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Has Academia and Media been successful of convincing youth there is no hope?

Climate change, divisive politics, endemic racism, anti-business, gender uncertainty, no privacy. Way to demoralize a generation!
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I work in academia teaching technology and supporting research. The students I work with have a lot of hope and enthusiasm. As research assistants they work on things like polymers for biomedical applications, novel solar cell materials to make solar energy cheap AF, battery technologies, novel polymers for water filtration, super hard and wear resistant composites inspired by bone and teeth. Some of them wind up their own start-ups even as students, or shortly there-after.

I wish people would stop characterizing academia in this politicized fashion. I've yet to see politics, race, economics, gender ever come up in the labs. It's just not a thing. I think largely because we're an international group of people, from a wide array of backgrounds. All we want to do is research and invent things.
SW-User
@CopperCicada It probably doesn't come up much because you work in technology/science. All the things he mentioned are problems in social sciences...especially endemic racism and divisive politics.
@SW-User Yea, but the criticism is still of "academics". Here "academia" includes all those social sciences, but it also includes pure and applied math, computer science, all the natural and physical sciences, nursing, medicine, and all the disciplines of engineering.

Edit: Also "academia" here includes business, hospitality, communications.

Really the vast majority of the whole place isn't driven by social or political interests beyond adequate funding for instruction and research.
SW-User
@CopperCicada
includes pure and applied math, computer science, all the natural and physical sciences, nursing, medicine, and all the disciplines of engineering.

That's because those subjects largely deal with logic and facts. I think that modern progressivism has infiltrated most academic fields to some extent though.
@SW-User
I think that modern progressivism has infiltrated most academic fields to some extent though.

This is what I keep hearing.

I'm curious in what ways progressivism might impact what we do in the lab?
SW-User
@CopperCicada I don't think it would impact anything in a lab per se, but it may influence what students get accepted for that degree by that university. In the past few decades there has been an interest in getting more females to study science subjects. Many workplaces now have a 50/50 ratio approach (or an actual requirement for it) and this is reflected in many fields of study.