Legislation that would squeeze out social science and geoscience spending from their traditional share of the National Science Foundation budget will be heard by the Senate Appropriations Committee on Thursday.

Leading academics and influential authors worldwide have signaled their concern by signing a statement backing academic freedom as a special issue of ‘Index on Censorship’ examines the threats facing universities.

All the arguments for a critique of the new authoritarian, hierarchical, business-minded corporate universities are in place, says Daniel Nehring. The ways to insert these arguments into public life still need to be found.

”Here’s the message I want to give you today: We’re all very close to research. When we gather information to understand this world that we’re in, we are gathering both numbers and statistics, and the stories of people. The research methods I do put those two together.”

Were a psychologist to win federal funding for an experiment that involved offering 3-year-olds marshmallows, it’s likely that grant would eventually be cited on the floor of the House of Representatives as yet another example of silly and wasteful spending on social science.

New research in ‘Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences’ finds that being left out and ignored causes more pain and emotional damage than any overt forms of abuse.