I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
John Fleck at the Albuqeurque Journal’s blog noted an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education that says that switching over control of national labs to the Department of Defense could have an adverse effect on the caliber of scientists who could be brought in to the labs for their research.
Some experts who have studied or worked with the labs fear that change could reduce the quality of research. “They’ve already made it much harder for themselves to attract good people,” said Hugh Gusterson, a professor of anthropology and sociology at George Mason University who has spent years studying the culture of scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, talking about the management changes. A further shift, he said, “will just compound the difficulty.”
The story says that the changeover of control to the Department of Defense could be a “death knell for a tradition of academic research.” While Sandia National Labs is more defense-oriented, Los Alamos National Labs (and Lawrence Livermore National Labs in California) have a long history of civilian research and control.
Meanwhile, Lawrence J. Kolb, assistant secretary of defense from 1981 to 1985, agrees that a change would be a bad idea. He said that he didn’t know of any security breaches at the labs and that the Pentagon has its own security problems.
The contrasting argument is that a switchover to Pentagon control would free up the Department of Energy to do more civilian research without worrying about the nuclear weapons research. Nuclear weapons research takes up two-thirds to three-quarters of the Department of Energy budget.
Stephen I. Schwartz, editor of The Nonproliferation Review, the journal of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, told the Chronicle of Higher Education that a changeover of the labs to military control would “unleash the Department of Energy to do what its name says.”
