“We all have a picture of the world, an idea of what is real, inside which we live.  Sudden disaster–the death of a loved one, the loss of a vital job, a murder, a meltdown at a nearby nuclear reactor–breaks that picture and we have to try to reconstruct it, or something like it, or something completely different.” 

Salmon Rushdie, “A Sundering,” in Suleika Jaouad, The Book of Alchemy: A Creative Practice for an Inspired Life (2025), 271.

He would say something like but gravity isn’t political, and Benjamin Franklin was born in 1706 – that’s fact, not interpretation. And I would say, yes, gravity itself the physical force isn’t political, but how we come to research and understand and then harness it absolutely is political, distributed by human relationships and negotiations of power. And while Benjamin Franklin was indeed born, that we choose to frame the event as such reflects our priorities; we could instead note that Abiah Folger Franklin labored long in a period of high maternal mortality to deliver the eighth of her 10 children, whom she named Benjamin. These were the kinds of conversations we had, my dad and I, scientist to humanist, secure in the parameters of a world committed to knowledge.

My father, an early and prominent computer scientist, passed away more than two years ago. Since then I’ve been trying to make sense of how rapidly the world that helped make him, and in turn the one he helped shape, is unraveling. Like many Americans of my generation, I have parents who lived their lives in the wake of World War II and all that the war’s end meant for the United States – what we convinced ourselves we were committed to at home and around the world. An academic, entrepreneur, public servant, and leader, my dad believed as deeply in America as he did in science – and in the inexhaustible value of higher education and scientific research for the nation. Child of an immigrant father, he invested wholly in what he was certain made the US great: the historic partnerships among academic, government, and industry institutions that were part of a post-war commitment to expanding opportunity, and to keeping the US at the economic and innovation pinnacle. This sense of national interest and national purpose was just as deeply rooted in an ideal of global collaboration.¹

These broad commitments and the structures to underpin them were blown forward from the mid- into the late twentieth century by gale force political winds. As a historian, I loved talking with my dad about that context, and how those winds might change. Now that they have, grieving his death feels inextricably tangled with grieving the catastrophe now overtaking the world he believed in.

This is a more personal post than most; over the last 10 years I’ve loved writing here, and learning from and with The Scholarly Kitchen (TSK) and SSP community. It has felt important to speak and write about the humanities for a scholarly communications industry dominated by the needs and interests of STEM research and publication, and it’s been a privilege to share ideas about the biggest issues that influence scholarship across disciplines. It’s not an accident that the conversations I had with my dad about how and why the STEM-ified nexus of US academia, research, and policy looks the way it does echoed alarms I’ve raised in TSK pieces over the years. These include questions about industry specifics like monolithic Open Access and the citation metrics game; about the landscapes of social media and legacy media; and perhaps further afield a failure of attribution culture in historical fiction that nonetheless felt to me like a perfect exemplar of taking humanities knowledge infrastructure for granted.

And it is the whole of our research infrastructure – so easy to overlook, so easy to take for granted – that is the most consequential victim of what’s happening in the US and elsewhere. I have tried to finish this essay many times over many months, but it turns out there is no concluding chapter. I type out the phrase “most recently” about one fantastical emblem after another of this destruction. The de-funding of peer-reviewed grants. The decimation of the National Endowment for the Humanities through de-staffing and the National Science Foundation through budget slashing. The dicta that National Institutes for Health scientists may not publish in the leading medical journals. The attendant, devastating consequences for government functions that require particular expertise (NOAA, IMLS, the FAA and many other agencies). And of course the ongoing attacks on the fundamental values as well as institutions of higher education, public and private alike. On and on. So I offer this now as an interim report, from the vantage we have right in this moment of needing to see what’s past while acknowledging we are entering an extraordinarily unstable future. And as a reflection on how I think I understand what my dad thought he understood about the world we were inhabiting.

I also write with the conviction that a failure to uplift the humanities, not just as critical underpinning for STEM research and technologies, but as essential to every feature of the research enterprise, has been part and parcel of this catastrophe. At the height of the pandemic lockdown, a senior colleague whom I admire said “Karin, please stop saying that history is as important as medicine.” I tell this story often in part because I understood the concern; of course I’m grateful for the extraordinary advances in biomedical and public health research that have made my life and my family’s so much healthier than earlier generations. But I can’t be dissuaded that history is in fact just as important as science, even medicine. History, what we know about but more importantly what we narrate about the past, is always the predicate. No one – including no researcher – operates without an implicit historical framework. It’s only a question of how explicitly that notion of what’s come before – and the implications for the future – is engaged, or how blithely it’s ignored.

We can’t pretend as if medicine and history have the same immediate impact on individual lives. Having pursued an understanding of and application of medicine to the individual body benefits the collective body politic in any number of ways that humanists and social scientists elaborate all the time; but having a deeper understanding of historical forces also benefits the collective in profound ways – including the research and provision of medicine.

It’s created such wreckage to have implied that history and humanities are luxury goods, rather than essential services.² It is also contrary to accumulating evidence (in the US and elsewhere) about the vital importance of the humanities for jobs, careers, and the economy. But more to the point, the idea that only science really matters has been enormously destructive. This isn’t the fault of the brilliant scientists who are doing critical work on climate, vaccines, galaxies, and a full universe of subjects. It isn’t the fault of agencies tasked with doing specific work – and to be fair, NSF and others have funded some social science. And it’s not to ignore important efforts at truly multidisciplinary work, in the medical humanities, for example, or among engineers thinking holistically (even humanistically) though this kind of work is always like sledding uphill. 

Rather the problem is that we have accelerated into a consuming and exclusive narrative about science in the national interest. Historians of science and technology tell us how deeply the Cold War influenced the growth of STEM research including university-funded STEM research and how that connects to the current reign of tech. From the early 1960s and accelerating with different Congressional and presidential administrative priorities, “the federal government has funded a majority of university R&D work” in STEM and biomedical fields. And the system of designating US universities as research intensive, which started in the 1970s, now leads universities to equate research with funded STEM projects. Even the acronym “STEM” is itself a historical artifact of the 1990s, according a particular weighty value to the union of science-technology-engineering-math (or medicine, because as many have pointed out, math is often more humanistic than scientific, and it is biomedical that has become the STEM-iest of all). The humanities and history are only minor players in the knowledge industries – higher education and scholarly communications – when we measure the value of research by grant dollars awarded and of scholarship by numbers of citations.

Fully engaged with the narrative of science and technology as powerful public benefits, my dad’s approach to the parallel narrative about other disciplines was to think about how we could get the humanities (and history especially) onto a more productive, by which he meant technologically-enhanced, track. He helped invest in the then-new field of digital humanities and his excitement about one of the first projects to really harness digital methods, was intense. I can remember him telling me with relish about the then-potent computing employed to aggregate and disseminate historical work: “now, if history could just get predictive!”

I’m not offering a declension narrative by positing a golden age of (higher) education and research when history and humanities were embraced for the good of all only to be displaced by the overweening emphasis on STEM.³ The before times in higher education were also tremendously exclusive. The university where my dad earned his doctorate, and the one where I earned mine each only started desegregating and admitting women as undergraduate students in the 1970s, for example. My dad thought he would be part of a solution to this. Having gone to community college (because it’s what he could afford) and then to university and graduate school, he saw higher education as the key to opportunities not just for individuals and their economic futures, but to how successfully they – like he – could give back. And he wanted this to be the case for more than just what he routinely described as the “pale, male” people like himself. It was – is – both the right and the smart thing to include as many talented people from as many different kinds of backgrounds as possible in any project or enterprise, he would say. In his own fields, computer science and engineering, he advocated for and also built programs for inclusion. He celebrated women, people of color and especially the role of new immigrants in advancing the kinds of progress he valued. He proudly told me about a trans colleague who was out in the 1970s. And he assumed that his own evolving perspective was a new norm for the US but, as it would turn out, this too may have been historically specific.⁴

It’s not as if I (or anyone) really think that what we have built and lived with over the last decades was a perfect system. Critique abounds: the military-industrial complex, an old-fashioned phrase for what’s become a tech behemoth, and its grip on academia just to start. There is also reasonable skepticism about the efficacy and politics of research across fields, with the kind of racism and misogyny that shaped some medical research and practices, for example, continuing to hamper public health efforts.⁵ In my own discipline there has been plenty of gatekeeping, with fields of inquiry or methods or modes being valued and others marginalized (also often mirroring socio-political marginalization). But grief has a way of calling attention to assumptions and choices as much as it encourages an often hazy nostalgia.

My dad would likely have argued with at least some (maybe much?) of my characterization of the research landscape, its history and present circumstances, and I know he would have added some compelling nuance. He absolutely also would have asked me what I or we were going to do about this? Even if we must grapple with what has brought us here to fully face what is happening now, it’s important to build toward what comes next. 

Greater minds have long said that STEM/HSS doesn’t have to be either/ or, and that in fact the full research ecosystem can never be binary. Yet many factors, including not least politics, have joined to make it so, advancing STEM while belittling and devastating humanities research in ways that have now been turned right back around to science. So let’s get serious about that. One thing that should be part of what comes next is a commitment to the full research enterprise, to not only resisting, but rebuking the forces that have compelled this overbalance. The National Science Foundation can not and should not exist, for example, without the National Endowment for the Humanities. And though the budgetary imbalances have long been plain, and there are different funding requirements for different modes of research, so too has the intensity of competition for the scarce humanities funding by comparison to STEM and this disequilibrium needs to be redressed.

A second is a full re-commitment to the values of a liberal arts education. Some years ago my dad conceived of a course about “technology for citizenship.” He argued that, much as Jefferson and others of his and subsequent generations argued for the key role of education in advancing democracy, people needed to know some essentials about the technologies that were beginning to surround them. I wish he’d had the energy to finish the book he imagined, because it was a great little primer. But that project presumed that people understand enough about the context for technology’s development, and about the critical relationship between democracy and education more broadly.  It’s not only in an individual’s interest to acquire training for a career, but in our collective interest for our fellow humans to have the education so necessary for a healthy society.

This isn’t just (only) a historian special pleading for the humanities; it’s in the originating legislation for the NEH that employs the same language of national purpose and service as the NSF’s:

“An advanced civilization must not limit its efforts to science and technology alone, but must give full value and support to the other great branches of scholarly and cultural activity in order to achieve a better understanding of the past, a better analysis of the present, and a better view of the future….Democracy demands wisdom and vision in its citizens. It must therefore foster and support a form of education, and access to the arts and the humanities, designed to make people of all backgrounds and wherever located masters of their technology and not its unthinking servants”

When we say that advancing knowledge through research advances us as a society, as a national and global citizenry, we should mean it. We should be as committed to exploring the essence of our humanity as we are to the inextricably bound nature of our physical selves, our environment, and the universe. We cannot conceive of the nation (in this case the US) if we do not know the history of its creation and ambitions, and the record of its people and politics. Of course, this presumes a next opportunity for a full, whole-of-society and institutional commitment to the benefits of research. For my dad’s sake, and for the kind of optimism about democracy and humanity that fueled him, I hope so.

1. Like many of his generation and subsequently, he saw working with government agencies and labs as vital to this vision. Also, of course I was going to include footnotes in this piece.

2. Though they are leisure activities, too. And the economic impact as well as the civic benefits of museums, for example, is profound.

3. Look, studying history and humanities doesn’t guarantee anything, political assertions to the contrary; plenty of people draw contradictory conclusions from studying the past. This isn’t about an instrumental notion that if you study x you will believe y, but an insistence that history and humanities are essential for civic function.

4. The liberal conviction that progress was unending and inevitable was always historically blinkered.  But without hope, what is there? Also, I loved my dad. But I’m not suggesting he was – or any of his views were – unproblematic. Unlike people, a blog post, even one with footnotes, can’t contain multitudes.

5. There is a key and healthy role for outside perspective, even skepticism, about research. I don’t think Daniel Immerwahr’s recent New Yorker piece gets it at all, conflating skepticism and conspiracism for one thing. And failing to address the ways that misogyny and racism shaped biomedical research in particular – think about gynecology, or cell research, for example.