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Our paper on NIH reform is now out.
Thank you @Health_Affairs for the opportunity to publish it.
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Jason Locasale
3.8K posts
Jason Locasale
@LocasaleLab
Scientist (metabolism, biophysics, AI, health/longevity). Academic & scientific reform. Former: Duke, Cornell, Harvard, MIT. DMs open • dr.jason.locasale@gmail
Raleigh, NC Katılım Mart 2015
697 Takip Edilen14.7K Takipçiler
Student loan debt — and the greed and avarice of universities — is one of the major economic issues facing our society. Healthcare is the only other that even compares. A two-year college gives you the same calculus class you’d get at Yale or Duke. MIT has had course lectures online for over 20 years.
Minimizing the amount of money spent on universities, for example by going to two-year colleges, should be an aspiration for every young person. Reducing credentialism, which drives up educational costs, and focusing more on talent and drive — while finding new ways for social development for our young people — should be something we strive for in every profession and every walk of society.
cpt dank@cptdankkk
Mark Cuban says taking out a loan to go to college is the dumbest thing you can do "If you can't afford it you can't afford it. Don't take out a ton of loans and f#ck up your future" "I tell people go to community college. Accounting class is accounting class whether it's at a community college or at Harvard" "The delta between the most basic four year school and the best public universities is really small"
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The reality is these institutions are hostile and view Dr. Bhattacharya as an adversary.
I understand his inclination toward viewpoint diversity and intellectual pluralism takes him into environments with contrasting views, but the expectation should be that anything he says will be used against him — to generate hit pieces, ridicule, and fodder for people and groups with clear agendas.
Dr. David Sanders@DavidSandersRep
I recently had the opportunity to hear Bhattacharya in person during his visit to @LifeAtPurdue. I expected to endure scientific ignorance, right-wing pandering and claims of victimisation, and I was not disappointed. @jamesglanz @fayeflam
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NSF, the National Science Foudation, is a declining institution that has given up on merit a long time ago. This board shares major responsibility for that decline.
Just looking at how many bureaucrats are loaded onto this panel should be shocking to any good scientist. NSF needs a hard reset, and removing this board is a strong start.
National Review@NRO
Trump’s recent firing of all 24 members of the National Science Board is important move against woke science and will help restore the prioritization of discovery over dogma. | @AndrewCFollett nationalreview.com/2026/05/trump-…
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This is welcome, but Yale and others who follow will have to prove it with actions, not words.
Marc Porter Magee 🎓@marcportermagee
Yale has changed its mission statement, rolling back the language that was adopted in 2016
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Every private university has free speech encoded in its policies for faculty, typically in a faculty handbook.
However, when push comes to shove, they argue in court that these handbooks and policies are not binding, and they can therefore do whatever they want regarding taking action based on speech. Some argue these policies are contractual in their offers, but universities will even deny that the offer letter is a contract, and more so that the policies are too broad to be a contract.
Some have accused universities of perpetrating fraud for doing this. The reason they do not communicate the limits they actually enforce is that doing so would effectively admit to fraud and breach of good faith. Further, no one would attend these places if they knew how limited their freedom actually is, since it goes against everything academia was built for.
American Council of Trustees and Alumni@goACTA
VIDEO PODCAST: Dr. Steve McGuire explains that private universities do have the power to limit speech on their campuses - but if they want to do so, they need to clearly communicate those limits to students and faculty.
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Business schools are some of the worst perpetrators of the credential gatekeeping racket rather than educational institutions. They charge up to $90K a year largely for students to network with each other and to give them keys to portals for future jobs. The classes are soft, and the degree functions mainly as a credential for entry into job pipelines where consulting, finance, private equity, and even hospital management recruit directly.
The university is acting as middle management between aspiring applicants and firms - selling access to jobs and a country club experience more than education.
GeniusThinking@GeniusGTX
Marc Andreessen just revealed how Harvard Business School was built on a broken 1941 theory, and how it's now collapsing... Andreessen co-founded Netscape in 1994 and a16z in 2009. He has sat on Meta's board since 2008. He has spent 30 years backing founders and watching managerial CEOs lose to them. The pattern traces back to one book: James Burnham's *The Machiavellians* (1941). Burnham argued every great company had been founder-run. Henry Ford ran Ford. Bob Noyce ran Intel. Today, Elon Musk runs Tesla, SpaceX, and Starlink. Then, he said, something broke. Between the 1880s and the 1920s, a new philosophy replaced the founder. It was called managerialism. The professional manager would now hold a portable skill, usable across any business. The consequences were: - Harvard Business School - Stanford Business School - Management as a universal skill - The 1970s conglomerate "That assumes the managers are going to do a good job," Andreessen says. For 30 years, they haven't. Managers can run something static, he says. Soup is soup. A bank is a bank. A car is a car. But when the industry changes, the manager freezes. Look at SpaceX. "Imagine being a professionally trained manager, trained at a top management school, working for a rocket launch company, competing with SpaceX." Then Elon's rockets started landing on their butt. "Your management skills ... what good are they at that point?" Andreessen's conclusion: "You're much more likely to build something important in the 21st century if you start with the founder and train them on management." What "professionally run" institution in your life has quietly stopped working? If you're new here, @GeniusGTX is a gallery for the greatest minds in economics, psychology, and history. Follow along for more similar content. P.S. I made a free toolkit breaking down 100+ mental models used by history's greatest thinkers. 5,000+ downloads. 113 five-star reviews. Grab your free copy here: besuperhuman.gumroad.com/l/mentalmodels — Marc Andreessen ( @pmarca ), co-founder of a16z, on David Senra's ( @FoundersPodcast ) podcast
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@MikeDrout @LocasaleLab I'm laughing out loud because I know who this is
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The most lucrative career path in academia is to work your way up the administrative hierarchy, just as in any large corporation. These higher titles connect directly to the corporate sector, where executive search firms value titles on your CV for placement.
Meanwhile, the professor who focuses on scholarship gets aged out and made irrelevant in this system.
Professor Charles Xavier@PezeshkiCharles
The faux belief is that the university is somehow an egalitarian society, where everyone is listened to. The reality is that it is a high-stakes hierarchy where people at the top make insane amounts of money they could never make someplace else, and will not brook dissent from others in a more vulnerable place in the hierarchy. Our former provost was an exemplar of how much money any anthropology major could ever hope to make.
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Almost every professor whose focus is biomedical research knows the NIH system collapsed a long time ago, but still spends their effort keeping the money coming in.
They know the research is derivative, overlapping, and redundant, and it funds staff and students who mostly have limited job prospects, even though these positions are meant to be training roles.
Rand@rand_longevity
every professor ive been talking to says the college system and getting a 9-5 job has already collapsed, they are just trying to keep the money coming in as long as possible
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I’m glad to see this issue being brought into the public forum. University medical centers generate revenue from this drug subsidy program on the scale of what it costs to fund all of the basic science at these institutions, yet that money is not going there. Instead, it goes into a black hole likely supporting high administrator compensation and even lobbying efforts to keep the money flowing.
American Resolve@AmResolve
The Trump administration is tackling waste and abuse in the 340B drug program to lower health care costs for Americans. It’s time for all Republicans to embrace radical transparency and stand firm against hospital lobbyists. realclearhealth.com/articles/2026/…
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I would add that these university administrators protect themselves and each other and shift responsibility for their scandals and poor performance onto those who are less powerful.
They form a tight-knit, highly collusive group, and search firms provide cover for their cartel-like behavior.
Michael Drout@MikeDrout
@LocasaleLab Thanks to non-disparagement clauses and executive search firms, there is massive "failing upwards" in academia. I personally know of someone who was no-confidenced as Dean, fired as Provost, wrecked a college and fired as a President, and was President at 2 other places.
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Political hacks keep pushing this narrative, and legacy media keeps amplifying it.
The reality is that NSF has been a major contributor to the decline of the American university system. These advisory boards have little to do with scientific expertise and far more to do with bureaucratic structures - people who climbed through a broken system to end up in these roles.
Rep. Haley Stevens@RepHaleyStevens
First RFK Jr. gutted our public health agencies, now Trump is purging the National Science Foundation. Their anti-science agenda is clear: if the facts don’t fit the narrative, fire the experts. npr.org/2026/04/28/nx-…
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I remember when I first became a professor, I was excited to see what actually took place in a faculty meeting. About 10 minutes into the first one I attended, I realized it was all bullshit - people bloviating about irrelevant things, talking over each other, and saying things just to sound smart. In later years it became completely performative.
The nastiest people behind closed doors would go on about how much they love students and minorities. It was pure narcissism - people trying to look good in front of others and caring more about promoting themselves than anything else.
The Independent with Scott Atlas@ScottAtlas_IT
Yep. Comical if people could see it at faculty meetings, with their own eyes.
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As universities have become corporatized, their sports programs function as professional leagues rather than student-athlete opportunities tied to higher learning.
Yet they are still paid for by taxpayers. The question is why not acknowledge what they are - semi-pro or minor leagues - and see if they can stand on their own financially. If they can’t, then we should ask whether they should exist in their current form. Let athletes turn pro if they want to, if they want an education, we should focus on making that affordable and let pro organizations subsidize them rather than taxpayers.
Wall Street Journal Opinion@WSJopinion
Where are all the Americans in American college tennis? The professionalization of college sports is reshaping athletic programs beyond football and basketball, writes @PatrickMcEnroe on.wsj.com/4dk2DZi
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There’s a lot of criticism directed at this person right now.
The reality is he’s an academic who publishes his work - academic work usually carries no value for direct military or industry applications. He was, however, widely regarded as one of the top scientists in chemistry - a field I trained in, so I was familiar with him. His work involves some interesting basic science, but he has not made any major breakthroughs in technological innovation. He made serious mistakes in not disclosing consulting money and in how he handled interactions with the FBI, and he’s a convicted felon for that. He lost his job and is no longer capable of conducting research in the US.
But since then he has been effectively unemployable in the US, and no university would touch him regardless of the value his science might provide. It’s not surprising he would go to China if they offer him a job. If the choice is being unemployed and unemployable in the US or continuing his work elsewhere, the decision is straightforward.
The broader issue is whether American research institutions that permanently exclude someone whose work and ideas still have value are serving their intended mission.
Reuters@Reuters
Charles Lieber, a former Harvard scientist convicted of lying to US authorities about payments from China, is now running a Chinese state-funded brain-computer interface lab in Shenzhen reut.rs/4mXiMqQ
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This claim is the result of faulty bookkeeping. It’s the result of internal accounting that universities can inflate in nearly infinite ways.
They can and will structure and report costs in countless ways to make it look like they are spending far more than they are on actual education. Meanwhile, they benefit from billions in tax subsidies that distort the market, and middle management can make up to seven figures.
Placement into top jobs is driven by an antiquated credentialing system built on legacy connections and backdoor networks. This can be sidestepped altogether — it’s not real value. At the same time, much of the actual instruction is delivered through online video lectures and lecture notes and homework PDFs. Grading can all be done with AI these days.
These institutions function as glorified country clubs for students with different appeals. In the cases of MIT, it's collecting a lot of nerds in one place where they can code and play video games together.
Marc Porter Magee 🎓@marcportermagee
Why for-profits can’t compete with top nonprofit universities: “We should note that the actual cost—to MIT—of administering an MIT education is about twice the listed tuition. Thus, even those students who attend MIT without any need-based aid effectively receive a 50% discount”
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People have no idea the damage executive search firms have done to the academy. They serve as a memetic filter, screening out all competent individuals who are not 'ticket punchers' from the top jobs.
So you end with leadership that is essentially boxed-in hierarchicalists, with no new thoughts or desire to change a system that is already deeply rewarding them with cash.
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Politicians continue to use this non-story as a talking point. NSF is a declining institution that has shifted most of its priorities to politics and soft science.
These boards are largely ineffectual and consist of bureaucratic hacks that bear little resemblance to actual scientific leadership.
Congresswoman Sara Jacobs@RepSaraJacobs
Trump just fired every Advisory Board Member of the National Science Foundation (NSF) – the leading funder of scientific research – with no explanation. Trump continues to illegally undermine and politicize science in ways that will set us back for years. scientificamerican.com/article/entire…
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If the science is truly novel, expect resistance not applause.
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If your result needs a press release, it probably needs more data.
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