I ran across two interesting science policy articles this week. (The second of particular interest as a daughter is applying to PhD programs.) I think both are firewalled, so I'll include short summaries.
At STAT, Anil Oza provides a long-format, deep-dive article, on the vocabularies of "banned words" at NIH and the need to change grant titles and abstracts to avoid "banned words" which trigger a fatal withdrawal of funding. Find it here:
https://www.statnews.com/2025/10/29/nih-banned-words-analysis-grant-title-changes/
At CHRONICLE of Higher Education, an article has the surprising or paradoxical title, "There has never been a better time to start a PhD." Find it here:
https://www.chronicle.com/article/there-has-never-been-a-better-time-to-start-a-ph-d
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AI CORNER
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1. STAT: “NIH Grant Titles and the New Politics of Language”
The STAT article offers a deeply reported look at how the politicization of science has reached into the most bureaucratic corners of the NIH — specifically, the grant titles that serve as public shorthand for federally funded research. Under the current administration, hundreds of NIH grantees have been asked to revise their project titles, often within 24 hours, to remove words now deemed politically sensitive — terms such as equity, disparities, diverse, and transgender. This process, though superficially semantic, represents a profound shift in scientific governance. Titles that once foregrounded marginalized populations or social determinants of health are being “sanitized” into vague euphemisms that obscure the work’s social or demographic focus. Researchers interviewed describe an atmosphere of fear and moral exhaustion: they alter their language to preserve funding but at the cost of accuracy and integrity.
The article also captures the ripple effects inside the agency. Program officers now endure a Kafkaesque “guessing game” in which political appointees demand edits without clear criteria, leading to over-censorship and confusion. Health-disparities scientists, long accustomed to framing their work carefully for different audiences, now face a new kind of ideological pressure — one that inverts NIH’s historic commitment to inclusion. The piece closes with portraits of internal resistance: scientists meeting in secret Signal groups, holding weekend “NIH vigils,” and literally mourning “banned words” such as equity and diversity. The cumulative picture is not only about administrative interference but about the corrosion of trust between scientists and their institution — a quietly devastating account of how language policy can become a form of scientific control
2. Chronicle of Higher Education: “There Has Never Been a Better Time to Start a Ph.D.”
The Chronicle essay argues, with contrarian flair, that the upheaval caused by AI and economic volatility makes this an ideal moment to begin doctoral study. The author reframes the Ph.D. not as a narrow path to academia but as training in a universally scarce skill set: how to verify facts, evaluate evidence, and reason under uncertainty.
Amid mass layoffs and automation, these capacities — once taken for granted — may soon define the most valuable human work. The piece also defends the broader civic role of Ph.D.s as “ambassadors for expertise” at a time when expertise itself is under political attack. Rather than retreating from graduate education because academic jobs are scarce, universities should redouble their commitment to producing deep thinkers who can navigate (and explain) the epistemic chaos of the AI era.
