Physicist George "Jay" Keyworth was not invited to join a panel at the National Academy of Sciences despite having a set of qualifications very few others - among them, just John Holdren, Frank Press, John Gibbons and Neal Lane - have.
What did he do wrong? Perhaps being Republican, writes Jeffrey Mervis at Science. Despite somewhat silly claims of 'self-selection bias', basically that Republicans have chosen to not be in academia despite it being a pretty good job with high pay, events like this are more 'stereotype threat'. Any young conservative scientist who sees what happened here also sees the writing on the wall career-wise, if he chooses to freely advocate his political beliefs the way his peers, armed with a political supermajority, can.
NAS President Ralph Cicerone said it was not politics at all, just that "We didn't want to go back that far" - meaning to the Reagan presidency. But Frank Press worked for Carter, even before Reagan. "Well, he was in town."
Oh.
Those who held the job for George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush are dead, so Cicerone really only had to dodge one bullet in rationalizing how he hand-picked his panel. How did he do? Not well. He would have had an easier time inviting Keyworth and insisting he drink from a separate water fountain than pretending his actual reasons for not inviting him were legitimate. There used to be at least a pretense of denying there was bias but there doesn't seem much need for it now. With Republicans now forced out early, to where only 10% of them are in science faculty and far fewer in the humanities and social science fields, there isn't enough of a minority to even complain about being a minority.
What would have been a perfectly fine excuse, at least to me; if Cicerone had said he thought Keyworth was an asshole and that if he ever got a chance to snub him publicly he had vowed he would take it - because political bias and personal hatred are the only two scenarios here.
Oddly, Keyworth believes his exclusion from the cool NAS clique is because he advocated basic research - what every scientist today says is more important than applied research. But scientists then wanted giant, multidisciplinary research, he contends. Yet he still pushed for the Supeconducting SuperCollider despite his preference for basic research - it was Democrats who killed that, along with the SETI program, in 1993, not anti-science Republicans.
Reagan was certainly a fan of science. He gave the greatest presidential endorsement of basic research and government science funding ever and Keyworth had a lot to do with that. Why is he not qualified to be on a panel with Obama science czar John Holdren, the Doomsday prophet who laid out a 1970s plan for forced sterilization and a new world order to control the population explosion and prevent mass starvation that he just knew was coming, along with an Ice Age?
The answer to that is a mystery of science. One that apparently only Democrats are qualified to figure out.
