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 asked, 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, Mike.
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.
We knew this day was coming.
And so on the one hand, it wasn't that shocking,
although 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.
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 or 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 want to 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 want to create messages that say,
here's the stuff that's true and then we want to use the platforms
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 want to make a message about something that is true and 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 sizable 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 teaching 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 need, 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 campus.
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,
because universities are places where we have really hard conversations about complex things.
There are places where 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 gain by stopping social security research in the United States?
Who's pockets are getting lined and who's 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 of 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 said, yes, we think you can do this.
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.
Thank you.
Security.
I mean, it's because people are claiming that the Trump administration will cut social security.
It's just...
No, I think it's that if you want to kill a university,
take away their research from like 30% of our budget is federal.
Right, but social security.
Like, I almost get misinformation on vaccines.
But so what I understand happened is many agencies, DOD, social security,
or 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.
Across the board.
Yeah.
It's efficient, it saves money.
Yeah.
Easier to just then consider it.
Because then they open themselves up to,
why do they hurt this group of disabled kids, but not that group of people?
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?
Michael Collins, Jay Michael Collins.
Okay.
Not Michael Collins who flew Apollo 11, but the economist Michael Collins.
It's interesting.
My husband is a...
Who's on Wisconsin today, a couple weeks, three weeks ago?
Okay.
Marissa says I've interviewed him.
Yeah, probably.
Yeah.
Oh, Nathan did.
Anyway, my husband is a Social Security Administrative Law Judge.
No.
He might be interested in...
Oh, yeah.
Collins' research.
Yep.
And Miriam Shelf was the medical...
What is like, I can't hire people to work with me at the VA on our projects.
Because we have a hiring freeze.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's keep coming.
Well, thank you.
Yeah, you bet.
Thanks for sharing your story.
Yeah.
Thanks.
Have a good weekend.
Hey, you too.
Thank you.
Thank you.
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