The first installment of the new class, International Media, went … OK. It’s syllabus day, which is an easy day, but also tedious. You just talk about the class in a meta way, and little is conveyed in terms of knowledge or thoughts challenged. But don’t you know they know where the various policies are in this 10 page document. They know what they’re getting into, at least.
And what they are getting into is a newly designed course. And my first class that will be taught in 75 minute sessions. The last two years I’ve been online, or leading three-hour classes. I have to figure out what 75 minutes feels like. I apologized preemptively for these sorts of rough spots.
At least there’s a clock in the back of the room. Except I realized, that’s not a clock. It’s a timer. (For public speaking classes, I guess.) I noticed that at the last moment, and managed to get everyone out with a moment or two to spare. So it’s a new class for me. A brand new course design. It’s being held in a time block with which I must get reacquainted. And it takes place in a room I’d never even seen until I walked into the room after the previous class filed out.
We made it out together.
Now we’ll see how many of them come back on Monday!
I stuck around the office for a few hours to do some work, and then set out for the drug store on the way home. I shopped for, not drugs, but vitamins. And I saw this sunset on the last chilly leg of the drive.
My suit got a compliment today, so at least I did that part right. Now I just have to iron for the twice-weekly meetings between now and May.
So as not to dive too deeply into the minutiae, The Washington Post is dying of a thousand self-inflicted paper cuts. They begged off running endorsements before the election. Some of their stellar newsroom members have left in protest of that, and some other things. The tenor is really changing in that venerable old newsroom. And no less than a 40-year veteran of the place, a Pulitzer Prize winner, was publicly critical of a recent editorial they published. These are all the by products of choices they’ve made, either at the hand of the new boss or the insistence of the owner, one of the oligarchs presently prostrating himself before the president.
Funnily, Jeff Bezos came up in passing after class today. It was one of those questions a student asked on the way out the door. It was a simple answer, one the student didn’t know, and that’s perfectly fine. Not everyone knows the things you know. But in that class they’ll learn a few of them. And we’ll probably wind up talking about Bezos and the Post. I’ll try to pretend not to be disappointed in the venerable old rag when we do.
But, then, I saw this ad as an interstitial ad on one of their stories. And, friends, I can tell you a whole table full of their sales and marketing people sat down together and wrote this nonsense.
Right after that I saw the first mentions of the indefinite pauses to the NIH process. This is important, important stuff. It’s difficult to state how vital the NIH grants become to local economies, to the fields they fund, and to the scholarship they help create. And we just … stopped them today. Even if you wanted to start the panels back up next week, even if you did it without change — and you know that won’t be the case — we’ll have done some real damage to the whole system. A system which is, in fact, one of those things we run better than just about anyone else in the world.
This isn’t just some small nonsense we’re talking about. Some colleague(s) at my current employer are working with some NIH grants on various small business grants. I don’t know the details, but it’s likely some scientific entrepreneurial enterprises. I looked up the grants at one of my alma maters. These are the departments that benefited from NIH money in fiscal year 2025 at UAB.
For FY 2024 UAB received $334,417,936 from 612 awards. This is critical money as states continue to cut back on university funding and administrators and scholars are forced to find their financial support elsewhere, as in these previous reliable grants. You wonder, now, how rickety the whole higher educational system is.
Not that that medical research is a worthwhile reason to maintain a sense of urgency or continuity. Not that there are patients around the country desperately trying newly developed techniques or therapies or medicines that might stem from those grants. Not that people around the world benefit from them daily. If you’d like to approach this from a strict dollars and cents perspective, by all means. NIH reports that for each dollar they dole out, it turns into almost $2.50 in terms of economic activity support. That chart also represents a few hundred jobs from highly skilled experts. Who knows if it is too early to worry about a brain drain, but hamstringing specialists and experts is certainly a dangerous strategy.
The largest beneficiary of NIH grants in FY 2024 was the famed Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, which earned 1,512 grants that totaled $857,947,550. Most of that, $821 million or so, goes into all of the amazing research they do there. You know, cutting edge Johns Hopkins.
What could possibly go wrong?
