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POLITICS
Conservative academics face a growing tension between their political views and the liberal atmosphere on many US campuses.
When physicist Michael Stopa decided to run for the Massachusetts state senate in 2010, he didn't expect much encouragement from his "overwhelmingly liberal" colleagues at Harvard University in Cambridge. He was acutely aware of his minority status as a conservative Republican on campus, and avoided talk of politics in his role as a staff scientist in a nanotechnology lab. Then the university newspaper wrote about Stopa's campaign - and closeted Republicans around campus began to reveal themselves with quiet messages of support.
"A lot of people snuck over and said, 'Hey, I hear you're a Tea Party guy. I am too"' says Stopa, who lost the election and eventually left academia, but has stayed active in Republican politics. He rejects the idea that his party is anti-science, arguing that "you can find rubes and lunatics on either side" of the US political divide.
But that idea has become a hard sell on many US university campuses, putting Republican researchers in an uncomfortable position, despite their party's history of strong support for science. Between 1976 and 2013, one study found, US government research and development spending was highest under Republican presidents (S. Kushi J. Sci. Pol. Gov. 7, 2015). Yet during that period, party leaders rejected mainstream climate science, opposed environmental protections and sought to ease regulation of medicines.
Republicans' anti-science reputation seems to have deepened under President Donald Trump, who has embraced 'alternative facts' and proposed steep spending cuts for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Environmental...