Arts and/or Sciences?

Jacob Levy captures most of my disdain for this horsefucker:

Maybe it’s just me, and maybe it’s just that I’m grumpy after having sat through 82 (this may be a slight overestimate) hours of involuntary ethics training because some piece of shit over on the medical side decided to torch every element of the scientific process in pursuit of a gigantic grant, but this kind of thinking leaves me just a little bit hostile. If the “sciences” want to struggle forward without being “yoked,” I suppose that they’re welcome to the illiterate and innumerate undergraduate and graduate students that will result from the de-yoking process.

Worse, of course, is that Morris seems utterly oblivious of the fact that the Trump administration is going after the sciences qua sciences. I suppose it’s just my fancy “humanities” training talking, but it seems that massive cuts to federal support for hard sciences in a number of fields that yield politically relevant (and necessarily politically consequential) results are about a bit more than just the “yoking” of the sciences and the humanities. I’ve known more than a few engineers over the years who have subsisted on the pleasant fantasy that their work is detached from political purpose and from political support, even as they collect checks from the federal government, but I guess I didn’t appreciate how deep the rot really went.