Who would have guessed that some funding cuts in the United States of America would throw the entire higher education system in Australia into crisis?
Not me.
Before you get the idea that I oppose all sharing of research and research funding with foreign entities, I don’t. Scientific collaboration, by its nature, doesn’t respect national borders. If the best researcher in some area is Australian, it makes sense for American researchers to collaborate with him or her, and the results will almost certainly benefit Americans.
It’s not like raw brainpower or cleverness are exclusively American qualities or that the benefits of scientific inquiry can or should be limited by borders. If funding good research means some of the dollars leave US soil, that’s no different than purchasing raw materials from another country in order to build something useful. You’re…
