by pdfernhout | 2025-04-25 00:34:11+00:00
To support your point, here is a 1975 book: "Resignation in protest : political and ethical choices between loyalty to team and loyalty to conscience in American public life" by Edward Weisband and Thomas M. Franck https://archive.org/details/resignationinpro00weis

From an Amazon review comment: "This book offers an insightful analysis into the history and norms involved in the tradition of resignation in the U.S. and the U.K. Why do the British tend to resign loudly in protest and Americans resign “to spend more time with family” while praising their president? How do these norms benefit and harm their respective systems? The book offered hints at the determinants of these norms. Written shortly after Nixon’s resignation, the principles discussed are enduring."

Some interesting results: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=resignation+in+protest

Including: "Federal technology staffers resign rather than help Musk and DOGE" https://apnews.com/article/doge-elon-musk-federal-government... " More than 20 civil service employees resigned Tuesday from billionaire Trump adviser Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, saying they were refusing to use their technical expertise to “dismantle critical public services.”"

Disclaimer: A four year NSF grant which my wife was on and which was recently awarded and getting started was just terminated last Friday. The grant was to promote STEM interest in a specific historically-disadvantaged neighborhood in part by helping people (especially kids) see how things that they did everyday were connected to STEM -- with hopes the idea could then be used nationwide to promote STEM learning. It took about four calendar years of her (unpaid) involvement to get that grant -- including the main organization getting cooperation and commitment by many other people in various local groups.

Tangentially related: "The Big Crunch" by David Goodstein (1994) https://web.archive.org/web/20240327073938/https://www.its.c...

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I believe it is a serious mistake to think of our system of education as a pipeline leading to Ph.D's in science or in anything else. For one thing, if it were a leaky pipeline, and it could be repaired, then as we've already seen, we would soon have a flood of Ph.D's that we wouldn't know what to do with. For another thing, producing Ph.Ds is simply not the purpose of our system of education. Its purpose instead is to produce citizens capable of operating a Jeffersonian democracy, and also if possible, of contributing to their own and to the collective economic well being. To regard anyone who has achieved those purposes as having leaked out of the pipeline is silly. Finally, the picture doesn't work in the sense of a scientific model: it doesn't make the right predictions. We have already seen that, in the absence of external constraints, the size of science grows exponentially. A pipeline, leaky or otherwise, would not have that result. It would only produce scientists in proportion to the flow of entering students.

I would like to propose a different and more illuminating metaphor for American science education. It is more like a mining and sorting operation, designed to cast aside most of the mass of common human debris, but at the same time to discover and rescue diamonds in the rough, that are capable of being cleaned and cut and polished into glittering gems, just like us, the existing scientists. It takes only a little reflection to see how much more this model accounts for than the pipeline does. It accounts for exponential growth, since it takes scientists to identify prospective scientists. It accounts for the very real problem that women and minorities are woefully underrepresented among the scientists, because it is hard for us, white, male scientists to perceive that once they are cleaned and cut and polished, they will look like us. It accounts for the fact that science education is for the most part a dreary business, a burden to student and teacher alike at all levels of American education, until the magic moment when a teacher recognizes a potential peer, at which point it becomes exhilarating and successful. Above all, it resolves the paradox of Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates. It explains why we have the best scientists and the most poorly educated students in the world. It is because our entire system of education is designed to produce precisely that result.

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RIP Dr. David Gooodstein. I enjoyed your writing and your "Mechanical Universe" videos that helped people learn physics in a fun way. Sad to see your Caltech faculty website is no more, but thank goodness for the Internet Archive. Makes me a bit sad I turned down admission at Caltech and my chance to study with you.