Dear Will the US Recover From this Brain Drain?

Letter Thirty Nine,

Dear Dr. Conroy,

I’m fairly young so I will say that I don’t have the complete history for research and science in the States, but will we ever be able to recover from the damage he is currently doing or will the US lose its spot as one of the worlds leading science and research hubs? 100% funding cut to education, 75% to math and science, no cuts though to Antarctic research? Will America science and research institutions be able to regain momentum, or are we entering a long term decline compared to other countries?

- Will the US recover from this brain drain?

Send your letters to: softacademiawithsydney@gmail.com

Dear Will the US Recover From this Brain Drain?

One of the greatest unexpected skills that being in academia - at a research centre that did not led with ego, did not stoke the flames of competition, did encourage growth through the years - taught me is to say I don’t know. It was in the moments when my supervisor was honest about where my work was outside of his expertise and he said “I don’t know” to a question I raised that I realized the next time he spoke to something he did know inside and out, I trusted that more.

And so before I write more to you, I want to say honestly that I don’t know how or when or to what extent the US will recover from this brain drain. (Brain drain is defined as the departure of educated and professional people from one country to another often due to salaries or living conditions)

I’m also working on receiving my alumni email so I am unable to go back into the literature for you to see how previous countries and times have responded and recovered from a brain drain.

What I can do right now is acknowledge what I know of the situation right now as it stands.

The list of words that has been and continues to be removed from the government’s website, that impacts research grants, federally funded education initiatives, and federal programs that use research to inform the public, pops into my head multiple times a day: science-based, mental health, women, elderly, safe drinking water, victim, multi-cultural, indigenous, key populations, trauma, ideology, advocacy, sense of belonging, vulnerable, solar power, gender, marginalize, understudied, men who have sex with men (but notedly, not men on it’s own), race, water pollution, vaccines, women in leadership, inclusive, excluded, disability, COVID-19, at-risk, climate change, institutional, male dominated, green, health disparity, identity, and peanut allergies. This list is not even half of it.

How does one do research if terms like these are getting grants flagged and defunded?

These are people’s entire research fields, not just a word on a grant proposal.

It’s not only the next three years of this administration that these choices will impact, it will ripple effect from new PhD students not getting started, to research lab’s multi-year projects getting stopped in the middle, to entire federal programs being cut where research was informing projects and next steps.

So the estimation of when recovery happens or what it looks like, I don’t think that can even be measured yet.

Especially because things are still changing.

The passing of this week’s budget bill caps federal student loans, including the loans medical students need to take out. Which is almost triple the amount it was just capped at. Less students will be able to attend medical school, unless they choose to go the private route for loans but many won’t and so won’t be able to afford it. The impacts of a shortage of medical professionals will be long lasting. We’re looking at, at minimum, four cycles of med school applicants being impacted by this.

Coupled with the fact that many people in the United States just also lost their healthcare through the budget bill so less people will be able to access routine medical care, disability support, and/or mental health care. This means people will turn to what is accessible: language learning models, content creators who speak with authority on a health topic (even if they may not have health backgrounds for example), and information they can find on search engines or in their libraries.

So when I think about answering your question, my brain goes so many different directions because the brain drain is happening for so many reasons and will have long lasting impacts in many directions. It’s not just a defunding of education, a restriction on research, a systematic takedown of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) or socio-emotional learning (SEL), it’s also losing healthcare, losing the federal funding that kept people’s workplaces going, it’s not being able to afford professional graduate school training, it’s living in a climate vulnerable area in the United States and no longer getting flash flood warnings because the agency that could predict and send those warnings was cut, and probably many other angles that I’m missing.

Rather than leave this letter in such a hopeless place of how much is out of our control, I want to talk about an area where I am finding some hope: story-telling.

I have been listening to the conversations online about how the jargon of the academic world is not helping when it comes to impacting votes in US elections; that it can make people feel condescended to or confused or left out/shut down. I’ve been holding that up with some feedback I received on a paper I submitted for peer review: that my writing was too casual and therefore not suited for publication.

How really those are both sides of the same conversation.

Success in academia means exclusionary, it means speaking in a language only some people can understand and that important work is what is chosen to be behind the paywall. And how impactful community work that engages the wide range of people who are within one is inclusive, it means meeting folks where they are at and speaking to them from there.

And I think that lays out important work for us who produce research, are academics, teach or lecture. Think about the success of your work outside of the ivory tower, outside of the stunting and unsustainable set up of academia, and instead consider what it would mean for it to be successful in your community.

Why story-telling? Because it’s effective science communication.

I’ve turned to Jane Goodall recently for hope (currently reading: The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times) and learned that she doesn’t include statistics or facts in her lectures. She tells her science, her knowledge, her research through what connects us all as human beings: stories.

So while we are in this moment of new science stalling, of grants being denied, of education being defunded, I think it would be interesting to see academics, researchers, scientists, turn to stories when and where they can. (I understand deeply that it may feel out of your wheelhouse and like you cannot learn a new skill while your workplace is burning, so if you’re in a place where you can’t even think about this, then read it but don’t add it to your to-do list.. (yet))

If these policies and changes have directly impacted you, your PhD was paused, your research grant was canceled, your agency had to strip their public facing information, it can be powerful to tell your story. What your work means to do, what the impact of this is outside of you, your ‘why’ for doing this work.

But you may not want to do that, and that’s okay. You can turn to how to translate your work into a story. What is the life cycle of the work? Who are the folks behind the work at it’s infancy, what did they get right and wrong? What can a teenage do with the findings? What can an eighty year old do with the thing you found out?

We may not on the individual level be able to change the course of the brain drain, but we are not powerless to show people why these policies and choices matter in the day-to-day. We are not powerless to bring our work out from behind the paywall and consider how it would benefit a teacher, a medical assistant, an electrician, a therapist, a director, a retail shop owner. How do we share why it matters? How do we tell the story of our work?

I don’t have the answers to your questions, but I would like to propose a shift of energy towards science and research storytelling on scale. I think the power to start to change the impact of the brain drain can lie with us, the researchers, the academics, the scientists.

Til next Sunday,

Sydney

Send your letters to: softacademiawithsydney@gmail.com

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