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grupaok:

Stop whining and welcome UC’s new Iron Lady.

To all my friends who think Napolitano is a poor choice for czarina of the UC system: get a life (preferably outside these borders). For years you’ve smugly believed that nuclear weapons (let’s close our eyes) alone would pay our salaries. That’s so old school. In case you haven’t read the paper, the UC-managed Lawrence Livermore National Ignition Facility has already spent $2 billion dollars simulating H-bomb explosions and updating the US nuclear arsenal. It’s future budget is uncertain. Did you really think that we could grow our future out of a hydrogen fusion monoculture? Of course not. If we want to keep our bear golden and our tenured salaries in six figures, we need to think about our nation’s true needs.

Thank god, the visionaries at UCSD have made their Jacobs School of Engineering the single most important hub of surveillance and intelligence technology in the country. Down here in the Torrey Pines, UC engineers and scientists have spun-off dozens of new defense intelligence spinoffs, leveraged the growth of SAI and General Atomics, and justified the foresight of locating the Border Patrol’s research division in San Diego. Diversity, this is the way to go: Dr. Strangelove in the north, Orwell and Big Brother in the South.

Now it’s time for the rest of us to step to the bat. UCR, I realize, doesn’t have an equal endowment of Nobel laureates and military contractors, but if we were truly committed to the new Master Plan for Higher Education and Homeland Security, I’m sure we could find our own niche. No campus, for example, is doing cutting-edge work on execution technology or pre-school incarceration: areas where the Inland Empire with all of its prisons and doomed kindergartners surely has a comparative advantage. In any event, stop bitching and start writing grant proposals to the NSA and CIA. At last we have the leadership we deserve.

— UCR Professor Mike Davis on the appointment of Janet Napolitano, former head of Homeland Security, to the presidency of California’s university system. [via @reclaimuc; image from spectacular defeat]