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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   28763 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 19, 2025

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The NYT wants you to know that Harvard has "no way out." I'm sure Harvard University with its 53.2 billion dollar endowment is going to start having trouble attracting researchers:

Trump has stripped extensive federal funding from Harvard. Let’s say a judge gives back all of that money for this year. Half of the university’s research budget comes from the federal government. Where is Harvard going to get the money in the year after that, and the year after that? If you’re a researcher, do you want to be doing research at a school where your funding is in question?

I suspect they're scaring their readership to rack in the clicks. The article is being embraced by Rightist influencer people eager for confirmation of their "victory." They're COOKED! Back in reality, the Democrats will likely take back the Presidency in 2028, if not then then very likely by 2032. It will eventually dawn on these people that Harvard remains massively prestigious while nobody knows or cares about Fred's Car Wash in Des Moines Iowa.

Harvard University with its 53.2 billion dollar endowment

Norman_Rockwell_Freendom_Of_Speech.jpg

It's OK to pay money to billionaires.

Federal grants to research universities are just a commission to research some topic that an agency finds valuable enough to fund with taxpayer money. If I don't feel swindled when I buy groceries from a multi-billion dollar corporation like Walmart then I don't believe I should feel bad just because my taxes are funding research at an institution with a multi-billion dollar endowment. We all got what we paid for and at a reasonable price. There is plenty of culture war slop research that should be defunded, but the endowment is a red herring in my opinion.

Norman_Rockwell_Freendom_Of_Speech.jpg

God I hate that painting. Rockwell wasn't even a good artist btw., unfortunately people have only really seen that particular work by him and his wider artworks have that uncanny valley feeling to them...

  • -14

have only really seen that particular work

You trippin foo, "Freedom from Want", "Rosie the Riveter", "Dreams", "The Runaway", and "Soda Jerk" are all at least as common in the US outside of the Extremely Online, "Freedom From Want" quite a bit more so. I've also seen "Be a Man", "Sunset", and "Sunday Morning" around pretty often. While I will otherwise refrain from offering opinions on artistic merit in this comment, I'll add that when I was trying to find links to all these pictures I'd seen but didn't know the names of I encountered "CPA" and "The Lineman" for the first time, and I quite like them both.

Same thing applies to the Blue-Tribe hue and cry over the government paying Elongated Muskrat to put their satellites in orbit....

(edit: the government's satellites; NASA, USGS, NRO, &c. &c.). Sorry if that wasn't clear.

  • -23

Could you elaborate on what you mean by this?

What does this add?

Do you have an issue with SpaceX? If so, what?

I don't have an issue with the government paying SpaceX to launch government satellites.

The Blue Tribe has similar antipathy for Mr Musk as the Red Tribe has for Harvard. I was making the point that the monies that they get from the government are both of the form 'Government gives money to rich person/organisation in exchange for services rendered', and thus they are both analogous to @Soul_Stuff giving money to Walmart in exchange for groceries.

(As for my general Views on SpaceX, while I have a few notes on Mr Musk's politics, I suspect that the people calling for his head are not being entirely honest about their motives, and are more driven by resentment not that he is wealthy per se so much as his having the temerity to not be subject to the high-school-cafeteria-style pecking order. I could be wrong.

Futhermore, even if one accepts the aspersions cast against Mr Musk's character, ending the eight-year, ten-month, nine-day period in which America Could Not Into Space has to count for something.)

Elongated Muskrat

Let's not do this.

Norman_Rockwell_Freedom_Of_Speech.jpg

For some reason this reminds me of @coffee_enjoyer

Except you get a say when you buy the groceries, and no one asks the communities all over the country if they want Harvard to get all these grants? Like you say, they have enough to do what they call research without needing a handout. This is bringing it more in line with how we do things with every company instead of giving it special treatment just because they promise its important.

Does there exist a class of research that is so speculative and/or long-term that it's beyond the quarterly target cycles of companies? Who would fund that kind of research if so?

Harvard Related piggyback: Steven Pinker published a mostly defense of Harvard in an NYT opinion piece titled "Harvard Derangement Syndrome". I call it a mostly defense, because I don't think the title is appropriate. While the purpose and conclusion of the article is to defend Harvard against Federal interference the meat is more rational examination.

Some pulled paragraphs:

Finally, our students are not blank slates which we can inscribe at will. Young people are shaped by peers more than most people realize. Students are shaped by the peer cultures in their high schools, at Harvard and (especially with social media) in the world. In many cases, students’ politics are no more attributable to indoctrination by professors than are their green hair and pierced septums.

A poll of my colleagues on the academic freedom council turned up many examples in which they felt political narrowness had skewed research.... In climate policy, it led to a focus on demonizing fossil fuel companies rather than acknowledging the universal desire for abundant energy; in pediatrics, taking all adolescents’ reported gender dysphoria at face value; in public health, advocating maximalist government interventions rather than cost-benefit analyses; in history, emphasizing the harms of colonialism but not of communism or Islamism; in social science, attributing all group disparities to racism but never to culture; and in women’s studies, permitting the study of sexism and stereotypes but not sexual selection, sexology or hormones (not coincidentally, Hooven’s specialty)...

Universities should set the expectation that faculty members leave their politics at the classroom door, and affirm the rationalist virtues of epistemic humility and active open-mindedness...

If the federal government doesn’t force Harvard to reform, what will? ... Universities could give a stronger mandate to the external “visiting committees” that ostensibly audit departments and programs but in practice are subject to regulatory capture. University leaders constantly get an earful from disgruntled alumni, donors and journalists, and they should use it, judiciously, as a sanity check. The governing boards should be more tuned in to university affairs and take more responsibility for its health. The Harvard Corporation is so reclusive that when two of its members dined with members of the academic freedom council in 2023, The Times deemed it worthy of a news story.

Pinker concedes much. Too much for the NYT commenters who might lambast him more in other contexts. He likely doesn't concede enough for those that want to see Harvard suffer. His position negates neutrality, though he attempts to refute this conflict of interest with with his own demonstrated principles.

I find the antisemitism weapons repugnant. I would consider it a good thing for student-activists and campus administrations alike to learn the value of viewpoint diversity, limitations of protest, boundaries of conduct at university, what an education is meant for, and so on. That's not going to happen regardless. Pick your poison.

This essay feels out of place in the NYT. Which is to say it's well argued, nuanced, a bit witty, requires more than twenty seconds of short-term memory and it advances claims that readers are not going to like. Also it's about 5x longer than usual. I am curious how many readers actually even get through it. The carrot and stick of the article (Harvard good but also bad but also good and Trump bad but also has a point but also bad) is potent but attention spans are so short and nobody is open to ideas.

Which is to say I think the article is excellent!

I don't think the essay is out of place in the NYT. At least I can understand why the paper wouldn't think so. The Atlantic also might have published it to reach the Quarterly Heterodox quota. If you judge how much the reader engages from the Reader Picks comment section, then the answer is no one read it.

One commenter opens with a claim they "often appreciated Prof Pinker's heterodox views" and "no ideas or philosophies either on the left or the right should be above challenge and criticism." They immediately follow that introduction with "the attacks are largely coming from conservative Christians (see Heritage Foundation) that simply don't believe in a plural democracy. There's a fundamental flaw when you take the Bible to be infallible as your primary tenet..."

Comments ignore most of the things in the article and focus on the things they already wanted to shitpost about. They might not have read it or understood it. They might not be American at all. Comment sections are universally bad. The reader base the NYT imagines justify its status and dominance aren't shitposting under articles and op-eds. If these people are real (they are) and they still read the NYT (they do), then the piece is understood as some uncomfortable nuance from an insider with a comfortable conclusion. That's not out of place in the NYT.

isn't that just the meme about questions at academic lectures. its not usually about asking a question, its usually just the person pushing their hobby horse.

If these people are real (they are) and they still read the NYT (they do), then the piece is understood as some uncomfortable nuance from an insider with a comfortable conclusion. That's not out of place in the NYT.

Yes that part fits like a glove. I still think it required (e.g.) more IQ points than the median NYT essay to follow though. But perhaps that's part of today's performance.

In many cases, students’ politics are no more attributable to indoctrination by professors than are their green hair and pierced septums.

This is such a funny sentence. It feels like it belongs in the 1960s, when I can imagine a stuffy old-fashioned college professor being shocked by dyed hair and piercings.

Nowdays... well, first it's not very shocking. Second, the students who have that kind of fashion are almost all liberal, sharing the same politics as the faculty. Many of the faculty probably had those fashions when they were younger (or still have them). And the school's admissions policies actively select for those kinds of kids via their vague "personality" rating, which rewards people for personal demonstration of radical leftist politics. Which is to say, it rewards them for having the right fashion, and for a college, that means counterculture punk shit.

Sure, the college professors aren't shocked by hair died in unnatural colours and piercings where they don't belong. But they are also not the originators- this stuff comes from peers.

I've made this point before, that colleges are essentially compounds full of unsupervised teenagers and that, elite colleges being still sort of meritocratic, they adopt the politics which justify the preferences of unsupervised teenagers writ large, because that makes them popular among their peer group- not their professors.

Ah yes, the personality assessment. In which the assessor looks at an applicant's race and marks them down as an unlikable unrespected coward if they are Asian.

The holistic interviews being originally invented to limit the number of Jews at Harvard, now easily repurposed for more modern racism.

I considered the point of that statement as connecting political beliefs of students with their fashion choices and not something that professors influence compared to other cultural forces (including and especially social media).

If none of the political opinions are brought in with the students, why are students beliefs so uniform? Why are all the kids with or without green hair so uniformly aligned to the values, attitudes, beliefs and ideals of the left liberal wing of the Democratic Party? If no indoctrination is taking place such uniformity should not happen. Yet on every issue, the students agree with the far left. There are protests for Palestinians, yet you can’t find any students— not even the Jewish ones — openly saying that Hamas had it coming. There are protests against Trump, but are there any MAGA hats or signs? The dude got 50+ percent of the vote.

A very clear sign of indoctrination is agreement by the populace on major issues. And going down issue by issue, it’s impossible to not notice just how closely modern college students align with the far left, especially when compared both to the surrounding communities and the communities these kids came from.

One of the first things I saw in a modern university was a lengthy 'do consent, don't be rapey, don't use words like bitch, also there's a wage gap between men and women plus a race wage gap (which inconveniently shows Asians are on top but we'll skip over that)' session. There was one guy who raised his hand and made an argument of it, saying men were more likely to do engineering and highly paid subjects which is why they earn more money.

But there was visceral, audible groaning from the audience at this display, about the only interesting thing that happened. The presenters basically just ummed and ahhed in response, they weren't really angry or anything. It was leftism on autopilot, leftism by default, apolitical leftism.

Somehow they'd already gotten to most the students. High school or maybe society generally is the key thing. Maybe the kids who pay attention to high school because they're going to uni actually soak up the message in high school and that's what's really happening? But they also do change people there, I saw a fairly normal albeit somewhat edgy guy turn into an Extinction Rebellion climate believer seemingly overnight. I saw none of this actually happening and don't understand the mechanism, only the effects. Dark leftism.

There were pro-Israel protests on college campuses. There's fratboys wearing maga hats.

Campus conservatism exists, it's just a minority tendency for a variety of reasons and the kind of mass-popular soft-social conservatism that Trump embodies isn't super appealing to the highly intellectual crowd.

So drawing on a population that elected MAGA with half the vote, a tiny minority is pro Trump? A population that has lots of Jews yet again only a tiny group of them protesting for their brothers in Israel? It still doesn’t track. Sure you don’t have 100% uniformity, but drawing from a highly polarized population that runs 45-55% between D and R and ending up with the vast majority of students would align with the far left which in the general population of the USA is maybe 20% of the population. If there’s no indoctrination, why doesn’t a typical college campus mirror the USA ideologically?

I don’t observe the same thing in business. If you hire 100 people, they’ll generally be pretty close to the demographics of the region. If I hire 10 people from Alabama, I get probably 9 southern Baptists, most of them very conservative, and so on to attitudes about abortion, gays, and proper grits. If I hired 10 people from Alabama and four years later they were mostly pro LGBT episcopal Christians and socialist to boot, you’d probably be right to suspect that there’s something fishy going on.

You can find well educated conservatives they’re usually just not maga. The religious right and the pro-business right are coalition partners, not loyalists.

Selection plus social pressure

I think most of the students are left-leaning even before they enter the university, they just don't express it so strongly. But yes, some indoctrination is clearly taking place. But it's more from student clubs and off-campus organizations than from the classes. Also probably pressure from dudes trying to impress women to get laid, and women are usually more left-leaning than men.

Women are more left leaning than men because they're more conformist and left-wing politics is the norm in those circles. It used to be the reverse.

Left wing politics is the norm in those circles because they're compounds full of unsupervised teenagers which award status for intellectual achievements, and unsupervised teenagers broadly want to get taken care of without having rules on themselves(and also often to get laid, dabble in substances, stay up late, etc). This is something that's pretty easy to justify from a far-left framework but can't be justified from a right wing framework at all. And there is a subset of high-status college kids at elite universities who are more than smart enough to understand that- how much of the football team is showing up at palestine protests(they don't care about intellectual consistency, by and large)? There are obvious reasons why future thought leaders are aggressively left wing when they're in college and our culture is just not good enough at making them be adults to exert a moderating influence.

Women are more left leaning than men because they're more likely to benefit from government services (healthcare during pregnancy, support for children, longer lives meaning social security and medicare, etc.) There's no need to point to indoctrination when self-interest is already more than explanatory. In the same vein, most people go to college to become professionals in dense urban centers, which also happen to be where government administration and benefits tend to be the most concentrated. There's culture war stuff going on too, but that's basically a proxy for self-interest. It's a mirror of how conservative denial of climate change and performative love of big trucks is downstream of the fact they're more likely to be involved in primary industries, and that people who drive big vehicles long distances are more affected by the price of gas. Throw in people making costly signals of ingroup affiliation and we have the modern situation.

There are protests for Palestinians, yet you can’t find any students— not even the Jewish ones — openly saying that Hamas had it coming.

Well, yeah, that's probably a great way to get punched in the face.

I would consider it a good thing for student-activists and campus administrations alike to learn...limitations of protest, boundaries of conduct at university... That's not going to happen regardless. Pick your poison.

As an empirical question, they are learning the limits and boundaries through personal experience. I just don't like what the limits are.

The limits of protest conduct are:

  1. Protest for causes the establishment likes (unlimited violence allowed)

  2. Don’t protest for causes the establishment dislikes (seriously, don’t even bother leaving the house)

From the article:

The nation desperately needs this sense of proportionality in dealing with its educational and cultural institutions. Harvard, as I am among the first to point out, has serious ailments. The sense that something is not well with the university is widespread, and it’s led to sympathy, even schadenfreude, with Mr. Trump’s all-out assault. But Harvard is an intricate system that developed over centuries and constantly has to grapple with competing and unexpected challenges. The appropriate treatment (as with other imperfect institutions) is to diagnose which parts need which remedies, not to cut its carotid and watch it bleed out.

Fact is, the right has tried that, most recently with SFFA v Harvard, which Harvard essentially thumbed its nose at. And Pinker himself, by his own testimony in this article, has tried that. It did diddlysquat; Harvard doubled down on the bad behavior. So either those opposed to what Harvard is doing must back down, or they must escalate.

Also, universities are committed to free speech, which includes speech we don’t like. A corporation can fire an outspoken employee; a university can’t, or shouldn’t.

FIRE (not a right wing organization) listed Harvard as the worst US university for free speech two years running. And it got the worst score EVER for any US university in 2023. Harvard cannot credibly use a commitment to free speech as a defense for anything, because it lacks one. Yes, I know Pinker objects to this ranking, but not really credibly.

Fact is, the right has tried that, most recently with SFFA v Harvard, which Harvard essentially thumbed its nose at. And Pinker himself, by his own testimony in this article, has tried that. It did diddlysquat; Harvard doubled down on the bad behavior. So either those opposed to what Harvard is doing must back down, or they must escalate.

If you want to govern, you're going to deal with problems that transcend politics. There are potholes in the road, Democrats and Republicans both want them fixed. You might need to work with the guy who fixes them even if he's an a**hole.

The "friend-enemy distinction" people lack a theory of politics for that. Harvard is the enemy, Carl Schmitt, blah blah blah. Never occurs to them that their job fight involve literal or figurative pothole-filling rather than zero-sum political warfare. As Pinker said:

Just as clear is what won’t work: the Trump administration’s punitive defunding of science at Harvard. Contrary to a widespread misunderstanding, a federal grant is not alms to the university, nor may the executive branch dangle it to force grantees to do whatever it wants. It is a fee for a service — namely, a research project that the government decides (after fierce competitive review) would benefit the country. The grant pays for the people and equipment needed to carry out that research, which would not be done otherwise.

The "friend-enemy distinction" people lack a theory of politics for that. Harvard is the enemy, Carl Schmitt, blah blah blah. Never occurs to them that their job fight involve literal or figurative pothole-filling rather than zero-sum political warfare. As Pinker said:

What is the pothole in this scenario? Harvard is the avatar of a parasitic system which is higher ed. People have been tinkering at the edges for a long while now. Some people like Mitch Daniels have had some local success at keeping costs down while not allowing overt politicization of the campus. Others like Rufo have had to take a scorched earth view to get anything accomplished at all.

What is the pothole in this scenario?

Scientific research.

Having worked in a lab with Ph.D candidates, I am pretty skeptical that we benefit from that system over just letting them free into the world to be employed.

They won’t be outside of hard sciences and engineering. There simply aren’t a lot of skills a PhD student has that a normal employer wants. Basically the phd programs outside of really hard science and engineering are jobs programs for the graduates of those programs. It helps hide that such programs are useless because those students do get jobs after graduating. If we didn’t have that, maybe the top 1% of those students get real jobs while the rest learn to take orders at coffee shops.

I worked in a hard science engineering lab for most of my time in undergrad. The people work incredibly hard as Ph.D candidates and post docs, but so much of it is dedicated to grant writing, only a small bit of the work is working on the projects those grants are for. It seemed a lot like (frankly) college admissions. You have to apply to a dozen schools to get into one, and its not really clear why you got into that one instead of the others.

If you want to govern, you're going to deal with problems that transcend politics. There are potholes in the road, Democrats and Republicans both want them fixed. You might need to work with the guy who fixes them even if he's an a**hole.

LOL. Harvard, and in general the entire left, have refused to do that when presented with said "a**hole". (Two of them, actually, Trump and Musk). Because this is false. Democrats (except a few marginalized dissidents) are happy with the situation as it is, and Republicans are extremely unhappy with it. If Democrats in general wanted to fix the racial discrimination problem at Harvard, they could have done so by now. If Democrats in general wanted to fix the issue of violent Palestinian protests at universities, they could have done a more credible job at it by now. If Democrats wanted to fix the problem of ideological uniformity at universities, they could have not contributed to it on purpose.

Just as clear is what won’t work: the Trump administration’s punitive defunding of science at Harvard. Contrary to a widespread misunderstanding, a federal grant is not alms to the university, nor may the executive branch dangle it to force grantees to do whatever it wants. It is a fee for a service — namely, a research project that the government decides (after fierce competitive review) would benefit the country. The grant pays for the people and equipment needed to carry out that research, which would not be done otherwise.

This is a theory, anyway. But dangling funding to force grantees to do whatever it wants is the standard situation -- he who pays the piper calls the tune; Trump, as you may recall, eliminated some of that which was pointing the other way (requiring various DEI things), to a lot of crying from the same people crying about Trump's actions against Harvard. In fact the government funds a lot of useless stuff that is basically alms for the universities, and that stuff which isn't... well, there are other universities which aren't so intransigent.

It becomes inevitable, at the start of the new dynasty: to throw all the old scholars and burn them with their books. There is approximately a snowball's chance in hell that anyone in Harvard will cooperate, Politics is the question of the posssible. It is impossible to do politics with the left. Best to cut the gordiian knot.

If someone calls you Hitler, believe them as an honest expression of non-cooperation.

Can anybody give a QRD of why Trump seems particularly pissed off at Harvard?

I don't think he's actually particularly pissed at Harvard specifically. It's really the combination of a few things.

  • It's the most sacred institution to DC people.
  • If anti-Trumpism has a Westpoint, it's Harvard Kennedy School
  • Harvard administrators are unbelievably arrogant and will be unable to present a sympathetic defence in public
  • The Trump base has zero sympathy for Harvard and love to see them get put in place
  • Harvard isn't what it used to be at the administrative level. Claudine Gay isn't up to the standards of Harvard 30 years ago
  • Harvard admin doesn't seem to grasp that a lot of their behaviour over the past few decades is explicitly illegal and they only got away with it because the feds were on side. There's no case law protecting them.
  • As the most prestigious school they make an obvious target for all of Trumpism's issues with academia.

Harvard stood up to some Republican bint (Elise Stefanik) demanding they be more of a safe space to an alleged vulnerable minority group.

Aside from what others have said, the fact that just 2 years ago they lost at the Supreme Court on their (obviously) racially discriminatory admissions process and are proceeding to not actually take the L and comply is not helping.

As far as colleges go, you can't really pick a better one than Harvard. It's got all the bluster and money of a big time college without really giving back anything concrete which people like or help people go on with their lives like MIT or state technical colleges, instead focusing on filling people's heads up with all kinds of strange notions and thinking they are just above all the "rubes" who don't need to think about what a woman is, we can see it!

Trump is just generally going after elite universities to try to force them into being... well 'allied' is probably not in the cards, but at least 'not aligned with his enemies'. It's just Harvard's turn.

He's not. If anything, Harvard is getting its turn after Columbia, which was targeted first due to its weaker position.

(Warning - link is not QRD. But it may be interesting.)

Now, I hate the NYT as much as anyone, but the first paragraph after your no way out quote says:

The Trump administration’s attempt to block international students from attending Harvard University was a sharp escalation in the showdown between the federal government and one of the nation’s oldest and most powerful institutions.

This is the real threat, not the squabbling over federal funds. Harvard might swim in cash, but they also live of their ability to draw in the best students from half the world. For billions of people worldwide, the answer to the question "Where would you study if you were super-smart and wanted to win a Nobel?" is "Ivy league, or a few prestigious state-run universities in the US". In the future, the answer for all but 340M (plus Canadians, perhaps?) will change to "... except Harvard, which does not take international students."

My understanding of the US private universities is that their students are either very rich and smart or brilliant and on a stipend. It is a symbiotic relationship: the rich student pays for both of them getting a prestigious, excellent education, and the brilliant student makes sure that the prestige of the university is maintained.

About 27% of Harvard's students are international (a lower number than I would have expected). I think that the "rich and smart" internationals can be replaced without too much trouble, you would not have to lower standards very much to find still very smart Americans willing to pay for the privilege of studying at Harvard. I did not find what fraction of students is studying for free at Harvard, never mind how many of them are internationals, but I suspect that the overall fraction of students on a stipend is small, and that a significant fraction of them are internationals. Replacing these with US nationals will likely hurt.

Also, there are cascading effects. If you are a brilliant young American, would you rather go to a university where you can meet the best minds of your generation (or so they would claim), or one where you can only meet the best US minds of your generation who do not care about that very fact?

The obvious reaction (if the courts uphold Trump's decision) for Harvard would be to announce them opening a branch in Canada, but that is not easily done.

I feel like people are giving institutions like Harvard the benefit of the doubt in a way that they do not deserve. If we where talking about MIT or caltech (and maybe even Stanford) I believe that most of these arguments about having the best international students would be correct, and while Harvard is very good, it’s not as if their institutions primary purpose is supporting ground breaking work in the physical sciences, it’s there to provide the most privileged children in the world a place to mingle and make connections.

I suspect the elite truly see themselves as post national “global citizens” and removing that from Harvard will hurt their image.

More broadly I don’t think that people have really thought through how corrosive having tons of international students is to the us university system (this comment applies to state schools as well as elite institutions). Put succinctly, academics advance their careers by getting grants, and publishing papers. This means paying talented post docs and graduate students. Having an essentially open boarders system for this means that academics can access foreign labor at a fraction of what it would cost to hire us students, so instead of having one or two students who are paid slightly more, you end up with academics who have 8-10 students, 2 of whom are domestic and the rest are international.

This leads to worse mentorship and the situation we have now where the us tax payers is funding efforts to educate a bunch of foreign nationals who then leave.

I have worked with plenty of brilliant people with PhDs, it may just be my particular background but it seems to me that the main trait shared by the best ones was that they had received good mentorship from their advisors. You’re less likely to get that when the advisor is able to recruit an army.

Finally I would add that giving them all green cards would just make the system even worse since it would give academics even more power over their international students than they have now and would make these positions even more attractive.

So while I don’t have a problem with some international students, I think it’s important to reco

while Harvard is very good, it’s not as if their institutions primary purpose is supporting ground breaking work in the physical sciences

Harvard's graduate programs are top tier in basically every science. Schools like Harvard and Yale may think of themselves, and wish to be seen as, liberal arts institutions that act as finishing schools for America's future elite while letting the eggheads at MIT and Caltech do the dirty work of science and engineering, but in practice every elite university has the same set of R1 research programs in STEM, and trying to shut down any of the top ~20 will do approximately the same amount of damage to American science as any other.

More broadly I don’t think that people have really thought through how corrosive having tons of international students is to the us university system (this comment applies to state schools as well as elite institutions). Put succinctly, academics advance their careers by getting grants, and publishing papers. This means paying talented post docs and graduate students. Having an essentially open boarders system for this means that academics can access foreign labor at a fraction of what it would cost to hire us students, so instead of having one or two students who are paid slightly more, you end up with academics who have 8-10 students, 2 of whom are domestic and the rest are international.

Domestic and international grad students and postdocs are paid the same and receive the same benefits. It's not as though you can accept a bunch of Indian PhD students and give them half the normal stipend, at least at any institution I'm familiar with. The size of a lab is usually dictated by how much grant money a particular professor can bring in, with salaries for each position fixed by the university. A new assistant professor might only have enough funding to support a handful of students, while an academic superstar could have dozens of lab members and spend very little time with each one as he jets from one conference to another or advises startups on the side. Some immigrant professors may prefer to bring in people from their home countries, which is annoying, but their labs tend to stay small because they are recruiting from a more limited pool and they write worse papers without native English speakers to assist.

In my experience, a decent fraction of international students at the undergraduate level are spoiled rich kids who could not have gotten into an American university on their academic performance alone, but at the graduate level you get students who are much less concerned with empty prestige (not even Asians would get a PhD just for bragging rights) and are on average smarter and harder working than their domestic counterparts. The ability to brain drain the rest of the world is the superpower that has enabled American dominance in science and technology ever since Operation Paperclip, and destroying it out of spite (at what, I'm not even sure) would be an act of such catastrophic stupidity that it would make a communist dictatorship green with envy.

This doesn’t really make sense. If you shut down Harvard’s STEM stuff, why wouldn’t most of it end up over the Charles at MIT or down the 95 corridor at Yale or across the country at Cal Tech? The researchers don’t disappear. The other universities could scoop them up.

Because the research is limited by both funding and competent people. Unless the first gets transferred more or less immediately, the competent people will disappear because they don't want to wait years in a limbo before getting on with their career. Sure, you'll eventually get replacements but those are effectively brand new research programs and it takes years to get them off the ground.

This leads to worse mentorship and the situation we have now where the us tax payers is funding efforts to educate a bunch of foreign nationals who then leave.

Universities already charge foreigners far more than natives for tuition.

As I said in my comment above, I believe that academics should be incentivized to support a smaller number of students who they actually mentor and otherwise invest in.

What if the academics don't agree that some people are entitled to their attention because they were born on one side of an arbitrary line? You can say "well I don't want to subsidize them" which I would agree with. But Trump's actions go far beyond that.

Harvard is top tier in the life sciences , same league as MIT.

the us tax payers is funding efforts to educate a bunch of foreign nationals who then leave.

Do they leave? I work with tons of very smart foreigners who got an advanced degree at an American university, so they can't all be leaving. We'd definitely be worse off if we can't brain drain the world anymore.

And let's not forget that Trump once proposed a drastic solution to retain international students:

You graduate from a college, I think you should get, automatically as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country. That includes junior colleges, too.

As I said in my comment above, I believe that academics should be incentivized to support a smaller number of students who they actually mentor and otherwise invest in. I might not have been explicit, buts my experience is that most work completed by graduate students is of relatively low quality and the point of the exercise is to train people so that they are equipped to do actual science. The foreign students I have interacted with are usually at around the same level as the domestic students but are more desperate because they are trying to escape from a shithole. Automatically giving green cards to people would just make the situation worse by further increasing the pool of labor available for exploitation.

As for the ones who stayed, how many of them are actually doing science? I bet the majority of them used it as a pathway into the us labor market and are now working fairly standard jobs. Had they not come these jobs would have still been filled (probably at significantly higher cost, but if that’s the cost of a more equal society, so be it).

I might not have been explicit, buts my experience is that most work completed by graduate students is of relatively low quality and the point of the exercise is to train people so that they are equipped to do actual science.

What fields have you observed this in? In capital intensive STEM research, the senior grad students and postdocs do all the work and the PIs are out of touch managers who have to spend all their time grubbing for money. I could see your statement being true for like economics or something, but it is not at all what I observed in the hard sciences.

Indeed I work in industry, not academia, but I don't see it as any way bad if foreign students use American academia as a stepping stone into American industry. It's still a net benefit to the US.

Had they not come these jobs would have still been filled (probably at significantly higher cost, but if that’s the cost of a more equal society, so be it).

It's unlikely that these jobs would have been filled at a higher cost on account of the cost already being very high. It's more likely that the job would have been not filled or filled with inferior people.

An example of the top of my head - all but one of the authors of Attention is All You Need are foreigners. I don't know if you count Google Research/Brain as a "fairly standard job" but it's pretty obvious to me that there aren't seven foreigners on this paper because they're cheap.

Its the opposite of what your gut instinct was. International students are the "rich and mediocre" type, overwhelmingly. And there is a surplus of brilliant, nonrich, Americans, not just for Harvard, but for the Ivy League.

In my experience, the typical elite undergraduate student is a capable smartish rule follower, regardless of if they're international or domestic. Dirt poor internationals don't ever make it to elite schools, and dirt poor domestics rarely do. The dirt poor domestics aren't particularly brilliant.

The occasions where someone is brilliant are rare, and they tend to be children of middle class professionals, regardless of if they're international or domestic. They do attend at higher rates than typical universities.

Technical PhDs are always smart. Masters students are universally idiots.

Do you know if the undergrads are any better? My primary experiences have been with international ms (the worst) and PhD (who seem average to slightly above average) students.

In law school, I remember people deliberately choosing classes with high numbers of international students specifically to benefit from the more generous curve of competing with the mediocre Chinese kids.

their students are either very rich and smart or brilliant and on a stipend.

Nope, not for undergads at least. You only get free money based on "need". And I believe that all international undergrads pay full price no matter what.

Phd is a different story, but phds in all US universities get paid slave wages for going to school

I hope Harvard stands firm and puts the admin in its place. It's one thing to be against Affirmative Action but a completely different one to oppose academic independence say you want MAGA leaning professors in the physics department.

Fight Fiercely Harvard!

  • -10

What's wrong with having MAGA professors? Their political beliefs don't really change the facts that they have to teach.

While you can probably find conservative professors in most subjects, MAGA is a populist movement which doesn't appeal very much to the educated crowd, so I'm doubting you can find that many of them.

Actually, you can't for most subjects.

I spent the last 20 minutes looking for it and I can't find it but a number of years ago I remember seeing data about the political afflication of professors by party, either Democrat or Republican (I think it was out of Jonathan Haidt's work but not 100% sure).

Anyway, the end result was that the balance (and this was back in the 2016-2018 era) was abysmal. Like really really bad. Most subjects had maybe 10 out of every 100 professors were Republican or Republican leaning. Some even lower. There was one or two subjects (I think was English literature and one other thing maybe) where they could not find a single Republican leaning professor at all, from their survey. The only subjects that had a "reasonable" balance of Democrat and Republicans were I think engineering and economics (unsurprisingly), but even that was like 60-40 D-R.

It means in most colleges, outside of engineering and economics, you might have 1 or 2 Republican professors in the whole college, and the vast majority of disciplines in any given university would not have a single Republican leaning professor.

I know Republican != conservative (honestly it's probably worse), and I might be misremembering the data slightly.

But there are more qualified applicants than professor jobs.

I think this is what you're looking for, and no it's not Jonathan Haidt's work. Here's a prior summary I wrote of the findings while TheMotte was still on Reddit: "It used data from voter registration data for faculty members to determine the Democrat to Republican (D:R) ratio of an array of social science fields, namely economics, history, communications, law and psychology. Out of a sample of 7,243 professors, 2,120 were not registered, 1,145 were not affiliated, 3,623 were Democrat, and only 314 were Republican. That's a D:R ratio of 11.5:1. Of the five fields, economics was the most mixed, with a D:R ratio of 4.5:1 (which fits pretty well with my perception of economics). History was by far the most skewed, with a whopping D:R ratio of 33.5:1." Note 60% of history and journalism departments, 45% of psychology departments, and 20% of economics departments have not even a single registered Republican in them. Granted there were a significant portion of people that were not registered as either Democrat or Republican and it's not beyond the realm of possibility there are some hidden conservatives in there, but still a failure to find even one registered Republican professor in such a large percentage of departments is really bad and rather shocking.

There is, however, also a paper Haidt participated in that reviewed a lot of evidence of bias against conservatives in academia (specifically social psychology) though. The rundown of the findings is basically that in social psychology 82% of people identify as leftist, 9% are moderate, and only 6% are conservative. Only 18% of respondents within academia state they would not discriminate against conservatives; 82% admit they would be at least a little bit biased against a conservative candidate. This is only capturing what they are explicitly willing to state; the actual prevalence of bias against conservatives is probably higher.

In some ways the precedent for the administration was set long ago. The only real question is whether the executive can deem Harvard, of all institutions, of similar legal stature to Bob Jones University. They may have the text of the law on their side: Congress not infrequently writes "If the Attorney General decides...", presumably giving her a lot of discretion in this case, subject to its other rules about capriciousness.

Alea iacta est, but I know not which way the legal cards will fall in this case.

Alea iacta est, but I know not which way the legal cards will fall in this case.

Over time? Almost certainly against Harvard, especially after the current fiscal year ends in about 3 months.

At the end of the day, Harvard's relationship with the US government runs through the regulatory state, not by statute. There is no law that says Harvard must receive funds, or even that- once approved- Harvard cannot have funds taken away if it is found to no longer meet requirements. Congress (and most legislatures in general, even outside of the US) by design gives the regulatory state significant deference to who, how, and whether to give out grants and funds and determinations to those effects. As this is a pretty well established federal government power, even injunction-inclined judges are working against a dynamic where other parts of the judiciary do not go along with a 'well, it's illegal when Trump does it' approach.

What limits the ability of even sympathetic judges to freeze the status quo with injunctions is that the US government largely spends year-by-year, or the ability to compel future actions.

Even when litigation can successfully freeze currently granted expenditures, there is no legal basis for courts to require future funding. Funding, after all, does not derive from the executive branch in the first place. It derives from the Congress, which puts its own terms and conditions, which include, well, executive discretion on approving grants on a going-forward basis.

Similarly, an injunction doesn't really work on, say, issuing student visas. Harvard can request a freeze on current student visas, to try and protect what it has, but Harvard cannot demand future visas still be granted. For one thing, Harvard doesn't even know who those future visa-holders even are. But more importantly is that in pretty much every country in the world visa issuance is a 'may', not 'must' responsibility of the government, and specifically its embassies. Embassies in turn have considerable discretion when issuing visas, such as if they have reason to believe the visa recipient would be able to keep their status inside the united states... say, for example, that they are requesting a visa on the basis of a specific university that the government is going through a process of invalidating for student visas.

It doesn't even matter if there is a judicial injunction stopping that from being affirmed for the moment. The visa-issuance discretion isn't on the basis of 'the university is ineligible'- it can be issued on the basis of reason to believe that the university will be ineligible during the student's time.

As a result, the current litigation is about stanching the bleeding (losing current grants / foreign students who already have visas), but the real issue is the lack of inputs over a longer term (lack of incoming grants / foreign students).

Over time, sure. But Harvard may well win by hanging on until the next administration reverses course.

If the next administration has to reverse course for Harvard to win, that is simply defining away Harvard's loss.

The only real question is whether the executive can deem Harvard, of all institutions, of similar legal stature to Bob Jones University.

That is what equality under the law means.

Some of Trump's demands in the funding case seem unreasonable, but both going after the tax status (which hasn't actually happened yet and is the same as what was done to Bob Jones for similar reasons) and Noem's letter about foreign students which demands only information, not policy changes, seem well within the law, except perhaps the demand for disciplinary records.

I mean I disagree. The reason people think of Harvard as a top tier school is because of the faculty it attracts and the work they do. If they all leave for greener pastures, the only thing left is the name. Sure you can coast on that for a while, but other schools who get the great professors and scientists will see their stars rise against Harvard’s downswing. If you can’t argue that you’re doing the best research, or developing minds under the best professors, on what, exactly is the prestige based? Name brand can help, but if it becomes obvious that Harvard graduates are not as good as in years past, they lose.

They're sitting on a $50b pile of money, surely they can bridge the Trump administration if they want to?

A bunch of that $50B is earmarked for something specific, though. They don't just have a swimming pool full of gold coins they can do whatever they want with.

A quick google search indicates that Harvard’s annual operating expenses are over $6 billion. Ten years of cushion is a lot, but not so much that they never need to worry about money again.

Probably the next administration rolls all this stuff back, but that’s not guaranteed.

The problem for them is that it’s mostly illiquid. So you’d have to borrow against it.

If it’s illiquid on a 10-year timescale then it’s not worth anything IMO.

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