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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   32726 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 10, 2025

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The Trump administration has cut off (some) federal funding to Columbia University because of antisemitism.

It's not clear exactly what is happening on what sources of dollars; there are a bunch of different numbers in the article, and they're mostly unattached to any particular mechanisms. It may be only $400M out of $5B. It's not clear if it's just some funding agencies or some other criteria. My guess from the following sentence is that it's currently just some funding agencies:

The Departments of Education and Health and Human Services plan to immediately issue stop-work orders on grants to the school, the task force said.

That would make sense, as DoE/HHS are a very small part of federal research funding.

One thing to note is that a "stop-work order" is a particularly harsh tool. Rather than simply defunding the agencies, so that there simply aren't new grants to go around (and no one knows how they can change behavior to improve the situation), a stop-work order says that the university must completely stop doing anything related to an existing grant. They certainly can't spend any of the money, not even on grad student salaries. It must grind to a halt.

I have heard about this sort of thing happening before. Back when the gov't started getting serious about China's influence in academia, they started requiring a bunch of disclosures about China-related stuff. Apparently, one guy at one university screwed up badly enough that they issued a stop-work order to everything the university did with their federal funding until they could sort everything out. At the same time, they were even prosecuting professors if they weren't disclosing. The message was clear that the gov't took this stuff seriously, and if anyone screwed up, then everyone, at the institutional level, paid the price. As I put it here, that makes the game theory pretty easy. If you're a top tier talent, you can't afford to FAFO with some university that can't get it together at an institutional level, no matter what else they might offer you.

Of course, right now, this seems to be limited just to antisemitism (and so far, just Columbia) rather than extending to further bad behavior in academia. I, of course, proposed doing this type of thing for when a university, at an institutional level, does basically anything that discriminates on the basis of race/gender (and I got a lot of downvotes here for saying that such a plan was way better then indiscriminate "chemo", just shutting stuff down randomly with no incentive for changing behavior). Maybe it'll come, and this is just the trial balloon. It could make sense to start with one that is over-the-top egregious. Even Scott Aaronson, who is famously over-the-top performative anti-Trump, went with this:

For the past year and a half, Columbia University was a pretty scary place to be an Israeli or pro-Israel Jew—at least, according to Columbia’s own antisemitism task force report, the firsthand reports of my Jewish friends and colleagues at Columbia, and everything else I gleaned from sources I trust. The situation seems to have been notably worse there than at most American universities. ... Last year, I decided to stop advising Jewish and Israeli students to go to Columbia, or at any rate, to give them very clear warnings about it. I did this with extreme reluctance, as the Columbia CS department happens to have some of my dearest colleagues in the world, many of whom I know feel just as I do about this.

He also sort of grudgingly accepted some game theory:

Time for some game theory. Consider the following three possible outcomes:

(a) Columbia gets back all its funding by seriously enforcing its rules (e.g., expelling students who threatened violence against Jews), and I can again tell Jewish and Israeli students to attend Columbia with zero hesitation

(b) Everything continues just like before

(c) Columbia loses its federal funding, essentially shuts down its math and science research, and becomes a shadow of what it was

Now let’s say that I assign values of 100 to (a), 50 to (b), and -1000 to (c). This means that, if (say) Columbia’s humanities professors told me that my only options were (b) and (c), I would always flinch and choose (b). And thus, I assume, the professors would tell me my only options were (b) and (c). They’d know I’d never hold a knife to their throat and make them choose between (a) and (c), because I’d fear they’d actually choose (c), an outcome I probably want even less than they do.

Having said that: if, through no fault of my own, some mobster held a knife to their throat and made them choose between (a) and (c)—then I’d certainly advise them to pick (a)! Crucially, this doesn’t mean that I’d endorse the mobster’s tactics, or even that I’d feel confident that the knife won’t be at my own throat tomorrow. It simply means that you should still do the right thing, even if for complicated reasons, you were blackmailed into doing the right thing by a figure of almost cartoonish evil.

This is what I have been saying. Use the tools that you have. Don't use them indiscriminately. Don't imagine that you're doing chemotherapy in just randomly attacking everything. Tailor them specifically to very very clearly change the incentives so that universities need to change at an institutional level and that if they don't, individual talent has a huge incentive to just leave them.

Now, of course, one always has to worry a bit about how when something is done by the stroke of a pen, it can be reversed by the stroke of a pen of the other guy (or an equal and opposite "Dear Colleague," letter). But solutions to that problem are much harder to come by.

DHS has already deported a Columbia graduate student (who was a student in December so not a current student it seems).

On March 9, 2025, in support of President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting anti-Semitism, and in coordination with the Department of State, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia University graduate student. Khalil led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization.

ICE and the Department of State are committed to enforcing President Trump’s executive orders and to protecting U.S. national security.

More details from AP:

Federal immigration authorities arrested a Palestinian activist Saturday who played a prominent role in Columbia University’s protests against Israel, a significant escalation in the Trump administration’s pledge to detain and deport student activists.

Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student at Columbia until this past December, was inside his university-owned apartment Saturday night when several Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents entered and took him into custody, his attorney, Amy Greer, told The Associated Press.

Greer said she spoke by phone with one of the ICE agents during the arrest, who said they were acting on State Department orders to revoke Khalil’s student visa. Informed by the attorney that Khalil was in the United States as a permanent resident with a green card, the agent said they were revoking that instead, according to the lawyer.

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, Tricia McLaughlin, confirmed Khalil’s arrest in a statement Sunday, describing it as being “in support of President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting anti-Semitism.”

It's all so tiresome. It certainly puts the BLM Riots in context- they can shut down protest when they want to.

I'm not sure in the long run it's going to be a good strategy to resort to such overt hard power. Zionism in the United States is facing an unprecedented pincer movement from both the Left and the Right opposing it from different angles of critique. Every day that goes by, the Progressives on X complaining about Zionist influence in American society are starting to sound more and more like their right-wing counterparts. Who can blame them when they are forced to face the stark reality of hard power when they want to protest Israel?

Every day that goes by, the Progressives on X complaining about Zionist influence in American society are starting to sound more and more like their right-wing counterparts. Who can blame them when they are forced to face the stark reality of hard power when they want to protest Israel?

Who can blame them indeed, one of the most red-pilling bits of information for me was learning congress critters each had a "personal" AIPAC handler, they all had "a guy". Their own personal guy.

If you believe Thomas Massie while trying to present himself as incorruptible and unlike every other politician.

Do you have any actual evidence that he was lying or just insinuations?

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