Fed Waste Bemoaned For $412K Study 'How to Make Glaciers Feminist'
Monday, 02 Jan 2017 11:29 AM
California Political Review has found what it calls the most wasteful study of all time for 2016, a $412,000 grant from the National Science Foundation for an article "proposing a feminist glaciology framework."
The article appeared in the journal "Progress in Human Geography" and notes that "relationships among gender, science, and glaciers" have been "understudied."
In reviewing what it considers six other top misuses of federal money, such as "Men Have Appropriated Cupcakes From Women" and "Safe Sex Videos are Marginalizing to Queer and Disabled People," California Political Review puts out a plea that "Hopefully President Trump will stop this abuse of the taxpayers by the academic class."
When asked about the controversy over the federal grant given to him for the study on how to make glaciers feminists, the primary author, Prof. Mark Carey of the University of Oregon, defended his research, tellingScience magazine that "Professional research is published in journals for specialists in a given field.
"When removed from that context and described to nonspecialists, the research can be misunderstood and potentially misrepresented," Carey said. "What is surprising about the brouhaha is the high level of misinterpretations, mischaracterization, and misinformation that circulate about research and researchers."
Carey went on to explain that "If one goal of glacier research is to help the people living in places like the Alps and Alaska adapt to shrinking glaciers - and the associated floods, landslides, and seasonal variation in water flows for irrigation and hydroelectricity generation - then it is important to study more than the physical properties of ice. Social scientists like myself work to understand those complex societies, their politics and economies, their cultures, and, yes, their gender relations because patriarchy and sexism marginalize certain segments of the population, just as racism marginalizes indigenous, Latino, and other peoples."
However, Carey’s attempt to explain his study's importance did not stop others from ridiculing it.
Reason.com commented that "Surely a satirist who set out to write a deliberate parody of left-wing papers using the jargon of the earnest social justice warrior could not have done a better job than a paper on 'just and equitable human-ice interactions.'"
Gawker said the claim that more than $400,000 was spent on this study is misleading, as the grant seems to have funded Carey's entire body of research on glaciers, which includes numerous other academic articles.
Related Stories:
© 2017 Newsmax. All rights reserved.
Click Here to comment on this article
Posts
