Why can't Ivies cope with losing a few hundred million?

https://www.economist.com/briefing/2025/04/10/why-cant-stinking-rich-ivies-cope-with-losing-a-few-hundred-million

by sneakerblack • 1 year ago

88 271 1 year ago

PaulHoule• 1 year ago

pjc50• 1 year ago

"Free speech" is when the President unilaterally withholds research grants from universities, based on statements made by students (not faculty)?

ty68532• 1 year ago

This is the double edge sword of moving away from voluntary transaction in the market and towards government-imposed funding. The government takes away your ability to choose what to fund, holds the purse, then smacks the purse at you filled with the weight of your own money.

freeone3000• 1 year ago

The government, with laws as written, has more restrictions on when it can pull money than private parties, due to its legal obligation to be content-of-speech-neutral. We are discovering that United Stares law is meaningless.

scottiebarnes• 1 year ago

I'm not sure this is a "free market choices" problem. Some institutions like education should be funded by government, in part or in whole.

The government threatening to take away that funding based on "taste" is more of a problem of authoritarianism.

mathgradthrow• 1 year ago

They might also be happy for an excuse to implement some of these policies and have the administration as scapegoat.

steveBK1235• 1 year ago

Yes some of them have said as much...

steveBK1235• 1 year ago

I am not a fan of the orange man.

But I think its an interesting question if the feds should be funding rich Ivies with small numbers of students vs more efficient state universities which educated 100s of thousands each at a fraction of the cost per student.

All of the Ivy League combined educate 65k undergrads. SUNY by comparison educates 5x that many at a tuition of 1/5th to 1/10th depending on in/out of state and community vs vs 4 year college.

Obviously what he is doing is punitive. BUT, I think the constant focus in the press on the Ivys when we talk about education is a huge distraction from how we are actually going to improve access, quality & cost to education in this county.

umanwizard2• 1 year ago

The feds aren’t funding ivies for the purpose of education, they’re funding researchers who happen to work at the ivies to do research.

steveBK1235• 1 year ago

Multiple people pointing this out, and absolutely right.

Some question though of how all the research grants do kind of cross-subsidize the education in a way as it pays for research professors, their graduate staff, etc? Otherwise why do we collocate research and teaching?

joshuanapoli• 1 year ago

So far, the funding in question is research grants. There's an argument that research is more effective at the universities that have concentrated the best researchers.

mcmcmc2• 1 year ago

There’s also an argument that public funds should go to public schools.

jimbokun2• 1 year ago

Top US state schools have a lot of really good researchers.

titanomachy• 1 year ago

Most of the money is research grants, not for training undergrads.

cg5280• 1 year ago

Many of the "good" universities in general seem more focused on prestige and acceptance rates than they do educating the masses. The Ivies could significantly expand the sizes of their student bodies (and to their credit they do make some content accessible online), but they don't because a lot of the value of a Harvard education is the exclusivity and the social network it gets you into.

lenerdenator2• 1 year ago

And therein lies why a lot of Trump's base has a massive problem with them.

To be fair, the exclusive social network very much includes Trump, but it spent most of the last 50 years bringing itself capital at the expense of Trump's base.

e402• 1 year ago

It's unfortunate that a rational discussion could not be had before the cuts were made. I can see a scenario where you and I and many others agree with cuts to many organizations.

indoordin0saur2• 1 year ago

Bureaucratic organizations and special interests there are entrenched. The people managing some of these endowments are getting annual compensations competitive with the best hedge funds. If we had a rational discussion they'd just work to run out the clock and keep the status quo.

senderista• 1 year ago

Funding teaching is not the same as funding research. Some of the best research talent is concentrated in the Ivies.

dragonwriter2• 1 year ago

But I think its an interesting question if the feds should be funding rich Ivies with small numbers of students vs more efficient state universities which educated 100s of thousands each at a fraction of the cost per student.

The funding at issue is research funding, not educational funding, and it goes to both kinds of universities (vastly more, in aggregate, to state universities than Ivies.)

Obviously what he is doing is punitive. BUT, I think the constant focus in the press on the Ivys when we talk about education is a huge distraction from how we are actually going to improve access, quality & cost to education in this county.

If research funding is used as a lever to establish political control, those things literally do not matter, since whatever universities survive will simply be tools of totalitarian indoctrination by the regime.

ToucanLoucan3• 1 year ago

BUT, I think the constant focus in the press on the Ivys when we talk about education is a huge distraction from how we are actually going to improve access, quality & cost to education in this county.

Because the entire discussion around colleges of all sizes, who gets to go and who pays has been turned entirely into yet another fucking stupid culture war issue by Republicans, putting rural/tradesman "real" Americans against the "educated coastal elites" of which it is far easier to cast Ivy league schools, professors and students as, rather than your local grocery store stock boy who is attending a tech school to go into STEM.

At this point the notion of the actual issue as in: "how we are actually going to improve access, quality & cost to education" is barely a factor in it. It's just about pitting poor people against other poor people and a handful of rich nepo-babies who are so insulated from the consequences of our system they might as well not be considered to be part of it.

For anyone interested, college used to be nearly in totality funded by the state, not per student, but via the grant system. Our parents will talk about "working their way through college" working as waitstaff, because that was once an achievable thing: to work while you studied and pay your tuition, and graduate with little if any debt, and go on to do all sorts of things my generation struggles to do, like buy a home and a car, and not a run down refrigerator box and an old wreck from the side of the road that barely runs, no. They got to buy good homes, at fair prices, and cars that were if not new, really close to it.

Then as with everything Reagan fucked it up, the "no more free lunch" lobby got to add another notch to their bedpost as they set about destroying yet another fucking thing funded with public money that was doing exactly what it was supposed to be doing to pass yet another goddamn tax cut and worsen the ability of America to compete on the global stage.

steveBK1235• 1 year ago

RE: our parents working their way through college, I think two things happened at least, yes.

Reagan gutted education spending.

But also the bifurcation of blue vs white collar wages really accelerated through the last 40 years. That is the spread between what my dad made working at a record store vs the professor/admin staff/etc at his college made increased tremendously. Think about it - minimum wage at federal level has only doubled in the last 40 years, while some quick googling looks like professors make 5-10x what they made 40 years ago (as most white collar has).

Plus all the discussion about the bloating of college non-teaching administrative staffing.

lenerdenator2• 1 year ago

Because the entire discussion around colleges of all sizes, who gets to go and who pays has been turned entirely into yet another fucking stupid culture war issue by Republicans, putting rural/tradesman "real" Americans against the "educated coastal elites" of which it is far easier to cast Ivy league schools, professors and students as, rather than your local grocery store stock boy who is attending a tech school to go into STEM.

That can't happen in a vacuum, though.

50 years ago, there was a far narrower gap between the two groups. Now it's expanding. That "no more free lunch" crowd was that "educated coastal elite" of the time. Remember, Reagan was elected governor of California twice.

masfuerte• 1 year ago

Funnily enough, when the law was passed giving the president the authority to meddle in university governance, Reagan vetoed it. And the left, in congress and the senate, forced it through.

jccalhoun• 1 year ago

It isn't about that efficiency. I teach at a community college and my state's republican supermajority just cut our budget by 10%.

steveBK1235• 1 year ago

Oh absolutely agreed, the GOP is anti-education however you slice it.

In a less partisan world, it would be nice to see a version of this that was more about efficient allocation of education dollars rather than an attack on education.

tencentshill• 1 year ago

It's one of the only ways people can still get into "The Club" without having a lineage of wealthy connections.

mandmandam• 1 year ago

Not a selling point.

The Ivies do a hell of a lot more for 'The Club' than for the people not in it.

(To be clear, I don't think giving Trump the authority to pull hundreds of millions in funding if they teach things he doesn't like, or allow anti-genocide protests etc, is in any way a solution to the above issue.)

etrautmann• 1 year ago

This framing is a little strange, since these universities serve multiple purposes. Much of this funding is for scientific research, which is somewhat distinct from the undergraduate teaching mission.

ahahahahah• 1 year ago

All of the Ivy League combined educate 65k undergrads. SUNY by comparison educates 5x that many

What a weird comparison. Yes, picking a group of universities that comprises 64 campuses is going to have more students than a group with a small fraction of that.

mattlutze2• 1 year ago

Too many people think these are funds to just run the universities. By and large, what is being withheld are funds for research.

Federally-funded academic science often looks like:

  1. The university + government fund/run a project
  2. Project creates new knowledge (cool!)
  3. The government gets a pretty awesome license to use that knowledge
  4. The government more often than not gives that knowledge away (or offers great accessible licensing), so that
  5. Private industry can adapt, apply and commercialize the knowledge, driving new GDP growth and opportunities for improving life, etc.

Withholding these funds ends the research projects, because Universities are not startup incubators. So the research stops, and one of the highest returning pipelines of new GDP growth for the US dries up—unless today, the professors and universities kiss the president's ring and promise to wipe out 50-100 years of human rights improvements.

lowercased• 1 year ago

It's that last step - 5 - which I think is a missing piece of the discussion. A lot of private company pharma and medical research is often doing the 'last mile' work that started in university research programs. Stuff that looks promising is picked up and commercialized, but there's usually significant work the research people have done before big commercial players take it to market. They're not doing all their research from scratch - they're taking the best bits funded by our government research programs and bringing them to market. Cutting university research will damage the private sector pretty quickly.

timewizard2• 1 year ago

On #3 "government gets a pretty awesome license" seems disingenuous. From what I've witnessed some specific agencies get to use that license in a rather limited way. It's often not broadly available to the public and commercial rights tend to be reserved to the University. Is that actually what most people would think of as "pretty awesome?"

On #4, "more often than not" and "offers great accessible licensing" seems equally disingenuous. Further, why should any of us have to license technology or patents that were primarily funded by tax revenue? Shouldn't that just be automatically and fully open? When the government decides to sequester that knowledge what process do I have to challenge that?

On #5, outside of pharmaceutical companies, what are these new GDP growth and returning pipelines that actually get created and impact citizens directly?

treis4• 1 year ago

This is somewhat disingenuous. Something like half of the grant is handed over to the University as overhead. Much of that is legit to cover things like labs but a lot of it goes to a cover a massive amount of administrative bloat.

Also, nobody really objects to the research that leads directly to stuff private industry can use. That's not what people want to cut.

sampo• 1 year ago

By and large, what is being withheld are funds for research.

I don't know precisely, but I would assume the universities take about 50% to 60% of the granted research funding as administrative overhead, and only what remains goes to the actual research.

onepointsixC4• 1 year ago

The feds are funding research, which elite schools have the best faculty and scholars who are conducting the very best research. May as well as why are VC’s funding promising startups instead of less promising ones, when those promising ones have already wealthy founders who have exited their previous venture.

mmooss15• 1 year ago

Universities have two roles: education and research. The funding is overwhelmingly for research and it's going to those that provide the best return on investment. Should cancer research funding go to your local community college?

Educating the best and brightest is also of special value, but that is beside the point.

physPop2• 1 year ago

I disagree -- the funding isn't ROI based at all. Heck NIH doesn't even really audit how well the funds were spent, how could they? They don't even really assess if the research had impact, save for counting journal articles and impact factors, which are in themselves poor proxies for quality of work (and easily gamed).

aidenn0• 1 year ago

Comparing tuition is silly, IMO. Lots of people don't pay full-price at private universities, and nobody who is in-state pays the full-price for public universities.

If you care about efficiency, then divide the budget by the number of students.

Harvard has a budget of about $9B, which is about 4-5x larger on a per-student basis than a few public universities I compared (I couldn't find the SUNY budget with 30s of searching, you are welcome to provide that info if you have it).

blitzar• 1 year ago

Universities are research institutions with loss leading teaching operations on the side.

amazingamazing6• 1 year ago

private schools shouldn't be getting public money. shocking people disagree. yes they do research that benefits the public. so does Meta and Google, who don't get public money. public money should go to public schools.

especially considering that the PIs who do the work in the private school scenario effectively boost the private school's clout with public money, but these private schools do not increase accessibility by opening up admission further.

that said, trump is also doing this for the wrong reasons, sadly.

micromacrofoot2• 1 year ago

Meta and Google absolutely do get public money, for another commonly known example, every single one of Elon Musk's companies have gotten significant funding paid for through our taxes — government contracts, subsidies, grants, you name it

amazingamazing6• 1 year ago

those also shouldn't - at least without the government getting an equity stake.

djtriptych• 1 year ago

Meta and Google definitely get a ton of public money.

amazingamazing6• 1 year ago

they shouldn't.

e402• 1 year ago

private schools shouldn't be getting public money. shocking people disagree. yes they do research that benefits the public. so does Meta and Google, who don't get public money. public money should go to public schools.

Those two are not the same. Research funded by Meta/Google doesn't benefit the public in the same way as research in Ivies (and non-Ivies).

s1artibartfast3• 1 year ago

This is the government paying for a service.

Should a private cement company get public money for delivering cement?

amazingamazing6• 1 year ago

This is the government paying for a service.

a service public schools can do.

op00to4• 1 year ago

What about private research institutes which do no education of undergraduates? What do you base your pronouncement on?

Kapura• 1 year ago

This framing conveniently ignores the question of whether the president should have the authority to single-handedly withhold funding for universities, broadly considered to be one of the foundational pillars of America's strength in the 20th century. While I think it's interesting and answers the specific question it raises, it's wild that the economist has just accepted that the president has dictatorial powers.

catapart• 1 year ago

Yeeep. This is the only thing worth knowing about this whole mess. The people trust their reps to handle the money, and the reps are the only people who are supposed to be able to manage that money.

Yet here we have tacit acceptance that the president can fuck with citizens' money just because he's in his feels about something. Absolute clownery.

snickerbockers2• 1 year ago

America is a democracy, not a bureaucracy. The executive branch is governed by a single representative elected by the people. It is becoming increasingly apparent that the people didn't make a great choice this time but our constitutional republic is also one of the foundational pillars of american strength and trump being an idiot doesn't change that.

The judicial branch has authority to stop him but they're only supposed to use it if they are convinced that what he's doing is unconstitutional. Some of the executive branch's appointee's have authority over him but only in specific circumstances (such as 25th amendment) and they're usually in agreement with him since he gets to appoint them anyways. Otherwise, all authority in the executive branch effectively belongs to the president and random midlevel bureaucrats can only exercise it on his behalf.

otterley15• 1 year ago

This is true only to the extent that Congress delegates its power to the executive. Per Article I of the Constitution, Congress has the plenary power of the purse.

So if it decides to spend $X on something specific, it has to be spent on whatever that something is. The President doesn't have discretion in that case.

epistasis• 1 year ago

If a presidential candidate promises to break the law in his campaign, that does not give him the authority to break the law. We are a constitutional republic and the constitution must be followed.

It's quite clear that the current President does not give a damn about the constitution, know anything about it, or have any compunction about blatant violation of the constitution.

Otherwise, all authority in the executive branch effectively belongs to the president and random midlevel bureaucrats can only exercise it on his behalf.

This is factually wrong.

UncleMeat2• 1 year ago

The judicial branch has authority to stop him but they're only supposed to use it if they are convinced that what he's doing is unconstitutional.

This is not true. They can also stop him if what he is doing is illegal. Statute can absolutely constrain the executive.

mmooss15• 1 year ago

The judicial branch has authority to stop him but they're only supposed to use it if they are convinced that what he's doing is unconstitutional.

That omits a crucial issue that many amazingly overlook: The bar isn't constitutional but legal. Congress makes the laws, not the President. The President is bound by those laws, and in fact their job is to enforce the laws that Congress makes. They cannot do things unless empowered by the law.

deepsun• 1 year ago

people didn't make a great choice

Choices. Congress can overturn any president's order, but they do nothing.

twic• 1 year ago

There are many other democracies, and most do not have this problem. Yours is just an exceptionally poorly-designed one.

rayiner17• 1 year ago

America is a democracy, not a bureaucracy

What a turn of phrase! Love it.

nine_k3• 1 year ago

This is a fair question, but it's being asked a lot already.

Let's imagine that completely legitimate circumstances lead to the US Government stopping the stream of grants to the Ivy League universities. How would they cope, given their enormous endowments that generate significant interest? This question is asked much less, and the answer is much less obvious. Hence the value of TFA.

SpicyLemonZest2• 1 year ago

What's the point of such an abstract question? The university's goals and expected resolution for the problem would always depend critically on why the stream of grants stopped.

xracy9• 1 year ago

What is "a lot"? The question is pertinent.

Additionally, the follow-on questions are irrelevant. There are a million better questions to ask on the other side of this as well, before we ask why someone can't live without the money that they've been acquiring entirely above board and legally. "Why does the gov't think it has the authority to do this?"

Why do we need to have theoretical debates about legitimate circumstances, when there are real debates about illegitimate circumstances happening? having this irrelevant follow-on discussion is doing the gov't's work for them.

In a different setting I can see asking this question, but there is no need to ask this question while the circumstances are clearly illegitimate.

bitwize2• 1 year ago

This question was not raised when the Obama administration dictated procedures and evidentiary standards to universities in cases of sexual assault, with threats of being found liable under Title IX for noncompliance. Well it was raised by some on the right, and then dismissed because, you know, the right, and who wants to defend campus rapists anyway? Those Duke University lacrosse kids should have hung -- even if they didn't actually rape that girl, they might have... or they might have raped some other girl.

When Orange Man exercises a power he presumes to have, it's "dictatorial", but when "Pen and a Phone" Obama exercised that same power -- together with the people, follow where Obama leads.

guelo• 1 year ago

But why are those on the right that objected to Obama not objecting to Trump?

onepointsixC4• 1 year ago

Obama threatened, but did not make good on those threats. Trump is threatening and actively withholding funds even to Columbia which bent the knee, because these are institutions which are seen as political enemies by the administration.

mmooss15• 1 year ago

This unlimited relativism is bizarre. If Trump invaded Canada, is his argument that Roosevelt invaded Germany? There is a difference between one and the other.

What does the Duke lacrosse case have to do with it?

ahmeneeroe-v22• 1 year ago

Why are you citing the these institutions' contribution to the 20th century? We are 25 years past the 20th century, 35 years since the end of the Cold War (which was the spiritual end of the 20th century).

What have these elite institutions contributed to the 1990+ world order?

amanaplanacanal3• 1 year ago

Tons of research in the sciences, including medicine.

_cs2017_• 1 year ago

"Conveniently" is the wrong word to use here. "Conveniently ignores" implies that the author intentionally disregarded some known facts to make their argument look more persuasive. However, this is not the case here. The article's argument is that a reduction in government funding is very damaging even when it is small relative to the endowment size. This argument would not lose any of its power if the author covered the topic of whether the president has the power to withdraw funding.

(On a side note, the word "framing" is also the wrong word to use.)

One way to phrase your message correctly would be: "This article is about the impact of the president's decision, but I wish it also talked about whether the president has the authority to make that decision in the first place".

xracy9• 1 year ago

There's a reason that court cases typically address standing before addressing the underlying question. It matters much more that you're taking on a case before you determine the case on the merits. If the case doesn't have standing it is not worth considering.

"Conveniently Ignoring" the standing question is frankly an admission of compliance to something that is not the law. Who cares "why people can't live without food" if someone is saying "let's starve the population." One question isn't worth platforming while the other is on the table.

kazinator• 1 year ago

"Conveniently" also insinuates that the author discarded some arguments or facts that don't suit their narrative, because they would then have to think more, which is precisely what is inconvenient. It's quite an insult, actually.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 1 year ago

Perhaps the commenter did not read the article and only reacted to the HN title.

bloppe• 1 year ago

They're not ignoring it: https://www.economist.com/united-states/2025/04/03/donald-tr...

throwawaymaths• 1 year ago

if you want to go that way, you're conveniently ignoring if congress should have the authority to allocate funds to nonprofits that aren't part of the government under the enumerated uses in article I section 8.

freejazz5• 1 year ago

In what way is what you raised a genuine question of constitutional law?

renewiltord• 1 year ago

Certainly one could argue if evidence of widespread racism by specific institutions should face punishment by the executive. It is entirely reasonable to believe that we should turn the cheek to institutional racism so that we can get good research out of it.

aag• 1 year ago

The Economist has articles on that subject already. They do their homework. Here's just one:

https://www.economist.com/united-states/2025/04/24/who-will-...

xracy9• 1 year ago

You don't go and decide a case on the merits when you've thrown it out on standing.

Addressing the other question is a pre-requisite to considering the one included in this piece. And given that they are ignoring the presumable answer to the other question, they have not justified the existence of this article.

codexb3• 1 year ago

At some level, someone needs to have discretion on which grants to award and not award. You can call it "dictatorial", but I don't see how it's any less dictatorial if the decision-maker is some faceless, unaccountable bureaucrat vs a President that is accountable to voters. Surely, grants were being denied before for other reasons.

lesuorac• 1 year ago

Do you honestly think Trump is individually reviewing grants?

Trump with help of various groups makes political appointees who either individually oversee grant reviews or administrate individuals that do. These people are just as faceless and unaccountable as with any other president ...

The difference here is that Congress who is much more accountable to voters deliberated and wrote laws authorizing various funding which is being completely overridden by the branch of government that is supposed to carry out the law.

DrillShopper5• 1 year ago

At some level, someone needs to have discretion on which grants to award and not award

Then that person should not be a politician or political appointee who judges on the merits and not on the votes it will bring.

NoMoreNicksLeft3• 1 year ago

Surely, grants were being denied before for other reasons.

Were they being denied? It might well be the case that grants were never denied except when the grant spigot ran dry waiting for the next year. I don't necessarily believe that is the case, but is there some evidence that it doesn't work like that?

wahern• 1 year ago

Process matters, everything else is to a first approximation merely platitudes. What's the difference between faceless bureaucrats making these decisions vs the president? It's the difference between rule of law vs dictatorship. Faceless bureaucrats have to follow policy defined by Congress and the President. If the person making the policy is the same person making the decision, and especially when the "policy" is whatever their fancy is, that's not rule of law. America was founded on the principle, "a government of law, not of men".

Moreover, faceless bureaucrats risk criminal and financial punishments for things like self-dealing. The president faces no such risk. And when they're a lame duck, they (theoretically) face zero risk, period.

Bureaucracies are slow. They're costly. Like democracy generally, they're inefficient. They're worthwhile because, at least as far as government is concerned, they're a necessary element to maintain rule of law and avoiding dictatorship. The solution to government bureaucracy isn't to remove the bureaucracy, it's to remove the government involvement. Otherwise, you're just inviting dictatorship. This has happened countless times. When the people get upset about perceived government ineffectiveness and its democratic institutions are too slow to respond (e.g. gridlocked Congress), there are two routes: privatization (i.e. reducing the role of government, not merely something like syndicalism) or dictatorship.

What's the difference between Donald Trump's rise to power and approach to governance, versus Huge Chavez's? Not much. The parallels are amazing. Both came to power promising radical overhauls of perceived sclerotic institutions, including broken legislatures. Like Trump, Chavez was a media whore who spent most of his time talking on television, making impossible promises and blaming everyone and everything else for his own failures. (Castro was like this, too.) They both spout so much B.S. that most people can't even keep up; they just start taking them at their word, which is why Chavez was popular until the day he died. His successor has zero charisma; the policies haven't changed, but now people hate the exact same kind of government they had during Chavez, but have no power to change it. That's what happens when you choose government of men rather than government of law.

freejazz5• 1 year ago

It is dictatorial, not because one person gets to make the decision, but because the US constitution delineates the powers of the gov't, to which the President does not have this power. I really do not understand why this is such a hard concept for many people here to grasp. The separation of powers is such a fundamental aspect of our government that I am astounded to see you miss this point. When any one branch usurps the power of another branch it is the *EXACT* kind of tyranny the constitution was created to avoid.

rayiner17• 1 year ago

The word "dictatorial" doesn't apply here. What we're talking about is government funding being provided to private universities. And Congress hasn't appropriated specific amounts of money to specific universities. It has created a pool of funds and given the executive branch discretion to allocate those funds. The powers of the executive branch are invested in the president. See Article II, Section 1 ("The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.").

Congress, moreover, has enacted laws that use those funds as a hook to influence the behavior of private universities. Specifically, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 allows the executive branch to deny federal funds to universities that discriminate on the basis of race. Now, it just so happens that, in 2023, Harvard university, among others, was found by the Supreme Court to have flagrantly violated that law: https://www.ed.gov/media/document/dear-colleague-letter-sffa...

There is nothing "dictatorial" about the President withholding taxpayer dollars from a university that is in violation of the law, where Congress has authorized the executive branch to do so. Indeed, I'm at a loss to understand who else you think has the power to do this, if not the President?

EMIRELADERO• 1 year ago

I'm guessing that what GP meant with "dictatorial" was along the lines of the power you describe being wielded in a specific manner.

To put it differently: a state of affairs where the Executive/President has those powers may not be dictatorial, but this specific instance of him making use of that discretion in this specific way might be.

otterley15• 1 year ago

There is nothing "dictatorial" about the President withholding taxpayer dollars from a university that is in violation of the law

Hey now, wait a minute. Has the “violation of law” been established yet? There’s a pretty wide gulf between “I believe a violation of the law has occurred” and having the matter adjudicated.

You’re clearly an intelligent person; there’s no need to try to sneak bullshit in through the back door. Let the strength of your arguments and facts speak for themselves. And make sure they are actual facts.

themgt• 1 year ago

A few other commenters have alluded to it, but Obama's 2011 (and then 2014/2016) "Dear Colleague" letters are critical to understanding what's going on here. As FIRE tells it:

In April 2011, the United States Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) established new mandates requiring colleges and universities receiving federal funding to dramatically reduce students’ due process rights. Under the new regulations, announced in a letter from Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Russlynn Ali, colleges and universities were required to employ a “preponderance of the evidence” standard—a 50.01%, “more likely than not” evidentiary burden—when adjudicating student complaints concerning sexual harassment or sexual violence. The regulations further required that if a university judicial process allows the accused student to appeal a verdict, it must allow the accusing student the right to appeal as well, resulting in a type of “double jeopardy” for the accused. Additionally, OCR’s letter failed to recognize that truly harassing conduct (as defined by the law) is distinct from protected speech. Institutions that did not comply with OCR’s new regulations faced federal investigation and a potential loss of federal funding.

The innovation in these letters was realizing OCR could just come to a new understanding of what civil rights law required, then tell universities that since this is what civil rights law means, following the guidance would be a mandate for institutions to receive federal funding. So now Trump's come in and reinterpreted civil rights law once again.

At this point probably a supermajority of the country thinks this innovative idea for enacting ad-hoc nationwide policy changes has been abused by one or more administrations, but I haven't heard anyone seriously working on a generalized solution. Everyone's mostly given up on Congress and just hopes their team can take control of the magic pen.

https://www.thefire.org/cases/us-department-educations-offic...

eric-p7• 1 year ago

From the HN guidelines:

"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

xnx• 1 year ago

I keep seeing this presented as if the money were being given away, but isn't it more accurate to describe it as payment for services (e.g. access to research facilities)?

linguistbreaker• 1 year ago

The POTUS should not have this authority obviously, BUT

As "Ivies" grew their endowments at hundreds of percent faster than their student bodies, they became essentially hedge funds that do some education.

primer42• 1 year ago

As I understand it, billionaires take out loans with their stock/investments as collateral to get cash without selling said assets.

Why can't universities do the same? Or is my understanding of billionaire money shenanigans incorrect?

rahimnathwani3• 1 year ago

Universities can and they do:

https://public.com/bonds/screener?issuerSymbol=PDFHV

The yield on ~20 year Harvard bonds seems to be about one percentage point higher than the yield on 20 year treasuries.

vonmoltke2• 1 year ago

Those are standard, unsecured bonds. They're not loans against anything in the endowment.

indoordin0saur2• 1 year ago

Or just use the endowment directly. Quick napkin math says that Harvard could make tuition free for all undergrads for 26 years with what they current have. Originally this money was meant to be spent on education but they just let it grow forever. Some of their hedge fund managers are approaching 8-figure annual compensation packages and I can't help but assume this is part of what has corrupted the university. Citadel LLC has $65 billion AUM, while Harvard has $53 billion while getting special tax-exemptions.

daft_pink2• 1 year ago

I feel things like Universities and Hospitals are some of the most questionable non-profits in existence.

They operate and appear as for profits businesses to most people.

amanaplanacanal3• 1 year ago

There are no owners (shareholders) getting dividends, is the major difference.

daft_pink2• 1 year ago

i just am not sure that the lack of shareholders is a reasonable reason why hosptitals and universities should have non-profit status

they appear to be operating as a large business that try to bring in more revenue than expenses and don’t seem focused on the public good and seem to have other motivations.

didgetmaster3• 1 year ago

It is part of the political reality that we live in. Whichever party is currently in power, will inevitably use that power to promote ideas that are favorable to them and to dissuade ideas that they are opposed to.

The same people who are whining about the Trump administration abusing their power by doing these things; were cheering on the Biden administration for doing similar things from the opposite angle.

This is why we have to be very careful when crafting laws. Before passing it because we want our party to use it to help us, we have to imagine what would happen when the opposing party tries to use this law against us.

gryfft• 1 year ago

cheering on the Biden administration for doing similar things from the opposite angle

What is the #1 thing you consider "a similar thing from an opposite angle?"

lordfrito• 1 year ago

Biden's multiple student loan forgivness attempts come to mind? He might have been handing out money, as opposed to taking it away like Trump. But the underlying issues are the same: he did it unilaterally using executive order, and the courts had to get involved because there were concerns about constitutionality.

If the executive branch has the authority to determine where money is spent, then it seems obvious to me that it also has the authority to determine where it isn't spent. If you think of the president as an executive "CEO", then the current CEO can change the decisions of the previous CEO... This is in fact what we're voting for in the presidential election -- "how" to run the daily business of country. New CEO, new goals, new policies, etc.

didgetmaster3• 1 year ago

The complete disregard for our immigration laws was probably the biggest thing, even though there were a number of things that came close.

Millions were let across our borders with almost no vetting whatsoever. Criminals came in freely from all over the world bringing drugs, violence, and human trafficking with them.

The Biden administration acted more like a travel agent than a border enforcement force. Anyone who spoke up about it, was attacked.

Something more closely related to Trump's current actions against universities, was Biden's war on energy. Pipelines canceled. Lands and leases locked up. Taxes and regulations designed to reduce energy production.

lief79• 1 year ago

The last part is accurate, but equating the two is a bit of stretch. The democrats went out their way to do everything by the book. They also generally took the time to understand the systems they were working with.

The current presidency went in with the assumption that everything was wasteful, and didn't take the time to understand what they were cutting. Hence, emergency rehires, judicial blocks on firing, etc.

The amount of noise about it was the same, but the root causes and support are far from equivical.

nickff• 1 year ago

Biden had the bureaucracy on his side (it’s well known that government employees are largely left-Democrats), so he was able to collaborate with it. In his first term, Trump learned that insiders were good at preventing him from accomplishing his goals when he ‘played by the rules’, so now he’s just ignored ‘the system’.

Insiders have plainly ignored the law in the past when it was convenient, (see all the agencies which violated notice-and-comment rule-making in the Obama years,) we’ve just never seen anyone ignore the administrative agencies to this degree before.

gs17• 1 year ago

I'm not aware of mass cancelling of research grants under Biden in the same way Trump is doing. The Trump to Biden transition took place during my PhD, and I never heard a peep about anything similar. Now all I hear about is cancelled grants.

Under Biden, many grants did have to appeal to liberal sensibilities to be selected, but he didn't order all grants that didn't focus on DEI cancelled in 2021. I'm not even sure if "inclusion" was added to the NSF's list of "broader impacts" under Biden or well before him.

mmooss15• 1 year ago

the political reality that we live in

Reality is something that exists regardless of what you think. Politics is what you make it; you don't 'live in it'; it's yours.

Whichever party is currently in power, will inevitably use that power to promote ideas that are favorable to them and to dissuade ideas that they are opposed to.

No prior president of either party has done anything like what Trump does, and you know it. Do you think nobody will notice if you make some rhetorical argument?

didgetmaster3• 1 year ago

No prior president did anything like Biden did either. Only hyper-partisans will claim that only one side does radical things.

strangeloops85• 1 year ago

Public schools in the US get a relatively small fraction of their budget from state funding. The distinction between public and private is not as large or substantial as one might imagine.

For example the 10-campus UC system's total budget is $54 billion of which $4.6 billion comes directly from the state's general fund. https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/4998 - the federal funding here is the same as for private universities, to do research or other work in the form of contracts/ grants.

jmyeet• 1 year ago

People need to understand how the pharmacology pipeline works.

The Federal government provides funds for research. That research finds novel compounds and new treatments. The product of that resaerch then gets transferred to private companies who commercialize it and then make massive profits from it.

Generally speaking, drug companies don't research with one exception: patent extension. A given compound will be patented and then the patent owner will have a monopoly over that for a number of years, supposedly because there'd be no investment otherwise, but that patent will ultimately expire. Except... it doesn't really. It's why over a century later we're still dealing with insulin patents. "Patent extension" is the process where you make a small change to a molecule or a delivery system and then get a new patent, refusing to sell the old. And it can be hard for someone else to produce a generic for many reasons.

Now I have a lot of problems with this system:

1. Any form of patent extension should be illegal, basically;

2. The institutions who actually come up with this should share in the profits. After all, it's the government paying for it;

3. We give a monopoly to these companies in the US where it's illegal to import the exact same product from overseas, which leads to something costing $800 in the US and $5 in France.

But given this is the system we're stuck with, cutting off funding makes absolutely no sense. Why?

1. It's going to dramatically impact drug companies negatively in the future as their supply of new products dries up;

2. It's antoerh element of soft power where the US can use the power to produce certain medicines to influence other countries. Think about what happens if China becomes the source for the world's medicines (personally, i'd be a fan but the purveyors of this policy most definitely are not).

Government research has given us things like the Internet and mRNA vaccines. This is so unbelievably shortsighted.

And why are they doing it? Well, the party of Free Speech is punishing institutions because some of their students made factually correct but mean statements about Israel.

dekhn• 1 year ago

pharma does plenty of research outside of patent extension.

boplicity2• 1 year ago

To be clear: It's not as simple as funding for these schools being taken away.

What's being threatened is funding for research being done at these schools. That's a huge difference.

aianus• 1 year ago

Does the admin of the school get any of this money today or is it entirely allocated to the individual researchers?

2cynykyl• 1 year ago

Yes, about half is skimmed off the top by the university, called 'overhead'. This is used to fund everything, from research-essential things like paying for heat and maintaining buildings, to less obvious but still research-essential things like IP lawyers to deal with contracts and campus security. However, SOME of the overhead will end up supporting things that are 'contentious' like DEI enforcement or whatever.

arduanika• 1 year ago

It's not as simple as that, either. Every research grant comes with an "overhead" charge on top that goes to the university admin, which can be something like 60%.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2025/02/10/lies-damn-lies-and-un...

And moreover, it's not just the research grants that are being threatened, as seen in TFA. There's also the massive subsidy in the form of tax exemption. No other hedge funds receive that kind of preferred tax treatment. Only universities.

boplicity2• 1 year ago

So I have a rare disease. The only treatment is surgery. However, there is an ongoing study on a promising treatment at an elite university for a very effective and simple drug-based treatment. That type of research funding is absolutely being threatened. So, yes, it really is that simple.

If only Trump were trying to force universities to be more efficient with their spending. However, both of us clearly know that is not what is going on here.

niemandhier• 1 year ago

Göttingen and Berlin were arguably the best universities in the world in 1930.

They were not in 1940.

amai• 1 year ago

For physics and math that might be true. But Copenhagen was also very important.

ssalazar• 1 year ago

This author presumably understands but buries the lede that for an endowment of $15 billion a university would typically only spend 5%, or $750 million, annually. So "a mere $400m" is over half of the annual funds from the endowment (not including tuition income and donations) that might be available to a university with such an endowment.

It should be relatively obvious that spending into the principal of an endowment is not a sustainable practice over the long-term for universities that are operating at the scale of centuries.

kccqzy• 1 year ago

At a scale of centuries, monetary units themselves become highly unstable. On this time scale it was recently that people thought deflation was good for the economy, and that spending 5% every year would be reckless.

Why can't Ivies cope with losing a few hundred million?

Related Stories