He’s grown in popularity like crazy recently, which is good and bad. Good because most of his followers are newly recruited baby lefts, bad because he’s turning them all into social democrat sectarian debate lords.

Tenured professors by themselves actually don’t contribute much to society. A lot of research, with regards to black holes, theoretical quantum physics, biodiversity and the well being of exotic species like polar bears don’t contribute that much. Look deep inside, even as biggest science fans you know it is true. At least they clearly don’t contribute as much as the research grant warrants. 1 million USD of taxpayer money to fly bunch of grad students to Patagonia and dig up Pleistocene mammal bones, really?

I’m not sure I agree. The neoliberal era has seen the focus of research shift towards entrepreneurial ends and away from fundamental research. One indication of this trend is the massive increase in technology transfers from university to industry in the form of intellectual property. For example, this report by the National Academy of Engineering states:

Many top universities, such as Stanford, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Southern California, have had technology transfer offices since the 1970s. These offices rose in stature when the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 gave universities the rights to technologies developed with federal funds, creating new incentives for institutions and faculty alike to commercialize their work. … The Bayh-Dole Act enabled the development of new university spinoffs (i.e., companies formed to license a technology).

Interest in university technology grew dramatically in the 1990s after a group from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) developed the Mosaic web browser (NCSA 2016) commercialized by the newly-formed Netscape Communications, whose initial public offering in 1995 effectively launched the first so-called “dot-com boom.” Although Netscape did not license the technology from UIUC, the tremendous success of the company highlighted the potential value of technologies and technical talent harbored inside universities.

The report goes on to claim that 30% of the value of the NASDAQ originates from IP that was created by federally funded basic research at universities that was transferred to industry in the wake of Bayh-Dole. So at least from the point of view of capital, tenured professors’ research in STEM is an important source of new IP, which in turn is the basis of the tech industry’s monopoly profits, which in turn is a major source of American imperial influence.

My background is in physics, and it was easy to see how the neoliberalization of university research played out. Nowadays, the esoteric fields like black hole physics and fundamental quantum research are very small communities relative to the physics community as a whole. Since the 70s physics funding has shifted to fields like condensed matter, and more recently to interdisciplinary fields (esp biophysics) where there is much greater potential for research to produce new markets and new IP for capital to exploit.

TL:DR Overall I agree with the main point of your comment–that industry exploits the burnouts from academia, and that educating the next generation of high-tech wage workers is a major function of academic science. However, I don’t think academic STEM research itself should be dismissed as socially useless. Under neoliberalism, academic research itself has been increasingly oriented towards serving monopoly capital.