this shit is insidious, widespread, and cleverly deployed.

i work at an R1 and years ago, i remember finding out about an on campus organization that connected young scientists with research institutions in china with incredible offers to study there. free tuition+housing+stipend, all coursework in english with mandarin lessons. and no requirement to stay there when complete. a pure "come learn some shit, you eager dorks" at the time i was finishing my MSci here, but the deal was absolutely incredible and the program selection/participating institution list was enormous. and we're talking for stuff like ecology, the bastard child of US academy that relies entirely on highly competitive, small bean grants, very few assistantships with research results generally ignored and high burnout among professionals. i totally filed it away for an alternative when i finished my MSci if i was unhappy with my professional options.

smashcut to a few years ago, the US comes down hard and insists any institution with this organization on its campus will have all fed funding clawed back. so naturally, it's gone with a CYA style email from the uni president saying, "this has been a great opportunity for our students, but our hands are tied. we can't give back $40 million [or whatever jumbo number]."

the writing has been on the wall for the neoliberal research university: they are starving us out. only research with immediate industry application (i.e. petroleum geology, etc) is getting any love, the rest of us can fuck ourselves. and this move was to staunch the flow of brain drain to the places where people with political power want to support scientific inquiry. 10 years ago i was hearing stories from senior faculty that had visited china and these were all casual libs, but they were blown away by the resources being put into scientific investigation into environmental sciences. when asked, "what research questions do you want answered?" the administrators said, "that is for our scientists to determine."

i cannot even imagine how far beyond the US they will have leapt in the coming decades.