I found a job advertisement yesterday that absolutely floored me.

50 new faculty positions in physics being created at Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST) in mainland China.

I was absolutely wordless. That news comes in the same week when we have been threatened with about 1/3 of our entire work force (yes, that means many of the scientists) being fired from Argonne. That’s about 1000 jobs we’re going to lose at ANL alone according to HR-1. Granted that’s a worst case scenario, but we’re not expecting to get through the budget debacle unscathed. At the same time, the number of available open faculty positions in physics in the United States has crashed. In October things were looking very good, with many positions being advertised. At this point lots of those positions have been canceled. Few places are going to be hiring new people when we’re threatened with losing so much funding.

And yet, things look pretty good in other parts of the world. 50 new positions this year (with many more rumored next year) at a single university. As an aside, HUST is already one of the top ranked universities in China, and it’s not the only organization undergoing massive increases in funding, people, and infrastructure.

Obama seems to be on board at least with increased science and education funding. That is probably part of the reason the GoP is so adamant to reduce our funding in the US. Incidentally, I believe we’re being reduced to funding levels as seen in 2008.

One option instead of just outright firing 1/3 of our staff would be to furlough the entire lab for a couple of months. That’s still a disaster as many of us wouldn’t be able to take a two month hit with no employment. Either way we’re going to be losing a lot of people. And it would seem pretty obvious where many of us will end up going.

There is an awesome document called The America COMPETES Act (which actually was passed back in 2007). It has no teeth and does not seem “binding” in any sense. But it’s a great read for those interested in seeing what some of the greatest minds in science and education think we need to be doing to ensure the future stability of our economy, provide for our security, and re-establish America as the premier country for science, innovation, and industry. It’s interesting because some countries have been following this exact plan. Instead of outlining what would happen here, the plan instead outlined what other countries could do to get ahead, and how best we could fail.

But perhaps I should be looking at this as an exciting opportunity. It would be great fun to live abroad for a significant period of time. The support and funding would be incredible too.


Zàijiàn !