University of California feels the pain

ScienceInsider has the details of the latest combination of cuts and furloughs proposed for our colleagues at UC here. It’s not a pretty story. Many of us consider the UC system to be the premier public university in the United States. It can’t stay that way for long if the great state of California doesn’t figure out some way to address its structural budget problems (which long pre-date the current crisis in my opinion). As a California native, and with many friends as faculty in the system, I really feel their pain.

Jim

Simulus the new baseline for science?

Jeffrey Mervis from ScienceInsider.com:

Several witnesses spoke in favor of using the numbers in the recently passed stimulus package—which add 50% to NSF’s regular budget and 40% to the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, for example—as a starting point. Although Mollohan was poker-faced during the hearings, he tipped his hand in a brief interview with ScienceInsider.