A university president makes a case against cowardice

https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/a-university-president-makes-a-case-against-cowardice

by pseudolus • 1 year ago

468 397 1 year ago

newyorker.com

pseudolus• 1 year ago

https://archive.ph/a9ie5

JKCalhoun2• 1 year ago

Wild that he is some kind of exception. Rolling over, folding is not the university culture I remember.

rincebrain2• 1 year ago

There wasn't, historically, the level of enormous potential negative consequences legally and practically if the universities talked back.

Universities, like many institutions, have also become more like large incumbent businesses than previously - e.g. perpetuating their own existence over having strong core values.

toddmorey• 1 year ago

This is really well articulated. It's like how a company uses fiduciary responsibility to shareholders to justify a pivot away from some kind of principled stance.

cess112• 1 year ago

Might have been a mistake to let some of them turn into real estate hedge funds.

Thorrez• 1 year ago

Biden was considering withholding federal funds from schools over their vaccine policies[1], and tried to withhold federal funds from schools based on how they treat transgender students[2], but that was blocked by a judge. Obama did a similar thing regarding transgender students[3].

Things like this are why Hillsdale College rejects all federal funds. So they can do what they want without threat of the government revoking funding[4].

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/biden-vaccines-delta...

[2] https://www.texastribune.org/2024/06/12/texas-title-ix-lgbtq...

[3] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/05/13/477896804...

[4] https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/07/the-co...

CaptWillard• 1 year ago

Not sure when you graduated, but I've seen a complete inversion.

Much like 90s rockers, they now rage exclusively on behalf of the machine.

JKCalhoun2• 1 year ago

1990, FWIW.

Spooky23• 1 year ago

Many universities are more like family offices that operate schools. Columbia is historically one of the biggest slumlords in NYC through their various entities.

insane_dreamer8• 1 year ago

not the university culture I remember.

that's because universities are now businesses first, research institutions second, and academic institutions third

red_admiral• 1 year ago

This point gets to the heart of the matter. The more I look into it, everything else seems downstream from this.

dudinax• 1 year ago

And yet the US has some of the best universities in the world academically.

mantas5• 1 year ago

Some of that so-called activism seems to be closer to suppressing any thoughts someone dislikes. Removing that from university life is not cool, that „activism“ itself went off the rails too.

throw48472853• 1 year ago

Freedom of speech necessarily implies that a group of people might team up and loudly announce that the people they don't agree with are incorrect and immoral and should be ignored or even ostracized. That's the price of freedom of speech, and it's a fair price.

Being annoyed, inconvenienced, or even negatively impacted by the speech acts of others is by design. To throw that out is to make a calculation that without freedom of speech, your perspective will be the natural default without activism to upset it. A dangerous assumption.

clarionbell• 1 year ago

Problem is that in the past two decades university admins gave in to various deplatforming causes and enforced codes. If they had stood firm before, the arguments against them wouldn't be nearly as strong. Unfortunately, they didn't. So when they now use the "free speech" argument themselves it rings hollow.

geertj• 1 year ago

they don't agree with are incorrect and immoral and should be ignored or even ostracized

You have that right. But doing this is not always wise. Labeling people as immoral and ostracizing them, especially on 50/50 issues, is one of the reason why the American political system is so radicalized at the moment.

mantas5• 1 year ago

I’ll defend other people rights to offend me. But nowadays some people think others, even just between themselves, can’t say what would offend them.

lelanthran4• 1 year ago

Freedom of speech necessarily implies that a group of people might team up and loudly announce that the people they don't agree with are incorrect and immoral and should be ignored or even ostracized. That's the price of freedom of speech, and it's a fair price.

Sure, agreed. But groups and institutions taking even a dime of tax money should not get to place a thumb on the scales of those arguments. US universities, in particular, chose a side and then silenced all opposing viewpoints.

It was inevitable that the silenced would eventually mobilise, and they did. And now the group has to abandon their arguments about allowing "punching up" and instead pontificate on "free speech".

Myself (and many others) argued over the last decade and more that the pendulum always swings back, so lets be a little less extreme in the left/right argument. I, on this site, got labeled a non-thinking right-winger apologist for pointing out that the mainstream views on transgender for minors does not match the views that the powers-that-be were pushing.

You can't push for normalising the silencing of views for well over a decade without you yourself eventually falling victim to the same normalisation.

mkoubaa• 1 year ago

We all know that isn't the kind of activism being targeted.

Cthulhu_• 1 year ago

Can you be a bit more specific what kind of "thought suppression" you mean?

mind-blight• 1 year ago

I know someone who works for a university in event planning. They were putting together an event for a civil rights icon. Because of the new policies, they were forced to go through all of the brochures and pamphlets and censor any use of words such as "racism" and "black" (when referring to the man's skin color).

They literally couldn't say "black man fighting against racism" about a civil rights icon without losing millions in funding. I have no idea how someone can argue that this kind of censorship targeting universities is acceptable

mantas5• 1 year ago

It is not acceptable. But at the same time the US „antiracist“ campaign itself looks just like (reverse) racism in many case. Two unacceptables don’t cancel each other out. But you reap what you saw.

Just my 2 euro cents.

diogocp• 1 year ago

They literally couldn't say "black man fighting against racism" about a civil rights icon without losing millions in funding.

They could. They just preferred to play the victim.

CapricornNoble• 1 year ago

They literally couldn't say "black man fighting against racism" about a civil rights icon without losing millions in funding. I have no idea how someone can argue that this kind of censorship targeting universities is acceptable

Sounds like they are being forced to take the Morgan Freeman Approach to Ending Racism: stop talking about race. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2RwJlQdzpE

DeathArrow• 1 year ago

It's nice universities will have to reform themselves and people will be able to speak their minds again without being afraid.

scarface_74• 1 year ago

You mean like afraid of being deported when they are here legally?

alabastervlog• 1 year ago

The data do not support what you suggest being a widespread problem. There's a popular story about it being a big problem, but when people start trotting out examples most of them fall apart on closer examination, which is weird if lots of solid examples exist (why pick so many that are, at best a stretch if not simply wrong, if this is a widespread trend and not just a couple actual events that were maybe not great?). Folks have tracked things like speaker cancellations, and there are vanishingly few of those, conservatives, even fairly fringe ones, speak on campuses all the time.

PathOfEclipse2• 1 year ago

I like how you claim data doesn't support this being a problem but at the same time can't be bothered to cite any data. I'll do it for you: https://5666503.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/5666503...

"Alarming proportions of students self-censor, report worry or discomfort about expressing their ideas in a variety of contexts, find controversial ideas hard to discuss, show intolerance for controversial speakers, find their administrations unclear or worse regarding support for free speech, and even report that disruption of events or violence are, to some degree, acceptable tactics for shutting down the speech of others."

"Less than one-in-four students (22%) reported that they felt “very comfortable” expressing their views on a controversial political topic in a discussion with other students in a common campusspace. Even fewer (20%) reported feeling “very comfortable” expressing disagreement with one of their professors about a controversial topic in a written assignment; 17% said the same about expressing their views on a controversial political topic during an in-class discussion; 14%, about expressing an unpopular opinion to their peers on a social media account tied to their name; and 13%, about publicly disagreeing with a professor about a controversial political topic. "

And as for examples, the sitting NIH director, Jay Bhattacharya, who in hindsight was far more correct on everything COVID-related than the CDC was: had this to say about his experience at Stanford: https://stanfordreview.org/stanfords-censorship-an-interview...

" I presented the results in a seminar in the medical school, and I was viciously attacked. ... It was really nasty: allegations of research misconduct, undeclared conflicts of interest… In reality, the whole study was funded by small-dollar donations."

"It was very stressful. I had to hire lawyers. I've been at Stanford for 38 years and I felt it was really, really out of character. At one point, the Chair of Medicine ordered me to stop going on media and to stop giving interviews about COVID policy. They were trying to totally silence me."

carbocation4• 1 year ago

So far the fight/not fight decisions can be predicted in advanced based on whether an institution has a medical center with NIH grants.

alephnerd3• 1 year ago

And if they hire the right alumni lobbyists - major reason why you don't hear about Dartmouth in the news [0] despite a similarly active student activism scene.

Most other private universities could have easily managed the relationship, but a mix of inertia and vindictiveness from certain alumni (eg. Ackman) messed it up.

Mind you, Dartmouth is also kind of unique in that their alumni relations team actually TRY to maintain a relationship. The other high prestige colleges (excluding USC) ignore you until they need to hit fundraising KPIs.

A Tuck or Dartmouth College grad will always fight for an alum if they make it to the shortlist - most other Ivy grads don't (Wharton kinda, but that's only for Wharton). This really helps build loyalty.

[0] https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/19/trump-is-bombarding...

ghaff2• 1 year ago

Dartmouth is smaller and has, historically, had a stronger and more intense ongoing alumni connection in various ways than is probably the norm with the Ivies in general.

CPLX• 1 year ago

Dartmouth is also famously the "conservative" Ivy.

Balgair• 1 year ago

The way I saw the Columbia protests was that Donny's trial was downtown, and because it was not televised, producers told their crews to stop filming the doors to the courthouse. So, looking for any story at all, they took the subway uptown to the hippies camping out on the quad. Hey, at least it's better than literally staring at a door, right? Next thing you know, the student protest thing blew up. Why? Because there was literally nothing else going on for the TV news crews to film those days. Soon as graduation happened and the trial wrapped up, we never heard another thing.

Dartmouth, sure, it may have a high energy protest scene and be smart and whatever. But no-one knows about it - not because they are crafty - but because it's in freakin Hanover.

insane_dreamer8• 1 year ago

Dartmouth's time may still come. Brown is apparently about to be targeted next. Trump is clearly not done yet.

ty68532• 1 year ago

And NSF grants?

carbocation4• 1 year ago

I’m not familiar with the NSF funding mechanisms or how people track NSF funding. Not saying NSF is not relevant, just that I’m not using it for my personal heuristic right now.

drooby2• 1 year ago

He states in the interview that Wesleyan has NIH grants. They are preparing to let scientists go if it comes to it.

carbocation4• 1 year ago

Wesleyan does not have a medical center and according to the NIH’s public reporting, they have under $2 million in NIH grants, compared to $600 million for Columbia. (Edited from $400 million, which is the value cut.)

Wesleyan has a $250 million operating budget, so the (from what REPORTER indicates) $1.6 million in NIH funding represents 0.6% of their budget. In contrast, the $600 million in NIH funding to Columbia represents about 10% of its $6 billion operating budget.

So both in terms of absolute numbers and relative numbers, the NIH contributions to Wesleyan are de minimis.

doctorpangloss• 1 year ago

And in the last two months, it’s become painfully apparent that wanting to have nice conversations is not going to stop people who are bent on authoritarianism. Right now, I’m not sure what will stop them, except successful court challenges, and even that seems precarious.

Winning elections could work.

Watching the video of this poor woman at Tufts who was abducted by federal agents —I wrote my blog today about that. I think the government is spreading terror, and that’s what they mean to do.

Brother, a blog post is, quoting you, a “nice conversation.” A New Yorker interview is a nice conversation.

Getting rid of legacy admissions… guess who wins elections? The sons and daughters of politicians! Whereas grandstanding on X or Y achieves nothing.

tomohawk• 1 year ago

This is rich. The Universities that caved to student activists engaged in antisemitism and other egregious activities should now fight for their rights to be cowards? Or the Universities that engaged in racist DEI programs are now going to stand on principal?

Give me a break.

MrBuddyCasino• 1 year ago

If tenure was designed to protect intellectual freedom, but academics are consistently the biggest cowards failing to stand up to anything - what does that say about academia?

bigyabai• 1 year ago

I thought private institutions weren't supposed to worry about federal guidelines. Does this mean Trump University can be attacked if a sufficiently powerful liberal wants to smear their university president for his antisemitic behavior?

sequoia4• 1 year ago

A lot of Americans support these attacks on universities. Why do people harbour this much animosity towards these institutions? Is there anything they could have done differently in the past decade or two to have broader sympathy now, or is people's ambivalence towards elite universities 100% irrational?

pjc50• 1 year ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings was arguably a worse time for universities.

Protesting attracts reprisals. Universities taught people, both explicitly and by example, to stand up for what they believed in, but have undersold students on how dangerous that is. Universities could have done a better job explaining that certain injustices are load-bearing, and that calling them out will make half the country hate you.

LatteLazy• 1 year ago

certain injustices are load-bearing

This is an excellent way of explaining why some injustices are ignored and others decried. Thank you

matthewdgreen2• 1 year ago

People in the 1960s were murdered for protesting. You might imagine that this motivated an end to protest, and everyone calmed down. But in fact, it didn't. The very best way to motivate increased protest is to act like a bunch of monsters.

drooby2• 1 year ago

I think it's actually extremely simple.. because the herd mentality is extremely simple. Intellectuals think it's complex because intellectuals love complexity.. This is what happened..

The right witnessed riots over the past decade. These riots were in response to police brutality and perceived racism. The ideas behind anti-racism spawned a perceived new ideology - "wokism". This frightened the right. Intellectuals on the right mapped the origins of this new ideology to philosophies from elite institutions. Therefore, these institutions must be punished to be kept in check.

It's really that simple..

What I find interesting about this guy is that in a way he actually is "caving" to the demands of the administration. This uni president advocates for more heterodox thinking - which is in alignment with what the Trump admin wants as well... maybe that's why Wesleyan won't be punished..

krapp3• 1 year ago

Nothing about this is new - the right has harbored a particular hatred for "academics" and "intellectuals" since at least the anti-war and civil rights movements of the 1960s. Today's fear of "wokism" is just the prior generation's fear of "cultural marxism" with a new coat of paint.

But this kind of political talk is against the guidelines. Good hackers don't care about any of this. So Javascript is getting crazy, huh?

ty68532• 1 year ago

Most people don't care about university protests. They're largely a means to get laid while achieving nothing and at worst destroying their own university. As long as they don't spill out into the surrounding town any outrage is essentially theater.

lr4444lr2• 1 year ago

There are some reasons that I think you probably know, which don't receive enough time and attention

1) Despite an appearance of being "left leaning" (according to polls of faculty political sentiment) they continue to gatekeep education behind prohibitively expensive tuition that is out of reach of lower economic strata without crippling debt, and have simultaneously struggled to produce graduates whose economic differential easily makes up for that expense and lost work time.

2) They enjoy a tax free status while receiving significant tax money despite many failing to grow their student bodies in tandem with the growth of the US population, leading to people questioning whether they deserve those benefits as institutions that serve the public.

3) There is a sentiment that basic literacy and numeracy of graduates has dropped over the last decades outside of a narrow area of studies, because of a shift to a model where students are customers buying a credential instead of getting an education.

(These are all interrelated, of course.)

insane_dreamer8• 1 year ago

many failing to grow their student bodies in tandem with the growth of the US population

this is mostly true of elite schools (who nowadays are mostly selling a brand more than an education), not so much of state schools

kjkjadksj4• 1 year ago

Lower economic strata doesn't take on debt, they get aid and free rides, cherry work study jobs to put some money in the pocket too. It is the middle class or upper middle class that insists in eschewing their state school benefit for a more or less comparable school in another state (or without favorable scholarship and aid package) that take the brunt of the loans.

bobthepanda4• 1 year ago

Also to some degree there is anti-elitist backlash after being told you need to have a bachelor's, which is very expensive at these universities, but also it's basically impossible to get an entry-level white collar job without one these days; and for a while the economy bifurcated with different outcomes for white-collar knowledge vs. blue-collar workers.

justonceokay• 1 year ago

I have multiple family members that are frustrated with higher learning because their children came out of the system more liberal-minded than when they entered. In this politically divided climate they feel like the university system “stole” their children from them.

In reality I don’t think people’s political opinions change very much and they are just mad that their children individuated.

_bohm• 1 year ago

While not about resentment towards universities specifically, I thought this article in The Baffler [1] did a good job of framing a dynamic that, I think, contributes to this phenomenon.

My interpretation: As the country has entered the post-industrial era, holding a college degree has increasingly become a table-stakes credential for entering the white collar labor force. The higher education system has struggled or failed to grow to meet increased demand for these credentials, which both drives up the cost and increases selectivity of higher-ed institutions. A lot of people get burned by this and become locked out of and, crucially, geographically separated from labor markets that now constitute the majority of US GDP. This split causes non degree holders to view degree holders as their class enemies, and the universities as the class gateway that divides them.

[1] https://thebaffler.com/latest/one-elite-two-elites-red-elite...

keybored• 1 year ago

Remember all those people who are resentful (of course that word) towards degree-holders because they wish they had one themselves? Me neither. That’s a they-hate-me-cause’-they-ain’t-me kind of logic.[1]

True othering comes from people living in different worlds and hating the other person’s world.

[1] I did not read the the article but I’ve read this argument in a Graeber article.

bell-cot• 1 year ago

There's a highly emotional Right-Left culture war going on in America. Many of our "flagship" universities conspicuously sided with the Left - at least on most of the "litmus test" issues. And where universities didn't do that, the Right found it advantageous to talk up the association & outrage anyway.

Any decent History Prof. could have explained to the U's that openly taking one side in long-term cultural wars was not a viable long-term strategy.

(Or, maybe that's why so many universities cut their History Dept's so brutally? Though "just shoot inconvenient messengers" is also not a viable long-term strategy.)

mrtesthah• 1 year ago

Billionaires shifted the overton window by pouring money into extreme right-wing media outlets and social media platforms. Every other existing institution now appears "left-wing" by comparison. That's not universities' fault.

matthewdgreen2• 1 year ago

The culture war was over about sixty days into the Trump administration. Lots of people just haven't realized it yet.

Aeolun4• 1 year ago

Many of our "flagship" universities conspicuously sided with the Left

I wonder if that’s related to universities often being places where ‘reasoning’ is taught.

And then by extension, that tells you a lot about the arguments on either side…

disambiguation7• 1 year ago

The political and ideological divide speaks for itself, but on behalf of the common folk universities have been failing their core mission - to provide the people with a quality education. The inversion and disconnect between the cost of tuition and economic outcomes is stunning. Too many kids who don't know better are pressured into pursuing higher education and taking on massive debt, only to graduate without any job prospects or reasonable hopes of paying off their loans. The salt in the wounds is that universities are flush with cash, yet its spent on anything and everything except for the welfare of the students.

harimau777• 1 year ago

It feels to me like part of the disconnect is that education and job training isn't necessarily the same thing. For many majors improving economic outcomes is not the core mission.

jwjohnson314• 1 year ago

The salt in the wounds is that universities are flush with cash, yet its spent on anything and everything except for the welfare of the students.

Maybe the elites. State schools and small colleges are not flush with cash and many have been shuttered or severely downsized recently. Though they could still spend their limited funds better.

taeric4• 1 year ago

Have they been failing at their core missions, though? You say there has been an inversion/disconnect between cost of tuition and economic outcomes, but looking at the data doesn't back that. At least, I have yet to see anything that supports an inversion. Diminished returns maybe. Certainly a good case to not take out loans to get into school if you don't have a reasonable chance of graduation.

But that is true of everything we do loans for, nowadays. The amount of consumer debt that people contort themselves into justifying is insane. If you want to use that as evidence that grade schools are failing in education, I can largely agree with you.

avs733• 1 year ago

but on behalf of the common folk universities have been failing their core mission - to provide the people with a quality education.

I see this a lot and it’s a concerningly reductive argument. Say what you want about a lot of colleges but when you talk about that mission you are talking about public colleges. Most have far lower endowments and most are very reasonably priced or free for instate students.

Georgia and California are great examples of this. The support for these institutions that used to come from states has gone down enormously while the cost of goods has gone up.

As a result it is not unreasonable to me for them to charge out of state and international students much much more. Georgia shouldn’t be subsidizing the college degrees of Alabamans, nor California of Arizonans.

All that to say the economics here are far more variable than people give much thought to and it’s easy to point at headline grabbing numbers that don’t reflect reality.

Schools rent the ones pressuring kids…their parents and society is.

InDubioProRubio• 1 year ago

Their core mission is to provide society with a endless surplus of food and energy from air

dogleash• 1 year ago

or is people's ambivalence towards elite universities 100% irrational?

    am·biv·a·lence  /amˈbiv(ə)ləns/ noun
    the state of having mixed feelings or contradictory ideas about something or someone.

Ambivalence seems like a rational take on post-secondary education in the US. I'd say an unwavering opinion (positive or negative) would be irrational. It's such a complex beast that serves so many roles and touches so many lives.

A lot of Americans support these attacks on universities. Why do people harbour this much animosity towards these institutions?

There are a lot of very real things that are rotten in academia if you exclude the social politics center to this article.

So when people see they're loosing federal funding... yeah, some will think along the lines of "eh, whatever, fuck 'em, maybe they'll figure out how to clean their own house." Especially if the university is also known for both sitting on a large endowment and for prioritizing self-serving administrators over doing academics.

Gothmog69• 1 year ago

They could have not been so partisan (https://readlion.com/93-of-college-profs-political-donations... ), supported rational discourse ( https://www.thefire.org/research-learn/2025-college-free-spe... ) , not used race to discriminate on certain out groups ( https://asianamericanforeducation.org/en/issue/discriminatio... ). Just for starters

fn-mote• 1 year ago

> Is there anything they could have done differently in the past decade or two to have broader sympathy now
not used race to discriminate on certain out groups ( https://asianamericanforeducation.org/en/issue/discriminatio... )

Since we have documentation of discrimination in university admissions for over a century, I don't think this particular issue produces "broader sympathy now".

In fact, I will be speechless if I ever learn the new administration policies do not lead to even higher levels of, but I suppose different, discrimination. Check back in 6 months.

recursive• 1 year ago

Provide a way to get a lower-cost credential without using the tuition to subsidize research/athletics/arts/social programs.

But that might be counter to their whole nature. Doesn't mean anyone's being irrational though. They're now de-facto gatekeepers on entering the professional class. I don't think it's unreasonable for the gate-kept to have opinions about the -keepers.

treis• 1 year ago

I've got the ticket to get in the gate and I'm pretty resentful of having to get it. Looking back there were a lot better ways to spend 4 years and 100k.

xracy9• 1 year ago

Honestly, it feels like the kind of thing that companies which actually want merit-based graduates should want to subsidize more aggressively.

If you're a billion-dollar company that only hires college grads, it feels like there's gotta be value to you in making sure there's more meritocracy in the process of getting degrees.

It would also change who the customer is so that the university doesn't "owe" the student a degree which makes the evaluation that universities do a little less rigorous.

guywithahat4• 1 year ago

attacks on universities

This really feels like bad phrasing, when people read that they roll their eyes. Basically every major republican politician went to college, nobody is attacking universities, they're trying to help the students.

watwut• 1 year ago

Yes they went to universities. No, they are not trying to help the students. They don't even pretend to be trying to do so. They are nit trying to make it cheaper and they are not trying to make it more accessible.

They agenda was either openly the opposite or they ignored the students. Except when they think they are too progressive and attack then verbally.

sequoia4• 1 year ago

apologies, I meant to suggest that Trump & MAGA are very hostile towards universities and Trump is threatening to pull so much federal funding some colleges may have to close, and a lot of Americans seem OK with that. I'm not making a value statement on that, Trump was elected to run the government, hence him reallocating funds (in this case) is part of our democratic process. People chose to put him in charge because they wanted him in charge.

To tip my hand: I personally think universities don't have more people rallying to their defence because they have abdicated their responsibilities to provide space for open inquiry, and have instead allowed themselves to be institutionally & ideologically captured by a group of people with activist leanings and fringe beliefs not held by 90+% of Americans.

My answer to my question above is "in the past two decades, the universities could have done more to protect speech across the board and not pick favourites to protect and others to abandon, as they have clearly done. In the last two years they could have refused to tolerate lawlessness on their campuses (not just 'speech' but actual law-breaking, including assaults, going unprosecuted) instead of turning a blind eye when the criminality was from a favoured cause du jour." I think if Universities had not abandoned their leadership duties, they wouldn't have Trump bringing the hammer down on them with so much public support.

chrisweekly2• 1 year ago

I think there's class warfare practically baked in with how paying for college works today. Imagine trying to determine how much a fancy car costs, and being told "it depends on how much money you have". That's on the upper-middle-class side.

The other side is just part of the worldview of the rampant anti-intellectualism which Trump rode to power.

taeric4• 1 year ago

Hard not to see this as a class war that has been fed by some of the personalities that were big in the "conservative" sphere for a long time. Modern podcast influencers are big, but this isn't exactly a new thing. Rush and his ilk were big on lashing out against "ivory tower" theories. And they didn't invent the idea. Just went after easy targets.

None of which is to say that mistakes weren't made in the institutions. They were. Mistakes were also made by the critics. Populism, sadly, has a habit of celebrating their worst and elevating them to heights they flat out can't handle.

2OEH8eoCRo02• 1 year ago

Fox News. I don't think it's 100% irrational but perhaps 99% irrational. These ideas usually contain a nugget of truth.

rayiner• 1 year ago

It was the progressive push of theoretically neutral institutions taking stands on moral politics. People who were fine with universities being staffed with liberals, but neutral in practice, realized their tax dollars were subsidizing institutions that were actively taking a side in national politics.

For example, universities burned a lot of political capital, and opened themselves up to a great deal of legal liability, with aggressively pursing affirmative action policies. When you depend on public grants, it’s probably a bad idea to publicly discriminate against the racial group that comprises the majority of taxpayers.

As to what universities should have done, the answer is “just dribble.” Universities should be places that are just as eager to research effective approaches to mass deportations as all the DEI stuff they do.

archagon2• 1 year ago

Sure, and why not open an Institute of Enhanced Interrogation Studies while you’re at it? Ugh.

WalterBright• 1 year ago

They could try hiring some conservative professors.

https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/31/2/homogenous_the_p...

zdragnar• 1 year ago

You can't really just hire some, though. You need to hire enough so that they don't get run out of the school for thought crime

https://www.thedoe.com/article/conservative-college-professo...

karaterobot2• 1 year ago

You're framing this in an odd way if you want neutral responses. Is withdrawing federal funding an attack? The government has always used the power of the purse as a lever to influence many institutions, including universities, and it often uses this mechanism to exert influence for ideological purposes. The most famous example is withholding funding for roads until states mandated a drinking age of 21. It's how the federal-state power asymmetry works. The disturbing thing is that Congress isn't really the one exerting it in this case, not that it's being used at all.

lr4444lr2• 1 year ago

As for the roads example, which would go to my second point if I understand you correctly, I think the analogy is limited: roads aren't gate-kept by admissions committees for certain intangible criteria for who can ride on them, with an artificial limit on how many cars overall, while they receive federal funding. If that was happening, then you'd have a similar situation to what universities are doing.

energy123• 1 year ago

It's about reclaiming lost social status. In their minds it's part of the liberal gollum that makes them feel alienated from society and disrespected.

tastyface• 1 year ago

Why did the Germans burn books? Look there for your answers. And I mean that sincerely. There’s really nothing new under the sun.

ytpete2• 1 year ago

Or the Cultural Revolution.

Sloowms• 1 year ago

Wait, there are attacks on universities? Or are we just using that word for any expression of free speech?

sequoia4• 1 year ago

I'm referring to threats to pull hundreds of thousands of dollars of funding if certain demands aren't met. But yes, there are also plenty of rhetorical attacks.

tomrod2• 1 year ago

From what I've been able to gather, a mix of jealousy for not being involved with institutions along with some form of Dunning Kruger effect thinking that the institutions have no merit or value (i.e. the individual thinks they could do better / have no need / are somehow subject to the outcomes of the institution).

pclmulqdq2• 1 year ago

The right's problem with universities is the same as the left's problem with churches:

1. They are institutions of "indoctrination" by the other side. Faculty are something like 98% registered democrats and many subjects ("X studies") have an explicitly left-leaning bent.

2. They have tax advantages and other significant government subsidies.

3. They exercise significant amounts of ideological control over the narrative for their groups of people.

4. They are exclusionary of people outside the club.

Add to that the fact that universities are getting increasingly expensive and real life outcomes for college-educated people are getting worse. The perceived costs used to come with significant benefits, but the costs are getting higher and the benefits are reducing, so there is less tolerance for giving them favored status.

squigz• 1 year ago

Maybe I just live in a bubble, but I don't think "the left" has acted as strongly against churches as "the right" has against schools.

nitwit005• 1 year ago

Left leaning, but authoritarian, governments have also cracked down on universities. The issue isn't the political lean.

People with a more authoritarian bent view dissent itself as objectionable. That's central to their whole worldview. Any institution or social organization that allows debate or questioning things is a problem for them.

wat10000• 1 year ago

One thing I haven’t seen anyone mention in the replies. There are millions of conservative parents who sent their children to college and then “lost” those children when they turned into a “liberal.”

The ideas that it’s ok if your child becomes a liberal, or that there might be good reasons why people who undertake higher education often become less conservative, are too horrible to contemplate. So they settle for “universities are bad.”

vunderba• 1 year ago

I can't speak to universities specifically, but I've always felt there has been a strain of anti-intellectualism underlying a great deal of mainstream America for as long as I can remember.

It's the little things like tv shows or movies with characters who seem to glorify ignorance, people who state self deprecating things like "I'm bad at math" and wear it like a bizarre badge of honor, etc.

josefritzishere• 1 year ago

I don't mind saying this is some serious Nazi stuff going on. The federal government is trying to obstruct free speech, jailing people for free speech... we are in a bad place.

JacobiX• 1 year ago

Not sure if Michael Roth is related to Philip Roth, but it somehow reminds me of American Pastoral and that era of protests against the Vietnam War and its aftermath. I'm not entirely sure how those demonstrations compare to the ones we’re seeing today, but the parallels are striking

guywithahat4• 1 year ago

The best solution here is for universities to become less involved with government money. They should have to compete for students and research on an even playing field, and we shouldn't be creating politically aligned fields through government spending.

kjkjadksj4• 1 year ago

The issue with these ideas is they lack an understanding of anything really about how we fund research in this country. We collect taxes and disperse these taxes in the form of research grants that we have boards of experts in the field call for proposals about realistically achievable topics that would benefit the American citizen in health, wealth, or some other form of prosperity. We only have a few national labs and most of this research is conducted in the university system, which simultaneously trains the next crop of researchers.

Now you are proposing this work doing/training aspect be cut off. What is your replacement? You have to come up with one that gets trainees hands on experience, as well as provides economies of scale benefits for expensive experimental apparatus or sample or data/compute resources, fosters collaboration and idea generation, and shares this work with other grant funded researchers in the field so that they might further their own efforts.

Or, you could just not blow the whole system apart with a broadside strike, and enjoy the striking benefits in fields like medicine we have enjoyed over the decades.

SubiculumCode• 1 year ago

No. Research Universities are about Research. There are non governmental sources of funding for research, but they pale in comparison with government funding. If you want to make the case that the private industry should take on research, the problem is that there is no immediate profit in it. It can take decades, and few companies can invest decades of funding hoping for some eventual breakthrough. Moreover, in that model, research is slowed because companies are notoriously bad at sharing research with competitors. So you either create national research centers, or you use research universities.

InkCanon• 1 year ago

Surprised at how it hasn't been pointed out here but - the "general public" wants the sausage, but not how it's made. They wouldn't if they knew what it entailed. Cutbacks to student aid, shuttering of departments, eliminating of PhD positions, etc.

mmooss13• 1 year ago

I don't see much talk of donors? My impression is that, as in many situations, the super-wealthy are forming a dominant class - as if it's their right - rather than respect democracy and freedom, and attacking university freedom. Didn't some person engineer the Harvard leader's exit?

Roth says the Wesleyan board is supportive; maybe they are just lucky.

chriskanan• 1 year ago

Being a super wealthy alum is a prerequisite for being a Trustee, and University Trustees are the group that University Presidents report to.

Loughla• 1 year ago

This is why I always have and always will prefer community colleges. Their boards are elected officials. Not perfect, but 1000 times better than just having wealth.

jmyeet• 1 year ago

The last year and a half in particular has exposed just what a sham the academic freedom fo colleges really is.

We've always heard that the college tenure system encourages freedom of expression and academic freedom without the pressure of potential job loss. Instead what we have iscollege professors and administrations who move is absolute lockstep and have acted like jack-booted Gestapos to crush and punish First Amendment expression where some people merely said "maybe we shouldn't bomb children".

Norm Finkelstein, who is a national treasure, does not have tenure. He is a world-authority on these issues. Why doesn't he have tenure? Because he embarrassed Alan Dershowtiz by exposing him as a rampant plagiarist and general fraud.

Int he 1960s we had the National Guard open fire on anti-Vietnam protestors at Kent State, killing several, to repress anti-government speech. I swear we're not far from college administrators open firing on protestors directly.

The collaboration between colleges (particularly Columbia) and the administration pales in comparison to the anti-Vietnam era. Colleges are standing by letting agitators attack protestors (ie UCLA) and then later using that violence as an excuse to crush the protest. They're cooperating with law enforcement to crush protests.

But they're going beyond that. These protestors who have been illegally deported have largely been named and targeted by college administrations as well as organizations like the Canary Mission.

Think about that: colleges are knowingly cooperating with people who are black-bagging people protesting against genocide, fully knowing they will end up in places like prisons in El Salvadore.

hello_computer• 1 year ago

Norm is a hero.

senderista2• 1 year ago

I have not heard of any protesters ending up in El Salvador, source?

senderista2• 1 year ago

I guess the downvoters must have information to which I am not privy...

necubi• 1 year ago

Oh hey, Wesleyan on HN! I’m an alumnus (matriculated a year or two after Roth became president). Wesleyan has a rich history of activism and protest, and not always entirely peaceful (Roth’s predecessor, Doug Bennet, had his office firebombed at one point).

I’ve had a few opportunities to speak with Roth since the Gaza war started, and I’ve always found him particularly thoughtful about balancing freedom of expression with a need to provide a safe and open learning environment for everyone on campus. In particular, he never gave in to the unlimited demands of protestors while still defending their right to protest.

In part, he had the moral weight to do that because—unlike many university presidents—he did not give in to the illiberal demands of the left to chill speech post-2020, which then were turned against the left over the past year.

I don’t see any particularly good outcome from any of this; the risk of damaging the incredibly successful American university system is high. Certainly smart foreign students who long dreamed of studying in the US will be having second thoughts if they can be arbitrarily and indefinitely detained.

But I hope the universities that do make it through do with a stronger commitment to the (small l) liberal values of freedom of expression , academic freedom, and intellectual diversity.

beepbooptheory• 1 year ago

Ok, I'll bite: in your view, what were the illiberal "demands" post-2020? Reading tfa, this kind of rendering feels a little too pat for him. Namely, its one thing to argue against the kind of knee-jerk moralism of well-meaning woke liberal arts kids, its quite another to imply a kind of "capital L" program to "chill speech."

Like, c'mon, are we really still doing this now? Roth himself is sensible enough to not be, in his words, "blaming the victim" at this point, what calls you to essentially do it for him anyway? It's nothing but out of touch at this point, and adds nothing to the discourse but conspiratorial noise. If I may assume a rough age based on your forthrightness, any single kid in school in 2020 was and is a lot less culpable for this current moment than you or I. We can set an example and be mature enough to own that, instead of, I don't know, forever being tortured by the real or perceived condescension of kids.

throwaway3892342• 1 year ago

It is a smaller step to further the justifications than to deal with the often severe implications (to the self-image) of having been wrong. The more obvious it becomes having been wrong, the more necessary the justifications are and the more absurd they become. As having someone accepting your absurd justifications becomes proof of being blameless.

throwawayqqq11• 1 year ago

It's nothing but out of touch at this point, and adds nothing to the discourse

Exactly. Its a communications problem.

Its hard to have a decent critical conversation when one side has a biased view about $symbol. Both communicating parties need to reach the same interpretation of a message, otherwise the conversation is broken. Thats why you shouldnt say the N-word or throw out a heil heart on stage (unless you want to hide behind this ambiguity). Or why its so difficult to have critical conversations with strong believers, for you its just evolution or vaccines but for the other side it may affect the core of their identity and the ape goes defense mode.

The result is that the discourse does not deal with differentiated cases but _only_ with simplistic labels like "chill speech", "woke", etc. because the more biased side drags it down into the mud.

For instance, the "chill speech" label is actually dependent on the "racist" label that initiated it. If a case shows clear racist behavior, then dismissing the lefts reaction as censorship is unjustified or biased. The other way works too, if there is no racist behavior, the censorship blame would be justified.

And since you cant look into peoples heads to clearly identify racist intentions, it falls back to interpreting messages. The problem with biased people is, they are not aware even of their unawareness. If you would ask Musk whether he is a neo-nazi, his response would be something like "hell no". Fast forward the dystopian timeline and his response might be "always have been".

The left has IMO more unbiased awareness about systemic issues -- but is not free of bias either. The right is in its core biased indentity politics about $culture -- but is not totally host to tribalism either.

My advise, avoid popular symbols at all cost and if you come close to using one, augment it with case specific background, even a vague "_unjustified_ chill of speech" would suffice. If someone opens with "the woke left" and shows no signs of differentiation -- or even better, acknowledgement of core leftist topics -- i mentally turn away. The comment you replied to was about personal anekdotes and projections and the one symbol that rubs me the wrong way too, even before trumps abuse.

kubb2• 1 year ago

They'll make it through if they bend the knee. Otherwise the regime will destroy them, and the conclusion will be that it's all because of these darned radical leftists.

lelanthran4• 1 year ago

They'll make it through if they bend the knee. Otherwise the regime will destroy them, and the conclusion will be that it's all because of these darned radical leftists.

Well, it is, isn't it? They required complete loyalty to the ideology before accepting any faculty: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/08/us/ucla-dei-statement.htm...

They shouldn't have gone that far.

brightlancer• 1 year ago

Wesleyan has a rich history of activism and protest, and not always entirely peaceful (Roth’s predecessor, Doug Bennet, had his office firebombed at one point).

Arson is not protest. Arson is a VIOLENT type of activism, which is legally classified as terrorism.

Trump (or anybody) shouldn't be allowed to punish folks for speech or peaceful protest. Unfortunately, folks are calling VIOLENT acts like arson and battery "protest", and threats of bodily harm "speech" ("harassment" or "assault" under most US criminal law) -- we should be in favor of the government stepping in to protect people from arson, battery, and assault/ harassment.

he did not give in to the illiberal demands of the left to chill speech post-2020,

Roth has been president since 2007. What was his response to Nick Christakis's struggle session (plenty of video of that) or Erika Christakis leaving Yale, after she penned an e-mail that students should be able to handle Halloween costumes they find offensive?

The American Left has been illiberal and going after speech for decades; it didn't start post-2020.

lupusreal• 1 year ago

Just so. The First Amendment assures the right to peacefully assemble and speak your mind, not to commit arson. Violent attacks aren't free speech and should always be prosecuted.

cess112• 1 year ago

If the state is illegitimate then it is permissible or perhaps an obligation to topple it, according to people like the revolutionaries that founded the USA. That is, it doesn't necessarily matter what is legal or not, if the state misbehaves then you should put it to the guillotine or fire or bear arms or whatever suits you.

As an outsider it's always funny to see people write about the "American Left", as if there were any leftist movements of national importance in the US. As if Food Not Bombs had at some point had a majority in congress or something, it's just a ridiculous idea. If that happened there would be a bloody purge, Pinochet style but bigger.

ath3nd6• 1 year ago

The American Left has been illiberal and going after speech for decades; it didn't start post-2020.

Good that the free-speech absolutist Musk is there to ban everyone on Twitter who calls him out on his lies, trying to buy democratic elections, and do nazi salutes.

Arson is a VIOLENT type of activism, which is legally classified as terrorism.

Lithium-ion batteries in badly made cars are prone to ...combustion.

turtlesdown112• 1 year ago

ah, some both sides claims while people are disappeared

trentnix• 1 year ago

If you don’t want to be subject to the whims of whoever is in office, don’t take the poison pill of government money.

altacc2• 1 year ago

If only politics was limited to affecting those who opted in. But mostly government shouldn't be the whims of one individual, it should be much more considered than that.

mathgradthrow• 1 year ago

These do not represent the whims of one person. Donald Trump was elected.

siliconc0w2• 1 year ago

They could fight back with, "We will not accept students from politicians that support anti-education policies". Further they could kick out any students currently enrolled, "if they wrote a college essay promoting their anti-education values, we wouldn't have let them in - so they were clearly lying and we're just remedying that mistake"

nosianu4• 1 year ago

"We will not accept students from politicians that support anti-education policies"

Given how many stories there are about children seriously at odds with their parents about political issues, I don't think that is a good idea. At all.

Do you want to be judged by how your parents think or behave, or think that is acceptable?

siliconc0w2• 1 year ago

This wasn't a serious proposal, I was mocking the cruelty and logic of the current administration.

insane_dreamer8• 1 year ago

Brown just got targeted next, after releasing a statement that it would "not compromise on academic freedom". We're about to find out how true that is or not. But if universities don't start fighting back, they will all find themselves in the same boat as Columbia -- and ultimately regret it.

The US's universities are one of its greatest assets, if not the greatest. The repercussions of this are highly damaging.

hayst4ck7• 1 year ago

America has done an absolutely terrible job of teaching people about rights.

If governments granted rights then they would be privileges not rights. In western tradition governments exist to protect rights, such as the freedom of expression, not to grant them. If you believe these are human rights, rather than your privilege as an American, then you must protect their rights to seek justice too.

People are already being robbed of due process, which means they are robbed of the process that determines their right to "protections" and citizenship status. Almost all authoritarian regimes presume the right to rob people of the protections of their state. You perceive citizenship to be some indelible legal status, but citizenship can be revoked either tacitly or explicitly which is a prelude to the violation of someone else's rights and their human dignity.

The law can't protect or enforce itself. If the ruling regime chooses not to be bound by law then what should happen or what is supposed to happen is supplanted by what can happen. Even a cursory look of what can happen in authoritarian regimes should turn anyone's stomach.

kelnos2• 1 year ago

I think what's going on is a helpful reminder that there's no such thing as "rights" in the way you describe. Everything we have, everything we're permitted to do, is at the pleasure and permission of our governments. Constitutions and laws are only worth anything if the people in charge honor them. Might may not make right, but might does let you impose whatever you want on people who don't have your might.

You can try to design systems where one group of people don't have all the might, and so those who balance them are somewhat adversarial in their goals and desires. We always thought the US had such a system, but when you put law enforcement and the military under a single group, and give the other two groups no teeth, you really don't have that sort of system.

branko_d• 1 year ago

Everything we have, everything we're permitted to do, is at the pleasure and permission of our governments.

Wrong! The people are ultimately responsible for reigning-in their governments and are the ultimate source of any rules or rights that the governments end up enforcing.

If you think that the ultimate authority is with the government, then you have justified every authoritarian regime out there.

klodolph2• 1 year ago

You’re making useful points but you’re also just choosing convenient definitions that make your point of view “correct”.

The parent comment has a definition of “rights” that admits their existence… and I think what you’ve demonstrated is that you have a different definition of “rights”. In other words, you’ve demonstrated that you haven’t really grasped the underlying meaning that the parent comment is getting at, and you’re instead responding to the words that they used to express it.

If you start with a definition for “rights” you can make arguments about whether they exist. But if you start with a different definition and get to a different conclusion, it doesn’t mean you’ve discovered some logical flaw in the argument, it just means that the two of you have failed to communicate with each other.

hayst4ck7• 1 year ago

These are the kind of men that founded our country, better men than exist today. This is the type of thinking that led to America, and these are the cultural echo's many young culturally American boys hear from their fathers and grandfathers.

These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated. Britain, with an army to enforce her tyranny, has declared that she has a right (not only to TAX) but "to BIND us in ALL CASES WHATSOEVER" and if being bound in that manner, is not slavery, then is there not such a thing as slavery upon earth. Even the expression is impious; for so unlimited a power can belong only to God. Thomas Paine - The Crisis

Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God - Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson (https://www.monticello.org/research-education/thomas-jeffers...)

If we were base enough to desire it, it is now too late to retire from the contest. There is no retreat but in submission and slavery! Our chains are forged! Their clanking may be heard on the plains of Boston! The war is inevitable and let it come! I repeat it, sir, let it come. It is in vain, sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death! John Henry -- Give me liberty or give me death.

You say you have no power and so let the world inflict itself on you, these were men that inflicted themselves upon the world. These men chose reason over comfort. These men chose not to be slaves through their action.

ooterness• 1 year ago

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

BeFlatXIII• 1 year ago

We always thought the US had such a system, but when you put law enforcement and the military under a single group, and give the other two groups no teeth, you really don't have that sort of system.

More like the two other groups (the elected group more so than the appointed judges) willingly gave up their teeth.

milesrout5• 1 year ago

What a strange view. America has done a poor job of teaching you about rights. They are legal only - natural law (the proper name for the doctrine of so-called "human rights") is religion. God-given rights you may have but rights in law they are not.

The rule of law is crucial to a free, just, and good society but you conflate the rule of law with the law saying what you would have it say. If the law is changed or the powers given under law are used in a way you do not like then that is not unlawful.

Dictators vary in how much they rely on law. Some have used law to do their evil: take Hitler. Some do their evil outside the law. This tells us that in truth the rule of law is but one part of what we need to have a good society.

ekianjo4• 1 year ago

In western tradition governments exist to protect rights, such as the freedom of expression, not to grant them.

You may be overgeneralizing here, only the US has enshrined freedom of expression in their constitution. Pretty much in any other western government such protections do not exist and freedom of expression has been under attack for a long time

shellac• 1 year ago

Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights is enshrined in legislation in the UK and Ireland, and offers protections for signatories of the convention.

(Edit: Oh, and the Bill of Rights gives parliamentarians quite an extreme version)

ath3nd6• 1 year ago

You may be overgeneralizing here, only the US has enshrined freedom of expression in their constitution.

Sounds very progressive considering voting for the African American population came about in 1965, and having McCarthyism in the 50s (which was basically persecution of free speech and freedom of expression, the same thing the Trump administration is doing atm).

Freedom of expression being "enshrined" in the Constitution sounds good, but if it comes with no voting if I am black, and with being persecuted for leaning left, maybe that's not exactly "freedom of expression".

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_Rights_Act_of_1965

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism

yieldcrv• 1 year ago

Universities don’t have to roll over, they also don’t have to accept federal funds

Easy

nonrandomstring• 1 year ago

Most simply this all boils down to two entirely incompatible models of a university. One institution produces thinkers who can innovate and lead. The other is a training camp that produces docile workers for the oligarchs. Regardless of allowing students free speech on campus universities have been heading toward the latter for three decades. It's a little late to be preaching courage thirty years after selling-out the core tenets of pedagogy. There is so much more to this than just "Trump". The fascists in power now are the result of 30 years of moral cowardice.

piokoch• 1 year ago

So, after long years of accepting cancel culture, kicking off people from universities since they happened to write a twitter comment that was not aligned with the current "right" way of thinking, universities suddenly are protectors of free speech. Well...

Who is going to buy this?

rtkwe3• 1 year ago

Harvard's rolling over was particularly annoying, they have a 52 billion dollar endowment! If any university could afford to make a stand and lose funding over it it's Harvard. What's the point of this massive pile of money if you never dip into it in exceptional circumstances?

pclmulqdq2• 1 year ago

Harvard is a hedge fund that happens to do some education and research as a tax-advantaged side gig.

xdavidliu• 1 year ago

who gets to withdraw that money?

Animats• 1 year ago

That surprised me. It set the pattern for lesser schools, too.

thinkcontext• 1 year ago

Universities typically only spend about 5% of their endowments per year, since it has to last forever. And much of it comes with restrictions on what it can be spent on, those come from the donors wishes. So money in the endowment that's for the theater department or to support an econ professorship can't be repurposed to support federal funds that supported cancer research.

rtkwe3• 1 year ago

Yeah they try to make them perpetual by only spending less than their growth each year but with 52 billion you could afford to draw down a billion or two (2.6 billion would be 5%) and that would fund research for years.

low_tech_love4• 1 year ago

Some personal highlights:

"They’re excellent schools, and they have excellent scientists, and if one of Vice-President Vance’s kids is sick, he’s going to want the doctor to have gone to one of these schools; he’s not going to want them to have gone to Viktor Orbán’s university."

"People have said to me, “Well, you take all that money from the government, why don’t you listen to them?” The answer is, because the money doesn’t come with a loyalty oath."

"I don’t have to agree with the mayor to get the fire department to come put out a fire. And that’s what they’re saying to these international students: “Well, you came to this country. What makes you think you can write an op-ed in the newspaper?” Well, what makes you think that is, this is a free country. "

jgalt2124• 1 year ago

The answer is, because the money doesn’t come with a loyalty oath

But it does come with some reasonable level of consideration and appreciation.

turtlesdown112• 1 year ago

"you didn't say thank you!!!"

sigmar• 1 year ago

You don't know how they feel, so what you're saying is "they have to show/express appreciation," which is synonymous with a loyalty oath.

dfxm12• 1 year ago

Why do you think this?

croes2• 1 year ago

The government pays to get good universities which attract smart foreign who come to the US to study on these universities.

Maybe the government should appreciate them not the other way around.

skeaker• 1 year ago

Being paid what you're owed doesn't necessitate gratitude.

humanpotato• 1 year ago

Consider that any competent manager will value polite debate and constructive criticism far more than the empty words of "yes" men.

Guess which category "reasonable ... consideration and appreciation" falls into.

Put another way, if you read North Korean state media, you will find that they always have a reasonable level of consideration and appreciation for their government.

hekette• 1 year ago

It is their right to be there. They do not have to show appreciation and the current government should never be one deciding these what is appreciation. Bowing to authority is exactly the opposite of what education is about.

kristjansson• 1 year ago

What about e.g. writing an op-ed expressing one's views conveys a lack of consideration and appreciation?

Telemakhos• 1 year ago

"They’re excellent schools, and they have excellent scientists, and if one of Vice-President Vance’s kids is sick, he’s going to want the doctor to have gone to one of these schools; he’s not going to want them to have gone to Viktor Orbán’s university."

I'm not sure I understand. If I want a medical doctor, I'm not looking for someone based on his political views or spirited independence from the Hungarian government, but for someone with training in a very narrow discipline, namely medicine. I really don't want someone who is more interested in "the modern and the postmodern" prescribing me meds, but I do want someone who conforms to the current pharmacological standards.

The University President in question does not even run a medical school; Wesleyan does not, to my knowledge, teach anyone the art of medicine, however highly it might rank as a liberal arts institution. Semmelweis University in Budapest, however, is older than the United States, is the largest healthcare provider in Hungary, and is ranked among the top 300 universities in the world. Therefore, if I had to chose between someone who went to Wesleyan and someone who went to Semmelweis, which I'll take as "Viktor Orbán's university," I should much rather have the Hungarian who actually knows medicine rather than the liberal arts PhD who might be able to lecture me on what postmodernism should mean to me.

abbadadda• 1 year ago

What are you purporting not to understand? It seems you’re fighting your own straw man.

low_tech_love4• 1 year ago

In that specific quote he’s talking about Ivy League universities, not Wesleyan, but the quote would be too long. I thought it was clear, sorry for the misunderstanding.

Regardless, I absolutely agree with you, except for one thing: I would have no problem being under care of a Hungarian, but I doubt you’d ever see a MAGA enthusiast saying he prefers that than an American doctor.

knowitnone• 1 year ago

The money comes from the public, not the government

Ray202• 1 year ago

Can I have statistics for this? Because I always thought it was mostly from the government, not from the public.

insane_dreamer8• 1 year ago

And I for one would much rather it go to subsidize university research than subsidize the defense industry

ninalanyon• 1 year ago

Surely he could have expressed himself better than that. Insulting some other country's universities seems a very odd thing to do when trying to make a point about your own universities. This is especially odd as the choice of country to insult has several universities that are well inside the top 10% worldwide and rank higher than Wesleyan.

We should expect better rhetoric from the rector of a liberal arts university.

Unfortunately I can't read the actual article to see what the rest of his argument was like. I wish that HN would automatically provide links to bypass paywalls.

low_tech_love4• 1 year ago

There was no insult. The point is very clear if you are not trying to intentionally make him look bad. He said that Vance would never send his kids to a hospital in Hungary; he never said hospitals in Hungary are bad, or that Hungarians are peasants, for example. What he’s trying to show you is that you’re being manipulated, that what they say is not what they do, so you shouldn’t believe them. But I guess most people prefer to trust the snake oil sellers than open their eyes.

Edit: and by the way Orbán is not Hungary, in the same way that Trump is not America, although they would very much like you to think so. I wonder why?

steviedotboston3• 1 year ago

The real cowardice was when student mobs took over campuses and harassed jewish students but the universities did nothing about. They hoped it would fizzle out and go away, and even though the worst of it did, it didn't go away entirely and the underlying tensions still simmered. Jewish students who were terrified to walk to class, lest they be harassed by some masked terrorist supporters, wanted to make sure the worst offenders of the protests were dealt with. Most universities still did nothing, and then Trump was elected. He has been consistently pro-Israel, and the organized Jewish community has been able to make inroads with his administration. So now he's dealing with it in the way that he deals with every issue.

What we are seeing now is entirely the fault of university administrators who failed to deal with the issue when it started.

Bluescreenbuddy• 1 year ago

And pray tell how did they harass jewish students?

steviedotboston3• 1 year ago

Here's one example: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/judge-rules-jewish-stud...

"the protesters created a “Jew Exclusion Zone” where in order to pass “a person had to make a statement pledging their allegiance to the activists’ view.” Those who complied with the protesters’ view were issued wristbands to allow them to pass through, the complaint says, which effectively barred Jewish students who supported Israel and denied them access to the heart of campus."

diggan• 1 year ago

How is this connected to the submission? Or is a random tangent because the article mentions "student activism" and "Trump" in the opening? The only part mentioning anyone Jewish is:

You have prominent Jewish figures around the country who get comfortable with Trump, it seems to me, because they can say he’s fighting antisemitism: “He’s good for the Jews.” It’s pathetic. It’s a travesty of Jewish values, in my view.

But I'm not sure how that is connected to what you wrote.

steviedotboston3• 1 year ago

The entire article is about anti-Israel student protests and how the Trump administration is punishing universities for not squelching them.

mapt• 1 year ago

Columbia has an endowment that stands (pre- Liberation Day) at 15 billion dollars.

They kowtowed to some of the militant Zionist interests involved in that endowment in order to attain a fractionally higher return, and betrayed their students.

They kowtowed to the fascist administration on the grounds that it was threatening 400 million dollars in grants, and betrayed their students to the point of facilitating a project to unilaterally deport many of them based on Constitutionally protected quasi-private speech.

At this point I don't think they want or deserve to be called a university. Let's go with "Tax-exempt investment fund".

dluan• 1 year ago

And specifically the ivy league schools and "elite" ones are cementing their reputation among younger students and soon to be college applicants. They are paying attention. I've seen several boycotts of Columbia and other universities from students.

efitz• 1 year ago

Cowardice is in the eye of the beholder and the article is self-serving.

The article makes the point that it's cowardly to cave to administration pressure to limit the activities of anti-Israel/Pro-Palestine protesters.

Someone on the other side of the issue could make the argument "it is cowardly to kowtow to a small but vocal minority who justifies interfering with other students' ability to learn, as 'free speech'".

It is dishonest to describe non-speech activity such as intimidation and forceful prevention of access, as "speech", even if you like the motivation or outcome. "Speech" is talking with words. Physically using your body to prevent someone else from acting in a desired way, is something other than "speech".

adultSwim• 1 year ago

The Trump administrations attacks are able to go so far now, because institutions already rolled over under a Democratic administration.

Take for instance University of Pennsylvania. In 2023, student anonymously projected "Let Gaza Live" onto a building. The next day then-college president Liz Magill publicly called in the FBI to investigate this as an "antisemitic hate crime". She was later forced to resign for "not doing enough" to combat alleged antisemitism.

assimpleaspossi• 1 year ago

What bothers me the most about all these protests and going-ons at universities and colleges is that they are generally by 18-22 year olds who are pre-adults still in their formative years who still have a lot of learning and growing up to do.

calf• 1 year ago

What bothers me is the ageist assumption that "full-adults", say, boomers, are somehow more educated, less indoctrinated, or less prejudiced than young adults

BoingBoomTschak• 1 year ago

Pretty sure that this wasn't implied. It's more about being "life wise".

tguedes2• 1 year ago

I suppose that means you don't know about the rich history of college protests that were instrumental in progressing human rights over the last 100 years?

trhway2• 1 year ago

It would be useful if you mentioned say a couple examples.

It would be even more useful if you were able to show that the effect of such student protests moving progress forward exceeded the effect of the student protests moving progress backward, like the Cultural or Iranian Revolutions. I think you'd not be able to show it.

kashunstva• 1 year ago

who still have a lot of learning and growing up to do

I’m 60, and I have a fair bit of learning to do yet. And as the father of a student in roughly the 18-22 I would be proud to see her standing up for views that she feels strongly about whether her knowledge is fully complete or not.

trhway2• 1 year ago

Yes, i guess you'd be a proud father of a Cultural Revolution participant ... right until they send you to reeducation.

anigbrowl• 1 year ago

OK. Does that mean you think they shouldn't protest because they're naive, or that people (especially in government) shouldn't be freaking out so much when they do protest?

A university president makes a case against cowardice

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