Numbers of science and engineering graduates from European and Asian universities are soaring while new degrees in the United States have stagnated...
In 2000... 17 percent of university bachelor degrees in the U.S. were in science and engineering compared with a world average of 27 percent and 52 percent in China.
The picture among doctorates -- key to advanced scientific research -- was more striking. In 2001, universities in the European Union granted 40 percent more science and engineering doctorates than the United States, with that figure expected to reach nearly 100 percent by about 2010...
The article frames these developments as signals of a terrifying loss of "American dominance," but for me they signal a considerably more terrifying withdrawal of American participation in the growing global conversation of scientific research and invention. To lose "dominance" while gaining peers and global collaborators in the projects of social and scientific progress would palpably be a benefit for us all, even if it might occasionally impose short-term and superficial disciplines on those aspects of the so-called "American Way of Life" that brainlessly demand a right to two SUVs in every garage and two cows on every plate. But to see America turning its back on the fragile accomplishments and values of shared democracy and shared scholarship is the truly terrifying spectacle. It is no mistake that the religious and market fundamentalists of the Bush Administration are so relentlessly attacking both science and democracy at once. Cultures of criticism and collaboration go hand in hand, and this is what authoritarian conservatives cannot stand.
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