(Intro Music Starts) SH: This is Relatively Prime, Funding in the Mathematical Domain. I am Sam Hansen Hello everyone, it is your host Sam Hansen and I am back with a new series in Relatively Prime that we are going to be calling seminars and it's going to be going out into the Relatively Prime feed off and on and it's going to be tackling the big questions about mathematics, so not from mathematics. (Intro Music Ends) We're not going to be digging deep into specific mathematical concepts here, but we're going to be doing more of a meta conversation about what goes on in mathematics and our first conversation is going to be about funding in mathematics and if you find that you have a question that you want to hear a seminar about please just email seminar@acmescience.com that's seminar at A C M E science.com and it will be up for a potential seminar in the future. So without further ado to join me and discuss funding in mathematics I have Carrie Diaz-Eaton, a mathematician and the associate professor of digital and computational studies at Bates College as well as the executive director of the Rios Institute, Drew Lewis, a mathematician and independent consultant and Jude Higdon, the chief operation officers of the Institute for Quantitative Study of Inclusion, Diversity and Equity or QSide. Hello everyone, thank you so much for joining me. CDZ: Hello, thanks for having us. JH: Good to be here. SH: And so first off let's talk just about where funding for math has traditionally come from and I can give a short little rundown about 64% of the funding in math comes from the NSF, 18% comes from the Department of Defense and these are the federal funders, not including the private funders, and the reason 18% is from DOD is that that is where the NSA or national security agency's money sits and 12% is from HHS which is where the NIH money sits. So has anyone here you know dealt with getting federal funding? What was it like? CDZ: I guess I can talk a little bit about the process. I'll start. There are many divisions within National Science Foundation that give federal funding for mathematics so one of them that I think folks are most familiar with is the DMS, Division of Mathematical Sciences, but I don't actually usually get funding from them at all. So in my world as a mathematician I work very interdisciplinary, I do a lot of education research, I also do some in math biology so I have been funded by programs in the education side of the house and some programs that are joint between education and biology. So each of those programs has like a flavor I think you know like you try to figure out you know what what are you doing? What kind of project do you have in mind? Is it going to be something that is focused on a particular research area? Is it going to be about bringing new trainees into your lab? Is it going to be about something you're doing for your institutional to create, institution to create capacity for something more? There are like all sorts of different ways that you can get or reasons why you might look to get funding for mathematics. My sort of experience of that is like sometimes putting in proposals that get shot down and then eventually getting proposals in after coming back to the drawing board and revising them and listening to feedback and getting funded, but it can be a very long process. It's a very lengthy, very intensive process. There are way more grants than can possibly get funded. It's very competitive. I've also served on the other side of things reviewing proposals and many proposals are great and we can't certainly fund them all and so it's overall a very difficult, rigorous, intensive project that gets measured all the way down to your margin size and point size and with some percentage chance of getting funded. But when it does it really can open the doors not just for mathematicians and for innovation but also for students and trainees that are also employed on projects as well. JH: I'm happy to jump in and talk about my experience there. I've been part of, similar to Carrie, I've been part of more application processes than funded processes. I think that's just sort of how it goes. Again, not being a mathematician myself, I sort of rep mathematicians. The role that I generally play in the proposal process is sort of narrative story building and trying to think about the why of the questions around this. My experience of federally funded grants as one of the, at least historically, we'll see where that goes, is that Federal grants particularly are incredibly onerous in terms of the strictures required. The hurdles you have to jump through both organizationally and as coming from a nonprofit, a 501c3, not from an academic institution that has that sort of baked into the sauce that's particularly onerous for my organization to sort of overcome those hurdles. So we have, and especially in the current political climate, largely walked away from even seeking federal grants. I've been part of several successful NSF grants, one successful NIH grants and more proposals than I can probably count or remember at this point. But they are, in my experience, federally funded grants are from federal institutions like the NSF, the NIH, the Department of Education, the Department of Defense. We don't tend to apply through the Department of Defense. I've never been part of that process. But it is, it's just a tough process, right? It's really hard to check all the boxes and to get everything in the exact right ways. There is a lot of bureaucratic structure to it. The payoff can be quite good, right? Because if you are successful, the numbers, you know, the amount of funding available there is quite good. And historically, it has also been incredibly stable once you're funded. I think the gravity, the sort of physics of that world are changing pretty quickly right now in ways that I think folks did not think they could be. But that's been sort of part of my experience with the funding landscape at that level. SH: Drew, is it possible for you to talk at all about sort of like what the impact of these grants means? Like what are some of the things that are actually happening when mathematicians are getting funding? CDZ: And I'll tell Drew to also talk about the institutes because I feel like that's a different kind of beast. Like we're getting federal funding by proxy, right? DL: Yeah, so the NSF funds all kinds of different things in math. So one thing that most mathematicians are maybe most familiar with there is the standard grants through DMS, the Division of Mathematical Sciences, which will directly fund mathematics research. So salary support and travel support for collaborations, right? For mathematicians to do math research, proving theorems, collaborating with others. Another big thing they fund is conference grants, right? This is across divisions and directorates, but they will fund directly conferences around different topics. So for instance, the Southern Regional Algebra Conference that helped organize one year, we got a DMS conference grant, helped support that and pay for particularly early career faculty to be able to attend the conference. Yeah, to Carrie's point, one of the big things that DMS funds is the, let me see if I can get the acronym right, is the Mathematical Sciences Infrastructure Program or something similar, which funds these big math institutes. So IMSI is one of them, right? And then there's AIM in Pasadena and ICERM at Brown University. And I think they also fund IAS at Princeton and one more, no, two more. CDZ: Ipam UCLA. DL: Yeah, and then the one in Minnesota, Minneapolis. JH: No, they don't fund that anymore. CDZ: SL Math is the one you're missing, I think. DL: There we go. SH: Yes, SL Math is the other main one, but they do still partially fund the Minnesota one. It's just not one of the big six Mathematical Sciences Research Institutes. Not to be confused with the Mathematical Science Research Institute, which is now SL Math. DL: Yeah, so these institutes are great because they host, in addition to shorter conferences and things, they also have longer programs and collaborations. So for instance, all three of us were part of one of those at IMSI a few years ago, where we all got to go to IMSI for a month and collaborate together in person. But they also do semester long or even year-long kind of collaborative programs where folks who are on sabbaticals can come and really intensively work on these projects for an extended period of time. And this serves as a great kind of, I want to say incubator. That's not quite the right word, but maybe catalyst is the right word to really make significant progress on these hard problems and provide that time and space for people to think really deeply about these kinds of things. SH: And Jude, you mentioned Q-side, probably moving a little bit away from from federal funding right now. So could you talk a little bit about what the other options are? Because there are private funders. The Simons is the big one that pops into my head, but I mean Kavli and some of the others also do provide funding. So what's sort of different when you exit the federal and go to the private funders? JH: Well, there's also a missing link in there, which is state funding. And there's a huge amount of opportunity there. And I think sometimes folks forget that there are state and local grants. And so we've actually been wrapped into a lot of work around state-level grants. We're doing a ton of proposal work with the collaborative in the state of California around the Racial Justice Act and around some of that work that's coming out of the state. And then we've also got a proposal in with the state of Pennsylvania. So that's something that I do think a lot of folks don't even think about, right, is the state-level grants and those hurdles that I mentioned earlier being so onerous are much lower in those spaces. So that's something to think about. You know, primarily where we have looked for funding is to private foundations historically. And I think for nonprofits, that tends to be the place that they tend to look for state grants and for foundation grants. And so yeah, you've got, I mean, there's a ton of them for the kind of work that we do at QSide, even some of the traditional large funding foundations aren't really appropriate. So the places we tend to look are to mission-aligned foundations, right? So the big ones that do work related to like criminal illegal system reform, like the Arnold Foundation or Arnold Ventures, we've been funded pretty significantly historically from the Walmart Foundation. We've had funding from the Bloomberg Foundation. And I would say the difference, in my experience, between those kinds of funding is that my experience is that the foundation grants tend to be a lot more relationship driven. Like I sort of was invited into the Walmart Foundation criminal justice reform network where I participated and sort of got brought in to do some consulting and QSide for smaller scale things for two years before that we were sort of considered ready to be eligible to sort of be actually an independently funded organization from the foundation. That's not everyone's experience, but I do think that it is very relationship driven and sort of understanding the portfolio of the foundation and their theory of change. Like they tend to have a kind of a philosophy around the kind of work that they want to see done. And that can be scientific in nature or it can be supported in our case by data science tools and techniques. But it's just a different mission, right? And it's a different way of thinking about funding, thinking about cultivating relationships around that in those spaces. So that's been my experience. And I know Carrie also has a lot of experience in the foundation space. So I'd love to hear if anything I said rings true with her. CDZ: Yeah, no, 100%. I think you kind of get engaged in a process. And instead of the whole time you being like, I'm putting in all this work and I'm not sure if it's going anywhere, that certainty increases as the relationship builds. So at some point you decide, hey, like, I think we should keep in each other's circles, but I don't think we're quite aligned at this moment. Or you just continue building that relationship and that funding and then you have a pretty good relationship and that can get leveraged long term. But there are some foundations that still operate in a more like NSF-y kind of way. Like there are some that do have just open calls and lots of proposals and panel reviews as well and are highly competitive. But I think the ones I have really actually very much enjoyed sort of making a relationship with my program officer at the Hewlett Foundation. And they operate with a philosophy that's very different from accounting for federal funds, which the back end of how you get your money and how it's dispersed and accounted for is very specific with federal funding. And there are some movements within philanthropy that are more relational and trust based that say we will give you some money for general operating costs and we know that you're going to use this money the way you need to use it when the time is called. So from my perspective in this moment it helps me to be able to quickly pivot my organization's actions based on what's going on in the world in a way that might be very difficult under another funding source. SH: Well if any foundation program officers are listening and you think that it's mission aligned for you to help spread mathematical stories, I am always looking for money. So one thing I do want to talk a little bit about is I mean there's this perception of mathematics, specifically theoretical mathematics, that it is one of those areas that's really nice because all you need is a writing utensil and something to write on and probably some books to read. And while I'm enough of a mathematician to know that that is not true, it is fundamentally different than some of the physical sciences or things like that where you say you are in physics, you're in high energy physics, you need a collider and that is not something that you can do easily and math can be a little bit easier to do without all those extra things. So I was digging into how different areas are funded federally. I chose federally because it's just a lot easier to get the numbers than to look at foundations. And so as I said before, math gets 64% from the National Science Foundation whereas across all of the science and engineering, medical, technology, the STEM fields, the average is 27% from the NSF. So you can already see that math is getting more from the NSF than a lot of other fields. There are social sciences and psychology get about 68%. Biology but only basic biological research, so not applied biological research, so we're not including say medical fields in this, get 69% and computer science, again just basic computer science, so theoretical computer science gets 83%, but that's also a very small amount of the computer science research that happens. And then looking at the total like dollar amounts, and I found this wonderful breakdown that the NSF published and this is across the across the whole federal government. We give about, at least last year, we get there was about 45 billion dollars worth of funding. So we're not we're not talking about a small amount of funding, but in comparison with the federal budget, we're talking about a very small amount of money because that's in the trillions of dollars, so we're talking orders of magnitude. And there computer science got 2.3 billion, geosciences got 3.4 billion, life sciences got 19 billion, physics got 9.5 billion, psychology 2.29 billion, engineering 3.8 billion, social sciences only 766 million, and math and stats 608 million dollars. So there is another thing for other, which was 3.7 billion, but these are going to be smaller fields, which will get less money than math. So math is of all of the large fields, the least amount of money. Is anyone surprised? DL:No CDZ: No, I mean, and I think I think part of the reason is exactly what you said. Historically, hasn't required a lot of large equipment and costs and purchases. And so the vast majority of of math funding is about like conferences and collaborations and travel, and and that's why the math institutes are this overly large disproportionate amount of money that sort of acts as these mini hubs for a lot of that. And otherwise, equipment costs have been traditionally a lot lower. So I'm not surprised, but I think it is for the audience, it may be an interesting observation that we are maybe the lowest funding, but we also have a high dependence on federal funds. I think with the exception of folks who are actually, or mathematicians, getting funded under biology like me, or something like that, a lot of this is really made possible just with federal monies, and there are fewer foundations out there and fewer different kinds of federal agencies that are supporting this work. Unlike, biology might also be supported by EPA or something. The landscape is shifting across all of those granting agencies, which is I think what we're getting to. JH: I think the only thing I would add is that one of the reasons why we as a mission-driven and applied, we're really a data science nonprofit, right? With the like the shorthand for QSide is data science plus social justice, right? That's like social justice problems examined and tried to solve social justice challenges through innovative uses and partnerships of using data science in that space. We have never found a home anywhere in the federal ecosystem for anything related to that, but my husband and I who co-founded QSide are, we are both scientists at our core. I'm a psychologist, my doctorate is in psychology, his is in applied math. Even in the applied math field, the true mathematicians in the group, correct me if I'm wrong, it can be even for sort of like more traditional applied math work. It's a heavier hill to climb in some ways in the federal ecosystem. Hyper-applied mission-driven work of using tools and using innovative tools or developing innovative mathematical tools that can sort of be used in social science contexts. We have yet to find a home or a kind of sympathetic landing spot for that within the federal ecosystem. We tried and sometimes we get subsumed in other types of grants like social science grants or something as kind of the resident quat nerds and to kind of bolster that, but it hasn't, we haven't really found a spot for this work within that landscape. SH: One thing that really strikes me when I'm thinking about all of this is that math, no and I don't want to get on, I don't want to get all soap boaxy, I also don't want to say things that are truthy and not truthful, but it really isn't that big of a stretch to say that mathematics is the thing that underpins most of this science at some level. Sometimes you have to dig really, really far down to get to it, but at some point there needs to be some math involved in most of this as long as there's any you know quantifiable research going on. And yet I've always felt a certain idea that a lot of people have that math is just sort of done, that it's this thing that exists and we have the math. And I worry about that some when we're thinking about funding in particular because as our university systems continue to move more and more in the corporatized direction that they have continually done under neoliberal leadership, I worry that without the funding with you know just being viewed as this thing that's sort of complete that math will atrophy a little bit. CDZ: So let me let me put a slightly different thing on it. I mean I think that's certainly something the students are taught in the classroom is like here are the rules apply the rules like math this has always been for 200 years in calculus. I mean I you know that is certainly a thing where we're teaching students actively whether or not we should do that is maybe a different podcast. But I think one of the things that I have been I wouldn't say struggling with but reprocessing I mean I think is the word to use is that traditionally DMS funding, mathematical funding direct from like the federal agencies has focused on mathematical innovation and not application. And when you go to application then you seek you know funding from the other divisions from the other places. While this is great for mathematical development I think it is part of the how we have not cultivated the relationship we need to have with our ultimate program officers which are the public. And I think that this is a huge problem how much are mathematicians the folks who are spotlighted when breakthroughs are made in all of these other areas right. You know if you're not supporting the applied work the work that's in the community because it's not innovation in in a traditional sense and is more about synthesis and border crossing from from the ivory tower to the public and to the community all of a sudden now you've missed this whole opportunity to tell people or engage people like with the joy of and the the excitement and the innovations and the insights and the power that you get from these techniques right. You've lost the right to claim it now you know that you're relevant and important to society. So I want to really appreciate how DMS funding has been used to really make sure that we are ahead on the innovation side that we're contributing to like thinking about like new complex problems before there are problem right. Just like the underpinnings of theory mathematical theory but I want to say at the same time I think we have created our own problem with who we're seen as and who we're seen for by the rest of the public. SH: Yes 100 percent I mean that's that is part of why I do the work I do right like I want to tell these mathematical stories. It's one of my favorite things to do even though I do prefer telling theoretical stories that applied stories but that's just because that's the area of math that I always gravitated towards myself. The applied stories are tend to be much more enjoyable for everyone listening though. So now now as as Jude previously indicated let's let's move to today. Well actually I'm going to send us back to about October 2024. Like I mean there's a long history that we could be talking about around different political parties views on scientific funding but we're not going to dig all the way into that because this podcast would be 45 hours long. So instead Drew can you tell me about the October 2024 commerce report from Senator Cruz? DL: Yeah so in October the the Senate Commerce Committee headed by Ted Cruz released a report. I forget the the title off the top of my head but essentially they went through the portfolio of NSF funding looking for keywords in a list. So any grant that used words like diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, identity characteristics like black or latine and cooked up this database of all these grants that use these words. They did into some manual checking. They thought that black holes were important right so they took those off of the list right but you know if you're talking about supporting black people then that went on their list. And so they released this database of grants to target. I guess I should say they only very recently released a full database. They put out a report in October and where they kind of cherry picked some particular grants on there and lambasted them in their usual kind of rhetoric about how terrible it is to actually include and support people of various identities. SH: Yes so and that that report highlighted about two billion dollars of quote unquote woke NSF grants and just just know whenever we're talking about woke today there's likely scare quotes around it because it is very very scary. And so that's I mean two billion that's about a quarter a little bit under a quarter of of the NSF's annual outlay. So that happens in October and then there's an election in November and in late January our current president jumps into office and on the first day does any well first first day and then some days after is anyone want to you know give a colorful description of some of the executive orders that came through. CDZ: Sorry I was just flipping to another page I had with this like gorgeous timeline I wish you could see like how beautiful it is. So the it had this timeline of events and January 20th to 24th executive orders targeting federal spending workforce DEI etc are issued and and so I it's nice because it has a whole layout of all well nice tragic whichever the correct word is to use and January 27th was the memo directing federal funding pauses. So there were kind of these waves either were the executive orders that were like you got to stop spending we're gonna we're gonna start cutting people and we're going to like do the Ted Cruz like like anti DEI on everything contractors spending on DEI etc and then separately from that but only put only a little bit later it we were they were going to operationalize all of this through these like reviews of every single grant they've given of every funding the federal funding agency etc and in order to do that they were saying don't spend any money at all and I think folks probably have heard you know a lot like USAID was like one of the agencies that got a lot of play in in our academic world the pauses of NSF and of NIH and all of these others then almost immediately there were legal challenges and within two days the memo was rescinded but at the same time that that memo was rescinded they were still freezing the funding so there was even more SH: And the press secretary literally said no we're still we're still freezing the funding like at a press conference CDZ: Exactly exactly and so they were like yeah we're not going to pay attention to this which you know so they were more judges being like no no you can't like you cannot freeze and and we're talking about folks who just you know different institutions and funding agencies also like interpreted these memos very very differently and had different ways of operating there was a variety of responses some were like business as usual let's play it out in the court some were like freaking out and they were like stop using all your grants and and some of those institutions had real on the ground impacts immediately like folks were fired folks were like you got you lost your job today because we don't we're getting reviewed we were on the Ted Cruz list or whatever and some grants for example DOE grants have been straight out canceled so let's say you had a grant that was supposed to last three more years too bad it's done like there have been ones like that NSF has been differently impacted so as far as I'm aware so far folks have not been able to renew grants and grants that were going to end have been denied the ability to ask for a no cost extension but grants that have been promised up to a particular point have not yet been canceled I'm saying yet then canceled because I feel like it was they were trying but yeah it has been kind of halted so this is kind of spanned everything and I think one of the difficult parts is the DEI attack was maybe one of the first waves and then there was the the freezing on grants and then there was the firing of staff and and now more staff firing and budget cut allotments so I worry a little bit that by focusing on the the funding and the freezes that were also like we forget to talk about the DEI part as well like is there a list of words that you're not allowed to say and also you know question the legality of that core because at least for NSF where math is highly where we've established math is highly dependent on for anybody who's reviewed it's two criteria intellectual merit and broadening participation that are legislated by congress so when you throw out DEI when you throw out specific actions that are meant to make sure that we are competitive because everyone who wants to have a STEM career can have a STEM career and that's done through DEI actions right if you have removed that ability then you're not actually you know executing the instructions of congress SH: Yeah that that is a really important and good point like this has been legislated broad broader impacts is in the actual law but the executive borders are apparently trying to limit how you how you do it and as people on blue sky because we're not going to talk about the hell site have been pointing out specifically as say Chanda Prescod-Weinstein like this is effectively a resegregation effort in in many ways trying to limit higher education and the other groups that need this sort of funding to include people who have historically had the power and privilege to take part in those groups and not trying to keep the door open I do want to talk a little bit about that list of words so the list of words that were being searched for was actually gathered and shared by Michael Harris who is a mathematician who has a newsletter called the silicon reckoner talking about mathematics and artificial intelligence and machine learning but also has been covering some of this topic as well and the other mathematicians here I I would love to hear from y'all what it what it means if mathematicians are not allowed to use words like inclusion inequalities some things like polarization are those words that might trigger math grants to be looked at weird but yet have nothing to do with quote unquote wokeness DL: I mean I think if you just do the the naive search through the grants you're gonna find a lot of math grants with those words but at some point I think it's a little bit of a distraction to think about that because we already saw with the Ted Cruz report right he went through black was one of the words in there right and specifically in this report he said oh if they're just talking about black holes that's okay so they want to support black holes they don't want to support black people so I think the same thing with the math grants they're gonna look and if you're talking about inclusions of sets right they're gonna say okay this is fine if you're talking about including students from underrepresented groups in your work that's gonna get flagged SH: So I uh I hope that you are right I think that you are right right now but something that I worry about here is this push that seems to be coming from our unelected apartheid Clyde with the black hat and the fun adult boy jumps Elon Musk and of this this push to fire everyone and I think start using LLMs for everything so large language models for pretty much everything and I I I do think that as long as there's humans looking at these things we don't have much to worry about what happens if there aren't humans to looking to look at them because they've already fired 168 people from NSF Sam from the future here, sorry to pop in like this but this is a fast moving story we are talking about in this seminar and I have to let everybody know that between the recording and release of the episode the courts have jumped in and required the administration to reinstate all of the fired employees. Some of them have been reinstated and placed but administrative leave and we don';t know the specific results for the NSF employees, but those fired employees are right now technically re-hired. OK, with that said let's go back to the seminar. so that was a what about 20% of the workforce and there's talk of cutting hundreds more people of like up to a 50 to 60 percent total cut of of workforce staff not to mention the fact that the house budget proposal probably will cut 50% to 75% percent of the funding that NSF gives out in grants so what if humans no longer look at them DL: Yeah JH: So there's well there's a really quick anecdote that I'll share that speaks to exactly what you're saying Sam from the first Trump administration where they went through and they they preferred the word homosexual to gay and so they did these massive final replacements this is something that a lot of people in the queer community remember but I think folks who are not in the queer community may not remember and so they did this like in this mass way like across all of these documents and there were people whose names were gay who were then renamed homosexual in the process and I think that we even even with the human cognitive component to it I think that's just illustrative of the problem so I I want to quibble with one thing you said that even if it is the former and not the latter it is still deeply problematic and troubling I don't think like we're safe but even if we accept that one is okay and like more okay once in a while is more okay than the other you know like we'll put it there I think that as someone who grew up on Don't Ask Don't Tell and grew up under the regime of it is not being a thing but it is being known as that thing and using those words and having the taste of those words in your mouth linguistics matter language matters and the outlying of words like diversity equity inclusion and belonging is inherently deeply problematic not just for the tactical kind of results of that but it is a problem right like we we have to resist that that impulse like it is a problem globally to have people telling us what we can say and what we can't in those kind of ways so I'll get now I'll get down off my soapbox and relinquish the floor SH: It's it's a good soapbox and it's one I'm glad that glad that you reminded me of because I was I've been thinking so much about the funding over the last couple days I forgot that on day one he signed an executive order that removed my gender from the the legal framework of the United States which I'm gonna tell you felt felt real good that was a that was a very very positive moment for me so I'd love to talk a little bit more about the importance of program officers so we have we have already discussed them a bit we've discussed them both you know we've mentioned them on the federal and the philanthropy side so for those of you who dealt with them like what like what is the importance of a of a program officer like what does it mean that we might lose a huge amount of them I think it's really gonna DL: impact the quality of the funded projects we see so Carrie was kind of describing earlier kind of how the you know NSF process works but I think something that was kind of skipped over there is that it's not just a black box you don't just like write a proposal and then you send it in and then it comes back later right so most successful proposals there are several conversations with the program officers along the way you send them a one or two page summary you have a conversation Carrie was mentioning there's all these different programs that fund different sorts of things and the program officers help you figure out what program fits what you want to do and do you align what you want to do with the goals of the program so I think that is a huge part of what program officers do in that they help make the science and the math better CDZ: yeah no I was going to say also and not just at the proposal stage but they also travel to conferences there are also where people are and they might see a really good you know talk and say like hey like have you ever thought applying to our program or could you be a reviewer and get people involved in the system and and help to understand it I was recently at the AAAS conference which is the American Association for the Advancement of Science which is a DC policy broadly STEM professional society and I mean I was like wow there are a lot of booths missing because all the federal booths are gone like there's no you know if you did happen to have some sort of affiliation with NSF like that's not the hat you were wearing like so you couldn't tell I noticed that deeply the the absence of all sorts of federal agencies missing the agencies that could be talking to students about hey like you know here are some options for funding graduate school or might be talking to faculty about hey did you know that we have this new program in I don't know teaching AI and mathematics courses I don't know but like whatever the thing is they just weren't there anymore DL I think it's interesting so the the RUME conference the research and undergraduate math education conference is happening I think right now as we speak like a quarter of a mile from the NSF headquarters and the program officers were because of the travel ban right we're not allowed to walk down the street to the conference SH: one of the one of the other things that program officers do is that they help make sure that the review process keeps going and they you know help as Carrie mentioned find people to review they also make sure that all the meetings happen and that all the decisions are meeting their deadlines and things and one of the things that I really don't want us to miss out on is the idea that the current administration could essentially stop federal funding not by not spending it not by completely shuttering the agencies or anything like that you know such as they did with USAID they could effectively stop it by just making it so that there's so few employees that nothing can actually get done so they could claim look we're trying to spend the money but if we don't have enough program officers to actually oversee all of the review processes and all of the grant applications and things it could be that some grants get given but you know it's a couple a year instead of the thousands now CDZ: yeah well even even the whole you know firing before they fired 10 of their staff they they were asked to review all I don't I can't I heard some number I think it was like 50 000 proposals that they have funded already so already they're like where are we going to find the time to do that right and then on top of that you fire 10 percent of your staff right and and and many who I've talked to say that's just the first round right so you're actually creating extra work not efficient work and so you know I think I think that I have heard suggestions about using things like generative AI large language models to step in and fill these roles as if you know the quality of the mostly but not all a lot of PhDs is somehow can be replaced by a generative AI I think it shows a general disrespect for what program officers actually do right and and I think like I have heard some folks chime in with critiques about NSF and I'm like now is that like I get it there are always things that can be improved but like now's the time to like go on the other side and say like yes we're we critique because it's an important thing in our lives that we want to get better and and sometimes we need to also fight for it too right and don't forget that at the same time JH: I would totally agree with you Carrie and I think I would rather than saying I don't even know that it gets to the level of disrespect because I think to garner that type of language requires an understanding of something right and I think it's actually ignorance fueled contempt is is sort of how I would phrase it I I think it's like folks literally do not understand what is happening I think part of the disconnect Carrie sort of touched on earlier in the conversation but I do think that it is sort of a multi decades driven philosophy that government is inherently wrong, government it is inherently bad, anything funded by the government is inherently wasteful and that is the sort of like the noble truth that undergirds all of this and all the actions flow from there so it's like if that is the foundational sort of cosmological philosophical belief that you have anything is justified at that point and you know this is where we get into the scenarios that go far beyond the NSF where it's like oh yeah oh those folks were keeping our nukes safe oh yeah those folks were like helping us respond to make sure Ebola or the bubonic plague doesn't end up in the you know but you don't understand that that's actually a function of government because it is sort of ignorance, fueled contempt of everything governmental CDZ: yeah and and when it works you don't know it's there right like unfortunately JH: it's odorless and flavorless yeah yeah CDZ: yeah yeah I think we saw this we were seeing this also one of the other orders had to do with trying to cut the overhead to 15 percent and not really understanding what that actually means and and if you look at some of the DEI memorandums or memos or whatever kinds of things that have been sent they try to position DEI in particular as like taking away from low-income white people right like they see it as a taking away and and so what I think is really interesting is some folks made this really nice map of NIH funding where you can go and look to see top NIH funders in your state and it turns out that for Maine on that list of top three are two biological laboratories that are I would say economic powerhouses of our Republican Second District in a rural area that and we are talking about millions would be taken away from them by cutting the NIH overheads to 15 percent millions direct to them and multiply by at least a factor of two if not more for the impact to the local area and we're talking about jobs in what is like sometimes a touristy area that are year-round and are really hard to come by this would this would be devastating for rural low-income communities the same thing with DEI directly one of the things when I was an external visitor which is like an evaluator for a division program for IU's one of the things we recommended was to reinvest in EPSCOR states these are rural low-funded states exactly the kind of demographics that I think they are thinking are being left behind and so I think you know we need to spend a little bit of time talking about how these things are going to directly impact and take away from everyone as well SH: And so while the NSF money seems to still be flowing mostly there's probably some one-offs that we don't know about but seems to mostly be flowing there there are cases where it is already having direct impact and one of those is on the research experience for undergraduates area which is something that as far as I know actually started in mathematics it's definitely something that's very strong in mathematics and these are summer programs that undergraduate students get to go to and experience like doing mathematical research which is and I will say this from my personal experience not something that I knew anything about until after I had already been in grad school for a while it's not even like you start math grad school and you start in classes like you don't this is not this is not like biology or physics or something like that where there's labs that you go into right away and oftentimes you're already in in undergrad times so I would love to know if either of you have have had any experience with r.e.u.'s and what it could mean if these r.e.u.'s keep shuddering and what that could mean for mathematics and and also like the bigger picture of what it could mean beyond just our our parochial little area of academia DL: I wouldn't be talking to you today if it wasn't for an r.e.u. I wouldn't I wouldn't be a mathematician if it wasn't for an r.e.u. so when I was when I was an undergrad I was a computer science major and I was I did a math major too just for funsies to make myself a little different but one of the one of the elder math majors shared about what they did in a r.e.u. experience this summer before and I thought this was amazing that you could go get paid to do math so I went and did one of these and learned what math research was and then immediately decided I'm not going to go be a programmer bro for the rest of my life I'm going to apply to grad school in math and I don't think that's a unique story I I shared this on blue sky the other day and a bunch of people are applying yes me too I did a r.e.u. I would not be a scientist today if I had not had this r.e.u. experience back at back at the time and we're seeing so many of these are being canceled this summer because of a lack of funding and I think what's really crucial about the r.e.u.'s is they happen for students at a very particular time in their preparation career right you do these in the summer while you're an undergraduate and that often is the catalyst to get undergraduate students to think oh I could go get a PhD I could be a scientist and when you take that away at that critical time right they're never even going to think that they have this opportunity to come do that and so it's just going to be an incredible loss for us you know 10 20 years down the road when these would have been scientists with PhDs doing the the cutting-edge you know math and science research that we want to happen CDZ: Yeah back when I was talking about program officers at meetings like I was at a meeting an NIH program officer was there saying hey like did you know that if your advisor has NIH money he can write for a supplement to help hire you so that you can spend a semester or a year or however much time working on your dissertation and not have to teach and I was like what so I went and told my advisor you can hire me and he's like I can like like if I if that program officer hadn't been there you know I mean how much I did not need extra years believe me to finish my PhD I don't know if I would have finished um so yeah these are I think REU's I think there's um I've also seen it in my own students grad school admissions are down particularly institutions that have that rely on research funds to do this I think for some places there is a little bit more going on there was renegotiation of union contracts that were already raising wages on this teaching and research assistant side and then when coupled with all of this uncertainty about federal funding it's just like cause some some some places are pausing entire graduate enrollments and so I think it is going to have impacts for a long long time beyond the immediate and what I will say is that even though we are talking primarily about federal funding the private sector has not remained unscathed so in my community working in inclusive STEM education it was a huge shock when the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's education foundation side of the operations because they have a research side and they have an outreach granting agency for education terminated its HHMI IE, inclusive excellence funding this means we they they had a few different cohorts go through the program cohort one has already been done I'm in cohort two our funding wasn't was in extension and it's final so we were told you know use up your money no final report that's it the next group after us was IE three they still had active awards ongoing that were closed immediately and again had staff working trying to make sure that you know students had good advisors or there was professional development for faculty or whatever else they had real jobs and didn't have on the next day and we're talking about a private funding agency that halted its programs Science coverage seems to suggest that this had to do with executive order orders targeting the threat of removing nonprofit status to foundations that funded DEI work I also imagine that because HHMI does both science work and has a foundation's arm this is me guessing this is but I think also was probably influenced by the instability of the the biomedical funding landscape as well so where some might be pivoting towards private grants some of those have also been withheld and we've seen Mark Zuckerberg's foundation CZI removed one of its fellows programs that were targeted towards supporting early career research fellows and other foundations I think Sloan for example has sort of said we don't expect to give any high number awards because we think we're going to get 10 times the applications and so we want to you know we're really probably going to fund try to fund more awards for less money and so this is having ripple effects throughout the entire ecosystem and I think for many years to come and has maybe opened our eyes to whether institutions were really fundamentally invested in equity and justice or just throwing money at it SH: So Carolyn Ibberson on Blue Sky I believe it was it was originally shared on February 22nd but the list keeps growing it shared a spreadsheet of reductions in admission and hiring at institutions as far as they are aware and so that now includes a reduction slash pause at University of Wisconsin Madison where I got my library degree across all programs there is 25 percent delaying offers at UNC Chapel Hill there's up to 60 percent admission cut at University of Pennsylvania and this is all this expectation of getting less and less money and there's also a number of places that are also instituting hiring freezes or slowdowns or pauses so well while I of course have been focusing us mostly on math today like this is a say landscape-wide sort of problem and one that if I'm going to be completely honest might actually start impacting math well not start that might impact math slightly less than the other fields just because math gets slightly less funding whereas you know in in health funding the the percentage of I mean in healthy like there's just so much funding that it could have outsized impacts CDZ: Yeah though I think we have to say for whom so I think I think there's a huge asterisk here so for example LatMath this year couldn't provide funding for any faculty other than who was invited to speak that's a direct result of the freezes and the unknowingness of funding so now we're talking about specific initiatives that are meant to celebrate and build the capacity for mathematics research that that happens within the Latino community in the US and so I think the the impacts for whom have to be I think there has to be a huge asterisk there SH: Of course yes you are you are very correct because while you might be able to convince say your department to give you funding to go out to the joint math meetings because they are you know the big one the thing to do the smaller conferences could yeah the the for whom could impact them a lot more CDZ: Or some people don't have departments that have money to send them places I've been there before in my life and you know SH: Oh no no no that that of course I'm like but just if you're likely to get any money at all it would be probably easier for the for the larger conferences than a smaller ones that probably have outsized impact on the people who attend them as opposed to the jmm which could have impact or could just be a giant waste of money for the people who attend so I mean we've been going for a while so I think we probably need to wrap this seminar up and what I would like to do is to ask for any sort of final concluding thoughts potential next steps you could see for for what we could try to do to survive this this changing in the landscape JH: Well so I think that Carrie hit on something that you know Chad and I have been really sort of zeroing it on within our sort of ties to the academic community is the things that we believe in fundamentally are worth fighting for and being quiet being silent about those things is not going to save any of it any of the things that we care about right it's it's just not and I I will tell you that my personal posture on this is yes everyone has to sort of find their path here and I'm not trying to finger wag at anyone right it is a weird moment and gravity feels upside down right now everything is upturned but I would just encourage everyone to know what you stand for and stand for it now because it it it will get eroded right out from under you and then it there is a point at which it may be too late right and so you know again it's like stand for what you stand for now is your moment you know we all need to know and we need to stand up strongly and link arms with people who believe in science right and who believe in the fundamental value of this endeavor DL: I guess what I'll suggest for things we can do to survive that I found helpful is just finding community with the other folks like present company that are committed to doing the work no matter what's going on right and I think that's been really helpful for me just to just to stay engaged and know that there are other folks that still care about this that are still doing the work it has to look a little different right now we may have to rewrite what shows up on the the public web page about our work we're gonna do but we're still gonna show up and and do that do that work together so that's that's been giving me a little bit of hope as we try and navigate all of this CDZ: Yeah I'm gonna plus one what Drew said in terms of community I think not being alone in this having many community eyes in on this and giving updates and I I can speak about you know our RIOS community or the data science for social justice community but also the blue sky community like coming in at a big time where twitter used to be that place where I think it was happening and to have blue sky be be there has has been huge I'll also reflect on what Jude said know what you stand for and stand for that now one of the things that happened pretty early into this process was I feel like as I don't want to say an old person but an older person than my students or early career faculty I feel like this isn't the first time I've done you know been in the academic ecosystem and and had these you know trump as president and and saw climate change get removed from all the websites and and all of all of the things and I I kind of went back I know there's a lot of differences between what's going on today and what happened then in a lot of ways but I had done this really interesting study a few years back where I had looked at DEI language in a journal archive of educational lesson plans and looked at how that journal language changed over time and one of the predominant narratives that's been given around our attitudes towards DEI is that we've had this shift in 2020 and then people started paying attention and so I feel like if I were to look at archives of published lesson plans post 2020 I would see this sort of signal of increased DEI language in fact what I noticed was earlier and I had you know based on the timeline of submission and review and everything that this was actually happening closer the submissions were happening closer to 2018 2019 and so I had thought about okay well what's happening in 2018 like what's what's going on at NSF or you know released its includes program which was focused on on inclusion there was like some real funding you know activities and spotlights because of that includes program of such a big launch it wasn't the only thing that was happening but it was a thing and that's kind of when I had done that study that's kind of where I had landed like okay like there was a lot of enthusiasm we had a lot of real fine finally some investment in that area and then we we we got some good research and professional development and then and then this shift happened I've been thinking about it a lot differently I've been thinking about who I was as an educator and where my socio-political turn was and I I think that I doubled down on that commitment right after the 2016 election I think the result the investments what what we saw happening at the level of NSF and all of these other things were not things of 2018 they were reactions from a community to what was happening in 2016 and 2017 and we activated we had the women's march we had march for science we fought our federal cuts we stood up and I think many of us ground down and recommitted to a new vision of what this future could be and so when I landed on that narrative I started seeing that this is a place of opportunity also for us to do something even better and remake this even better than it was before (Outro music starts) SH: Well don't think we're going to get any better closing than that so I want to thank Jude Drew and Carrie so much for joining me thank you for taking part in this seminar DL: Thank you it's been a pleasure thanks so much Sam SH: And that is all the time we have for this Relatively Prime Seminar I want to thank Carrie, Drew, and Jude once again for joining me to talk about funding And if you want to know more about the work that they do, which is amazing and super cool, make sure to head on over to RelPrime.com where you can find links to their work as well as to a lot of new stories that are connected to the important topics that we covered today. Beyond that I'm just so happy to be and if you have any ideas for seminars or math stories that we should cover on Relatively Prime please send me an email sam@acmescience.com. That is my personal email address, I will definitely get it. So without further ado I want to thank lowercase n, you can find them at lowercasen.bandcamp.com, for our music, and thank you so much for listening. I hope you have a matherrific week y'all.