I Laugh And Cry At You Too, Friedman

Somehow I question the sincerity of Tom Friedman in his New York Times column today where he writes about “America’s quiet crisis” in “high-end science education,” which is significant to the point where Friedman noted an abundance of foreign-born graduates in the class at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute where he recently participated in the commencement.

This excerpt struck me in particular…

Folks, we can’t keep being stupid about these things. You can’t have a world where foreign-born students dominate your science graduate schools, research labs, journal publications and can now more easily than ever go back to their home countries to start companies – without it eventually impacting our standard of living – especially when we’re all slipping behind in high-speed Internet penetration per capita. America has fallen from fourth in the world in 2001 to 15th today.

I would call that a total indictment of this country’s lack of investment in education and R&D under the now-happily-over days of Repug congressional ownership, though of course Friedman only goes so far as to correctly point out the obvious; that the Iraq war is draining this country via its human cost as well as investment in an utterly failed enterprise and our loss of world prestige (OK, I’m putting words into his mouth a bit here).

But really, how seriously are we to take Friedman anyway as he laments the lack of homegrown science college graduates? Especially when he has been one of globalization’s biggest cheerleaders, even extolling the virtues of Wal-Mart in his book – what’s the point of graduating more Joe and Jane Smiths when their jobs are going to end up in Bangalore or Beijing?

I’ll tell you what, Friedman; put the formidable resources of your paper to work and find out what happened to the Defending American Jobs Act proposed in the U.S. House by former Rep. Bernie Sanders and Pete Stark of California in 2004 (noted here). Do that (and also contact your elected representatives to spur them into action on it maybe?) and I will believe you when you state that you care about graduating more American-born college graduates in the sciences.

Otherwise, your dire warnings of a problem you’ve helped to perpetuate will fall as flat as the world in the title of your book.