So arguably (I know it’s not as simple as this), the decline of print science reporting doesn’t matter, because it’s all there online & generally better than it was ever done in the newspapers.

Look, I’m being facetious, but the point of this post isn’t about blaming anyone or anything. If you can read that post and think it’s mostly about blaming, more power to you; you’re even more screwed up about assigning blame than I am after twelve years of Catholic education.

I don’t think we can BLAME universities wholly for decreasing science knowledge and interest any more than we can BLAME wholly newspapers (or secondary or primary educators, or Creationists, or Flatearthers or Cub Scouts). The way university required curricula are being affected by the increasing insistence that university students are consumers is a complex issue: I would LOVE to make my introductory class on human evolution a requirement for students, and I like to believe that they’d attend cheerfully and embrace the subject, but the reality is that my university is under pressure for enrollment, and if the little dears didn’t like it, it might affect our viability as an institution. And I also am well aware of the poisoned attitude that requirements often create toward educational offerings. Some of my colleagues must have had very thick skin to ignore the hate-filled, dull-eyed glares of the students who resented every minute of being in required science and math classes (or Latin or English or civics). They were made of sterner stuff than I am.

What I meant to suggest in my post was that I find it sad, understandable and yet utterly impossible to comprehend that all the cool stuff happening in science right now isn’t being splashed across the front pages of papers. Of course, if people aren’t interested, and newspapers cut budgets (and people don’t have university or high school classes in science, and nonstop carpet bombing with news of Paris Hilton and Brangelina have damaged the collective IQ, etc.), I understand that science reporting will decrease. The fact that I loosely understand the causal chain of low readership leading to decreased reporting doesn’t help me to get the most basic fact: why isn’t science news?

Clearly, firings of science writers is not the disease itself, but a symptom of a wider disease. The fact that I see the symptoms, feel the disease, and pray for a cure, however, neither assures that I understand the pathology or can prescribe the right medicine.

Here’s hoping things get better somehow…