Fergie's Tech Blog

Stanford Panelists: 'Bush is No Friend of Tech'

Michael Kanellos writes on the C|Net "Future Tech" Blog:

The Bush administration is starving the U.S. tech industry of two crucial ingredients, according to members of a panel of academics and entrepreneurs at Stanford University: foreign students and research grants.

"If you make it difficult for foreign students to come here or work here, you will have a dramatic influence on education in the United States and the quality of industry," said Mark Horowitz, a professor of electrical engineering at the university and the founder of Rambus. "The U.S. is becoming less attractive for graduate students."

Academics often are hostile to politicians, but Stanford has typically not been a hotbed of leftist resentment--former Reagan Secretary of State George Schultz has an office here after all, as does former Defense Secretary William Perry. The engineering faculty is crawling with millionaires who founded companies while climbing up the tenure ladder. Silicon Valley is also a hotbed of limousine libertarianism. In other words, it's the sort of university where you're not going to see massive protests over capital gains cuts or multibillion dollar weapons programs. So hearing such strong statements against a conservative president is slightly novel.

posted by Fergie @ 3/22/2006 10:39:00 AM