At the time, he was a concern troll, posing as a liberal worried about other liberals who were, he claimed, misunderstanding Republicans. Whereas liberals thought of Republicans as bigots and misogynists, concerned with preserving their own position in racial and gender hierarchies, Haidt explained that they actually had their own set of values, based on order, purity, honour and loyalty. The wheels started falling off that one when Donald Trump, the antithesis of all of these things, came along and received the unqualified support of the supposed believers in purity.

Haidt responded by reinventing himself a free speech advocate, concerned about cancel culture and the coddling of young minds. He hung out on the “Intellectual Dark Web” with Bari Weiss and Stephen Pinker. Now that Weiss is busy suppressing reporting of Trump’s crimes, the IDW appears to have shut up shop.

?Haidt’s next reinvention was an almost complete backflip. Despite having no relevant research background (as discussed his previous focus was on adult voters, followed by a shift to scolding college students) he suddenly became an authority on the effects of smartphone use on teenagers. His concerns about freedom of speech suddenly went out the window, replaced by a fear that the speech teens encountered on their phones was making them depressed as miserable.

Haidt’s work writings on this topic inspired the Australian government to pass legislation aimed at banning access to social media platforms for people under 16. It’s been mostly ineffective, but for the minority of kids who have left social media, a notable impact has been reduced access to news.

Possibly because recognition of this failure is spreading, Haidt has gone back to the “coddling” theme in a commencement address at NYU, for which he was roundly booed. Haidt appears not to have noticed that, far from protecting students from views that might upset them, NYU is busy suppressing speech by students that offends the administrators and of course the Trump Administration.

The kind of concerned punditry of which Haidt is an exponent never goes out of style, even if the topics of concern change from time to time. Given his ability to leap from one topic to the next with a fine disregard for consistency, I expect he will be around to annoy me for a long time to come.

[they look so innocent]

A moment with the app revealed that this was Ranuncula bulbus, the Bulbous Buttercup.  There are a bunch of species in the genus Ranuncula, which is another way of saying there are a lot of different kinds of buttercup.  That’s because buttercups appear to be a recent evolutionary radiation, and a pretty successful one.

But when I did a quick search on these little guys?  I found they used to have another name.  The Bulbous Buttercup was once known as Saint Anthony’s Turnip.

Saint… what?

Let’s start with the “Bulbous” part.  The Bulbous Buttercup is so called because it has a bulb.  Specifically, it has a “corm” — an enlarged stem, just below the surface, that stores energy in the form of starch.  


[pedantry: corms are enlarged stems, while true bulbs like onions are enlarged roots]

The next thing to know is that buttercups are pretty toxic to humans.  The leaves and stems, the sap, the flowers, and the corm — all bad.  Eating one buttercup won’t kill you, but it could make you sick.(1)  And buttercups are a significant menace to horses and cattle, who are also vulnerable to the toxins.  Google around and you’ll find lots of online articles about how to kill this pretty-but-dangerous little flower if it shows up in your pasture.  So while that crunchy little corm has lots of calories — starch and a bit of protein — it’s not going into any salads.

(1) The lethal dose for humans seems to be about 500g, or about a pound of fresh buttercup greens.  So you’d have to work at it, fair enough. 

However: while humans, horses and cows are vulnerable to the buttercup toxin?  Swine are not.  Pigs will cheerfully eat a buttercup and ask for seconds.  In fact, since the corms grow close to the surface, it’s very easy for swine to root them up.  A meadow full of buttercups?  For a pig, that’s a tasty, nutrient-rich buffet.

So how does that connect to “Saint Anthony’s Turnip”?  Well, that’s easy: it’s because St. Anthony is the patron saint of swineherds.


[Saint Anthony accompanied by a pig, 15th century]

Which… okay, there are a lot of Catholic saints, and most of them are patron saints of something or other.  Pretty much every profession has a patron saint, from funeral directors (St. Joseph of Arimathea) to bartenders (St. Armand of Maastricht). (2)  “Swineherd” is one of those jobs that basically no longer exists but that was really quite important for thousands of years.  So it makes perfect sense that there would be a patron saint of swineherds.   

(2)  Some professions have multiple patron saints.  Lawyers, for instance, have three or four.  Catholic lawyers know the Lawyer’s Prayer to St. Thomas More, which gives good advice even if you’re neither a lawyer nor Catholic.  

But wait a moment.  Is this… the Saint Anthony?  Saint Anthony the Great?  The third-century Roman who gave up all his wealth and went out into the Egyptian desert to become a hermit, where he was alternately tormented and tempted by demons?  That Saint Anthony?

[copyright Michelangelo Buonarotti, c. 1487)

Yup, that’s the guy.

So the original story of St. Anthony comes from a Roman bishop named Athanasius, who wrote a Life of Anthony sometime in the late fourth century.  I went back to look at that original text (pdf).  And while the Life has both the temptations and the torments, there’s nothing about pigs.

But somewhere, somehow over the centuries a bunch of legends and traditions accreted around St. Anthony.  So, there’s a legend that a demon possessed a wild pig in order to threaten the saint, and then Anthony cast out the demon, and the grateful pig became his friend and companion.   In another story, Anthony healed the piglet of a wild sow, which caused the sow to follow him around like a pet.  There are a number of these. 

Which is all perfectly common and normal for saints, especially early / OG saints. (3)  But as to why pigs particularly… nobody seems to know.


[but there it is]

(3) St. Anthony is also associated with fire — see him standing in flames in the middle image above?  There are like three different legends associated with that and I’m not even going there.

So if you have a nodding acquaintance with European art history, you know there’s a vibrant tradition of pictures about the Temptations of Saint Anthony, from Hieronymus Bosch —


[as Bosch goes, relatively restrained]

— to Salvador Dali.


[Dali painted this for a contest!]

The subject matter gave artists pretty free rein, after all.  They could depict the grotesque, monstrous, surreal or erotic —

[but note stalwart companion pig]

— sometimes to the extent that the saint himself simply vanishes under a mass of demonic weirdness.


[tbf this is Max Ernst, and… yeah, it’s Max Ernst.]

And of course, the modern internet has joined the fun.





But okay!  Somehow St. Anthony became associated with a pig.  So you have a tradition of Anthony depicted as tormented and/or tempted, and another tradition showing him with a pig.


[or sometimes both]

And based on the pig connection, Anthony became the patron saint of swineherds. (4)  And thus, the pig-edible Bulbous Buttercup became St. Anthony’s Turnip.  All done, then?

(4)  I went down a whole side-bar rabbit hole on swineherds — everything from the Gadarene Swine to Circe to the dueling shapeshifting swineherds of Irish legend.  TLDR, the status of swineherds varied wildly over times and places, but they were associated with various sorts of magic and weirdness way more often than you might think.  

Well… there are a couple of other things.  In England there was a tradition of taking the smallest pig of a litter — what today we would call the runt — and donating it to the Church.  And these little pigs were known as tantony pigs, with “tantony” being a contraction of “Saint Anthony’s”.  This in turn led to occasional use of “tantony” as a verb, meaning to follow someone superior like a little pig following its mother.  The word is now entirely obsolete, but now and then it still pops up.

The other thing has nothing to do with pigs or saints.  If you’re British, Irish or American you might recall a child’s game where a child holds a buttercup under your chin, and if your chin turns yellow, it means you like butter.  Nobody has any idea where that comes from, but it’s true that if the sun is shining, and you hold a buttercup under your chin, you can get a surprising yellow-gold glow off the buttercup.



[if you’ve never tried this, check it out, it’s actually pretty cool]

So the reason this happens is because buttercups are very glossy and reflective.  Is this just random?

No.  According to this paper (“Functional Optics of Glossy Buttercup Flowers”), there are a couple of reasons for it.  One is what you’d expect — it’s probably more attractive to potential pollinators.  But the other is this:

“Buttercup flowers are heliotropic and when ambient temperatures are low they have approximately the shape of a paraboloid.”

— A heliotropic flower is one that, over the course of a day, turns to face the sun.  A paraboloid is the three-dimensional version of a parabola.  It has the interesting property that anything striking its inner surface tends to get bounced or reflected directly to a single point in its center.  So…

“Under these circumstances, incident sunlight that reaches the petal surface under a large angle will not be reflected to the outside but towards the central flower area where the reproductive structures are located. This will cause increased floral temperatures, which enhances seed and pollen maturation and is preferred by pollinators… Indeed, under natural conditions, the centre of the paraboloid-shaped glossy flowers of the arctic buttercup, R. adoneus, were found to be several degrees warmer than the ambient air.”

In other words, the buttercup is a little solar oven.  It focuses sunlight into its center, partly to keep its own genitals warm, but also as a boon to pollinators.  On a cool but sunny spring morning, cold-blooded insects will prefer the flowers that literally warm them up, allowing them to bask in concentrated sunlight.  


[like a cozy snuggle in a warm blanket]

So the sun-focusing buttercups will get pollinated preferentially over flowers that don’t have this ability.

If you’re a science fiction nerd, you might remember that an author named Larry Niven once proposed an alien plant called a “sunflower”.  It grew a flower with a mirror surface that could reflect and focus sunlight…

A single species of plant evenly dispersed across the land, from here to the infinity-horizon. Each plant had a single blossom, and each blossom turned to follow Louis Wu as he dropped. A tremendous audience, silent and attentive.

He landed and dismounted beside one of the plants. The plant stood a foot high on a knobbly green stalk. Its single blossom was as big as a large man’s face. The back of that blossom was stringy, as if laced with veins or tendons; and the inner surface was a smooth concave mirror. From its center protruded a short stalk ending in a dark green bulb.

All the flowers in sight watched him. He was bathed in the glare. Louis knew they were trying to kill him, and he looked up somewhat uneasily; but the cloud cover held.

“You were right,” he said, speaking into the intercom. “They’re Slaver sunflowers. If the cloud cover hadn’t come up, we’d have been dead the instant we rose over the mountains…”

There was no alien survivor anywhere in the domain of the sunflowers. No smaller plant grew between the stalks. Nothing flew. Nothing burrowed beneath the ashy-looking soil. On the plants themselves there were no blights, fungus growths, disease spots. If disease struck one of their own, the sunflowers would destroy it.

The mirror-blossom was a terrible weapon. Its primary purpose was to focus sunlight on the green photosynthetic node at its center. But it could also focus to destroy a plant-eating animal or insect. The sunflowers burned all enemies. Everything that lives is the enemy of a photosynthesis-using plant; and everything that lived became fertilizer for the sunflowers.

Niven wrote that around 1970. The first papers on buttercup reflectivity appeared in the 1990s, decades later.  So, coincidence.

That said… I mentioned at the start that buttercups seem to be a fairly recent and successful evolutionary radiation, with a bunch of related species spread widely across several continents.  At a guess, the reflection is probably the reason.  Apparently all buttercups do it.  And it is, in biological terms, rather novel.  (5)  So who knows how far the buttercups might take this trend, millions of years from now?

(5) Edit, added one day after the original post:  the “paraboloid reflective petals -> miniature solar oven” trick appears to have evolved independently several times, though buttercups seem to go harder than most.  I belatedly found this excellent recent survey paper, which gives an overview of the various tricks flowers use to warm themselves up.

Anyway: I snapped a casual photo while walking the dog, and boom — an hour later I was reading about corms, Catholic hagiography, and the physics of paraboloids.  We all learned that little Tennyson poem back in school, right?

Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower—but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.

And that’s all.

Generative AI, for all its problems, has one virtue: it forces us to rethink that assumption. The ease with which AI can spit out seemingly coherent text, or help rewrite a few convoluted sentences into elegant prose, has been perceived by some academics as a threat to the very meaning of our professional existence. “I feel like one of those coal miners must have felt when it was already clear that the mines would be closed soon,” a colleague recently said to me.

I want to resist this idea – maybe out of a desperate desire to cling to my professional identity, but with what I have come to think of as an important distinction: texts as products, or texts as means to something very different.

There may be situations in which texts are really products in and of themselves. I wanted to provide examples (certain types of cheap fiction writing? user manuals? the small print in contracts?), but the longer I think about it, the harder I find it to come up with examples that would really fit. We treat texts as products; they get bought and sold (think of everything around copy right and IP). But in reality, texts are almost always something else. Here is an incomplete list of what texts can be:

• a means for communicating certain facts or ideas,
• a means for communicating that one knows certain facts or ideas,
• a means for helping others solve problems,
• a means for establishing a certain formal status, e.g. by defining or shifting or excluding legal liability,
• a means for establishing a certain informal status, e.g. by claiming authority over certain ideas,
• a means for establishing social bonds, e.g. ingroup and outgroup relations,
• a means for transferring emotions,
• a means for opening up one’s soul to another human being.
• …

Depending on what it is that a text is actually meant to do, it is more or less appropriate to use AI (and by the way – if we had less IP on certain texts, we could do much more with good old copy+paste, for many practical purposes, and would not need AI). Around some things, legal or social norms will probably change (Is it okay to use AI to write a birthday poem for grandma? Will proud authorship claims be made about prompts rather than final products?).

Back to academia, and the doomsaying about the humanities that my colleague expressed. The “product” of a course is not the stack of essays that lands in our inbox, or on our desks, at the end of it – and that might be corrupted by the use of AI. The point of a humanities education, I would argue, is not even to “produce students who can write good texts.” The point is to produce human beings of a certain kind: who understand certain things, who have certain forms of knowledge, who have certain skills such as critical thinking and creativity – and who, as a byproduct, can write good texts.

The availability of AI tools forces us to rethink what it is that we want to achieve with our pedagogical methods. Enter (drum roll) – the “Dublin descriptors.” If you work in European academia and ever had to set up a new program or get an existing one reaccredited, you’ve probably come across this list of words that are meant to describe what students learn (here, for example; for specific programs one then needs to then specify them at each level, and show how each element of the program contributes to the overall goal). When I first came across them, I found this a tedious bureaucratic exercise. Many traditional pedagogical strategies, after all, are meant to achieve a combination of them, e.g. knowledge about a certain classical text and critical exegetic skills and the ability to formulate arguments and exercise judgment. But in times in which AI requires us to rethink many traditional forms of examination, this exercise is actually quite useful for thinking about what one wants to achieve in one’s teaching (and which pedagogical strategies and form of examination fit with those goals).

It is a widespread fallacy that by using AI, students can learn faster. Another dean of my university (let’s be graceful and not mention the discipline) recently said in a meeting that students could use AI to let it summarize “500 pages of text” for them. But why should an employer want to hire graduates who have just read the AI summary of these 500 pages, rather than actually having worked through them? How would such a student later contribute to *expanding* knowledge in the relevant field, by thinking creatively about what is already known and by asking the right questions about what is still unknown? This will still require the cognitive process of going through the 500 pages and understanding them.

The hard work of suffering through such learning processes cannot be replaced by AI. They include many emotional side effects – enthusiasm frustration, triumph, disappointment when the sense of triumph turns out to be premature, etc. From that pedagogical perspective, insofar as writing is part of it, it is very much the process of writing and rewriting that matters, the reaction to feedback, the refinement that comes from someone saying: “I don’t understand what you mean.” It is no accident that learning has almost always been organized in social settings.* You need peers to go through these processes together, and someone to guide and motivate you when things don’t go as smoothly as you would wish. I very much doubt that AI will take over that deeply human role of pedagogy; certainly not for younger children, but probably also not for the young adults we typically teach at universities.

And then there is a last thing over which I’ve recently been mulling a lot. A key point of a good text, written by a person, is that it expresses a sense of that person standing by the words they wrote, of taking a stance because it matters to them: because they want to correct what they see as a fallacy or wrong position, because it is connected to certain interests or values, because they care.

AI, in contrast, cannot care about anything because it is a machine and not a person, it has no vulnerabilities, no dignity, nothing that could be hurt. Insofar as it sounds emotional and engaged, it has copied that tone from texts written by humans who were emotional and engaged. Despite that copying, all too often – at least in the experiments I did with AI so far – it often sounded incredibly bland and indifferent, producing bullshit without accountability. I often couldn’t help thinking, about its tone: a privileged kid, a bit drunk and therefore overconfident, who grew up knowing their daddy will pay for the lawyer to get them out of whatever nonsense they produce with their indifference to truth….

Learning to write, as a human, also means learning to understand what one cares about, and what one is willing to take a stance on. It means learning to weigh one’s words, in written even more than in spoken contexts, because the words are there to stay (the same holds for spoken words that are recorded, of course). The texts may come to contribute to defining who one is, or at least how others perceive one’s public persona. There are still many settings in today’s world, in which what you write can get you shunned, or unemployed, or even killed. In such cases, it takes bravery to stand up for one’s words – and yet it is precisely this courage that often leads to text that really matter.

Maybe it is this attitude, the virtue of truthfulness and the courage to find the right words for what one really thinks, that our ways of teaching students should focus on much more? Then we can be quite sure that no AI will ever replace us.

 * I very much enjoyed reading this text about the social nature of human intelligence.

Political economists have been talking for decades about the RBA’s tendency to redistribute wealth from the bottom upwards. But now it seems most people understand that the latest interest rate rises requires ordinary people to hand over more of their cash to their bank, to get it out of circulation and bring down inflation.

Asking whether superannuation or taxes could also be used for the purpose of reducing interest rates, the ABC pointed out that interest rates were not always the way inflation was managed. They published an article asking ‘Would you rather hand over an extra $300 a month to your bank or the federal government?’ – suggesting that this might even be an option.

Rightly, the ABC points to the place of government in setting up this structure. But history shows that for all that government is nominally in charge. Well. You might have noticed that banks are fairly powerful. Government v bank doesn’t always mean the government wins…as we will see.

I recently published a review of Bob Crawshaw’s Battle of the Banks, which is about the role of the media in what nearly every historian agrees was a controversial (sometimes seen as just plain mad) decision on the part of 1940s Labor Prime Minister Ben Chifley to try to nationalise Australia’s banking sector.

We have a number of accounts of this fairly notorious episode in Australian history. This one might be the most rollicking. Here is my review, though you probably need institutional access to the Journal of Australian Studies to read it. Yell out if you can’t and I can send you a pre-published version.

The basic story of the battle of the banks is this:

• The Curtin/Chifley governments had been able to use the banking system( especially the ‘People’s Bank’, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, which was owned and operated by the government as a central, merchant and trading bank) to help finance Australia’s participation in the Second World War.
• They now sought to use similar measures to enable them to finance Post-War Reconstruction, which among other things included a very substantial housing program, which they said would fulfil all the dreams of ‘Mrs Australia’.
• To do this, there was a new banking Act. Led by what is now NAB, the commercial banks challenged the Act in the High Court. Based on a bit of the constitution about money moving across state borders as a foundational goal of federation, one of the provisions of the Act (requiring local government to bank with the Commonwealth Bank so that the flow of cash would help finance housing) was deemed unconstitutional.
• Evidently pissed off, Chifley called a Cabinet meeting where it was agreed that since this Act was bust, they would nationalise the banks.

At this point nearly every historian (including Crawshaw) declares this to be ‘rash’, as if Chifley just thought it up out of pique and somehow bulldozed cabinet into this crazy plan.

But in fact bank nationalisation has been Labor policy for several decades.

Populist Money Movements

Historian Peter Love wrote an excellent book a while back now about populist opposition to ‘the ‘money power’, which grew as banking became more influential in the development of Australian capitalism.

Peter Love shows they way this movement helped cohere working class activism in the face of multiple crises, especially the bank crashes of the 1890s and the 1930s Great Depression.

In the 1920s, opposition to the ‘money power’ also coalesced into a politics attached to Douglas Credit. This was a (kinda wacky, in retrospect) idea that a new kind of money could be distributed as as a kind of ticketing system. This would guarantee consumer demand on one hand, and redistribute national wealth on the other, rather than allowing historical power blocs to accumulate more, while others have insufficient money to purchase what they need. It is a precursor, in some ways, to both MMT and a universal basic income.

In the 1920s when ideas and practices of banking, money, economics and politics were still a little more up for grabs than they now seem, the labour movement’s anxiety about the money power helped give Douglas credit political potency. The political party linked to the idea made some progress in the 1930s.

During and after the Great Depression, the idea that we could fix things by issuing currency differently took such hold that it grew into a key reason (on the surface at least) for a Royal Commission into the Monetary and Banking Systems in Australia, commencing in 1935 and reporting in 1937. Reading the report and the submissions from banks, one gets the impression that Social Credit was the public reason for the Royal Commission. Underneath it – at least to my (fairly cursory…SO FAR) reading – was a desire to consolidate data about banking to see what sort of regulation and coordination the sector needed in the wake of the Great Depression.

I wrote about this recently for Griffith Review.

Banks are a utility

The final report of the Commission (1937) includes a dissenting report by Chifley. In it, he describes the way that banking has become more important in the past half-century or so.

Emerging in modern form as a partner of the state, helping facilitate fiscal policy, in other respects banking was a marginal industry on the edge of international shipping. It was crucial to that, though, providing the money needed to ship (say) you wool clip to England to meet a contract. In return for this service, banks took a cut, known as the ‘discount rate’. This was core business to such a degree that some 19th century banks didn’t even accept deposits. That wasn’t what they were there for.

Beginning with the 1851 gold rush (I think), this began to change in Australia. Becoming buyers and sellers of gold set them up as deposit-holders because a deposit was the better way to pay for gold.

And slowly, slowly – too slowly for some farmers and small business owners – they also became providers of business credit.

So in 1937, Ben Chifley looked at this system and saw that nothing could happen in the economy without the banks. It was a utility. In my Griffith Review piece I likened banking-as-utility to sewage. It is essential, but also full of shit.

That time Australia nearly nationalised all the banks

As a utility, Chifley thought that (a) nationalisation was best, but in the absence of that, what with how all the other commissioners were more conservative and were never going to back nationalisation, (b) banking profit rates should be seriously limited. Chifley had some specific suggestions, but the commissioners did in fact agree that the government could consider limiting bank profits.

For Chifley limiting profits would ensure government had the cash it needed to do stuff and/or money was circulating in the economy where it belonged (a key factor during the Great Depression to be sure), rather than flowing relentlessly into the coffers of the banks’ rich shareholders, redistributing national incomes straight into the pockets of the ‘money power’.

We should briefly note that the situation Chifley saw has only intensified. Since bank deregulation, home loans are the big asset on banks’ balance sheets. These are created from nothing (kind of), secured against the ever-rising value of real estate. They are like a vacuum, created to hoover up wages.

So Chifley’s attempt to nationalise the banks in the 1940s was not such a mad plan as it seems in retrospect. It not only reflected longstanding Labor policy, but it also embodied Chifley’s 1937 observation that banking was the sewage system of the economy: public (economic) health depends on its effectiveness, and a focus on very high profits was likely to fuck up its very purpose.

From the people’s bank to the bankers’ bank

Spoiler alert: Chifley failed. The proposal was that banks would be compulsorily acquired at the commercial rate independently assessed and where every bank worker would keep their job at the current pay rate or better. But in the anti-communist moment, the banks were able to leverage wider dissatisfaction with Chifley to ensure he would not be elected and that their fella, conservative visionary Robert Menzies, would be.

Chifley’s opportunity was gone. And the banks now felt themselves to be unstoppable.

While they were on a roll they decided to go after the Commonwealth Bank, known then as ‘the people’s bank’.

The commercial banks really, really didn’t like that this central bank also competed with them as a trading bank. Just like Rupert Murdoch doesn’t like the existence of the government-funded national broadcaster, the ABC, they felt that the Commonwealth Bank had an unfair commercial advantage.

So, the pressure mounted until the central bank and the trading bank roles were separated. The Reserve Bank of Australia was established as the central bank in 19t60, separating out this goal from the Commonwealth Bank.

Whatever else they may be, we would hardly describe either the Commonwealth Bank or RBA as a ‘people’s bank’ any more. And the power of the banks, not to mention their incredible annual profits, has certainly not lessened – even after another, much more scathing, Royal Commission in 2017-18.

Also known as the Sea Swallow, or the Blue Angel, or… man, just look at that.  Isn’t that just ridiculously gorgeous? 

Well, these guys(1) look this way for reasons.  Let’s discuss.

(1) English “guy” and “guys” are currently in an awkward blurry space between male-coded and gender-neutral.  But these guys are obligate hermaphrodites, so it’s not an issue.

So sea slugs aren’t very closely related to land slugs.  They’re marine molluscs that evolved from a shelled, snail-like ancestor way back in the Paleozoic, before the dinosaurs.  They’re formally known as nudibranchs — pronounced nooda Bronx, or just “nudies” if you’re a diver.  (If you’re being a huge nerd about it, there are some sea slugs that aren’t formally nudibranchs.  Never mind that now.)

They’re often some combination of weird and beautiful.  A few examples:

[I literally just grabbed some pictures at random]

Giving up their shell freed them of a major metabolic burden and liberated them to swim around.  But it also meant they had to evolve new defenses against being eaten.  Which they did.  Some evolved incredibly good camouflage; some used their flexible bodies to mimic more dangerous creatures; some evolved internal toxins that made them taste nasty.  And a bunch of them, including the Blue Dragon, evolved venomous stings.

But in the case of the Blue Angel / Blue Dragon, they evolved stings, but they never evolved venom.  Because the Dragons don’t make venom.  They steal it.  These slugs get their venom from eating venomous prey, particularly and preferentially Portuguese Man-o’-Wars.

[a couple of Blue Dragons closing on a Man-o’-War, like biplanes attacking a zeppelin.
(c) imagequestmarine.com, via Fae Sapsford]

— You might wonder how a slug can bite pieces off something.  Well, strictly speaking slugs don’t have jaws.  But most molluscs have a hard chewing apparatus called a “radula”.  And in the case of the Blue Dragon, the radula has convergently evolved into something that looks and works exactly like a jaw.


[specifically, like the kind of jaw you have nightmares about]

So it has no trouble slicing pieces off the soft-bodied Man-o’-War.  And by doing so, it gains a sting powerful enough to cause severe pain, blisters, cramps, nausea and vomiting even in an adult human.


[very bad idea!  please do not!]

So all this has been known for a while now — decades.  And it’s weird but not unique.  There are a number of species that do something similar.  There’s even a technical term for it:  kleptocnidy.  The Dragons eat the Man-o’-War’s stinging tentacles and gain the ability to sting.  (They eat the rest of the poor Man-o’-War, too.  In fact, despite being around 1/100 of the Man-o’-War’s size, they’re an important and dangerous predator.)

But when you get down to the cell-tissue-organ level?  The way this works is pretty crazy.  

First, somehow the Dragon’s digestive system sorts out the stinging cells.  We know where inside the slug this happens (the liver) but we still don’t know how.

Next, the Dragon has specialized cells that grab and digest the stinging cells, but that keep the stingy bits.  The part that stings is called a nematocyst, and it’s an organelle within the cell.  The Dragon has cells that use a modified form of phagocytosis to do this.  Phagocytosis is what your white blood cells do to invading bacteria — they flow around, engulf, and dissolve.  The Dragon’s cells do this, except they don’t digest (or even disturb) the delicate nematocyst.  

[How did this evolve?  Did the slugs have something like a white blood cell, which was then adapted to this new use?  Apparently this is an area of ongoing research right now.]

Okay, now comes the really insane part.  You see those long feathery “fingers” on either side of the slug?

[the better to hug you with, my dear]

Those are called “cerrata”.  And the slug’s digestive system has specialized ducts that connect to them.  You and I have digestive systems that are straightforward tubes, but the slug’s digestive system has branches.  And those specialized cells transport the nematocysts out to the ends of those branches, and then stuff them into special stinging organs there.

It’s a bit as if you could eat a plateful of bees, and then your intestines would wrap up the bee stings, and then special branch-intestines would reach into your arms and hands, carrying the stings there.  So that you could deliver hundreds of bee stings with the touch of a finger.

Back to the paper, then.  All of the above is old knowledge.  What wasn’t known was what the slug used the stings for.  I mean, yes defense obviously.  But do the Dragons / Angels also use the stings for offense?  In particular, do they use them to aid in predation?

Turns out: yup, they sure do. 

The authors managed to keep a number of Blue Dragons alive in captivity (this is quite difficult, because reasons) and introduced them to various living prey items.  And it turns out the slugs are active predators.  They don’t just gnaw on defenseless jellyfish.  They’ll eat anything they can catch, including other invertebrates — worms, shrimp, whatever — and small fish. 

And “anything they can catch” was a broader category than suspected.  That’s because, if the slug can get close enough, they’ll whip those long cerrata around to sting their prey.  And each one can contain enough nematocysts to instantly paralyze a small animal.  So while the slug isn’t fast, it only needs to land a single touch.  One flick, just a moment of contact, the lightest caress, and that’s the game.

The paper authors watched this play out in real time, repeatedly.  Hence their title: angels with devil hands.


[big hands, I know you’re the one]

— I mentioned that the slugs look this way for a reason.  Well, we can now guess why they have those very long cerrata: they’re weapons.  Longer cerrata give the slow-moving slug a longer reach for hitting prey.

As to the coloration, they float on the ocean surface most of the time.  Hence their pattern of blue, dark blues and whites: they reflect a lot of harmful ultraviolet, and also blend in.  From a distance, a Dragon will look like a small clump of seaweed or a streak of light on the water’s surface.

— Did I mention that they habitually float upside down?  And that they swallow air bubbles for buoyancy, to float effortlessly, but then cough them back up when they want to swim more actively?  Or that they are cheerful and energetic cannibals?  Or that they can regenerate?

Well.  Obviously I like writing these nerdy science posts!  But I do think they connect to the greater CT project: much is known, but there’s so much more yet to know.  And sometimes the moving frontier between between the known and the unknown hits something that’s just cool.

And that’s all.

“I admire the many federal prosecutors across the country who have chosen to resign rather than carry out illegal or immoral orders. To my knowledge, no department head, dean, or other administrator at Texas A&M has taken any meaningful action to defend academic freedom.”—Martin Peterson

Today’s post was prompted by two recent news items: first, by the announcement that Martin Peterson, currently professor of philosophy at Texas A&M University, will be moving to Southern Methodist University (SMU); second the report by the Harvard Crimson that “Harvard Asks Donors to Endow $10 Million Professorships for ‘Viewpoint Diversity.’” (Wasn’t that what the visiting fellows program at the Kennedy school was for?)

First, Peterson’s comments (quoted at the top of this post) resonated with me. Of course, administrators are also people with mortgages, have parents with expensive care needs, and have kids with expensive tuition. American political economy with its go-fund-mes for urgent medical care and (say) funeral costs makes individual, principled stances incredibly fraught affairs in a job-market that is clearly imploding for mid-career academics, and that most certainly leaves fewer alternative opportunities than (the usually more lucrative options) former prosecutors have. Some of the administrators at Texas A&M may well have had tenure, and they do deserve special opprobrium for their cowardice.

Second, Peterson’s words remind us that something is very broken in the academy when the people who are charged with running it — and Texas A&M is not some idiosyncratic place; it is one of the great, earlier public land-grant research universities — can’t bring themselves to even try to defend fairly basic academic freedom. (If you inform yourself of the details you will learn that Peterson was really making a basic point.) This absence of principle exhibits cynicism and only engenders further erosion of the academy’s spiritual authority (recall this post). I don’t mean to suggest the situation is more cynical than a President who barely pretends to care about revelation and then reads 2 Chronicles 7:14 in front of the cameras. Both exhibit what Machiavelli would call ‘corruption.’

Third, and speaking of cynicism, in its fundraising, Harvard has embraced a term, ‘viewpoint diversity,’ whose (let me adopt James Burnham’s terminology) formal meaning implies a kind of openness to intellectual pluralism, but whose real meaning means ‘people that are critics of liberalism from the non-libertarian right.’ That is to say, this is affirmative action for right-wing coded intellectuals.

As an aside, I am myself not a critic of funded centers that presuppose an ideological commitment. If the institutional embedding is properly organized, these can enrich a campus and even the disciplines in which the academic housed in them publish. (I have a soft spot for the development of ‘schools’ with distinct orientation within many disciplines.) I have been a ‘visitor’ at centers where the ultimate source of funding was ‘right’ coded back in the day.

Harvard University’s official guidance for a policy on university statements (May 2024) does not embrace institutional neutrality. So, I am not suggesting that Harvard is inconsistent with its own understanding of university speech. In fact, its “policy commits the university to an important set of values that drive the intellectual pursuit of truth: open inquiry, reasoned debate, divergent viewpoints and expertise. An institution committed to these values isn’t neutral, and shouldn’t be.” (That’s from an NYT OPED written by Noah Feldman and Alison Simmons.)

But the reason why I use ‘cynicism’ is because nobody believes that Harvard’s funding drive is designed to create intellectual pluralism at the disciplinary or methodological level where groupthink may be lurking. (I have published on the epistemic and normative risks to society of disciplinary groupthink, so this is not a merely intellectual matter.)1 The fundraising goal is not a means to advance knowledge. Rather, Harvard’s fundraising is patently a means to appease a hostile and dangerous administration and the intellectuals that are partisans of it.

This administration has demanded ‘viewpoint diversity’ from Harvard in a letter (here) of April 11, 2026. And the reason why it is legitimate to be cynical about the use of ‘viewpoint diversity’ is that this is an administration that across a range of topics and institutions seems to have no interest in ‘viewpoint diversity’ when those views contradict its own. Most strikingly this is exhibited in the way it has sought to control public media and the way it has sought to deport foreign students who express views it doesn’t like; but also in weaponizing the judiciary in attacking its enemies (and so on).

This gets me to the real point of today’s post, which is not the manifest cynicism on display. Rather, to grapple with the following point. I have remarked before that many prominent universities are exceedingly long-lasting corporations. They have endured, in part, by their willingness to exhibit context-sensitive prudence, alas. If, say, a well-entrenched, Bonapartist government wants a certain amount of conformism to its preferred viewpoints in public institutions and universities, it will usually be obtained eventually. Again not merely a hypothetical point; the forced departure by (former prime minister) Orban of CEU from Budapest is fresh in memory. Many nineteenth century European intellectuals may have been spontaneously nationalist and imperialist, but the governments also nudged the universities in appointing reliable pairs of hands.

Sometimes this process leads to an official purge at the official universities and the subsequent development of an ‘underground university’ as occurred in, say, Czechoslovakia after the Prague Spring. I understand Zena Hitz’s Catherine project and Justin Smith-Ruiu’s The Hinternet Foundation as the building blocks of an underground university of the future.

The more intense cases occur, in circumstances where the academics and the social forces that really support them and, say, the political and economically influential elites have drifted apart, but the law has not caught up with that divergence yet. The best known and most dramatic examples of this occur in the context of civil war or separatism/revolutionary wars. For example, in the age of the English civil war, Oxford’s politics was sometimes very far out of step with the parliamentarian party. And, after the American revolution, the University of New Brunswick and the University of King’s College were founded by loyalist exiles in what came to be known as Canada.

I have used the neutral term ‘drifted’ in the previous paragraph, but echoing the diagnosis of Michael Polanyi back in the day, strategic agents including fascists and anti-liberal movements will aim to lower the trust and authority in the professions and the academy in order to make possible and consolidate their own power. So, it would be a mistake to treat ‘drift’ as pointing to a lack of agency. But universities’ vulnerable strategic position is also due to the loss of their spiritual authority in wider society.

The university’s distinctive spiritual authority (recall this post) was rooted in two features of its intrinsic mission: witnessing truth and being the institution that engages a non-trivial part of the education of an important subset of near adults. Both tasks are serious and dedication to them commands respect. How to engage in this mission such that spiritual authority is the effect is something to figure out and decide upon by each university, conceived as a corporate entity (in the medieval sense), and to be articulated in its mission and the practices that are structured by it. A private university should have more space for autonomy in these matters than public ones. Self-consciously politicizing their mission — by seeking out ‘viewpoint diversity’ — is not a means to recover such authority.

MAGA and its allies want universities to believe that Stateside a regime change has already occurred and so that accommodation is the only prudent way forward for research-intensive universities. It is somewhat puzzling that while they maintain considerable freedom to shape events on their own campus, so few universities have found ways to make the case that an independent education and the advancement and preservation of knowledge is worth preserving.

[don’t stand so]

[don’t stand so]

[close to me]

The moon gets torn to shreds, and the shreds form rings.  This is (we think) how planets get rings around them.  Current thinking is that Saturn’s rings, for instance, probably originated with a now-extinct moon with the excellent name of Chrysalis.

[and Saturn throws in that crazy hexagon at its north pole, just to flex]

Okay, so back to Phobos.  Phobos is orbiting about 2.7 Martian radii from the center of Mars.  The Roche limit for a solid object is about 1.6 radii.  It’s expected that Phobos will hit that limit in about 40 million years, give or take.  It will then be pulled apart and destroyed.  And Mars will get a lovely set of rings!

Which, okay, but…  the Solar System is about 4.5 billion years old.  Phobos is scheduled for destruction in 40 million years.  That’s less than one percent of the lifetime of the Solar System.  Isn’t it a bit of a coincidence that we should be seeing Phobos right now, just as it’s starting its death spiral?  

(It’s true that we’re seeing a couple of other moons doing this at Jupiter and Neptune.  But those are giant planets that have ridiculous numbers of moons — Jupiter has over 100.  And their gravitational fields are so large and strong that they regularly capture new moons from wandering asteroids and such.  So a moon in a decaying orbit around Jupiter is not exactly a surprise.)

But okay, so Mars will have rings one day.   Here’s a thing about rings: they don’t last.  Over geological time, they tend to widen, spreading inwards and outwards. (3)

Eventually, the innermost ring particles hit the planet’s atmosphere and either burn up or crash.  Meanwhile the outermost ring particles drift outwards until the ring is attenuated into nothing.  This process can be delayed or complicated by the presence of other moons — Saturn famously has a bunch of “shepherd moons” constraining its rings — but the  point here is, rings don’t last forever.


[well, they don’t]

So a while back someone had a crazy idea:  what if, after Phobos breaks up into a ring, some of the ring particles disperse outwards and drift far enough from the Roche limit to re-coalesce?  Their mutual gravity would be very weak, sure.  But over millions of years, maybe they could gradually recombine into a new moon!  One outside the Roche limit! 

The new moon would be smaller, of course — at least half of Phobos’ mass would be lost.  But while Phobos is pretty small for a moon, it’s still about ten trillion tons.  Cut Phobos in half and you’ve still got a moon.

Alas, the math didn’t quite work.  Phobos’ Roche limit was too low.  Most of its mass would fall onto Mars.  Not enough ring material would climb high enough to form a new moon.

And there the matter rested for a bit, until this latest paper.  Which asks the question: well, what if Phobos isn’t a solid object?  What if it’s a rubble pile?

See, in the last little while we’ve been sending probes to asteroids.  And while asteroids all look pretty solid from a distance, when you get closer? Turns out a lot of them aren’t solid at all.  They’re just big floating piles of rocks sand and gravel, very loosely held together by weak gravity.

[everybody looks a bit rougher in close-up]

You remember the DART mission a little while back?  It’s when NASA blasted the hell out of a small asteroid, because it was cool.  I mean, sorry, because for planetary defense and also science.


[we tried negotiating with the so-called “moderate” asteroids]

Well, that impact didn’t just hit the small asteroid.  It literally blew half of it off into space.  Because that little asteroid was actually a rubble pile.  So the DART impact was a bit more… impactful, than expected.


[pretty much this, yeah]

Which brings us back to today’s paper!  Because if asteroids can be rubble piles, why not small, asteroid-sized moons as well?  

And it turns out that if Phobos is a rubble pile, everything changes.  Because then the Roche Limit will be higher — further out from Mars.  Because it’s much easier to tear apart a rubble pile than a solid object, yes?  And if that’s the case, then Phobos will die sooner than we think, and the ring system that it produces will start higher, and will spread out further away from Mars.

And if that’s the case, then… suddenly the math works.  Enough ring material will be high enough to re-combine into a smaller moon well outside the Roche limit.  But that moon will still be sub-geosynchronous, so it will start spiraling inwards again.  And so, over tens to hundreds of millions of years, the cycle will repeat. 

It won’t be able to repeat forever, because Phoenix Phobos will be smaller every time.  Eventually there won’t be enough ring material to produce a moon.  But it could potentially continue for several more cycles.



And extending it backwards into the past… yeah.  Maybe Phobos used to be a lot bigger!  But maybe it’s been through several cycles already.  Spiral inwards, hit the Roche Limit, break up into rings… rings spread out, inner part falls onto Mars, outer part recombines into a new, smaller version of Phobos… this could have been going on for a while now.  And you’ll notice that this solves the “why are we seeing Phobos just as it’s dying” question.  It’s not actually dying!  Sometimes Mars has two moons; sometimes it has one moon, and a pretty ring system. 

If the dinosaurs had owned telescopes, they could have seen rings around Mars.  Whatever intelligence inhabits Earth in 50 million AD (4) may see rings around Mars. Us?  We just happen to be catching Mars and Phobos at this particular point in their cycle. 

But wait!  As a bonus… remember Deimos?  The other, more distant moon?  Well, if the rubble pile model is correct, then some ring material might eventually be captured by Deimos.  So while Phobos would get smaller with every cycle, Deimos would get a little bit bigger.  And also, Deimos should be covered in a thick layer of Phobos material.

Okay!  Cool theory. 

Is it true?

Well, we don’t know.  But we might know pretty soon.  

JAXA, the Japanese space agency, is planning to send a probe to Phobos.  It’s scheduled to launch in the next Mars launch window, which is in November-December 2026.  That would bring it to Mars orbit by September 2027, give or take.  JAXA has only a fraction of NASA’s budget, but they have a pretty good track record of successfully sending probes to do cool science in space.  Their Phobos probe will orbit Phobos, scan it with a bunch of instruments, and drop a rover onto the moon’s surface.  Then it will swing in close and take a bite out of Phobos’ surface for a sample return to Earth.  And then for an encore, on its way out the door, it will do a close flyby of Deimos as well.


[unironically, fingers crossed for this]

So — if all goes well — we’re going to learn much, much more about the moons of Mars.  And we could have an answer to the “rubble pile or solid” question in the next couple of years.

And if the sample return succeeds… well, we’d have some stuff from another world, which is astonishing enough by itself.  But not just any stuff.  It would probably look like a handful of sand and gravel.  But it might be sand and gravel that has spent the last couple of billion years cycling between being part of a moon, then part of a ring system around Mars, and then part of a moon again.  

And that’s all.

(1) don’t be that guy
(2) because reasons
(3) because reasons 
(4) probably raccoons.

A lot of the songs were topical and are now very dated. But the theme of the title song is one that, sadly, never gets old (true also of the Irish original) Here it is.

As I was walking past the lodge, haroo, haroo
I saw a most peculiar dodge, haroo, haroo
Bob Hawke came by and I swear its true
He went in red and he came out blue
And the Liberals* didn’t know what to do
Oh, Bobby, I hardly knew you !

Where are the eyes that flashed with fire, haroo, haroo
Where’s the fear you once inspired, haroo, haroo
The bosses love you like a son,
You’ve got the greenies on the run
Flogging yellowcake by the ton
Oh, Bobby, I hardly knew you !

Where’s the workers leader now, haroo, haroo
Consensus is the sacred cow, haroo, haroo
Our wages cut and hours froze
Except for the doctors and such as those
I think that something’s on the nose
Oh, Bobby, I hardly knew you !

Where’s the voice that roared so loud, haroo, haroo
Wheres the left-wing stand so proud, haroo, haroo
You smile so sweet and you talk so glib
You duck and dodge and you fudge and fib
And you sound just like a bloody Lib
Oh, Bobby, I hardly knew you !

*For largely forgotten historical reasons, the main Australian conservative party calls itself “Liberal”

Last summer, I had written on this lack of Global Science Equity. It is problematic for at least two reasons. The first is moral: some of the global inequities are so stark that they stand in blatant contrast to the meritocratic rhetoric still widely used within academia. When being situated in favorable circumstances gets framed as “talent” or “excellence,” and being from a disadvantaged country as “lacking quality,” this is an unjust distortion of the facts, which leads to misguided distributions of respect and recognition across academics worldwide.* The second is epistemic: academic research works best if diverse perspectives and approaches are taken into account, not if there are steep status hierarchies and historically grown centres of gravity that determine what research gets done and under which paradigms. 

Of course, knowing that some things are unjust is not the same as knowing what would be ideally just – a point that Amartya Sen has famously made, arguing that we can move away from injustice even though we may not have a blueprint of a perfectly just world. Some inequalities in the situation of researchers across the globe are probably unavoidable, given the manifold differences between countries (if only something like being in the “wrong” time zone, which makes participation in online events difficult). Hence, the term “Global Science Equity” (instead of “Global Science Justice”) is meant as a way of capturing the imperative of reducing the most massive imbalances and unfair disadvantages and moving in the right direction. 

These are some of the considerations that led us – Amal Amin, Flavia Maximo, Darlene Demandante, and me – in 2025 to start a survey among researchers about their working conditions and experiences. We had hoped to complement some of the existing research on related topics, for example the reports by the Global Young Academy on the state of young scholars in different parts of the world (on Africa here; on Latin America and the Caribbean here), or various reports about the experiences of women in science (e.g. here) and in science organizations (e.g. recently here on national academies). 

Methodology

We had hoped to reach sufficient numbers of participants to do sophisticated statistical analyses about, say, how much travel money for international conferences doctoral students in Latin America vs. Sub-Saharan Africa get. Alas, the numbers of responses were not large enough for that level of detail, despite our efforts to circulate the survey on social media and in various science organizations (e.g. Women in Science Without Borders, Societies for Women in Philosophy, Global Young Academy, Rede Brasileira de Mulheres Cientistas). We were probably too ambitious, wanting to cover a broad variety of issues and leaving many open-ended questions in order to get a good grasp of the different social experiences. 

Nonetheless, we got 146 answers, enough for some statistics – and certainly for some qualitative analysis. We are extremely grateful to everyone who took the time to share their experiences. We here present some of the results, in full awareness that the sample is small and we thus cannot claim statistical significance.** We start with some descriptive statistics, and then move on to the more qualitative parts of the survey. Originally, the survey was in English; on request from colleagues in Brazil, Flavia produced a Brazilian translation as well. 

64 participants were from OECD countries and 82 from non-OECD countries. Female academics were 115 of the respondents, 29 were male and 2 identify with another gender; this probably reflects our dissemination efforts in several organizations for women researchers. Regarding race/ethnicity, 49 identify themselves as White; 26 as Black; 21 as Asian; 11 as from Middle East and North Africa; 10 as Latinx/Hispanic and 5 as multiracial; 17 persons did not declare their race/ethnicity. 

Some quantitative data

The data show striking asymmetry between OECD and non-OECD respondents regarding geographic mobility. While OECD-based researchers are almost evenly split between those who remained in their country of origin (31) and those who did not (32), non-OECD respondents show a strong tendency toward working in their country of origin (75 out of 82). This pattern – if representative – suggests that geographic mobility in academic careers might operate differently across geopolitical contexts. In OECD systems, international mobility is both structurally incentivized and often institutionally required for career advancement. In non-OECD contexts, by contrast, the concentration of researchers working in their countries of origin may reflect constrained mobility for economic reasons.

This economic interpretation suggests itself because in our data, mobility resources were sharply unequal. Among parsable answers to our question about annual travel funding, non-OECD respondents cluster at $0, while OECD respondents cluster around $2,000, reaching up to $6,000. 44% of Non-OECD participants reported having no funding at all for traveling. This is an inequality with direct implications for participation in international networks, invitations, and collaboration ecosystems that shape grant and publishing outcomes.

These outcomes are also shaped by language barriers. English dominance is system-wide, with most participants reporting that they are expected to publish in English. But compliance burdens differ: overall, Non-OECD respondents are more likely to report needing language editing before submission, which takes time and money – though of course, there are also Non-OECD countries, e.g. India, in which English is the dominant academic language. Non-OECD respondents more frequently face the extra step of language editing, and also show a higher overall rate of personal payments for such language services. Some, however, expressed the hope that with affordable AI language editing options, these unequal burdens may become smaller. 

Across the full sample, 60 respondents (41%) reported career interruptions due to family duties, against 80 who did not; 6 for reasons that they did not want to disclose. The majority career interruptions were with female academics (52) and mostly due to maternity leave (but note that we had a high number of female respondents, as reported above). The OECD subsample shows a near-equal distribution (32 yes, 30 no), while non-OECD respondents report fewer interruptions in relative terms (28 yes, 50 no). 

These figures must be read with caution, because lower reported interruption rates among non-OECD respondents do not necessarily indicate more favorable conditions. They may, instead, reflect the absence of institutional policies such as parental leave policies, which means that the data – if representative – risk underrepresenting the actual burden of care (and note that we were not able to control for rates of parenthood among researchers at all, another potentially confounding factor). Yet another factor might be different cultural understandings of parenthood (and in particular motherhood) and the social acceptability and affordability of outsourcing care work. More research is needed to illuminate these differences. 

That 60 out of 146 respondents (41%) reported needing supplementary employment to sustain themselves financially represents a significant indicator of structural precarity within academia. The disproportion between OECD (23 yes) and non-OECD (37 yes) contexts is notable, though not as sharp as might be expected. This means that precarity, while more pronounced outside OECD countries, is by no means absent within them, especially in earlier career stages. These findings complicate the assumption that academic labor would always mean stable professional employment (maybe especially for women). Labour precarity appears across different career levels, but especially among doctoral students, independent scholars, and researchers without permanent contracts. 

Another datapoint may be related to the need to earn an additional income. In our responses, OECD affiliation correlates with earlier academic timing in this dataset: the clearest marker is age at PhD completion (median 30 in OECD countries vs. 34 in Non-OECD countries ), coupled with much younger OECD doctoral/postdoctoral ages. This points to different structurings of academic pathways, with people from non-OECD countries taking longer to get academic degrees and academic positions, maybe because of the need to also pursue other endeavors to maintain oneself, in academic systems with less structural funding for young researchers. 

Some qualitative data

On many other issues, we asked qualitative questions. Let us emphasize once more that we cannot claim statistical representativeness here (nor, obviously, verify the claims made by participants). 

Concerning experiences of discrimination, there were many entries in which women or people of color reported being a minority in their field, which made them feel not at home at academic events, but there were also reports of direct discrimination by academic managers, and of sexual harassment of the form that one can, sadly, call “classic.” One participant claimed to experience discrimination as a man because women were given preference in his field; while we cannot judge this specific case, it raises the problem of how to morally and practically deal with the disappointment of men in previously male-dominated fields that are being opened up to women (or along other lines), and about how to win them as allies in the fight against discrimination. One person pointed out that when “voices from the South” are invited, those might exclusively be those of Indigenous peoples and local communities (which are undeniably also of great importance), not those of scholars from these countries. 

When it comes to journals, many respondents focused on the theme of substance over formalities. For example, papers should not be rejected (by editors or reviewers) because of small linguistic issues that are difficult to avoid for non-native speakers; instead, there would, ideally, be help with linguistic issues at the stage of acceptance. 

Many respondents also reacted to the question about “token representation”: researchers from disadvantaged groups being included because this makes projects look better, without being taken fully seriously. At least 30 provided answers that directly reported such experiences. Some expressed great anger about it, others saw it as an unavoidable consequence of affirmative action programs and were therefore more ambivalent about it. 

Overall, a key insight from these qualitative data is that inequity in science is multidimensional, runs across different dimensions, and sometimes takes unexpected forms. For example, when it comes to languages, researchers from English-speaking non-OECD countries may experience fewer problems than those from non-English-speaking OECD countries. There are invisible obstacles such as chronic illnesses which lead to very different forms of exclusion, than, say, being visibly radicalized. For some scholars, time zones are a great challenge when it comes to international academic events or digital calls, for others, different academic calendars, for some, both.

To give some concrete examples: Young scholars at conferences on other continents may suddenly find themselves in unsafe situations because their phones do not work there and they cannot afford to pay for phone data, and they get lost on the way back from the conference dinner because no printed maps were provided. A form of exclusion that is probably relatively new is that international scholars from certain countries who work in the US cannot travel outside the country because they fear that they might not be allowed back in. 

Let us also note that several participants pointed out that we should have paid more attention to class as a category of inequity, e.g. when researchers come from very high class-positions in non-OECDs countries compared to people from disadvantaged class backgrounds in OECD countries – a point very well taken. 

Towards global science equity

One respondent from the Global North wrote: “I would like […] to hear voices from the Global South telling rich universities from the Global North what we can do that will be useful to and welcomed by them. I don’t know whether the voices are speaking and I’m not hearing them, but I think a lot of Global North academics would be enthusiastic about being involved with initiatives that help to equalise things, but nobody has any idea what to do – and they don’t want to make suggestions that might come across as (or indeed unwittingly be) patronising or racist”  

By combining the responses to the open-ended questions in our survey regarding best practices in international projects, cooperations, or scientific associations, we can provide some answers to this question. 

Diversity as a default aspect of science

Whether in terms of gender, race/ethnicity, class, age, nationality, language, or models of scientific knowledge, diversity was seen by many respondents as a key element for a global science equity. Inclusiveness along all these dimensions should not be something one has to argue for and justify, but be accepted as a mandatory dimension of academic work, whether it is in organizing conferences, running research teams, or reviewing for and editing journals. Participants highlighted the need for more diverse collaborations, respecting local realities, with knowledge transfer between different countries.

Including early-career academic researchers was repeatedly suggested as a way to reduce power imbalances: offering mentorship, funding and training opportunities, and thinking about capacity building as a core goal.  Also, providing support for childcare was often raised, as well as sensitivity to the needs of people with special medical needs or disabilities.

Simple suggestions that can be easily adopted into daily academic life were mentioned, such as more flexibility when it comes to the use of English; providing translation and language editing support or even allow submission in other languages, with the possibility of a later translation; awareness of the academic calendar in the Global South when scheduling conferences or meetings; moving meeting hours around to make it easier for participants in different time zones.

Quite some participants who had either little travel funds, or care responsibilities, or both, pointed out the advantages of online conferences and regretted the fact that after the end of the Covid-Pandemic, far fewer opportunities for online participation in international academic events remained intact. This raises the question of how in-person conferences might do more to keep open channels for those who cannot easily attend, whether as part of conferences or in the form of, say, digital reading groups or seminar series.  

Geopolitical redistribution of funding 

The unequal distribution of research, publication, and conference participation funds is one of the driving factors of the lack of Global Science Equity. As a solution, respondents suggested specific funds for including researchers from poorer countries in international events; hybrid options in conferences for participants for whom international travel is difficult; conference or membership fees that are differentiated according to GDP of the country of residence; or research funding opportunities where emerging countries compete with each other, not with better-resourced countries from the Global North. Transparent funding structures, with clear guidelines on fund allocation, disbursement, and reimbursement to avoid inequities or delays were also pointed out as best practices.

In addition to the lack of visibility for researchers from the Global South, who cannot obtain funding for publications, conferences, or projects, the concentration of resources in countries of the Global North has been experienced by some respondents as a form of control over scientific knowledge. One participant wrote that “collaborations should be equal, not the one who brings the money calls the shots. They can have the money as bait but they cannot do the research without the local partner, especially in the Global South.” Another respondent pointed out that countries of the Global South often continue to be treated as case studies for research from countries of the Global North, without being granted a leading role in theoretical production.

Horizontal academic relationships

Many respondents called for fair and transparent procedures in all aspects of scientific knowledge production. Some expressed the hope that it would be possible to achieve more equity when younger researchers get more of a say. As one participant wrote: “I think getting younger generations more involved is key to changes – and part of the struggles as scientific associations are often dominated by older academics with rather stubborn views”.

The generational difference in positions of power (often intersecting with a lack of female representation) has often been identified as problematic. Therefore, a broader distribution of decision-making power is essential for working towards more equity in science, with strategies that allow all researchers, and not only those with insider knowledge or a powerful mentor at their side, to participate equally. Such strategies include simplifying bureaucratic processes for accessing resources; standardizing reporting formats; using open science practices, sharing data, protocols, and outcomes for  the benefit of all partners, and eliminating the “friend-factor” in scientific relationships. An implicit theme in many answers was the endogamy of access to funds, networks, and visibility among researchers from the same institutions and the same countries, typically higher GDP and situated in the Global North. As long as the right to define what counts as “good science” remains exclusively in these circles, without attention to different local circumstances and different epistemic opportunities, the inequities of the global science landscape will be difficult to overcome. 

One final thought: A structural problem that might arise from the multiplicity of discriminatory experiences that we have described is that many academics may feel disadvantaged one way or another. While true in some sense, this may make us overlook the really drastic differences on a global level that matter far more, morally speaking. It reinforces an attention economy that is all too often dominated by old path dependencies (what were the “leading” centers in a certain field half a century ago?). The practical steps described above may help, in concrete ways, to overcome these unjust and epistemically harmful hierarchies, and to move towards more Global Science Equity.

This post has been written by Flavia Souza Maximo and Lisa Herzog. We would like to thank Amal Amin and Darlene Demandante for their support in the phase of setting up and distributing the survey, and Paulo Savaget for his help in analysing the data and commenting on a draft version. AI was used for summarizing some of the data, with manual doublechecking. All remaining errors are ore own. 

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 * If you’re skeptical of this claim, have a look at the distribution of Nobel prizes and other international science prices – looking at those, one might think that vast parts of the world do not even have academic research… 

 ** Also, it may be the case that our survey has been filled in mostly by people who feel that they have been treated inequitably in some way or another by the academic system. We had been open about the framing, which is preferable in terms of research ethics, but this might have biased the sample by not appealing to those think that there are no issues with equity in the scientific system.