This just in from Bloomberg News: The University of Florida’s $70 million supercomputer is going to do big, big, big things. But our Great DeSanitizer’s “anti-China crusade is preventing some highly skilled AI researchers from ever setting foot in the state.“
This in reference to a state law that restricts universities from recruiting students from seven countries “of concern,” including China.
Bloomberg reports that “Foreign Ph.D. students and postdoctoral fellows have long been crucial to academic research in the US. UF says its professors recruited more than 1,000 graduate students every fall from China, Iran, Venezuela and four other countries covered by Florida’s law prior to its passage. This year, it’s closer to zero, faculty leaders say.”
“The day-to-day research work is actually done by grad students, not done by the faculty members,” Jiangeng Xue, a professor of materials science and engineering at UF told Bloomberg. “If we don’t have a pipeline of good, high-quality Ph.D. students, we cannot do all the work that we want to do.”
But, really, that’s a small price to pay for state-imposed academic xenophobia.
FreeGNV 