Did My Father’s World Die with Him? Grieving the Incalculable Costs of “STEM.” – The Scholarly Kitchen

Source: “This isn’t just (only) a historian special pleading for the humanities; it’s in the originating legislation for the NEH that employs the same language of national purpose and service as the NSF’s:This isn’t just (only) a historian special pleading for the humanities; it’s in the originating legislation for the NEH that employs the same language of national purpose and service as the NSF’s:”

“An advanced civilization must not limit its efforts to science and technology alone, but must give full value and support to the other great branches of scholarly and cultural activity in order to achieve a better understanding of the past, a better analysis of the present, and a better view of the future….Democracy demands wisdom and vision in its citizens. It must therefore foster and support a form of education, and access to the arts and the humanities, designed to make people of all backgrounds and wherever located masters of their technology and not its unthinking servants.”

“We all have a picture of the world, an idea of what is real, inside which we live.  Sudden disaster–the death of a loved one, the loss of a vital job, a murder, a meltdown at a nearby nuclear reactor–breaks that picture and we have to try to reconstruct it, or something like it, or something completely different.” 

Salmon Rushdie, “A Sundering,” in Suleika Jaouad, The Book of Alchemy: A Creative Practice for an Inspired Life (2025), 271.

He would say something like but gravity isn’t political, and Benjamin Franklin was born in 1706 – that’s fact, not interpretation. And I would say, yes, gravity itself the physical force isn’t political, but how we come to research and understand and then harness it absolutely is political, distributed by human relationships and negotiations of power. And while Benjamin Franklin was indeed born, that we choose to frame the event as such reflects our priorities; we could instead note that Abiah Folger Franklin labored long in a period of high maternal mortality to deliver the eighth of her 10 children, whom she named Benjamin. These were the kinds of conversations we had, my dad and I, scientist to humanist, secure in the parameters of a world committed to knowledge.

My father, an early and prominent computer scientist, passed away more than two years ago. Since then I’ve been trying to make sense of how rapidly the world that helped make him, and in turn the one he helped shape, is unraveling. Like many Americans of my generation, I have parents who lived their lives in the wake of World War II and all that the war’s end meant for the United States – what we convinced ourselves we were committed to at home and around the world. An academic, entrepreneur, public servant, and leader, my dad believed as deeply in America as he did in science – and in the inexhaustible value of higher education and scientific research for the nation. Child of an immigrant father, he invested wholly in what he was certain made the US great: the historic partnerships among academic, government, and industry institutions that were part of a post-war commitment to expanding opportunity, and to keeping the US at the economic and innovation pinnacle. This sense of national interest and national purpose was just as deeply rooted in an ideal of global collaboration.¹

These broad commitments and the structures to underpin them were blown forward from the mid- into the late twentieth century by gale force political winds. As a historian, I loved talking with my dad about that context, and how those winds might change. Now that they have, grieving his death feels inextricably tangled with grieving the catastrophe now overtaking the world he believed in.

This is a more personal post than most; over the last 10 years I’ve loved writing here, and learning from and with The Scholarly Kitchen (TSK) and SSP community. It has felt important to speak and write about the humanities for a scholarly communications industry dominated by the needs and interests of STEM research and publication, and it’s been a privilege to share ideas about the biggest issues that influence scholarship across disciplines. It’s not an accident that the conversations I had with my dad about how and why the STEM-ified nexus of US academia, research, and policy looks the way it does echoed alarms I’ve raised in TSK pieces over the years. These include questions about industry specifics like monolithic Open Access and the citation metrics game; about the landscapes of social media and legacy media; and perhaps further afield a failure of attribution culture in historical fiction that nonetheless felt to me like a perfect exemplar of taking humanities knowledge infrastructure for granted.

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Source Links: Did My Father’s World Die with Him? Grieving the Incalculable Costs of “STEM.” – The Scholarly Kitchen