
Rising Call to Promote STEM Education and Cut Liberal Arts Funding - Futurebot
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/22/business/a-rising-call-to-promote-stem-education-and-cut-liberal-arts-funding.html?ref=technology
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dalke
I think it's safe to say that "STEM", when used by politicians, is code phrase
for "subsidized training for business and industry jobs."

Otherwise, do you really think they intend to fund more specialists in, say,
general relativity, paleontology, and astronomy?

Personally, I find that I lack the history training to really understand the
politics that drives a lot of science. For example, pieces like
[http://genotopia.scienceblog.com/573/a-whig-history-of-
crisp...](http://genotopia.scienceblog.com/573/a-whig-history-of-crispr/) and
[http://blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk/engineering-
life/2016/01/18/crispr...](http://blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk/engineering-
life/2016/01/18/crispr-in-the-history-of-science-and-intellectual-property/)
helped me understand the recent "Heroes of CRISPR" firestorm.

Then again, this anti-liberal arts movement started in the 1960s, when all
those people trained in college to understand history, philosophy,
anthropology, etc. started protesting the actions of a government using
science, technology, engineering, and mathematics to conduct war in Southeast
Asia.

