The memo to Harvard directing them to hire someone approved by the feds and survey staff AND STUDENTS and then implement "Viewpoint Diversity" as it relates to admissions and hiring as directed by the feds was straight up thought police type stuff.
AStonesThrow · 1d ago
Pope St. John Paul II responded to the minority report in 1990:
It’s not “thought police stuff” to condition receipt of taxpayer money on those things. Harvard can think or say whatever it wants, but that doesn’t mean the federal government must fund it!
derbOac · 23h ago
Conditioning government support based on "viewpoint" is about as close as you can get to government constraining freedom of speech.
rayiner · 23h ago
It’s not “constraining freedom of speech.” It’s declining to subsidize speech with grants.
Recall that these are grants issued to specific universities for specific reasons, not generally available services it funds provided to everyone. Why are taxpayers required to allocate his money to organizations that (in the view of elected officials) don’t serve the public interest?
On top of that, it’s well accepted that the government can use the threat of revoking federal funds force universities to regulate speech: https://cei.org/blog/obama-administration-undermines-free-sp.... Under Title VI and Title IX, the government can force schools to regulate speech in ways that the government couldn’t regulate directly among private citizens.
derbOac · 8h ago
Withholding funds based on viewpoint is coercive by definition, otherwise the administration wouldn't be doing it. Because it's the government, it's government constraints on speech.
Title IX moreover is codified law passed by the legislative branch, not an executive order, and pertains to gender/sex nondiscrimination. It's not an executive order about how students are expressing their opinions about international policy pertaining to a foreign entity (note that no US citizens are being prosecuted currently for any of the things the administration is seeking leverage about with noncitizens, which suggests the viewpoints are protected speech).
rayiner · 1h ago
If your theory is that it’s a first amendment violation, then it’s irrelevant whether it’s a law passed by congress or an executive order.
It is well established that the government is allowed to make value judgments in deciding what activities to support with discretionary grants: https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/government-funding-a... (“The absence of an affirmative right for individuals to receive government aid has been central to this doctrine and these cases.”).
Title IX is an example of this. As interpreted today, it covers not only sex discrimination, but also speech, including speech by students, relating to sex and gender that would be protected by the first amendment outside the federal funding context: https://www.kgw.com/article/news/education/university-of-por....
duxup · 22h ago
Monitoring staff and students viewpoints and directing the school to hire, potentially fire, admit the governments prescribed people based on viewpoints has nothing to do with “declining to subsidize speech”.
If you’re a student or even random staff, you’re not likely even asking for a grant, but you are subject to having your viewpoint assessed under the system demanded by the current administration, for no reason other than the federal government demands it.
Presumably based on the letter prospective students would have to have their viewpoints assessed to make sure they have the correct viewpoints.
rayiner · 22h ago
The government is declining to fund with public money what it views as a hotbed of ideology that’s contrary to the public interest to subsidize. The things you mention are remedial measures Harvard could agree to implement if it wants to show the administration that it’s changed its character into something the government does want to subsidize.
Again, this is within precedent. Universities are already required—under threat of loss of federal funds—to have a compliance framework for Title VI and IX that requires, among other things, universities to police campus speech that would be beyond the government’s authority to regulate outside of campus.
jauntywundrkind · 22h ago
Rayiner, your continued love for political axe grinding and merciless screw-everyone-else conservatism is truly a thing of note & wonder on this site, standing above even the regular stand up conservative HN guy memes.
This is just so off the wall insane. "These grants are issued to specific universities for specific reasons," indeed. "Why are taxpayers [...] allocating this money to organizations" such as Harvard? Because this organization is a world leading researcher that does top notch research. Because they are perhaps the top institute in the whole world across numerous realms of science.
That's why they have for example 350 medical research grants. Because they are awesome, a national treasure, along with countless other research institutes. Both for the direct science they do, and for the offshoot enterprises, hands on training, and economic development these incredible unparalleled instituions create, that nothing else that we know of can reproduce.
There's no real question that Harvard deserves these grants, that they are very good at this, that they have some of the best research. That their 243 years of doing this have created a worthwhile institution that does amazing work.
But some people can just cast doubt and say these people don't serve the public interest - like you do, incessantly, with endless messages day in and day out Rayiner - because it's inconvenient for the administration that some of these people actually speak their mind. Most of them just do their research, but there's a couple things here & there the administration with it's pathetic streak of authoritianism cannot suffer to allow exist, and so the whole lot of the institution has be to directly assaulted at it's very core. Made to do exactly what Dear Leader insists or else.
You cite a paper vehemently arguing in favor of bullying, so long as it's not based on race or sex. Fine, ok, maybe people have rights to be awful. What I really don't get is what's the offense here? Where's the beef? Why is CEI and you so offended that Obama would write a letter to some universities that were allowing or promoting homophobia or bullying. It seems beyond compare to look at a sole letter, and compare it to cutting off all federal funding: an absurd victimhood complex, mountains of out of molehills. Did anyone feel any need to seek legal guidance or to go to court over this letter, was any damage done at all?
You cite Title VI of presumably the Civil Rights act, prohibiting discrimination based on race, color, or national origin. You cite Title IX, prohibiting sex-based discrimination. It's worth noting that these are negative liberties to citizens, protect their right to be meddled with for who they are, keep government money from being used in ways that constrain or exclude them. So yes, Congress has passed acts that constrain how federal funds are allocated with regards to what speech is acceptable. In Trumplandia there are two notable differences: first, there's no law here, no acts of Congress: Trump is using countless executive orders and hot air to bully & cause as much pain as he possible can, in whatever manner possible. There's sometimes a flimsy excuse that this is entirely over Harvard being anti-Semitic, but it's impossible to take that seriously, and there's nothing but the typical insane bluster of a self-serving authoritarian sniffing his own insane farts without bothering to explain or make a case for how this massive institution is actually doing any real harm or injury. How banning foreign students is going to help or hinder that cause is further unclear: like everything else, there's no moral or just cause, no attempt to improve, only a desire to inflict massive endless & total damage, not to actually find remedy.
rayiner · 13h ago
I think little-c conservatism is good, and credentialed managerial liberalism—of which Harvard is the beating heart—is bad. In my view, had the founders of modern India/Pakistan (Jinnah and Nehru) been conservatives like Lee Kuan Yew, instead of coming back from Oxbridge with highfalutin ideas about secular humanism and socialism, then my homeland would be a lot more prosperous today and I might still live where my ancestors did.
So I’m willing to do a lot to ensure my adopted homeland doesn’t suffer the same fate. Because in my estimation, the difference between India/Pakistan and the U.S. isn’t smart people, but the political and civic culture of ordinary people. What makes America great is the participatory democracy and deference to the wisdom of the common man that Alexis de Tocqueville admired. Not the modern trend of democracy as masses of mobilized demographic groups providing nudges to the Harvard-educated civil servants that actually run the country.
And viewing Harvard and its impact on the country as a negative is hardly some Trump invention. The quip that you’d rather be governed by the first 2,000 people listed in the Boston phone directory than the entire Harvard faculty is more than half a century old. The only difference is that the new right is willing to actually try and implement their vision of what would be good for the country. They’re willing to use the same legal and political tools—including control over discretionary federal funds—that liberals have long used to reshape society, culture, and civic institutions.
jauntywundrkind · 12h ago
I can recognize some admirable goals here, but holy heck, there's no replacement coming. Tax breaks for the ultra wealthy, destruction of opportunity and social safety net for everyone else, "for my friends anything, for everyone else the law" politics.
Liberals have tried helping everyone, endlessly. Giving chance and opportunity to all. That doesn't seem so unreasonable. They've lead not with restraint and threat (except to say you have to allow other people to be people).
Conservatives are broadly against art and culture and science, perceiving them as liberal in mature and actively working to gut these institutions, with no replacement to be found. "The professors are the enemy" and so are the artist, the scientist, anyone who will not publicly supplicate themselves fully before this administration & it's madcap regex powered book burning scorched earth.
There's nothing like this intolerance, like this assault on not just a couple perceived Harvard elites, but on the tools America has used to bolsters the welfare and development of its people. This assault on speech and free thinking. This purposeful agenda to destroy a culture, to regress the Civil Rights of citizens, to undo a New Deal that finally saw to the common welfare of suffering people and built a nation that believed in its own greatness, to regress what chance reconstruction offered. This is a filthy mad quest to insure only a certain elite favoritism prevails and rules with absolute power, unchecked, with courts entirely stocked by radical extremeists that represent only the tiniest most wealthy and largely white nationalist oriented segment of society. That seems to controls speech and thoughts absolutely. Whatever the qualms with the Harvard elite, I just cannot see how much obvious imperious rulership, with nothing to offer other than destruction, is good. Control of discretionary funds should boost the welfare and liberty of this nation, broadly, not reduce us down and be used to allow meanness and grievance to flourish. I can't imagine at all how you can equate such control for such political and biased vicious ends, such narrowing and winnowing of the mind, with the boring and carrot-first center-left attempts to expand and enrich the world & human potential.
jaybrendansmith · 3h ago
So why repeat here your specific issues with credentialed managerial liberalism? Let's just reverse the meaning of that term: You are in favor of a fascist oligopoly that is lawless, arbitrary, and ignorant. A sadopopulist, elite, chaotic, authoritarian movement bent on the destruction of an egalitarian educational institution. Why ask an expert? The common man knows better! Why get a specialist? Fuck it, duck it! Hold my fucking beer!! You know, next time instead of hiring a devops specialist, I'm gonna go hire a fridge repairman to do my security and infrastructure on AWS. /s
rayiner · 1h ago
I’m in favor of Americanism. That means giving more respect to the college dropout who built a startup than the college professor who never built anything. That means bottom-up, participatory democracy, where the masses decide what direction to go and the experts figure out how to get there. And it means little-c conservatism—contrast the American revolution to the French revolution.
I think Harvard is great. Society needs elite scientists, etc. But they need to stay in their lane.
duxup · 23h ago
They’re demanding Harvard hire someone to police staff and students viewpoints, and then adjust admissions and hiring to achieve the government’s desired ratio of viewpoints.
That’s exactly thought policing.
ecb_penguin · 1d ago
Everyone forgets the pendulum eventually swings back. For years, it was the opposite thought police. You had to have very specific viewpoints about gender and identity, even if it made no sense.
Edit: Flagged for wrongthink!
davidcbc · 1d ago
Don't recall the federal government doing that at all
ecb_penguin · 1d ago
Don't recall saying it was the federal government. Happy for you to show me where I did though!
Edit: It seems as though the federal government has flagged me. Oh, wait.
davidcbc · 23h ago
There's a big difference between private citizens saying things and the federal government punishing speech. Of course, you already know this, you're doing a false equivalency as a transphobic dogwhistle (or whichever bigoted opinion you're upset about having consequences for), which is why you were flagged
ecb_penguin · 13h ago
> There's a big difference between private citizens saying things and the federal government punishing speech
Nobody said there wasn't a difference. Why do you keep making arguments that nobody is saying??
These things do not exist in a vacuum. The federal response is to limit federal funds. Not receiving billions in taxpayer money is not a punishment when you fail to uphold the basic principles for which that money was awarded.
> as a transphobic dogwhistle (or whichever bigoted opinion you're upset about having consequences for),
There it is! Took you two comments. Thought terminating cliches are exactly why Harvard needs to lose these funds.
It's wild how easy it is for you to absolutely lose your mind. This lack of maturity has no place in education or tech.
lurk2 · 19h ago
I vouched for your parent comment earlier but have unvouched as this isn’t the standard of discourse that people expect to find here. Consider reviewing the site guidelines.
When did I say the feds sent a memo previously? Is it easier to argue points that nobody makes?
An organization that receives federal funds is being told they can no longer restrict viewpoints after having done so. What part is confusing you?
crises-luff-6b · 16h ago
Some Harvard students are violating other Harvard students' federally protected civil rights. Imagine if they were on the quad threatening black people, linking arms together to prevent black kids going to class, to prevent black kids going to the library, physically intimidating black kids all across campus not just on the quad, interrupting finals for classes primarily attended by black kids... I think most of America would go "Full Luigi".
But thankfully Luigi can just rot in jail, because we have clear legal mechanisms we can leverage. If the university is violating constitutionally protected civil rights, as Harvard is clearly doing and their former president admitted in sworn congressional testimony, then they should not be receiving ANY public benefit: DOD/NIH/DOE/etc research grants, federal student loan guarantees, any sort of IRS benefit for student loan payments being tax deductible, IRS 501c3 benefits, all employee H1B1s should be revoked, increased scrutiny on any co-related tax entities. What's been done so far is not nearly enough, and there's a lot of fruit on the tree.
Harvard is NOT an institution in the public good. Get off the government teat.
duxup · 15h ago
I don’t understand this kind of “yeah well they’re bad” argument that props up. I don’t buy into your theory but even if I did my objection to the feds actions is just the same.
Are you ok with the government policing people’s views and adjusting employment and admissions as long as you don’t like the school?
Are you going to be ok with it if another party or politician does?
It’s unfortunate but it appears people have no real ideals now, just recriminations that can justify anything.
linguae · 1d ago
From the article: “But universities cannot get around the fact that federal grants, by their nature, selectively fund certain ideas at the expense of others. The government picks intellectual winners and losers among private citizens, which is the exact opposite of intellectual freedom.”
But couldn’t this be said about any source of funding? All funders, public or private, make decisions about the projects and people they choose to fund. This selection process is not an infringement on academic freedom. In fact, restricting who and how patrons choose to fund research is itself an infringement on their freedom to fund what they want. If I want to fund cancer research, how is this an infringement on physicists and mathematicians?
The real problem in academia regarding academic freedom isn’t federal research grants, but the dependence on external funding from any source to help maintain operations, and how this affects tenure decisions. Tenure-track professors should be able to do whatever research they want, but this freedom is tempered by two pressures: (1) publish-or-perish culture, and (2) the pressure to raise money for the university. In practice, this means having to do research that is more likely to get funded and published. Modern research universities are effectively think-tanks with researchers working on what could get published and funded. It’s still possible to do curiosity-driven work under such a setting, but one must still “play the game” to get tenure.
Getting rid of federal research grants won’t solve those problems. In fact, it may make things worse. I’m not confident about industry’s willingness to fund research, given the demise of legendary research labs such as Bell Labs and Xerox PARC and the overwhelming culture these days of only supporting research that has a high chance of getting productized immediately.
The consequence of getting rid of federal research funding is that a lot of universities will end up reverting to the pre-WWII model where there was very little funding to do research at all. This is the norm at many teaching-oriented universities, but research universities today rely heavily on research grants, particularly those from the federal government. Relying entirely on grants from private individuals and organizations won’t solve academic freedom issues if professors there are required to do publishable and fundable work in order to earn tenure, and with less money for research, this may make things worse.
garrettgarcia · 23h ago
> But couldn’t this be said about any source of funding? All funders, public or private, make decisions about the projects and people they choose to fund. This selection process is not an infringement on academic freedom.
The authors of the article are not claiming that this infringes on academic freedom, but intellectual freedom. They explain here:
"Intellectual freedom is the principle that all individuals have the right to think for themselves, to express their convictions on any subject, and to give their support, financial or otherwise, only to the ideas they choose. When government coercively seizes your money and uses it to subsidize some research program or viewpoint for any reason, it is violating your intellectual freedom. This is the injustice inherent in all government research grants. It is this that private universities like Harvard should now name and challenge.
Instead, they fight for “academic freedom,” which is actually the opposite of intellectual freedom. It asserts the right of universities and professors to teach, write and research whatever they see fit — and to do it at the taxpayer’s expense."
MattPalmer1086 · 18h ago
It is certainly intellectually dishonest to claim that the government funding anything you don't like is a violation of your "intellectual freedom". You are still free to think and say anything you like.
Taken to its logical conclusion, it would mean that the government should not fund anything, ever, for any purpose, because someone might disagree with it? Isn't disagreement actually a sign of intellectual freedom?
crises-luff-6b · 16h ago
Why are these researchers allowed to keep their data private for their future benefit? The data generated here should be part of the public domain.
---
How about at the Library of Congress or National Archives? Just create a `nih-GR12345-2025-05-31.torrent` for all the data which would offer lots of benefits:
- small network traffic for LOC/NA to seed
- American-skin-in-the-game to share the publicly funded data
- more eyes on the prize, the "FOSS" case for data
All the more reason to go abroad for school and try to immigrate to the country where you study. Soon there will be no reason to stay here except to lose weight on the poverty diet.
crises-luff-6b · 16h ago
Why do these researchers get to benefit from patents and other intellectual property generated using the public money? The IP generated here should immediately enter the public domain.
bytematic · 2m ago
same for companies that take federal money
throwworhtthrow · 23h ago
For most of the essay, the author pretends to care about Harvard's loss of funding. But at the end they awkwardly transition into their real argument, which is that every tax dollar spent on something they potentially don't 100% agree with is morally wrong.
Colleges' problem is that they weren't taking enough federal funding. If they had achieved TBTF status then Trump wouldn't be harassing them now.
cratermoon · 1d ago
Let's be honest: private sector funding is going to come with as many if not more strings attached that will limit or warp 'true intellectual freedom'. The only way a college could avoid those pressures would be to be completely self-funded and put their endowment money in investments not subject to political whims.
garrettgarcia · 1d ago
The article addresses this:
"Intellectual freedom is the principle that all individuals have the right to think for themselves, to express their convictions on any subject, and to give their support, financial or otherwise, only to the ideas they choose. When government coercively seizes your money and uses it to subsidize some research program or viewpoint for any reason, it is violating your intellectual freedom."
What is unique about the government funding as opposed to private-sector funding is that government funding comes from money coercively seized from people, and private sector funding doesn't.
cratermoon · 23h ago
> coercively seized
I categorically reject that characterization of how government works,
but you do you.
garrettgarcia · 23h ago
Deny reality all you want, it doesn't change the truth. The fact is that taxes are collected under threat of force.
One need not express an opinion on whether there should be more or less taxation to acknowledge this truth. As you said previously, let's be honest.
BrenBarn · 1d ago
This is like saying if Trump says you have to pay for air, then you have to stop breathing to have true freedom.
No. We don't need this, and we also don't need a return to the status quo. What we need is a more equitable system where everyone's freedom is guaranteed and everyone accept that, such that actions like what we see Trump taking here are treated like an old crank on a street corner screaming about the apocalypse: we put him into a padded cell and move on with our lives.
garrettgarcia · 1d ago
> This is like saying if Trump says you have to pay for air, then you have to stop breathing to have true freedom.
Can you explain what you mean? I don't see how this follows from the arguments in the article.
BrenBarn · 23h ago
The article is saying that Trump's actions have illustrated how dependency on federal funds makes colleges vulnerable. The proposed solution is to eliminate that funding. But what I'm saying is that what is better is to remove the loopholes in our system that allow Trump to threaten it.
Rereading the article, it does seem to have a bit more generic right-wing-flavored "government shouldn't do stuff" than stuck with me on the first read, which may be why my logic was a bit unclear. Basically my point is that the government cannot use funding to control universities unless some individuals have discretion over how and whether to award that funding. I'm saying what should be reduced is not funding but discretion.
(I'm open to rethinking the system to make it less discretion-dependent; the article does have some ideas that could be relevant there that I wouldn't dismiss out of hand. But that an issue of how schools get funded, not whether.)
daft_pink · 1d ago
At the end of the day, the executive branch still has widely delegated authority to regulate foreigh student visas.
Trump could easily move towards a work visa style, where the universities would need to prove they can’t get Americans to fill their admissions spots and quickly eliminate virtually all foreign students from highly selective US universities while still allowing your local non-selective university to fill their roles with high paying foreign students.
This would totally align with his ideology and could easily and quickly happen.
Harvard may prevail on some of its challenges to the administration. But the gaping hole in its defense is that Title VI, by design, uses the threat of revoking federal money to regulate behavior in ways that would otherwise raise first amendment concerns. The Supreme Court is never going to rule that universities can invoke the first amendment as a shield against Title VI allegations, because that would gut the civil rights laws. If universities could, for example, engage in race conscious practices to increase diversity while still retaining federal funding, they could also engage in race conscious practices to decrease diversity while retaining federal funding.
The government, as a grant maker, obviously doesn’t have to provide federal funds to say neo-nazis. And if that’s true, it follows that the government can withhold federal funds based on any ideological disagreement. These organizations are of course free to say whatever they want, but the government doesn’t have to fund it!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_corde_Ecclesiae
https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/apost_constit...
Recall that these are grants issued to specific universities for specific reasons, not generally available services it funds provided to everyone. Why are taxpayers required to allocate his money to organizations that (in the view of elected officials) don’t serve the public interest?
On top of that, it’s well accepted that the government can use the threat of revoking federal funds force universities to regulate speech: https://cei.org/blog/obama-administration-undermines-free-sp.... Under Title VI and Title IX, the government can force schools to regulate speech in ways that the government couldn’t regulate directly among private citizens.
Title IX moreover is codified law passed by the legislative branch, not an executive order, and pertains to gender/sex nondiscrimination. It's not an executive order about how students are expressing their opinions about international policy pertaining to a foreign entity (note that no US citizens are being prosecuted currently for any of the things the administration is seeking leverage about with noncitizens, which suggests the viewpoints are protected speech).
It is well established that the government is allowed to make value judgments in deciding what activities to support with discretionary grants: https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/government-funding-a... (“The absence of an affirmative right for individuals to receive government aid has been central to this doctrine and these cases.”).
Title IX is an example of this. As interpreted today, it covers not only sex discrimination, but also speech, including speech by students, relating to sex and gender that would be protected by the first amendment outside the federal funding context: https://www.kgw.com/article/news/education/university-of-por....
If you’re a student or even random staff, you’re not likely even asking for a grant, but you are subject to having your viewpoint assessed under the system demanded by the current administration, for no reason other than the federal government demands it.
Presumably based on the letter prospective students would have to have their viewpoints assessed to make sure they have the correct viewpoints.
Again, this is within precedent. Universities are already required—under threat of loss of federal funds—to have a compliance framework for Title VI and IX that requires, among other things, universities to police campus speech that would be beyond the government’s authority to regulate outside of campus.
This is just so off the wall insane. "These grants are issued to specific universities for specific reasons," indeed. "Why are taxpayers [...] allocating this money to organizations" such as Harvard? Because this organization is a world leading researcher that does top notch research. Because they are perhaps the top institute in the whole world across numerous realms of science.
That's why they have for example 350 medical research grants. Because they are awesome, a national treasure, along with countless other research institutes. Both for the direct science they do, and for the offshoot enterprises, hands on training, and economic development these incredible unparalleled instituions create, that nothing else that we know of can reproduce.
There's no real question that Harvard deserves these grants, that they are very good at this, that they have some of the best research. That their 243 years of doing this have created a worthwhile institution that does amazing work.
But some people can just cast doubt and say these people don't serve the public interest - like you do, incessantly, with endless messages day in and day out Rayiner - because it's inconvenient for the administration that some of these people actually speak their mind. Most of them just do their research, but there's a couple things here & there the administration with it's pathetic streak of authoritianism cannot suffer to allow exist, and so the whole lot of the institution has be to directly assaulted at it's very core. Made to do exactly what Dear Leader insists or else.
You cite a paper vehemently arguing in favor of bullying, so long as it's not based on race or sex. Fine, ok, maybe people have rights to be awful. What I really don't get is what's the offense here? Where's the beef? Why is CEI and you so offended that Obama would write a letter to some universities that were allowing or promoting homophobia or bullying. It seems beyond compare to look at a sole letter, and compare it to cutting off all federal funding: an absurd victimhood complex, mountains of out of molehills. Did anyone feel any need to seek legal guidance or to go to court over this letter, was any damage done at all?
You cite Title VI of presumably the Civil Rights act, prohibiting discrimination based on race, color, or national origin. You cite Title IX, prohibiting sex-based discrimination. It's worth noting that these are negative liberties to citizens, protect their right to be meddled with for who they are, keep government money from being used in ways that constrain or exclude them. So yes, Congress has passed acts that constrain how federal funds are allocated with regards to what speech is acceptable. In Trumplandia there are two notable differences: first, there's no law here, no acts of Congress: Trump is using countless executive orders and hot air to bully & cause as much pain as he possible can, in whatever manner possible. There's sometimes a flimsy excuse that this is entirely over Harvard being anti-Semitic, but it's impossible to take that seriously, and there's nothing but the typical insane bluster of a self-serving authoritarian sniffing his own insane farts without bothering to explain or make a case for how this massive institution is actually doing any real harm or injury. How banning foreign students is going to help or hinder that cause is further unclear: like everything else, there's no moral or just cause, no attempt to improve, only a desire to inflict massive endless & total damage, not to actually find remedy.
So I’m willing to do a lot to ensure my adopted homeland doesn’t suffer the same fate. Because in my estimation, the difference between India/Pakistan and the U.S. isn’t smart people, but the political and civic culture of ordinary people. What makes America great is the participatory democracy and deference to the wisdom of the common man that Alexis de Tocqueville admired. Not the modern trend of democracy as masses of mobilized demographic groups providing nudges to the Harvard-educated civil servants that actually run the country.
And viewing Harvard and its impact on the country as a negative is hardly some Trump invention. The quip that you’d rather be governed by the first 2,000 people listed in the Boston phone directory than the entire Harvard faculty is more than half a century old. The only difference is that the new right is willing to actually try and implement their vision of what would be good for the country. They’re willing to use the same legal and political tools—including control over discretionary federal funds—that liberals have long used to reshape society, culture, and civic institutions.
Liberals have tried helping everyone, endlessly. Giving chance and opportunity to all. That doesn't seem so unreasonable. They've lead not with restraint and threat (except to say you have to allow other people to be people). Conservatives are broadly against art and culture and science, perceiving them as liberal in mature and actively working to gut these institutions, with no replacement to be found. "The professors are the enemy" and so are the artist, the scientist, anyone who will not publicly supplicate themselves fully before this administration & it's madcap regex powered book burning scorched earth.
There's nothing like this intolerance, like this assault on not just a couple perceived Harvard elites, but on the tools America has used to bolsters the welfare and development of its people. This assault on speech and free thinking. This purposeful agenda to destroy a culture, to regress the Civil Rights of citizens, to undo a New Deal that finally saw to the common welfare of suffering people and built a nation that believed in its own greatness, to regress what chance reconstruction offered. This is a filthy mad quest to insure only a certain elite favoritism prevails and rules with absolute power, unchecked, with courts entirely stocked by radical extremeists that represent only the tiniest most wealthy and largely white nationalist oriented segment of society. That seems to controls speech and thoughts absolutely. Whatever the qualms with the Harvard elite, I just cannot see how much obvious imperious rulership, with nothing to offer other than destruction, is good. Control of discretionary funds should boost the welfare and liberty of this nation, broadly, not reduce us down and be used to allow meanness and grievance to flourish. I can't imagine at all how you can equate such control for such political and biased vicious ends, such narrowing and winnowing of the mind, with the boring and carrot-first center-left attempts to expand and enrich the world & human potential.
I think Harvard is great. Society needs elite scientists, etc. But they need to stay in their lane.
That’s exactly thought policing.
Edit: Flagged for wrongthink!
Edit: It seems as though the federal government has flagged me. Oh, wait.
Nobody said there wasn't a difference. Why do you keep making arguments that nobody is saying??
These things do not exist in a vacuum. The federal response is to limit federal funds. Not receiving billions in taxpayer money is not a punishment when you fail to uphold the basic principles for which that money was awarded.
> as a transphobic dogwhistle (or whichever bigoted opinion you're upset about having consequences for),
There it is! Took you two comments. Thought terminating cliches are exactly why Harvard needs to lose these funds.
It's wild how easy it is for you to absolutely lose your mind. This lack of maturity has no place in education or tech.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://www.ed.gov/sites/ed/files/about/offices/list/ocr/doc...
An organization that receives federal funds is being told they can no longer restrict viewpoints after having done so. What part is confusing you?
But thankfully Luigi can just rot in jail, because we have clear legal mechanisms we can leverage. If the university is violating constitutionally protected civil rights, as Harvard is clearly doing and their former president admitted in sworn congressional testimony, then they should not be receiving ANY public benefit: DOD/NIH/DOE/etc research grants, federal student loan guarantees, any sort of IRS benefit for student loan payments being tax deductible, IRS 501c3 benefits, all employee H1B1s should be revoked, increased scrutiny on any co-related tax entities. What's been done so far is not nearly enough, and there's a lot of fruit on the tree.
Harvard is NOT an institution in the public good. Get off the government teat.
Are you ok with the government policing people’s views and adjusting employment and admissions as long as you don’t like the school?
Are you going to be ok with it if another party or politician does?
It’s unfortunate but it appears people have no real ideals now, just recriminations that can justify anything.
But couldn’t this be said about any source of funding? All funders, public or private, make decisions about the projects and people they choose to fund. This selection process is not an infringement on academic freedom. In fact, restricting who and how patrons choose to fund research is itself an infringement on their freedom to fund what they want. If I want to fund cancer research, how is this an infringement on physicists and mathematicians?
The real problem in academia regarding academic freedom isn’t federal research grants, but the dependence on external funding from any source to help maintain operations, and how this affects tenure decisions. Tenure-track professors should be able to do whatever research they want, but this freedom is tempered by two pressures: (1) publish-or-perish culture, and (2) the pressure to raise money for the university. In practice, this means having to do research that is more likely to get funded and published. Modern research universities are effectively think-tanks with researchers working on what could get published and funded. It’s still possible to do curiosity-driven work under such a setting, but one must still “play the game” to get tenure.
Getting rid of federal research grants won’t solve those problems. In fact, it may make things worse. I’m not confident about industry’s willingness to fund research, given the demise of legendary research labs such as Bell Labs and Xerox PARC and the overwhelming culture these days of only supporting research that has a high chance of getting productized immediately.
The consequence of getting rid of federal research funding is that a lot of universities will end up reverting to the pre-WWII model where there was very little funding to do research at all. This is the norm at many teaching-oriented universities, but research universities today rely heavily on research grants, particularly those from the federal government. Relying entirely on grants from private individuals and organizations won’t solve academic freedom issues if professors there are required to do publishable and fundable work in order to earn tenure, and with less money for research, this may make things worse.
The authors of the article are not claiming that this infringes on academic freedom, but intellectual freedom. They explain here:
"Intellectual freedom is the principle that all individuals have the right to think for themselves, to express their convictions on any subject, and to give their support, financial or otherwise, only to the ideas they choose. When government coercively seizes your money and uses it to subsidize some research program or viewpoint for any reason, it is violating your intellectual freedom. This is the injustice inherent in all government research grants. It is this that private universities like Harvard should now name and challenge.
Instead, they fight for “academic freedom,” which is actually the opposite of intellectual freedom. It asserts the right of universities and professors to teach, write and research whatever they see fit — and to do it at the taxpayer’s expense."
Taken to its logical conclusion, it would mean that the government should not fund anything, ever, for any purpose, because someone might disagree with it? Isn't disagreement actually a sign of intellectual freedom?
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How about at the Library of Congress or National Archives? Just create a `nih-GR12345-2025-05-31.torrent` for all the data which would offer lots of benefits:
- small network traffic for LOC/NA to seed - American-skin-in-the-game to share the publicly funded data - more eyes on the prize, the "FOSS" case for data
I think public data would also help all of us, collectively, to lead us out of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
Colleges' problem is that they weren't taking enough federal funding. If they had achieved TBTF status then Trump wouldn't be harassing them now.
What is unique about the government funding as opposed to private-sector funding is that government funding comes from money coercively seized from people, and private sector funding doesn't.
I categorically reject that characterization of how government works, but you do you.
One need not express an opinion on whether there should be more or less taxation to acknowledge this truth. As you said previously, let's be honest.
No. We don't need this, and we also don't need a return to the status quo. What we need is a more equitable system where everyone's freedom is guaranteed and everyone accept that, such that actions like what we see Trump taking here are treated like an old crank on a street corner screaming about the apocalypse: we put him into a padded cell and move on with our lives.
Can you explain what you mean? I don't see how this follows from the arguments in the article.
Rereading the article, it does seem to have a bit more generic right-wing-flavored "government shouldn't do stuff" than stuck with me on the first read, which may be why my logic was a bit unclear. Basically my point is that the government cannot use funding to control universities unless some individuals have discretion over how and whether to award that funding. I'm saying what should be reduced is not funding but discretion.
(I'm open to rethinking the system to make it less discretion-dependent; the article does have some ideas that could be relevant there that I wouldn't dismiss out of hand. But that an issue of how schools get funded, not whether.)
Trump could easily move towards a work visa style, where the universities would need to prove they can’t get Americans to fill their admissions spots and quickly eliminate virtually all foreign students from highly selective US universities while still allowing your local non-selective university to fill their roles with high paying foreign students.
This would totally align with his ideology and could easily and quickly happen.
Harvard may prevail on some of its challenges to the administration. But the gaping hole in its defense is that Title VI, by design, uses the threat of revoking federal money to regulate behavior in ways that would otherwise raise first amendment concerns. The Supreme Court is never going to rule that universities can invoke the first amendment as a shield against Title VI allegations, because that would gut the civil rights laws. If universities could, for example, engage in race conscious practices to increase diversity while still retaining federal funding, they could also engage in race conscious practices to decrease diversity while retaining federal funding.
The government, as a grant maker, obviously doesn’t have to provide federal funds to say neo-nazis. And if that’s true, it follows that the government can withhold federal funds based on any ideological disagreement. These organizations are of course free to say whatever they want, but the government doesn’t have to fund it!