Turning back to higher ed cuts,
he calls it the Friday Night
Massacre of the Verifiable
Truth.
A UW-Madison professor researching
and amplifying accurate claims about
vaccines saw his
$5 million federal grant
terminated a week ago.
The National Science Foundation
grant was axed, quote,
per the presidential action that the
NSF will not support research
with the goal of combating
misinformation, disinformation and
malinformation.
That could be used to infringe on
protected speech rights.
Professor of Journalism and Mass
Communications, Michael Wagner,
is here.
Ahead of this, we should note, PBS
Wisconsin is part of
UW-Madison.
Hi, good to see you.
How surprised were you, shocked
really, that your grant was
terminated?
Well, in the short term, I wasn't
shocked. I mean, we've been under
scrutiny from the federal government
and even the weaponization of
government subcommittee in the House
for the last year and a half.
And so we knew this day was coming.
And so on the one hand, it wasn't
that shocking, although we knew we
didn't know exactly when it was
going to happen, but more broadly to
say that researchers in the United
States who made, you
know, grant proposals and had them
vetted by a series of experts that
were blind to us, so we don't know
who was evaluating us, said this
is a project worth doing and that
could really help people.
And then to have the government say,
we're not so interested in sharing
things that are true, that's
really shocking.
And what's even more shocking is
that it's not just happening to us.
I mean, it's a big deal to us and
our team and the grant we have, but
this is happening all across campus
and all across the country.
So describe your research
now that is on
hold. What were you looking at and
why?
So we were really interested in ways
that we could try and
improve the information environment
without engaging in content
moderation. So one thing that's
really controversial, and there are
experts who study this, is to say if
some things are false, and
especially if they're dangerous,
maybe platforms should be pressured
to take them down.
That's not what we do.
What we say is we want to
identify networks of conversation
online that are sharing information
that might be false.
Then we wanna see are there
independent fact checkers and
independent research studies that
have been done, at least three, that
confirm this thing
that's being shared online isn't
true. If that's the case, then
we wanna create messages that say
here's the stuff that's true,
and then we want to use the
platform's advertising mechanisms
to buy ads and show them
to the people who saw the false
stuff. So put simply,
if people are seeing things that
aren't true, we wanna make a message
about something that is true.
Share it with people so that the
truth can compete with the
falsehood.
We don't want to take any content
down we just want those two things
to compete and then we want to see
does sharing the truth make things
better for people?
So as you said, yours is
not the only sizeable grant
eliminated at UW-Madison.
At least $12.6 million
in direct research funding has
been canceled. What are you hearing
from your colleagues about all of
this?
We organized a teach-in for
our undergraduate students last
week, and in that conversation,
one faculty member from the School
of Human Ecology noted more than
a dozen.
Grants related to social security
studies. So this is not just for
seniors, but for lots of other
folks who get social security
benefits, people with disabilities,
children of people who have died and
don't have parents anymore.
All kinds of folks who, we
need to understand how well are
these benefits helping them?
Is it the right amount?
Are they being distributed in the
right way? All those kinds of
things. All those got immediately
killed.
We've heard from people in the
medical school that in some cases
there are hiring freezes, even at
the VA, so that new staff
can't be hired and new research
assistants can't be hired.
This is especially hard for
undergraduates who say want to go to
med school because you really need
to have experience in a lab to make
your application to med.
School sing and now it's getting
harder to do those kinds of things
on our campuses.
It's happening all over social
sciences, hard sciences, humanities,
everywhere.
Can you begin to kind of understand
the motivation?
There seems to be a coordinated
war on universities
and their mission, right?
Because universities are places
where we have really hard
conversations about complex things.
There are places were the truth
is iterative and we learn more
over time and sometimes things that
we thought were true change in the
face of new evidence.
Sometimes the new evidence turns out
to be wrong and the scientific
process is slow and messy
and controversial.
And sometimes scientists don't
communicate it as clearly as they
ought to.
But I think there's a coordinated
war on folks who
are interested in studying these
kinds of things. And I think it's
worth citizens asking, who
is to gain by stopping
misinformation research in the
United States?
Who is to gained by stopping social
security research in the Unites
States? Whose pockets are getting
lined and whose are getting fleeced?
So having just spoken to Congressman
Tom Tiffany, he says that
people upset about these kinds of
cuts, all they have to do is make
a case, and maybe they can be
restored.
So what's your case?
Our case is that we
have a scientifically vetted process
that actually went through two
phases. The NSF, for our grant,
had a phase one that was a much
smaller award, still a lot of money,
$750,000, which is a lot money,
especially in social sciences.
And it gave us a year to demonstrate
a proof of concept that we can do
this. We did that,
we submitted our $5 million grant,
and the scientists who evaluated
it said, yes, we think you can do
it. We've also been making a ton
of progress that we regularly share
with the NSF every year.
And so we turn in our yearly reports
about here are the new things we've
learned, here's how we're changing
what we're doing.
And so, we're simply trying to learn
things that are true and share them.
And I don't think it's in the
interest of the United States to
stop doing that.
Professor Mike Wagner.
Thanks very much.
I mean, it's because people
are claiming that
the Trump administration will cut
Social Security.
No, I think it's that
if you want to kill a university,
take away their research fund.
Like 30% of our budget is federal.
Right, but social
security, like I almost get
misinformation about vaccines.
But so, what I
understand happened is
many agencies, DOD,
Social Security Administration said
we're no longer going to fund social
science research.
Social science is bad, we shouldn't
fund it, and so they're just killing
it all.
Cross the board.
It's efficient. It saves money.
Yeah. Easier to just, then,
consider it. Yeah, than to parse.
Because then they open themselves up
to, well, why did they hurt
this group of disabled kids but not
that group of, you know, that's a
harder thing for them to try to do.
Just to say, we just don't want it
done because we don't trust it.
Who is that professor I'd be
interested in?
Michael Collins.
J. Michael Collins, okay, not the
Michael Collins who flew Apollo 11,
but the economist Michael
That's interesting. My husband is
a...
He was on Wisconsin Today a couple
weeks, three weeks ago, maybe about
that.
Marissa says I've interviewed him.
I just can't remember.
Oh, Nathan did.
Anyway, my husband is a social
security administrative law judge,
so he might be interested
in colleges. Oh, yeah.
Research.
Yeah.
And Miriam Shaleff was the
medical one who's like, I can't
hire people to work with me at the
VA on our projects because we have a
hiring freeze because of these
things. Yeah, yeah.
It's keep coming.
Well, thank you. Yeah, you bet.
Thanks for sharing story.
Yeah. Thanks.
Have a good weekend.