Background:
UCLA violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, "by acting with deliberate indifference in creating a hostile educational environment for Jewish and Israeli students."
Outcome:
These grants are likely in a temporary holding pattern until ucla settles the issue.
Den_VR · 2h ago
The root bsky post says “NSF is suspending roughly 300 grants with UCLA, following a DOJ finding on Tuesday that the university violated Title VI by "creating a hostile educational environment for Jewish and Israeli students."”
Which is entirely par for the course with the administration and doesn’t seem particularly targeted at Tao. I’m shocked even more NSF grants haven’t been hit, this was a prime DOGE target. They want these headlines.
throwaway290 · 1h ago
> "creating a hostile educational environment for Jewish and Israeli students"
Of course suspending grants is probably the wrong way to go about it anyway, but since you brought this up... do you imply that it's false? I'm not in the US but I heard pretty interesting things about what was happening in universities following Oct 7.
hackyhacky · 1h ago
Yes, it's false.
Students have a first amendment right to express opinions, even anti-Zionist ones.
The administration is using baseless charges of antisemitism as a cudgel to extract fealty and concessions from universities, which they see as opponents of their party.
cvoss · 1h ago
The accusation from DOJ isn't about student speech, though. It's about the university's actions or inactions, which are not protected and are governed by obligations to Title VI discrimination law.
hackyhacky · 1h ago
You're right, but the university is not allowed to censor student speech based on content. The "actions" that the administration claims the university should have taken would have violated the constitution.
ethbr1 · 55m ago
Furthermore, the redresses the administration has proposed in similar cases (like the university reporting students who protest to federal authorities) suggest this is more about federal power / censorship than furthering universal free speech.
throwaway290 · 55m ago
This is a strawman. Of course there is free speech. It doesn't mean it's okay to talk on the phone in a cinema or recite the Bible aloud during a math lecture. It doesn't mean it's fair play to shout obscenities on the train and spit on people. Idk about US but there is a thing called "verbal abuse" and police is 100% callable for that. That out of the way so how about hostile environment for students again? I was downvoted for asking a question and this did not answer it.
hackyhacky · 48m ago
Shouting obscenities on the train, as well as hate speech broadly, are constitutionally protected under the first amendment.
Creating a hostile environment for students based on their religion would violate the Civil Rights Act. However, there is a paucity of evidence that the universities did that. Allowing protests probably isn't sufficient, especially when prohibiting those same protests would be unconstitutional.
Even if the protesting students were spitting on Jewish students, that doesn't impact the legality of the protest. The spitting could be prosecuted as battery.
I recommend reading this [1] great article about the sometimes confusing rhetoric used in the media about American free speech.
Okay so if I get it correctly they could be kicked out like in the cinema or not, because like I assume regardless of free speech there are rules, but this "cinema" cannot be prosecuted by US gov for NOT kicking a noisy jerk out of it because then it becomes a free speech thing. If taking away grants counts as prosecution? I guess that makes sense.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF · 24m ago
> I was downvoted for asking a question and this did not answer it.
I am 100% sure your comment was downvoted for this sentence:
> I'm not in the US but I heard pretty interesting things about what was happening in universities following Oct 7.
People here don’t like propaganda-fueled speculation. The commenter also literally answered your question. You asked if it was meant to be implied as false and they said yes.
dcre · 1h ago
It’s complete bullshit. Half the students protesting for Gaza were Jewish themselves.
throwaway290 · 54m ago
This is the closest to the answer for now, thanks. I remember reading how it was pretty antisemitic with racial shaming and bordering on physical violence but can't remember what sources it was. If half of the protesters were jewish as you say then that's unlikely
guelo · 8m ago
Propaganda directed straight from netanyahu. He ordered America to censor the students in public sperches and within days America inexplicably did it.
plemer · 1h ago
Allowing people to speak out against overt genocide committed by a foreign government = anti-semitism. Isn’t that self-evident? /s
Tbh, this standard argument is itself anti-Jewish as it implies this behavior is inherent to being Jewish, which of course is grotesque and inaccurate.
* Jewish /= Zionist
* Zionist /= Imperialist
* Imperialist /= Genocidal
What we have really imo is an extreme colonist policy that is only superficially Jewish. That doesn’t absolve Jews in Israel supporting it, it rather absolves all those who don’t and makes genocidal colonists take responsibility for their own actions.
Also, genocide is bad.
throwaway290 · 57m ago
Nice strawman. So how about the actual question which is hostile environment for students? I was downvoted for asking a question and this did not answer it.
Edit to reply: what I remember reading was not about saying "end genocide", it was about saying "you are a jew so go die" kind of stuff. It seemed pretty crazy but I didn't save any sources
guelo · 7m ago
What about the hostile environment to the students who protested?
Tadpole9181 · 40m ago
If I make a sign that says "Nazis are Evil", and a guy gets upset and says "you can't say that about me" - what do you call that guy? A Nazi.
If I make a sign that says "End the Zionist Genocide", and a Jewish person says "you can't say that about me", they don't feel uncomfortable because they're Jewish.
ysofunny · 48m ago
but not killing palesitinans is offensive to institutional Zionists who represent Jewish and Israelite interests!
what a conundrum. if palestinians are getting murdered then the everybody is unhappy but the money is happy (bombs sell)
and if palestinians are NOT getting destroyed, well, I don't think palestinians have never been at peace for as long as I have lived so this is an unknown, hypothetical at this moment. for shame..
mgaunard · 2h ago
why does US law have articles to specifically protect one ethnic group instead of being generic and protecting them all?
jdross · 1h ago
They do. The law is literally that you must equally protect all groups
hackyhacky · 1h ago
Correct. However, the current administration is interested in enforcing the law about discrimination only against one group.
UncleMeat · 15m ago
And they aren't even doing that. The administration doesn't give a shit about jewish people. It cares about hurting lefties and has decided that "pro-palestine efforts are anti-semitic" is a cudgel they can use to do that.
verzali · 12m ago
I wonder how many jewish researchers lost their funding here and in the other cases. Seems like a misguided approach if this is what they really care about.
fuzzfactor · 19m ago
That's a misguided political party for you.
Looks to me like they've got their sights on a lot more than one group, some are just more obvious than others.
elcritch · 2h ago
They do to my knowledge, the quote is the specific violation of the civil rights act.
frob · 1h ago
Thw law is very obviously being abused here by Trump and his administration to punish unfavored speech and unfavored groups. They dont care about equal protection one bit. They want to punish academics and universities so that Trump et al can controll their speech.
sjsdaiuasgdia · 1h ago
"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."
guelo · 5m ago
You state politicians' accusations without due process as fact.
roenxi · 1h ago
Additional Background: US government provides funding, US government tries to use that leverage to decide how the show will be run.
Over the years I've come to accept the blind spot most people have where, despite all evidence, they assume that the government goals match their own. But it still isn't the case. The prudent approach is to set up institutions that are largely independent of government. Government funding is not an answer to long term problems. Governments are too fickle and the political bandwidth isn't high enough to handle complex arguments like whether researching structure in sequences of 0s and 1s is a good idea.
I know the fashion is to present Trump as some weird aberration but he's been a factor for about 10 years now and won his 3rd election pretty convincing margins. Nobody can say they are surprised that the US government is behaving erratically if it is an environment where Trump is a top contender for high office.
vharuck · 1h ago
But government funding was set up in a way meant to counteract fickleness. Government actions are supposed to be proposed publicly, accept and consider public comments, and then allow legal arguments about the process and motivations. And funding is assigned by Congress, two legislative bodies with hundreds of members that follow extensive rules and procedures to do anything.
The current "fickleness" is from a single individual. The other branches of government are refusing to check out even criticize his actions. This is what would happen with any funding from individuals. The lesson we should be taking from this situation is either (1) controls on the government need to have more teeth and not rely solely on politicians, or (2) the US accepts authoritarianism right now and no Constitution would stop that.
jhanschoo · 1h ago
> Government funding is not an answer to long term problems.
Funding from private sources who are usually more short-sighted and less transparent can't be the alternative. An alternative I can think of are international entities that have some semblance of independence from constituent nations. I think that for a democratic government, public funding is alright, as long as the government is, well, healthy. In this light the issue with funding is simply a symptom of a government that does not serve its citizens well, which is the root cause that must be cured.
muglug · 1h ago
> Government funding is not an answer to long term problems
It has been said that government funding is the worst form of funding except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time
853c2b2b · 1h ago
>> won his 3rd election
Really - I think that more or less confirms your bias.
fc417fc802 · 53m ago
Reads as "won the 3rd election in which he has participated". Your assumptions betray your own.
lupusreal · 2h ago
> Background: UCLA violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, "by acting with deliberate indifference in creating a hostile educational environment for Jewish and Israeli students."
Translation: ULCA declined to violate the First Ammendment and allowed their students and faculty to criticize Israel.
mensetmanusman · 2h ago
It’s more akin to the civil rights movement/counter movement when some universities ignored various assaults on black students (saying it wasn’t their job to police behavior).
The protesters were fine to criticize Israel, but then turning the rage to the actual American Jews on campus crossed the line.
jhanschoo · 55m ago
Give me a MSM source that claims that student protesters on a UC campus targeted American Jews on campus with their "rage". For this, I do not regard instances where American Jews feel unsafe or threatened to fall under this where they felt that way due to having conflated anti-Israel sentiment with antisemitism, or because of having their own identity enmeshed with modern Israel. (I do not consider identifying with modern Israel part of being an American Jew.)
DSingularity · 1h ago
Provide evidence from reputable sources.
Israeli Jews kill tens of thousands of Palestinian children and we are supposed to care that Zionists feel targeted by the protests on campus? Zionists are literally starving people right now. Do you not get that?
nrclark · 1h ago
There's a distinction to make between Jewish people and Israel.
Jewish people are fine. The Israeli genocide of Gaza is not.
peterfirefly · 1h ago
> There's a distinction to make between Jewish people and Israel.
Lots of Jews don't seem to know that.
zmgsabst · 2h ago
Preventing Jews from entering the campus and threatening them are not protected by the 1st Amendment — that’s why UCLA settled the lawsuit for millions, because they had a duty to stop those acts.
AFAIK the protestors blocked everybody and did not discriminate. And they occupied only individual buildings or sections of campus, entry into campus as a whole was not restricted.
DSingularity · 1h ago
Background: Israeli Jews engage in genocide against Palestinians triggering global outrage against Israeli policy. To combat the blowback Zionists engage in lawfare to target any university that dares to not clamp down on anti-genocide protests.
kj4211cash · 1h ago
Was it really the Zionists that did this? Or a Trump administration that enjoys disrupting academia and experts in general.
SpicyLemonZest · 2h ago
Did Terence Tao or the other researchers whose grants have been suspended violate Title VI? This just seems like dishonest excusemaking for extortion. UCLA would dispute that they violated Title VI, so the Trump regime is pulling out a bat and breaking their researchers' kneecaps until they agree to give in.
bananapub · 2h ago
uh, no, the president has just claimed that the uni was not horrible enough to pro-palestine protestors and so he'll be randomly withholding federal money until they bend to his pathetic will and permanently destroy the independence of the university by letting his cronies rule it.
jahnu · 2h ago
The consequences of this Cultural Revolution will be felt for decades.
oceansky · 2h ago
I would say at least a century
PartiallyTyped · 1h ago
We can agree that decades of soft power are gone. So it’d take twice as much to ameliorate.
drstewart · 1h ago
You would say that based on what?
hermitcrab · 1h ago
The effects of the Chinese Cultural Revolution are still very keenly felt in China.
linotype · 1h ago
If an alliance decades in the making can be undone in six months it wasn’t much of an alliance in the first place. Just a bunch of countries subsidizing their defense budgets off the backs of the poor and middle class in the US (NATO).
oceansky · 22m ago
Destroying is much easier than building something, including alliances, trust and deals.
buyucu · 1h ago
I think a comparison to China's Cultural Revolution is the best analogy for what is happening in the US right now. Ideological purity takes priority over everything else.
dist-epoch · 1h ago
No they wont, the AIs which will rule the world decades from now will not care.
It would be like us caring about some chimp wars from time forgotten.
epistasis · 2h ago
The past year has been utter chaos, madness, and sadness for STEM in the US. I hope that Tao's grad students don't suffer from this too much in the immediate term. In the long term, all science is being harmed greatly, and we are causing a gigantic bubble in the pipeline of the production of scientists, most severely damaging those who are graduating soon.
SirFatty · 2h ago
It's been 6 months....
PartiallyTyped · 1h ago
It has felt like years a few weeks in.
dandanua · 1h ago
It's ok, USA doesn't need mathematicians after the AGI is built. If you need to compute something just ask AGI. The subscription, of course, will cost you multiple lifetimes' worth of the minimum working wage (luckily you could take a credit that will be payed off by multiple generations of your descendants), but you know, the progress can't be stopped!
yadiyadiyadi · 1h ago
You know... yesterday, I asked Google if Arnold Schwarzenegger was the tallest Mr Olympia of all time at 6'2.
Their AI assistant told me that, no, he was not the tallest as there were several Mr Olympias who were taller at 5'5, 5'6 and 5'7.
Just now?
"No, Arnold Schwarzenegger is not the tallest Mr. Olympia. While he is a well-known and successful bodybuilder, his height is 6'2" (1.88m), which is not the tallest among Mr. Olympia winners. The tallest Mr. Olympia is likely Ronnie Coleman, who is 5'11" (1.80m)."
I'm really not too concerned about being replaced in the next couple months at least.
pklausler · 3m ago
The physician's assistant recorded my height last week as 5'13". I'm worried now about "I" in general, not just "AI".
maleldil · 38m ago
Are you talking about Google Search's AI summary? I don't know what model they use for that, but I tested Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite (the smallest of Google's current models), and it got the answer right.
fuzzfactor · 2h ago
>most severely damaging those who are graduating soon.
When Nixon was getting ready for his recession it was pretty bad too.
nyeah · 2h ago
It was not like this. Nixon was not dismantling science and engineering.
fuzzfactor · 2h ago
>dismantling science and engineering.
Not directly, I admit that was just collateral damage.
About like these NSF grants are situated within the big picture.
Paul-Craft · 1h ago
> The past year has been utter chaos, madness, and sadness for the US.
FTFY.
tmaly · 12m ago
I think it would be better to tie the grant to the researcher and let them move around if they want. This does not better humanity if they are tied up with a place that is in the political crosshairs by the current administration.
Also, DOGE just doing a blanket cut to NSF research grants was horrible.
pklausler · 2h ago
The country born out of the scientific enlightenment is eagerly devolving back into medieval mindlessness.
littlestymaar · 2h ago
For people despising the Muslim world, those people are working hard to reproduce their fate: going from the most enlightened place on earth to religious obscurantism.
schaefer · 2h ago
Another way to say that would be: the USA is finally doing to itself what it did to Iran. Toppling a liberal democracy in favor of an authoritarian cult of personality with the support of a fanatic religious sect.
cmrdporcupine · 1h ago
I don't know why people keep painting this conjuncture as some sort of aberration in American history. Intolerance and domination of religion and conservative ideological positions over the state and public sphere is actually the norm, not the exception, if you look back on the 20th century history. From the 60s through the 90s is the exception, really.
One of my earliest memories was staying up late on a Sunday night to see Neil and Buzz on the moon. Now, in the same country that could once put them there, I have to defend that it even happened. Basic health measures like pasteurization and vaccination are under direct attack. It's been a long shitty decline into madness, and it's just accelerating.
est31 · 2h ago
It is comparatively easy for a mathematician to relocate, given that, like most scientists, they already have world spanning international networks, and unlike other sciences there is no need for expensive lab equipment. Stuff like LIGO is hard to move around, but there is plenty of places in the world that have a good math library.
verzali · 9m ago
We are getting a lot of very qualified Americans applying for our open positions in Europe. Assuming we are not a special case, it looks like a lot of smart people are looking at options beyond the US.
willvarfar · 2h ago
I'm guessing that Terence really wants to be surrounded by thinkers of his calibre. So he gravitated to the ivy league. Perhaps in the future there will be a new gravity well where these minds congregate?
tossandthrow · 2h ago
That there should be only 8 places in the world where you can find elite thinkers, all located in the US, is such extreme American nationalism and straight up ignorant.
SpaceNugget · 2h ago
That's not what the person said. Give a little bit of the benefit of the doubt when interpreting posts. Using the context of a person who grew up and was educated in the Anglosphere. Obviously the ivy league is going to be one of the more attractive options for finding a larger group of elite mathematical researchers. They have a ton of funding compared to most places and draw in many other brilliant people from around the world. That doesn't mean there's no elite thinkers anywhere else, just that it's inevitably going to be a strong contender for where a very bright person looking for that kind of environment would consider.
nyeah · 2h ago
Stop and think about this rationally for a minute. A first-rate school needs to have an American football team. Otherwise it's basically not in any league.
dgfitz · 1h ago
Don't tell CalTech...
No comments yet
ben_w · 1h ago
Sure, there's also two such places in the UK.
Thing is, I do find myself missing the one I spent nearly a decade living in, because such networks are self-sorting and I didn't realise how rare it was until I failed to find it again after leaving.
(Still, Berlin is doing me good in almost all other aspects besides being able to accidentally find I've moved right around the corner from the same pub frequented by the author of PuTTY and a co-author of the proof that Magic The Gathering is Turing-complete and one of the Debian project leaders (seriously, all three went to the same pub, and I didn't know before I moved to Cambridge the first time back in 2007)).
petesergeant · 8m ago
> there's also two such places in the UK
Oxford, Imperial, and?
gregjw · 2h ago
Very very funny.
mensetmanusman · 2h ago
We can thank Hitler for the exodus of academics to the US and for the creation of the Israel/Palestine issue (without the holocaust/ww2, the state would never had been made).
sitkack · 2h ago
Zionism and Jewish colonizing of Palestine started before WW1.
Yes, but they didn't steal the land until after WW2. What happened in the decades before WW2 is a strong warning to everybody about what can happen when you have mass immigration of young radicals of military age.
nyeah · 2h ago
Yeah. We've coasted for a long time on importation of geniuses and on being the only un-bombed industrial nation ... in 1946.
And now we've largely closed the door to geniuses from wealthy countries. (Why take the risk of living in the USA right now?) We've even taken the first few steps towards deliberately driving out the geniuses we have. I didn't expect that even six months ago.
mensetmanusman · 2h ago
Academic institutions in the last decade or two started pre-filtering based on ideology goals before taking into account actual research. In general the system was veering off as the massive bureaucracy gained mission creep.
nyeah · 2h ago
So I hear. But how much has that really affected medicine, math, physics, chemistry, engineering? And is destroying universities altogether really the solution?
andrepd · 1h ago
What do you mean?
Tainnor · 2h ago
We won't know if Israel would or wouldn't have been created if the Holocaust hadn't happened, but Jewish immigration to Palestine started much earlier in response to renewed pogroms and rising antisemitism in the late 19th / early 20th century. Already in the 1920s there were tensions and occasional eruptions of violence in Palestine.
Yes, but the final push was due to Germany’s neighbors passing the buck on helping fleeing Jews. After the world learned the consequences of that, the political will to create the state was cemented.
fakedang · 2h ago
Jews were already migrating to British Mandate since the 1900s (read about the Aliyah). Even without Hitler, communist expansion would have resulted in a World War 2 (with different players) and a mass Jewish exodus (from Russia, which happened later on in our timeline). Jews were already carrying out terror attacks on both Palestinians and British troops and Britain was already stretched thin after WW1.
The creation of a rogue Israel happened with decolonization, and while it might have been delayed, was inevitable.
est31 · 2h ago
Currently he is at UCLA which is technically not an Ivy League place but a public ivy. As for thinkers of equal caliber, he is probably quite alone anyway. But if you look at the list of Fields medalists, there is a lot of europeans in that list who are still in europe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fields_Medal#List_of_Fields_me...
chollida1 · 2h ago
> So he gravitated to the ivy league. Perhaps in the future there will be a new gravity well where these minds congregate?
Doesn't he work at UCLA?
psychoslave · 2h ago
Not every mathematicians has the fame of this person. I don't know much about Terrance to be frank, only red a few posts that landed on HN homepage. That's enough to grasp the level of fame he enjoy, I guess.
apwell23 · 1h ago
relocate for 250k?
cmrdporcupine · 1h ago
This. Someone like this could maybe come up here to Canada, and enjoy slightly a more sane political/cultural climate, but they won't be getting this kind of funding. Academics here are already barely holding on, and even in the best of times there has never been the kind of flow of cash available in the US for scientists and intellectuals.
I imagine a similar story applies to the UK and other places in the Anglosphere
So will the administration's push to use pro-Israel reasons to censure and penalise the universities steadily get out of touch with what the public want and sympathise with?
TinkersW · 1h ago
The poll doesn't ask about support for Israel, it asks about approval for the war in Gaza, a very different question. Easy to disprove of a war that has gone on for this long, while still favoring Israel.
paxys · 2h ago
When has a dictatorship ever cared about public opinion?
__MatrixMan__ · 2h ago
1793, France. Just ask King Louis XVI.
azangru · 2h ago
Is monarchy a dictatorship?
motoboi · 1h ago
If they say god appointed the person, is monarchy. If the person say she is going to stay in power because enemies, then it's a dictatorship.
__MatrixMan__ · 55m ago
Monarchy just means "rule by one". Dictatorship means, "because I said so".
A king who gets their power from God and can make rules whether or not the people consent is both a monarch and a dictator.
jjgreen · 1h ago
If they have power, yes.
svantana · 2h ago
Yes
psychoslave · 2h ago
When setting repressive measure to mute any opposition and skyrocketing the budget of their personal security agaisnt all raising threats?
toomuchtodo · 2h ago
Sounds like the tyranny of rocket equation applied to personal security. At some point, the cost to derisk exceeds what is available or logistically feasible.
brnt · 2h ago
Remember, dictators are never wrong. They can only ever double down.
It's why they are so destructive.
hermitcrab · 1h ago
Brian Klaas wrote an interesting article about that, saying that the biggest weakness of dictators/autocrats is that they surround themselves with 'yes men' and quickly lose touch with reality.
vFunct · 2h ago
ALL dictatorships need public support to remain in power. Even medeival kings needed public support from the merchant class.
psychoslave · 1h ago
Well, what they need is obedience, and to obtain it they often reach for the path of spreading fear, doubt, uncertainty, violence, menace, murder, torture, and so on. Sure that's not the less brittle way to grab and retain political power in your claws, as it certainly also foster an environment full of people eager to stab you too death at first possible occasion. But there is not much morale and brillant about greed.
encom · 2h ago
What dictatorship are you referring to?
fabian2k · 2h ago
Antisemitism is just an excuse for these actions against universities, it's a pretext. Not a particularly believable one anyway, but that doesn't seem to matter.
The Trump administration is punishing institutions that disagree with it, or that it dislikes for some reason.
sitkack · 2h ago
MAGA is heavily antisemitic, you absolutely right that this is pretext. They would have picked something else, this is just the best one at the time.
brookst · 2h ago
Yep, zero principles at play here. They would has as happily use “mistreatment of transgender people” as a pretext, despite championing such mistreatment.
It’s all just words as magic spells to justify bad behavior. Semantic content and beliefs aren’t even part of the equation.
wiz21c · 2h ago
Considering US support to Israel, I wonder if MAGA is Trump or not...
I've never really understood the relationship between the US and Israel. The US gives Israel pretty much whatever it wants and in return the US gets ... nothing? Israel even (deliberately?) attacked a US ship during the 6 day war, with little (if any) consequences:
>While millions of American evangelical Christians have long been fervent supporters of the Jewish state because of End Times prophecies
Is that the main reason for this incredibly one-sided relationship?
maleldil · 33m ago
The main reason is geopolitics. Israel is an ally in the Middle East, a key region to US foreign policy.
hermitcrab · 24m ago
So is Saudi Arabia. The US doesn't have such a one-sided relationship with them, as far as I can see.
retinaros · 2h ago
it is not an excuse. They are a well represented community in USA and students felt not safe/had different political stance which was enough to push gov to act. How is it different from for instance BLM era with governments, media and democrats punishing some institutions and people that didnt want to say their slogan, were having opposing idea or even just didnt went to publicly bend the knee, ending whole careers and sometimes even killing them without any reason beyond rage? Once again you guys built and used the same tools than Trump is now wielding. A few people that were against biden era politics were pointing this simple fact that by creating a precedent and believing that your cause was righter than the others you just helped your opponent to do the same
ModernMech · 49m ago
What precedent? When did the Biden administration pull funding from universities to control speech it didn't approve of?
nyeah · 2h ago
Do you really think the Trump administration is committed to its pro-Israel position? If they flipped sides, how long would it take for 90% of their voters to adjust and be happy again?
kolektiv · 1h ago
Given their positions on things like Russia, the Epstein files, free trade, etc. (where the position has changed from things that were either broadly "American" values or positions that Trump directly supported) I would guess it would take a day or two. The core "Trump is infallible" demographic will follow him no matter what. If he said the sun set in the morning, they'd blame the sun when it rose.
cmrdporcupine · 1h ago
It is perhaps the deepest position on the American right now, and extremely unlikely to shift.
To the point that you have people who have politics that derivates from a populist/nativist right wing historical current that was always virulently anti-Semitic, now being the staunchest backers of the current Israeli government.
In the post-9/11 era, hatred of Islam, putting an equals-sign between Jewish and Israeli, and smearing anybody on "the left" who criticizes the actions of the Israeli state as "anti-Semitic", and shoring up the Israeli state with massive financial support ... this is all an ideological bundle that is working extremely well for them.
And is allowing them to siphon off support from "moderate" American Democrat voters who share these biases but not the rest of their ideological bill of goods. It's actually allowed them to build a powerful base of support even when they're doing extremely controversial things.
nyeah · 1h ago
Nyeah. Maybe. Please don't make me mention an even deeper issue on the US right that is shifting as we speak.
lupusreal · 2h ago
Whatever Trump personally feels, he is demonstrably acting in Israel's interests. Maybe they have him blackmailed through Epstein stuff, or maybe he supports Israel due to his family connections or bribes. It doesn't really matter, the end result is the same.
nyeah · 2h ago
Agreed, but not what I asked.
lupusreal · 2h ago
Support for Israel among Americans is starkly stratified along generational lines, with young people on both sides of the traditional partisan divide being broadly sick of Israel's shit. This has Israel freaked out, they know their support from America is now on borrowed time and without it, they are doomed. I think this is why they're pushing so hard now, they're trying to secure their strategic objectives (particularly the annexation of Gaza and the eradication of the Palestinian people) before the American baby boomers, their bastion of support, die or otherwise age out of the political process.
churchill · 1h ago
Exactly this. Glad someone else can see it. Having studied other settler colonial states (I believe), Israel realizes that Western weapons and doctrine guarantees they'll win every single confrontation with the Palestinians, just like the Rhodesians & Apartheid South Africa. Easily too, with insane KD ratios.
Those two regimes won every battle easily, but what eventually did them in was sanctions. And, when the West sanctions you, you eventually collapse or stay economically irrelevant. Case in point: USSR, Maoist China, Rhodesia, South Africa, etc.
But, the Boomer, Christian Zionist generation is dying out, along with older Germans (and Europeans) who still struggle with some Teutonic guilt.
Irreligious, humanist youngsters across the Americas and Europe now see it's a clear good vs. bad struggle and the Zionists are not the good guys, so Israel likely believes they need to expel the Palestinians from Gaza & the West Bank within one generation or they'll be facing devastating sanctions within 10-20 years.
Given that Israel's economy depends heavily on technology service exports, diamonds, and agriculture, if they don't change posture and end up getting sanctioned, it'll cripple them without a doubt. Just cutting off their technology workers' foreign exchange salaries is enough to shrink the economy by half once that FX channel dries up.
foobarian · 1h ago
What I don't understand is why not go along with letting at least WB or also Gaza get recognized as Palestine and do what India and Pakistan did going forward. Seems like it would be a lot more likely to work and a lot less risky. Maybe there are some special resources in either place?
crinkly · 2h ago
I think this poll is disingenuously quoted here and may not represent public opinion that well.
The questions are very specific rather than general. For example you can disapprove of the military action and the president of a country, but that doesn't mean when asked "pick a winner" you'd pick the other guy.
I mean if the US went to war with North Korea and Pyongyang got flattened, I would certainly disapprove of the US military and the president, but I probably wouldn't consider the other party "winning".
So as always it depends on which question you ask. You can ask questions to get the answer you paid for (speaking as an ex-statistician who worked for a pollster)
glitchc · 2h ago
Relevance to the NSF grant or just practicing whataboutism?
vFunct · 2h ago
What's going to be interesting is when the next Democratic administration comes into power, they're going to be extremely anti-Israel, given that the Democratic base is fully against Israel now at a 5:1 ratio. There will never be another Democratic President that supports Israel (none of the pro-israel candidates have any hope of ever being President) and this will mean extremely hard anti-Israeli action, using precedent like this to push anti-Islamophobia messages.
You can imagine the next Democrat administration defunding universities based on their collaboration with Israel, for example. Or defunding universities based on their punishment of pro-Palestinian demonstrators, etc..
People should accept that Israel lost against Hamas and be prepared for the consequences of that going forward. It's pretty much the same as a Vietnam situation, with the war being won/lost based on public opinion.
hermitcrab · 1h ago
>People should accept that Israel lost against Hamas
It looks to me that the extremists in Hamas gave extremist Israelis the excuse to do what they always wanted to do. And everyone who isn't an extremist lost. Meanwhile, the Hamas leadership are living in 5 star luxury in Qatar.
nyeah · 2h ago
The Democratic party supports Israel just fine. The party is not run by weirdo academics who can't even remember the Hamas attacks.
The worst that serious Democrats might do is publicly compare Israel's current behavior to the US's lashing out at Afghanistan after the WTC attacks.
vFunct · 2h ago
The Democratic Party doesn't support Israel at all. The current elected officials do, but not the base. Polls show support for Palestine over Israel at a 5:1 ratio.
This is resulting in current Democratic elected officials being removed from power when their term expires, starting with the US Presidency last year, which was lost BECAUSE of their support for Israel. A YouGov poll earlier this year showed the primary reason Biden 2020 voters didn't vote for Harris was because of Israel: https://www.imeupolicyproject.org/postelection-polling
This is all happening quickly. You won't see any Democratic candidate that supports Israel run for President in 2028.
nyeah · 2h ago
Sorry, that is a mix of speculative fiction and self-contradiction. The GOP supports Israel at least as strongly as the Democrats do. So how did Harris' support for Israel cost her the election?
Supporting Israel, including acknowledging their right to respond militarily to terrorist attacks, is one thing. Falling deeply in love with Netanyahu's current policies is another. Freaking out and caring only about Hamas is ... a third thing.
te_chris · 1h ago
Trump got less votes last time than when he lost to Biden. The democrats lost, trump didn’t win. People stayed home.
nyeah · 1h ago
Good point. I'm not convinced that support for Israel was the issue, though.
There are lunatics in the US who seem to have completely forgotten the 1300-1400 Israelis killed by Hamas just last year, but who can see the human disaster in Gaza. I don't think those people are so politically engaged on that single issue that they deliberately stayed home from the polls and let Trump win ... in order to ... help people in Gaza? I could be wrong, but it doesn't seem to fit together.
EDIT: To be fair those same folks are notorious for shooting themselves in the foot. So who knows?
EDIT 2: Some of the lunatics above are probably anti-Semitic, despite Trump's claims that they are anti-Semitic. But again how does that drive them to help Trump right now?
fc417fc802 · 2m ago
> completely forgotten
More like the two things aren't even remotely in the same ballpark. Imagine if the US had surrounded Baghdad and intentionally starved the residents. And even that example still fails to account for some of the context.
Hikikomori · 2h ago
The party largely fully supports Israel.
wiz21c · 2h ago
I live in Europe and according the common media outlets, the US absolutely, totally, forever support Israel. "largely" is too weak of a word here.
And now honnest question: why is this support so strong in the US ? are the ties with the jewish/israely community so deep between these two peoples ?
kj4211cash · 1h ago
You and the other replies focus too much on the Jewish community within the US. Support for Israel is very strong in the US, particularly among Republicans, because of the rise of Evangelical Christians. Evangelicals have ... religious reasons for supporting of Israel. They also strongly identify with Europe and people with European backgrounds. They have an inability to identify with Palestinians.
Hikikomori · 1h ago
When it comes to the democratic parties loyalty to Israel I think it's mostly the work of AIPAC that is responsible.
Hikikomori · 1h ago
Largely as we have people like AOC, Ilhan and Bernie. Maybe a stretch to say they're part of the party.
cmrdporcupine · 1h ago
The real story here is the way Zionism has so deeply and intensely and succesffully managed to tie Jewishness to Israel-iness.
And so many people who are rightfully proud of their Jewish ethnicity and cultural identification -- a rich and beautiful culture that has had absolutely outsized contributions to art, science, culture in the west, with a history of being persecuted and mistreated by said "west" -- have become defacto "citizens-abroad" and advocates for Israeli positions in all things.
That combined with a deep and historical distrust of Islam in western culture...
It's the same story here in Canada. How deep the bank account for this blank cheque is, I don't know.
I should say that as a left wing critic of what happens in the middle east under Israel's banner, I am also deeply uncomfortable with some of the anti-Semitic tinge some forms of the protest take. It's a conundrum.
It is absolutely important to make it clear the criticism is of the actions of Israel, and not "Jews"
twixfel · 1h ago
The only country the Americans love and worship more than their own country is Israel. I can understand brain dead nationalism for your own country, but brain dead nationalism for another country, especially one doing the things Israel is doing... it's very strange.
sjsdaiuasgdia · 1h ago
There's at least a few factors in play...
Christian sects that believe the second coming of Jesus is not too far away believe that Israel's existence is critical to bring that to pass.
People with anti-muslim or anti-arabian feelings see Israel as a counterweight to muslim and arabian power in the middle east.
There's a lot of people who, consciously or not, equate anything other than total support for Israel with antisemitism.
soulofmischief · 2h ago
Haha, that's funny. What'll really happen is they'll campaign and say one thing, then do another once in office, maintaining status quo for the elite and war machine as they've been doing for decades in tandem with the Republican party, gaslighting the American public at every level.
Sure, but what kind of action does it imply? North Korea is recognized by (almost?) every country too, but that doesn't mean anyone is hurrying to provide aid to starving North Koreans. Similarly the international recognition of Azerbaijan and Armenia did nothing to prevent one from taking Nagorno-Karabach from the other earlier this year.
So "recognizing the Palestinian state" is all good and well, but unless anyone also gets off their butts and actually does something then the situation in Gaza won't actually change.
azangru · 2h ago
> Sure, but what kind of action does it imply?
A BBC article from a couple of days ago lists about 150 countries that have recognized a Palestinian state, dating back to 1988 (which is, btw, when North Korea recognized it). I don't know what kind of action it implies.
Yes, recognizing Palestine should be a very simple and uncontroversial thing. And yet.
brookst · 2h ago
It’s noble of you to say that countries might as well not recognize Palestine because it will do no good, but by and large the Palestinians have a different view and see such recognition as a first step.
One of the things that makes a country a country is recognition by other countries. Look it up.
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crinkly · 2h ago
As it’s a threat, it’s cheap and easy words to pacify growing hostility within society.
It has nothing to do with helping the Palestinian and Israeli people or holding the Israeli government or Hamas to account.
ysofunny · 2h ago
the god of israelites is merely (trying to) reassert dominance because
we have invented universal translators, so all humans can talk to all humans. like in the myth of the Tower of Babel, this pisses of god Israel so they're throwing a huge tantrum
mensetmanusman · 2h ago
Tower of Babel: The Limits of Human Unity and Ambition
drumhead · 2h ago
He should go to China, they'd set an entire research institute just for him.
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7373737373 · 41m ago
This is the US not shooting itself in the foot or heart anymore, this one is going straight to the brain. Civilizational suicide.
nyeah · 2h ago
Damn slacker. Who does he think he is, defrauding the people by being an eminent mathematician who also does massive outreach to folks at the almost hobbyist level.
PartiallyTyped · 1h ago
He has a very magnetic personality tbh, on all videos he is cheerful, and enthusiastic at talking about math and science without coming across as a know-it-all.
kakadu · 2h ago
Would something like this happen if the hostile educational environment was against - say - black people? Or any other ethnic group?
raincole · 1h ago
Probably not, but definitely should have.
peterfirefly · 45m ago
It's usually favouring blacks heavily. The discrimination is against whites, Asians, natives, non-Socialists, men
ModernMech · 19m ago
I'll give you natives, but men, whites, Asians, and non-socialists can be found in abundance, existing freely and flourishing on any college campus in America.
mi_lk · 2h ago
more like: UCLA grants are targeted by NSF and some of them are suspended including Tao's
poulpy123 · 1h ago
This single out Tao but it's UCLA that is attacked. Let's see how US academia is going to react.
FilosofumRex · 2h ago
This is a patently illegal case of collective punishment by ADL/AIPAC lobby.
UCLA is a public institution and should be free of political pandering.
Any alleged incidents of anti-semitism should be litigated individually, based on specific facts thereof, and if proven, then appropriate sanctions imposed on the guilty parties, only.
estomagordo · 2h ago
Not sure I've ever come across an entity that feels they have to explain why or how something is antisemitic.
I expect most people here are (like me) admirers of Terence Tao, and fans of his work.
But, if UCLA is indeed an institution that routinely violate civil rights law, would we still want our taxes to fund it?
For those objecting to any reduction in federal funding, is this because:
A) You believe UCLA complies with civil rights law (perhaps with small, isolated exceptions that are driven not by policy but by rogue employees), OR
B) You believe there should be enforcement of the law, but it should take a different form, OR
C) Something else?
I live in California, and have some interest in state agencies operating within the law, and for the benefit of all.
UCLA, where Terence Tao works, is part of the University of California system (a state school). Like other UC campuses, UCLA receives substantial federal funding.
There are good reasons to believe that UCLA has, for many years, engaged in racial discrimination in both hiring and admissions. But the issue is whether anyone with legal standing can actually take the school to court and win.
IANAL but my understanding is as follows. If an individual were to sue the school, they would need to be an individual student who had applied and been rejected. But any court case would take years. It is likely that, part way through that process, that individual student would have graduated from another college, and no longer be seeking undergraduate admissions. Thus they would lack standing and the case would be dismissed as moot.
That's why in SFFA vs. Harvard, the plaintiff was a membership organization. As Harvard was continuing to discriminate, there were always new members to join the organization who did individually have standing, even as some of the existing members lost standing.
In any civil suit over admissions policies, UCLA holds two major advantages over individual complainants:
- Vast resources: UCLA has deep pockets with which to pay lawyers.
- High stakes: UCLA has a lot to lose.
But the folks who are injured are recent high school graduates:
- Limited financial means: When you were 18yo, could you have scraped together money to pay lawyers? Most 18yo kids wouldn't even have the money to pay the court filing fee.
- Minimal personal upside: By the time any case progresses, these students have already enrolled elsewhere. Transferring to UCLA mid-degree, even if they win, would be disruptive and often undesirable.
> There are good reasons to believe that UCLA has, for many years, engaged in racial discrimination in both hiring and admissions.
The reason you are being downvoted for your thoughtful comment is that the downvoters know perfectly well this happens, they are fine with it, and they want it to continue because they share the ethnic animosity.
rahimnathwani · 25m ago
I suspect most negative reactions would be some combo of:
- it's off topic to talk about racial discrimination in hiring and admissions, when OP is about how a group is treated on campus
- Terence Tao's research funding shouldn't be affected by politics, and it's irrelevant that he happens to work for UCLA
- dislike the current administration's positions and methods in general
- don't like this particular action, so any attempt to see good in it is bad
SpicyLemonZest · 47m ago
The reason I downvoted the comment is that it's engaged in excuse-making for an authoritarian extortion campaign. I acknowledge and strongly oppose UCLA's racial discrimination in hiring, and if the Department of Education sent them a letter demanding they knock it off or face a lawfully justified penalty I'd have absolutely no concerns about that. Over here in the real world, an aspiring dictator has destroyed the Department of Education, and is directing his goons to be as disruptive as possible about an entirely separate issue.
rahimnathwani · 33m ago
How did my comment engage in 'excuse-making'?
I specifically called out that I was interested in understanding people's rationale for disagreeing with the actions taken by the federal government.
From your comment, it seems like you're mostly in the (B) camp, i.e. wrong enforcement method. Maybe also (C) due to questionable motive for enforcement. Have I understood correctly?
SpicyLemonZest · 21m ago
I would say (B) captures my position pretty precisely, yes. Perhaps I've been too radicalized, because it's very hard for me to credit the idea that (B) is even possible to disagree with.
oulipo · 2h ago
Hopefully Terence will be able to continue his research in France, we would be more than happy to welcome him!
khalic · 1h ago
I really hope Europe has made some plans and put some money on the side for the second american brain drain of this century…
bananapub · 2h ago
I continue to find it fascinating that essentially none of the public American elite actually have any values at all. for all the whinging about "free speech" and "free markets" and "freedom from government", approximately everyone has rolled over and is publicly fine with the president ruling like a king - using laws and regulations to enrich and ennoble favoured courtiers, to punish his imaginary enemies and to destroy institutions and relationships with the world that annoy him. this is literally centuries of hard work by hundreds of millions of past Americans being blown up because one rich cunt doesn't like foreigners or loud students or science but does like getting massive bribes and praise.
lotsofpulp · 2h ago
The problem is even if they had values, American voters chose to elect someone without values.
I do not understand this griping about rolling over when over half the nation votes for a treasonous leader. At that point, the only option left is war.
tolmasky · 1h ago
Over half the nation did not vote for Trump. 77M people of a total population of 340M did, which is around 23%. Trump didn’t even get over half of the total votes cast (49.8% vs. 48.3%). You are free to be dismayed by these numbers, but please stop supporting the notion that “more than one out of every two people you meet in the US voted for Trump”, it is wildly untrue and really misrepresents the strength of the movement.
lotsofpulp · 1h ago
When the stakes are this high, not voting is voting for the winner.
By not voting, they are signaling they are fine with the situation, and will not stand with any opposition to the winner.
Edit to respond to below comment due to hitting posting limit:
>98M of the 185M total population of non-voters had the pretty rock solid excuse of not being eligible to vote, right? Almost a third of the country can’t vote (permanent residents, children, ex-cons in certain states, etc.)
Children seem irrelevant to consider, especially with voting trends of the youngest generations. Same with permanent residents and ex-cons, I don't see any reason these would have cast votes in different proportions. The most damning thing is this is after already seeing the evidence of 2017 to 2020 and the response to Jan 6, 2021.
>55% of White naturalized citizens voted for Trump in 2024, compared with 41% in 2020.
>51% of Hispanic naturalized citizens voted for Trump, up from 39% in 2020.
>46% of Asian naturalized citizens voted for Trump, an increase from 35% in 2020.
>This is without needing to get into the very real voter suppression effort that took place (we’ll assume every one of those “stands” with the winner).
I am assuming the number of people whose votes were prevented were negligible in comparison to the number of people who were apathetic (or boycotting).
>They also probably skew more to your position given their demographics.
A valuable lesson I have learned from 2016 and 2024 elections is that this is not true. What is most important is that people's feelings about their status relative to others not be disturbed (i.e. man over woman and white over non white), and the candidate willing to preserve that, no matter how horrible, is likelier to win more votes.
>I am not sure why you insist on going out of your way to dramatically overrepresent the size of your opposition
Obviously, the measure of the size of the opposition is subjective, and people are free to make bets as they see fit. However, based on the aforementioned "rolling over", it seems others are making the same bet I am.
tolmasky · 35m ago
You’re aware that, just for starters, 98M of the 185M total population of non-voters had the pretty rock solid excuse of not being eligible to vote, right? Almost a third of the country can’t vote (permanent residents, children, ex-cons in certain states, etc.) This is without needing to get into the very real voter suppression effort that took place (we’ll assume every one of those “stands” with the winner). These people may not be able to vote, but they’re still people, and able to participate in the political process in other ways, and thus not worth ignoring (for example, they can donate). They also probably skew more to your position given their demographics.
I am not sure why you insist on going out of your way to dramatically overrepresent the size of your opposition. If there’s some sort of underdog psychology you are trying to tap into, you should maybe also consider the possibility that staunchly presenting the current situation as “we’re outnumbered and most of our population stands with these abhorrent values” may actually be more demoralizing than invigorating as a battle cry, which is even more of a shame when it isn’t true.
bananapub · 1h ago
that's an insane pov.
is it really your sincere proposition that after an American presedential election, there should be no expectation of anyone to criticise the winner, no matter what they do? really?
lotsofpulp · 1h ago
The context of this discussion is a university doing what it needs to gain access to money from the federal government.
>approximately everyone has rolled over
I did not say anything about not criticizing the winner. An "elite" can criticize all they want, but for day to day actions, when the opposing side has all 3 branches of government, willingly given to them by the majority of the population, I can't blame someone for not sacrificing themselves.
My point is this isn't some small group of radicals that weaseled their way in, this is more than half the "country" (if you can call it that), seeing the first term and really his whole life, and saying we want more of this chaos.
Edit: Yes, I know the nominal votes do not add up to half the voters, but practically, if you are to bet on the level of support you would get from opposing the winner, surely you are going to assume the non voters will be fine with however you are treated by the winner, especially this winner with his well known track record.
Effectively, I would expect support of far less than half of my fellow citizens. If you can't be bothered to vote, you're definitely not going to be bothered to do anything more.
sjsdaiuasgdia · 1h ago
> more than half the "country"
2024 voting-eligible population: 244.6M
Voted for Trump: 77.3M
Voted for Harris: 75M
Voted for other candidates: 2.6M
Eligible to vote, but didn't vote: 90M
Unfortunately, the largest constituency continues to be the "can't be fucked to vote" party.
booleandilemma · 42m ago
I think for the past 20 years or so, possibly longer, American politics has been hijacked by people who are just interested in making money for themselves, full stop. Any benefit they provide to the public is incidental, anything they say is lip service. Maybe there are a couple exceptions, such as Bernie, but even he is a millionaire, not an ordinary person.
But yeah, it's just people who are trying to maximize how much money they can get into their pockets. They don't care about the public. They don't care about anything. Democrat, Republican, it's all the same.
Hopefully people will now see the benefit of not centralizing basically all of the power and money on Earth in institutions.
It is extremely annoying how it is a natural fact of life that entities tend to agglomerate and acquire each other, when instead the best way to ensure freedom and openness is through federation.
hydrogen7800 · 2h ago
>Hopefully people will now see the benefit of not centralizing basically all of the power and money on Earth in institutions.
I'm interpreting your comment in the context of scientific institutions being beholden to centralized institutions (i.e. the US federal gov't) via funding. Is that accurate? If so, what's the alternative? The explosion in scientific and technological research in the the 20th century was enabled by the fact that the governments recognized its value and consciously funded it. Prior to that, it was essentially only a small cohort of the aristocracy who saw the value in these pursuits, and was limited by their means and interests.
chickenzzzzu · 2h ago
Yes you are correct in your interpretation. Here's my further opinion:
Those with power and money fund things. Anything else just a name-- "aristocracy", "government/democracy", "private companies".
The reality is, we are all fighting one way or another for the attention and benevolence of those more powerful and wealthy than us, and boy are they fickle. So, you might as well hope for a federation of hundreds of entities, rather than the world we currently have, which is realistically in the dozens at most.
ndsipa_pomu · 2h ago
I'd consider that the issue isn't centralisation so much as that can be very useful, but that rich/connected people are not penalised for breaking laws.
It's absolutely bizarre to me that a convicted felon can run for president and apparently win. It's not surprising to then see that position be abused for personal profit and petty revenge.
Centralising research efforts can make a lot of sense if you want to gather the top people to work on related projects (e.g. CERN)
chickenzzzzu · 1h ago
What you are describing seems to me to be a direct side effect of centralization. If the USA was just one country in a sea of two hundred roughly equal countries, the majority would quickly say "we will not allow that person to be a leader".
But since the USA is basically the world's richest and most powerful entity, the rest of the word begrudgingly tolerates the leader that has somehow come to power, simply because they need to keep the money flowing. There's no other spigot in town.
ndsipa_pomu · 1h ago
I disagree - we have a general principle around the world that a democratically elected "leader" is the result of the votes from the population and thus should be recognised at representing those people. The problem is when democracy is subverted with various methods such as gerrymandering districts, making it harder for some demographics to vote, removing voter registrations of certain demographics, misrepresentation of facts by the mainstream media etc.
It is a real problem with countries declaring "democratic elections" which are mere shams of democracy.
narcissism889 · 1h ago
[flagged]
maleldil · 29m ago
> Israel is a multiethnic country that achieves high standards of living
Ask the Arabs who live in the country if their standard of living is the same as the rest.
assword · 53m ago
Not sure why the religion of genital mutiliation and lying is much better
KnuthIsGod · 2h ago
The world's greatest living mathematician has fallen victim to the battle against Thoughtcrime.
tyrrvk · 2h ago
So much for freedom of speech in US Universities. Israel dictates what is forbidden/permitted on US campuses now?
anon-3988 · 2h ago
Care to provide more context? Does Tao's grants never get rejected?
epistasis · 2h ago
This is not "rejection" this is cancelling an existing grant.
> Breaking: NSF is suspending roughly 300 grants with UCLA, following a DOJ finding on Tuesday that the university violated Title VI by "creating a hostile educational environment for Jewish and Israeli students."
Tao won the Fields Medal in 2006 and won the Royal Medal and Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics in 2014, and is a 2006 MacArthur Fellow. Tao has been the author or co-author of over three hundred research papers, and is widely regarded as one of the greatest living mathematicians.
Outcome: These grants are likely in a temporary holding pattern until ucla settles the issue.
Which is entirely par for the course with the administration and doesn’t seem particularly targeted at Tao. I’m shocked even more NSF grants haven’t been hit, this was a prime DOGE target. They want these headlines.
Of course suspending grants is probably the wrong way to go about it anyway, but since you brought this up... do you imply that it's false? I'm not in the US but I heard pretty interesting things about what was happening in universities following Oct 7.
Students have a first amendment right to express opinions, even anti-Zionist ones.
The administration is using baseless charges of antisemitism as a cudgel to extract fealty and concessions from universities, which they see as opponents of their party.
Creating a hostile environment for students based on their religion would violate the Civil Rights Act. However, there is a paucity of evidence that the universities did that. Allowing protests probably isn't sufficient, especially when prohibiting those same protests would be unconstitutional.
Even if the protesting students were spitting on Jewish students, that doesn't impact the legality of the protest. The spitting could be prosecuted as battery.
I recommend reading this [1] great article about the sometimes confusing rhetoric used in the media about American free speech.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20220313175157/http://popehat.co...
I am 100% sure your comment was downvoted for this sentence:
> I'm not in the US but I heard pretty interesting things about what was happening in universities following Oct 7.
People here don’t like propaganda-fueled speculation. The commenter also literally answered your question. You asked if it was meant to be implied as false and they said yes.
Tbh, this standard argument is itself anti-Jewish as it implies this behavior is inherent to being Jewish, which of course is grotesque and inaccurate.
* Jewish /= Zionist
* Zionist /= Imperialist
* Imperialist /= Genocidal
What we have really imo is an extreme colonist policy that is only superficially Jewish. That doesn’t absolve Jews in Israel supporting it, it rather absolves all those who don’t and makes genocidal colonists take responsibility for their own actions.
Also, genocide is bad.
Edit to reply: what I remember reading was not about saying "end genocide", it was about saying "you are a jew so go die" kind of stuff. It seemed pretty crazy but I didn't save any sources
If I make a sign that says "End the Zionist Genocide", and a Jewish person says "you can't say that about me", they don't feel uncomfortable because they're Jewish.
what a conundrum. if palestinians are getting murdered then the everybody is unhappy but the money is happy (bombs sell)
and if palestinians are NOT getting destroyed, well, I don't think palestinians have never been at peace for as long as I have lived so this is an unknown, hypothetical at this moment. for shame..
Looks to me like they've got their sights on a lot more than one group, some are just more obvious than others.
Over the years I've come to accept the blind spot most people have where, despite all evidence, they assume that the government goals match their own. But it still isn't the case. The prudent approach is to set up institutions that are largely independent of government. Government funding is not an answer to long term problems. Governments are too fickle and the political bandwidth isn't high enough to handle complex arguments like whether researching structure in sequences of 0s and 1s is a good idea.
I know the fashion is to present Trump as some weird aberration but he's been a factor for about 10 years now and won his 3rd election pretty convincing margins. Nobody can say they are surprised that the US government is behaving erratically if it is an environment where Trump is a top contender for high office.
The current "fickleness" is from a single individual. The other branches of government are refusing to check out even criticize his actions. This is what would happen with any funding from individuals. The lesson we should be taking from this situation is either (1) controls on the government need to have more teeth and not rely solely on politicians, or (2) the US accepts authoritarianism right now and no Constitution would stop that.
Funding from private sources who are usually more short-sighted and less transparent can't be the alternative. An alternative I can think of are international entities that have some semblance of independence from constituent nations. I think that for a democratic government, public funding is alright, as long as the government is, well, healthy. In this light the issue with funding is simply a symptom of a government that does not serve its citizens well, which is the root cause that must be cured.
It has been said that government funding is the worst form of funding except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time
Really - I think that more or less confirms your bias.
Translation: ULCA declined to violate the First Ammendment and allowed their students and faculty to criticize Israel.
The protesters were fine to criticize Israel, but then turning the rage to the actual American Jews on campus crossed the line.
Israeli Jews kill tens of thousands of Palestinian children and we are supposed to care that Zionists feel targeted by the protests on campus? Zionists are literally starving people right now. Do you not get that?
Jewish people are fine. The Israeli genocide of Gaza is not.
Lots of Jews don't seem to know that.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/29/ucla-lawsuit...
It would be like us caring about some chimp wars from time forgotten.
I'm really not too concerned about being replaced in the next couple months at least.
When Nixon was getting ready for his recession it was pretty bad too.
Not directly, I admit that was just collateral damage.
About like these NSF grants are situated within the big picture.
FTFY.
Also, DOGE just doing a blanket cut to NSF research grants was horrible.
For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bertrand_Russell_Case
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Thing is, I do find myself missing the one I spent nearly a decade living in, because such networks are self-sorting and I didn't realise how rare it was until I failed to find it again after leaving.
(Still, Berlin is doing me good in almost all other aspects besides being able to accidentally find I've moved right around the corner from the same pub frequented by the author of PuTTY and a co-author of the proof that Magic The Gathering is Turing-complete and one of the Debian project leaders (seriously, all three went to the same pub, and I didn't know before I moved to Cambridge the first time back in 2007)).
Oxford, Imperial, and?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zionism
And now we've largely closed the door to geniuses from wealthy countries. (Why take the risk of living in the USA right now?) We've even taken the first few steps towards deliberately driving out the geniuses we have. I didn't expect that even six months ago.
https://www.britannica.com/place/Palestine/World-War-I-and-a...
The creation of a rogue Israel happened with decolonization, and while it might have been delayed, was inevitable.
Doesn't he work at UCLA?
I imagine a similar story applies to the UK and other places in the Anglosphere
So will the administration's push to use pro-Israel reasons to censure and penalise the universities steadily get out of touch with what the public want and sympathise with?
A king who gets their power from God and can make rules whether or not the people consent is both a monarch and a dictator.
It's why they are so destructive.
The Trump administration is punishing institutions that disagree with it, or that it dislikes for some reason.
It’s all just words as magic spells to justify bad behavior. Semantic content and beliefs aren’t even part of the equation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Liberty_incident
>While millions of American evangelical Christians have long been fervent supporters of the Jewish state because of End Times prophecies
Is that the main reason for this incredibly one-sided relationship?
To the point that you have people who have politics that derivates from a populist/nativist right wing historical current that was always virulently anti-Semitic, now being the staunchest backers of the current Israeli government.
In the post-9/11 era, hatred of Islam, putting an equals-sign between Jewish and Israeli, and smearing anybody on "the left" who criticizes the actions of the Israeli state as "anti-Semitic", and shoring up the Israeli state with massive financial support ... this is all an ideological bundle that is working extremely well for them.
And is allowing them to siphon off support from "moderate" American Democrat voters who share these biases but not the rest of their ideological bill of goods. It's actually allowed them to build a powerful base of support even when they're doing extremely controversial things.
Those two regimes won every battle easily, but what eventually did them in was sanctions. And, when the West sanctions you, you eventually collapse or stay economically irrelevant. Case in point: USSR, Maoist China, Rhodesia, South Africa, etc.
But, the Boomer, Christian Zionist generation is dying out, along with older Germans (and Europeans) who still struggle with some Teutonic guilt.
Irreligious, humanist youngsters across the Americas and Europe now see it's a clear good vs. bad struggle and the Zionists are not the good guys, so Israel likely believes they need to expel the Palestinians from Gaza & the West Bank within one generation or they'll be facing devastating sanctions within 10-20 years.
Given that Israel's economy depends heavily on technology service exports, diamonds, and agriculture, if they don't change posture and end up getting sanctioned, it'll cripple them without a doubt. Just cutting off their technology workers' foreign exchange salaries is enough to shrink the economy by half once that FX channel dries up.
The questions are very specific rather than general. For example you can disapprove of the military action and the president of a country, but that doesn't mean when asked "pick a winner" you'd pick the other guy.
I mean if the US went to war with North Korea and Pyongyang got flattened, I would certainly disapprove of the US military and the president, but I probably wouldn't consider the other party "winning".
So as always it depends on which question you ask. You can ask questions to get the answer you paid for (speaking as an ex-statistician who worked for a pollster)
You can imagine the next Democrat administration defunding universities based on their collaboration with Israel, for example. Or defunding universities based on their punishment of pro-Palestinian demonstrators, etc..
People should accept that Israel lost against Hamas and be prepared for the consequences of that going forward. It's pretty much the same as a Vietnam situation, with the war being won/lost based on public opinion.
It looks to me that the extremists in Hamas gave extremist Israelis the excuse to do what they always wanted to do. And everyone who isn't an extremist lost. Meanwhile, the Hamas leadership are living in 5 star luxury in Qatar.
The worst that serious Democrats might do is publicly compare Israel's current behavior to the US's lashing out at Afghanistan after the WTC attacks.
This is resulting in current Democratic elected officials being removed from power when their term expires, starting with the US Presidency last year, which was lost BECAUSE of their support for Israel. A YouGov poll earlier this year showed the primary reason Biden 2020 voters didn't vote for Harris was because of Israel: https://www.imeupolicyproject.org/postelection-polling
This is all happening quickly. You won't see any Democratic candidate that supports Israel run for President in 2028.
Supporting Israel, including acknowledging their right to respond militarily to terrorist attacks, is one thing. Falling deeply in love with Netanyahu's current policies is another. Freaking out and caring only about Hamas is ... a third thing.
There are lunatics in the US who seem to have completely forgotten the 1300-1400 Israelis killed by Hamas just last year, but who can see the human disaster in Gaza. I don't think those people are so politically engaged on that single issue that they deliberately stayed home from the polls and let Trump win ... in order to ... help people in Gaza? I could be wrong, but it doesn't seem to fit together.
EDIT: To be fair those same folks are notorious for shooting themselves in the foot. So who knows?
EDIT 2: Some of the lunatics above are probably anti-Semitic, despite Trump's claims that they are anti-Semitic. But again how does that drive them to help Trump right now?
More like the two things aren't even remotely in the same ballpark. Imagine if the US had surrounded Baghdad and intentionally starved the residents. And even that example still fails to account for some of the context.
And now honnest question: why is this support so strong in the US ? are the ties with the jewish/israely community so deep between these two peoples ?
And so many people who are rightfully proud of their Jewish ethnicity and cultural identification -- a rich and beautiful culture that has had absolutely outsized contributions to art, science, culture in the west, with a history of being persecuted and mistreated by said "west" -- have become defacto "citizens-abroad" and advocates for Israeli positions in all things.
That combined with a deep and historical distrust of Islam in western culture...
It's the same story here in Canada. How deep the bank account for this blank cheque is, I don't know.
I should say that as a left wing critic of what happens in the middle east under Israel's banner, I am also deeply uncomfortable with some of the anti-Semitic tinge some forms of the protest take. It's a conundrum.
It is absolutely important to make it clear the criticism is of the actions of Israel, and not "Jews"
Christian sects that believe the second coming of Jesus is not too far away believe that Israel's existence is critical to bring that to pass.
People with anti-muslim or anti-arabian feelings see Israel as a counterweight to muslim and arabian power in the middle east.
There's a lot of people who, consciously or not, equate anything other than total support for Israel with antisemitism.
So "recognizing the Palestinian state" is all good and well, but unless anyone also gets off their butts and actually does something then the situation in Gaza won't actually change.
A BBC article from a couple of days ago lists about 150 countries that have recognized a Palestinian state, dating back to 1988 (which is, btw, when North Korea recognized it). I don't know what kind of action it implies.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvgp5z1vvj5o
Turns out, it's complicated.
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It has nothing to do with helping the Palestinian and Israeli people or holding the Israeli government or Hamas to account.
we have invented universal translators, so all humans can talk to all humans. like in the myth of the Tower of Babel, this pisses of god Israel so they're throwing a huge tantrum
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Any alleged incidents of anti-semitism should be litigated individually, based on specific facts thereof, and if proven, then appropriate sanctions imposed on the guilty parties, only.
https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2347850&His...
But, if UCLA is indeed an institution that routinely violate civil rights law, would we still want our taxes to fund it?
For those objecting to any reduction in federal funding, is this because:
A) You believe UCLA complies with civil rights law (perhaps with small, isolated exceptions that are driven not by policy but by rogue employees), OR
B) You believe there should be enforcement of the law, but it should take a different form, OR
C) Something else?
I live in California, and have some interest in state agencies operating within the law, and for the benefit of all.
UCLA, where Terence Tao works, is part of the University of California system (a state school). Like other UC campuses, UCLA receives substantial federal funding.
There are good reasons to believe that UCLA has, for many years, engaged in racial discrimination in both hiring and admissions. But the issue is whether anyone with legal standing can actually take the school to court and win.
IANAL but my understanding is as follows. If an individual were to sue the school, they would need to be an individual student who had applied and been rejected. But any court case would take years. It is likely that, part way through that process, that individual student would have graduated from another college, and no longer be seeking undergraduate admissions. Thus they would lack standing and the case would be dismissed as moot.
That's why in SFFA vs. Harvard, the plaintiff was a membership organization. As Harvard was continuing to discriminate, there were always new members to join the organization who did individually have standing, even as some of the existing members lost standing.
In any civil suit over admissions policies, UCLA holds two major advantages over individual complainants:
- Vast resources: UCLA has deep pockets with which to pay lawyers.
- High stakes: UCLA has a lot to lose.
But the folks who are injured are recent high school graduates:
- Limited financial means: When you were 18yo, could you have scraped together money to pay lawyers? Most 18yo kids wouldn't even have the money to pay the court filing fee.
- Minimal personal upside: By the time any case progresses, these students have already enrolled elsewhere. Transferring to UCLA mid-degree, even if they win, would be disruptive and often undesirable.
UCLA is currently being sued by a membership organization. In a couple of weeks, they will file their response to this complaint: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cacd.95...
One of the people who initiated the lawsuit is Richard Sander, a professor at UCLA: https://law.ucla.edu/faculty/faculty-profiles/richard-h-sand...
Some folks don't like this: https://dailybruin.com/2025/04/21/ucla-law-students-lead-pro...
The reason you are being downvoted for your thoughtful comment is that the downvoters know perfectly well this happens, they are fine with it, and they want it to continue because they share the ethnic animosity.
- it's off topic to talk about racial discrimination in hiring and admissions, when OP is about how a group is treated on campus
- Terence Tao's research funding shouldn't be affected by politics, and it's irrelevant that he happens to work for UCLA
- dislike the current administration's positions and methods in general
- don't like this particular action, so any attempt to see good in it is bad
I specifically called out that I was interested in understanding people's rationale for disagreeing with the actions taken by the federal government.
From your comment, it seems like you're mostly in the (B) camp, i.e. wrong enforcement method. Maybe also (C) due to questionable motive for enforcement. Have I understood correctly?
I do not understand this griping about rolling over when over half the nation votes for a treasonous leader. At that point, the only option left is war.
By not voting, they are signaling they are fine with the situation, and will not stand with any opposition to the winner.
Edit to respond to below comment due to hitting posting limit:
>98M of the 185M total population of non-voters had the pretty rock solid excuse of not being eligible to vote, right? Almost a third of the country can’t vote (permanent residents, children, ex-cons in certain states, etc.)
Children seem irrelevant to consider, especially with voting trends of the youngest generations. Same with permanent residents and ex-cons, I don't see any reason these would have cast votes in different proportions. The most damning thing is this is after already seeing the evidence of 2017 to 2020 and the response to Jan 6, 2021.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/06/26/voting-patte...
>55% of White naturalized citizens voted for Trump in 2024, compared with 41% in 2020.
>51% of Hispanic naturalized citizens voted for Trump, up from 39% in 2020.
>46% of Asian naturalized citizens voted for Trump, an increase from 35% in 2020.
>This is without needing to get into the very real voter suppression effort that took place (we’ll assume every one of those “stands” with the winner).
I am assuming the number of people whose votes were prevented were negligible in comparison to the number of people who were apathetic (or boycotting).
>They also probably skew more to your position given their demographics.
A valuable lesson I have learned from 2016 and 2024 elections is that this is not true. What is most important is that people's feelings about their status relative to others not be disturbed (i.e. man over woman and white over non white), and the candidate willing to preserve that, no matter how horrible, is likelier to win more votes.
>I am not sure why you insist on going out of your way to dramatically overrepresent the size of your opposition
Obviously, the measure of the size of the opposition is subjective, and people are free to make bets as they see fit. However, based on the aforementioned "rolling over", it seems others are making the same bet I am.
I am not sure why you insist on going out of your way to dramatically overrepresent the size of your opposition. If there’s some sort of underdog psychology you are trying to tap into, you should maybe also consider the possibility that staunchly presenting the current situation as “we’re outnumbered and most of our population stands with these abhorrent values” may actually be more demoralizing than invigorating as a battle cry, which is even more of a shame when it isn’t true.
is it really your sincere proposition that after an American presedential election, there should be no expectation of anyone to criticise the winner, no matter what they do? really?
>approximately everyone has rolled over
I did not say anything about not criticizing the winner. An "elite" can criticize all they want, but for day to day actions, when the opposing side has all 3 branches of government, willingly given to them by the majority of the population, I can't blame someone for not sacrificing themselves.
My point is this isn't some small group of radicals that weaseled their way in, this is more than half the "country" (if you can call it that), seeing the first term and really his whole life, and saying we want more of this chaos.
Edit: Yes, I know the nominal votes do not add up to half the voters, but practically, if you are to bet on the level of support you would get from opposing the winner, surely you are going to assume the non voters will be fine with however you are treated by the winner, especially this winner with his well known track record.
Effectively, I would expect support of far less than half of my fellow citizens. If you can't be bothered to vote, you're definitely not going to be bothered to do anything more.
2024 voting-eligible population: 244.6M
Voted for Trump: 77.3M
Voted for Harris: 75M
Voted for other candidates: 2.6M
Eligible to vote, but didn't vote: 90M
Unfortunately, the largest constituency continues to be the "can't be fucked to vote" party.
But yeah, it's just people who are trying to maximize how much money they can get into their pockets. They don't care about the public. They don't care about anything. Democrat, Republican, it's all the same.
It is extremely annoying how it is a natural fact of life that entities tend to agglomerate and acquire each other, when instead the best way to ensure freedom and openness is through federation.
I'm interpreting your comment in the context of scientific institutions being beholden to centralized institutions (i.e. the US federal gov't) via funding. Is that accurate? If so, what's the alternative? The explosion in scientific and technological research in the the 20th century was enabled by the fact that the governments recognized its value and consciously funded it. Prior to that, it was essentially only a small cohort of the aristocracy who saw the value in these pursuits, and was limited by their means and interests.
Those with power and money fund things. Anything else just a name-- "aristocracy", "government/democracy", "private companies".
The reality is, we are all fighting one way or another for the attention and benevolence of those more powerful and wealthy than us, and boy are they fickle. So, you might as well hope for a federation of hundreds of entities, rather than the world we currently have, which is realistically in the dozens at most.
It's absolutely bizarre to me that a convicted felon can run for president and apparently win. It's not surprising to then see that position be abused for personal profit and petty revenge.
Centralising research efforts can make a lot of sense if you want to gather the top people to work on related projects (e.g. CERN)
But since the USA is basically the world's richest and most powerful entity, the rest of the word begrudgingly tolerates the leader that has somehow come to power, simply because they need to keep the money flowing. There's no other spigot in town.
It is a real problem with countries declaring "democratic elections" which are mere shams of democracy.
Ask the Arabs who live in the country if their standard of living is the same as the rest.
> Breaking: NSF is suspending roughly 300 grants with UCLA, following a DOJ finding on Tuesday that the university violated Title VI by "creating a hostile educational environment for Jewish and Israeli students."
https://bsky.app/profile/dangaristo.bsky.social/post/3lvc7ld...
Tao won the Fields Medal in 2006 and won the Royal Medal and Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics in 2014, and is a 2006 MacArthur Fellow. Tao has been the author or co-author of over three hundred research papers, and is widely regarded as one of the greatest living mathematicians.