Uzique wrote:
well then what's your point? all disciplines have esoteric and far out stuff that gives no immediate payback - right. the idea is that research and academia progresses laterally, in a protean mass, in all directions, with no specific logic. academia and intellectual research is not a logical process of ever-advancing progress. you're asking the wrong things of it. a far-out science PhD in high-level astrophysics today which is by all means 'useless' may shed some light or lead the way to a technological breakthrough in 200 years. science makes leaps and bounds like this all the time. similarly the research done in arts/humanities may shape our view of the past or our understanding of the present in multiplicand indefinable ways in the future. you just cannot say. and yes, funding bodies do have arbitrary and rather difficult means of distinguishing between "what benefits the collective and what doesn't". remember, over here 95% of funding applications get turned down because they do not supposedly satisfy this tricky and elusive requirement.
although, of course, the implication is that everybody in every subject that has received funding and is doing high-level research has had it deemed 'worthy' by the govt. or the people with the money to hand out. which is what i am fully behind, principally: all subjects being deserving of funding, even in tough times. jay and dilbert and co. are effectively trying to say that some subjects are no longer worthy of funding, and/or that the funding body is wrong to grant research money to history or english researchers. this i fundamentally disagree with.
It's that, ultimately, were budget constraints to demand it, I can accept the closing of funding for certain research while retaining that of others. I do rank them in terms of importance. Would I accept the cutting of funding for an entire field of study? Absolutely not. I can agree principally that every subject is deserving of funding, given that its existence is motivated and its benefits evident - in this, some have more than others. Thus, some are deserving of more funding than others.
