The National Association of Scholars organized a symposium at the June 2024 Heterodox Academy conference. The symposium title was Rescuing Science, reflecting the concern that science in the universities is in trouble—rife with politicization, activism, phoniness, and fraud. To restore science from that sorry state, it needs rescue.
We invited three speakers to offer their thoughts. Professor Terence Kealey, Vice-Chancellor emeritus at the University of Buckingham, offered thoughts on the perverse economics of government funding of science. He concludes that the economic assumptions behind government funding of science are nonsensical, and that science would do perfectly well without government funding at all. Dr. Seaver Wang, of California's Breakthrough Institute, offered his perspective on how science works at an independently funded research institute, and how this alternative model might serve science and the public better than the dominant university-based model does.
And in this video, Scott Turner analyzes the network of perverse incentives that have been built into academic science since lavish government funding began to flow into universities post-WWII.
Photo by Yevhen on Adobe Stock
