In Saturday's San Francisco Chronicle Business section, reporter Birgitta Forsberg notes that American universities, once the dominant force in information technology worldwide, are clearly losing that leadership. In this year's Association for Computing Machinery International Collegiate Programming Contest, the University of Illinois tied for 17th...the weakest result for the US in the 29-year history of the competition. (China took 1st and 2nd, Russia 3rd and Canada 4th.)
The full story at: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/04/09/BUG9EC5LBI1.DTL&typ
e=business
The poor showing is but one of numerous indicators that our nation is steadily declining in what had been its leadership position in science and technology and at mounting risk to our nation's future.
On February 16th, The Task Force on the Future of American Innovation, a coalition of high-tech industry, scientific societies, and higher education associations, issued its own warnings of the mounting problems which it blamed in large measure on the "weakening federal commitment to invest in science and research."
http://releases.usnewswire.com/GetRelease.asp?id=43212
The Task Force cited a number of benchmarks as indicators of the mounting problems:
- The number of US science and engineering graduate students is declining, while the average age of working scientists and engineers in the US workforce is steadily advancing. In 2001, 57% of S&E graduate students in US universities were foreigners.
- Unless more domestic college-age students choose to pursue degrees in critical S&E fields, there is likely to be a major shortage in the high-tech talent required by the U.S. defense industry, key federal research and national defense agencies (e.g. the Department of Defense, Department of Energy and NASA), and the national laboratories.
- As a percentage of GDP, funding for physical science research has been in a thirty-year decline.
- Asian countries are investing significantly in nanotechnology, and may have already surpassed the U.S. in this promising area of research.
.......and yet today, the Bush administration, far from encouraging and supporting these critical areas, has chosen to focus its spending on the military and its political efforts on cutting taxes, creating massive deficits which weaken our ability to respond to these challenges.
Further still, it has systematically undermined the scientific process, staffing important review boards and scientific panels with conservative idealogues intent on assuring political correctness rather than encouraging promising scientific research. Equally damaging is the fact that in a growing number of cases,they are trying to deny basic scientific facts as in the case of "creationism," hardly a climate which encourages young people to consider careers in science.
The administration's ideological limits on basic stem cell research have left the door open for other countries to assume the leadership in this important field.
Its ideological limits on international aid to programs designed to control explosive population growth and the spead of AIDS have made this a more dangerous world.
Five years after taking power, the Administration has yet to take any significant steps to deal with our nation's massive reliance on foreign energy sources -- instead of initiating a public/private initiative to encourage new scientific studies and research and encourage conservation, it has stood by, and in some cases subsidized the auto industry's continued promotion of large, gas guzzling vehicles.
If the Democratic Party is to regain control, it needs to make the American public aware that their future prosperity and good jobs for their children and grandchildren are increasingly at risk because of the short-sighted policies (and in many cases lack of policies) of a GOP so focused on narrow ideology and short-term political advantage that it is incapable of protecting their interests.
The issues aren't gay marriage, gun control or runaway judges....they are our willingness to invest in resources vital to the economic success and the leadership of our country and with it our future as a global leader and beacon to the world.