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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   32941 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 14, 2025

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Harvard decides to decline Trump's administration's "agreement in principle" for continuing to provide Federal grants and contracts. The Trump administration freezes their $2.2 billion funds.

Unlike Columbia, Harvard is willing to send a costly signal that it is, indeed, an elite private university, and it plans to stay that way.

The Fed's letter included contradictory demands. One can't require merit-based admissions and hiring while also requiring viewpoint-diversity admissions and hiring:

Viewpoint Diversity in Admissions and Hiring. By August 2025, the University shall commission an external party, which shall satisfy the federal government as to its competence and good faith, to audit the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity, such that each department, field, or teaching unit must be individually viewpoint diverse. [...] Every department or field found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by hiring a critical mass of new faculty within that department or field who will provide viewpoint diversity; every teaching unit found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by admitting a critical mass of students who will provide viewpoint diversity. [...]

I would have loved to see that viewpoint diversity report on an Abstract Algebra class. It should at least require the elimination of radical ideals.

The way I see it, what makes Harvard University elite is that it both draws and correctly chooses the elite. The elite want to go there because other elite will be there, and admission of the non-elites is carefully curated for their usefulness. It's like an exclusive party that's awesome because a whole bunch of awesome people are there, and boring people aren't, with a few useful wingmen. If the party's host was required to invite a bunch of boring people, the party will break up as awesome people take off. There might be a brief party hiatus for the awesome people as they coordinate where to have the next awesome exclusive party, but awesome people seem to coordinate pretty quickly, so that party will resume. Just not at the current host's place.

So Harvard looked at the $2.2 billion, looked at their party, and decided to party on.

I don't even understand how exactly viewpoint diversity is supposed to be done? Almost any topic you can think of has a litany of varied views available. Even within something like "pro-life vs pro-choice", does viewpoint diversity mean you need

1: A person who believes in abortion at all times

2: A person who believes in abortion before it can survive outside the womb on its own

3: A person who believes in abortion before it can survive outside the womb with support

4-~22: A person respectively setting their limit at each month.

23: A person who believes in no abortions except for X, Y, Z etc etc exceptions (like rape, severe disease, risk to the mother).

23-29+: A person who believes in any mixture of the exceptions like XY but not Z or YZ but not X.

Whatever number we're at now: A person who believes in no abortions no matter what.

And you might think that sounds silly, but do you think the person who believes "no abortions no matter what" feels properly represented by the "no abortions except if it's rape or risky to the mother or blah blah blah reasons"? No, they wouldn't. Does the person who thinks abortions in the later parts of the second trimester feel represented by the person who says only in the first month? No, they wouldn't.

You have to flatten out viewpoints and beliefs to get anything close to functional, leaving many different views unrepresented.

But even outside of that it's still insane. Some viewpoints are just stupid and wrong. Do we want an economics course to be forced to hire a literal Chinese Marxist to teach Xi Jingping Thought? A German history class to be required to be taught by a Holocaust denier? A biology class led by someone who thinks dinosaurs are a hoax and evolution is a lie?

There's no reason to have DEI for idiots. We shouldn't be censoring well made criticisms or ideas but tons of viewpoints simply don't belong in a serious educational establishment because they're stupid. We don't need viewpoint diversity on if the earth is flat.

I don't even understand how exactly viewpoint diversity is supposed to be done?

You're overthinking it. It's affirmative action for right-wingers. You do it by hiring right-wingers into faculty positions until the Viewpoint Diversity Czar is satisfied. The specifics of their viewpoints are largely irrelevant, because the actual point is to try and install a bunch of Trumpist faculty.

do you think the person who believes "no abortions no matter what" feels properly represented by the "no abortions except if it's rape or risky to the mother or blah blah blah reasons"?

If it's a choice between that and "every single member of faculty donates to Planned Parenthood" then yeah, I'll take that.

Look, take the victory on gay marriage. In the current discussion around trans rights, even the people who are "well hmm it's gone a bit far" are all "and this isn't like gay rights at all, now everyone accepts that gay marriage is the normal and natural and good and moral thing". That's the lack of ideological diversity here; oh sure some people way back objected but now they've come round to the right way of thinking.

Suppose I don't agree that it's the moral thing, but I accept it as legal? There's no ideological diversity there for me, I can only be a bigot and homophobe if I don't agree on the "perfectly right and good" take. And that's just on freakin' civil marriage, not the really radioactive hot button topics.

So yes indeed, if it's "abortion is a blessing and our work is not done" or "no abortion but some exceptions", then the latter is closer to my views than the former.

You misunderstand: it's not DEI for conservatives, but ensuring that there's at least one witch in every panel and body of importance. There doesn't need to be parity, or quotas, or anything like that. Just the minority report. If you don't consent to the witch, then you're not really in favor of academic freedom: you're a monoculture of our enemies that needs to be blown up and you certainly don't need tax dollars that are paid by witches. If even the smallest of token concessions are impossible to negotiate, it's time to start indiscriminately nuking civilian targets.

After all, it's Hogwarts: School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, and not Harvard: School of Progcraft and Libbery.

You misunderstand: it's not DEI for conservatives, but ensuring that there's at least one witch in every panel and body of importance.

"You misunderstood, it's not DEI for conservatives, it's DEI for conservatives".

Also I skipped around that but you explicitly made it clear to understand that "diversity of thought" really just means conservatives which let's be honest really just means "people with similar idealogical views as Trump" and not say, an American capitalist and a Chinese style communist. If the only "diverse thought" is the thought the Leader agrees with, it doesn't sound like diverse thought to me.

Here's some "witches" you might not like but are broadly unpopular in American society, I guess we need to DEI these views too.

Open borders. Complete abolition of gender. Flat earthers. Men losing the right to vote. Forcibly seizing any and all guns in the US and executing anyone who tries to keep theirs. Mandatory abortions for whites.

If you don't consent to those witches then you're not really in favor of diverse thought. Or maybe idealogy DEI is just retarded.

"DEI for conservatives" or "ideology DEI" isn't really a coherent concept, because DEI is giving advantages to or having quotas for people specifically on the basis of characteristics that have no direct relation to their ability to contribute to the organization, motivated heavily by the belief that these characteristics have some correlation to the actual meaningful characteristics. Giving conservatives preferential treatment or using a conservative "Czar" to oversee such things is categorically different from that, because ideology - and specifically a diversity of ideology - does directly influence someone's ability to contribute to the organization, and certainly positively in this specific context.

I'd say that any well motivated academic would find such a regime to be useless, because they already prioritized diversity of thought in their hiring and admissions practices. Unfortunately, evidently, this has not been the case. Government mandate doesn't seem like a good solution to me, but honestly, I'm not sure if there's a good solution. The only real point of optimism I see is that this could teach academic institutions in the future to better regulate their ideological biases, such that the government doesn't become motivated to come in and regulate it for them. But if I'm being pessimistic, I'd say that Harvard's behavior shows that they're more likely to double down and circle the wagons further in the future, which will further discredit them as institutions for generating knowledge, which leaves a vacuum that is both bad in itself and will almost definitely be filled by things much worse.

Giving conservatives preferential treatment or using a conservative "Czar" to oversee such things is categorically different from that, because ideology - and specifically a diversity of ideology - does directly influence someone's ability to contribute to the organization

This is identical to DEI arguments. As I'm sure you're aware, there has been a great deal of effort invested in the idea that diversity is not an ideological goal, it is a pragmatic benefit. The right-wing argument is that this is not true for, say, women, but is true for conservatives (and only conservatives, not other views with poor representation in academia).

No, it is not identical. I explained the significant difference in the above comment. DEI is specifically about adding diversity of things believed to be correlated with diversity of thought while this is an actual instance of directly adding diversity of thought. There's plenty to criticize about adding diversity of thought in this way, but it's categorically different from adding diversity of demographic characteristics under the belief that adding such diversity would increase diversity of thought.

The defense of forcing ideological diversity, per your own words, is that it directly influences someone's ability to contribute to the organization.

The defense of forcing background diversity is that it directly influences someone's ability to contribute to the organization.

it's categorically different from adding diversity of demographic characteristics under the belief that adding such diversity would increase diversity of thought.

Why? What is the categorical difference between "You need more conservatives because it will add perspectives you haven't considered" and "you need more [women/blacks/etc] because it will add perspectives you haven't considered". You don't actually articulate what makes it different.

The primary distinction I see is that while both are ideological arguments, the latter is not arguing for ideological representation while the former is. Other than that, either way you're dealing with an argument to use an imperfect proxy for some nominally desired underlying quality (and in both cases the nominally desired quality is a figleaf for ideological goals).

The defense of forcing background diversity is that it directly influences someone's ability to contribute to the organization.

This isn't really a good characterization of DEI policies. You'd have to replace "background" with something like "superficial" or "demographic." But, in any case, the argument still works when considering "background," as below.

"you need more [women/blacks/etc] because it will add perspectives you haven't considered"

These are what I'd consider strawman/weakman versions of DEI, not the actual defensible portion of DEI. Even DEI proponents don't tend to say that the mere shade of someone's skin is, in itself, something that makes their contribution to the organization better. The argument is that the shade of their skin has affected their life experiences (perhaps you could call this their background - but, again, DEI isn't based on those life experiences, it's based on the superficial characteristics) in such a way as to inevitably influence the way they think, and the addition of diversity in the way people think is how they contribute better to the organization. This argument has significant leaps of faith that make it fall apart on close inspection, but it's still quite different from saying something like that someone's skin color has direct influence to diversity of thought, which would be a leap very few people would be willing to make.

Whereas with targeting ideological diversity, someone who has a different ideology, by definition, adds a different perspective. That is a direct targeting of the actual thing that people are considering as being helpful to the organization, i.e. diversity of thought.

So again, no, the very concept of "DEI for conservatives," at least in the context of diversity of thought, is just incoherent. If people were calling for putting conservative quotas in the NBA or something, that might work as a comparison.

Those extremist strawmen are already well represented in American academia. You can easily find academics who are in favor of open borders, the complete abolition of gender, men not having the ability to vote, draconic gun control, and voluntary white extinctionism. (Flat earthism is the only one that doesn't belong.)

The fact that these viewpoints are tolerated while the slightest bit of pushback to global race communism isn't is strong evidence that this measure is necessary.

You can actually find plenty of conservative academics https://www.chronicle.com/article/actually-there-are-more-conservatives-on-the-faculty-than-you-think-study-finds https://www.realcleareducation.com/articles/2023/03/23/conservative_faculty_are_outliers_on_campus_today_110844.html

They're disproportionately left leaning but ~25% being conservative is still pretty meaningful and I simply think you have an absurd view of academia in general if you believe the literal Chinese communists, draconic anti gun and/or anti-male vote crowd would be more common. There might be some very particular fields at a few random colleges where that could be the case, I don't know every single college ever but overall it would be a hard sell to say that anywhere close to 25% of academia is hard open borders or wants whites exterminated.

Edit: You'd also be surprised how much you hear about universities are literally not true. Like that famous story of the professor who said a Chinese word that sounded like a slur being suspended, despite that literally not happening and him being found completely innocent in the internal investigation

After weeks of an internal investigation by USC’s Office for Equity, Equal Opportunity and Title IX (EEO-TIX), however, Patton was found to have acted appropriately, as Garrett announced to students and the rest of the Marshall School community in a September 25 email. The EEO-TIX found that “the concerns expressed by students were sincere,” the dean wrote, “but that Professor Patton’s actions did not violate the university’s policy. They have also communicated this to the professor and he allowed me to share their conclusion with you.

“To be clear, Professor Patton was never suspended nor did his status at Marshall change. He is currently teaching in Marshall’s EMBA program and he will continue his regular teaching schedule next semester.

What happened is that multiple students make a complaint, an investigation occurs (as it should, an investigation is how you find out if a complaint is legitimate or not), Patton willingly steps down from the one class it occured in during the investigation (and most likely to not have to deal with those students anymore), social media people just make up shit (like this inside higher Ed article claiming he was suspended in the title despite literally acknowledging he was not suspended in the body) a.nd they find him completely innocent and he is still teaching to this day.

Here's some "witches" you might not like but are broadly unpopular in American society, I guess we need to DEI these views too.

Conservatives were deliberately driven out and are there in far below their proportions in the population. This isn't true of the groups you mention.

Also, having one witch everywhere is still far below the proportion in the population, so I wouldn't call that DEI.

I don't think that this would work. For one thing, heterodox opinions are not neatly arranged on a line, and the faculty will end up having some leeway which kind of witch they want hired.

The witch for gender studies will not be some MRA. It will be someone who advocates castrating all the men. She checks all the boxes: she has a heterodox viewpoint (I hope), but also is not on the wrong side of the culture war.

The witch for climate science will be someone who wants humans to go back to the neolithic. The witch for evolutionary biology will advocate for Panspermia. The witch for Catholic theology will be a Zoroastrian. The witch for medicine will be a homeopath quack who is incoherent due to inebriation most of the time.

Unless Trump defines what the relevant controversies are which views represent significant opposite views, I don't think this will have much effect.

And while it is true that science sometimes clings to their cherished paradigms long after better ones come around ("Science advances one funeral at a time" and all that), I trust the federal government (and Trump in particular) even less than academia to recognize fruitful new paradigms. If we let him decide, then RFK will get tenure in medicine, some YEC will be forced on to the biology department and the odd proponent of mercantilism will represent heterodox economic viewpoints.

The witch for Catholic theology will be a Zoroastrian.

I'm very tempted to say that regarding the state of modern theology, a Zoroastrian at least believes in the principles of good and evil as being opposing divinities, and indeed in divinity. That would at least be closer to traditional Catholicism! So yeah, I'd take a theologian who believes in good and evil and gods and demons than someone who is all "it's all us, we're the most important beings".

I mostly picked them for "they are a small sect which has not been terrible successful as a meme; a far-group not an outgroup;"

If they picked an Agnostic, Muslim, Evangelical, Old Catholic, or worshipper of Santa Muerte, that would be giving aid and comfort to an outgroup instead.

(Naturally, theologians might select on different criteria than just outcomes -- perhaps a minor heresy is preferable to atheism, or perhaps it is the other way round.)

they are a small sect which has not been terrible successful as a meme

Zoroastrianism was the official religion of multiple dominant empires spanning over a millennium. Its influence didn’t wane because it was “an unsuccessful meme”; the final Zoroastrian Persian empire was militarily defeated by Muslims, who then ruthlessly persecuted the Zoroastrian holdouts, forcing them to flee to the Indian subcontinent, where, even as a minority religion vastly outnumbered by the populations around them, they managed to maintain their religion over a thousand years later. I don’t think it makes sense to treat it as some obscure sect that “lost out on the marketplace of ideas.”

Okay, I did not know this and I stand corrected.

Since the government's letter demands a "critical mass" in every academic department and teaching unit, it's subject to interpretation whether that calls for one witch or a coven of witches.

It also implies that one can't change one's mind. "Wait," the Statistics department chair says, "we hired you to represent the Frequentists, what are you doing using Bayesean statistics in your research?!"

To any reasonable observer who's not already part of the in-group and selectively blind to conflict theory when it suits him, this is obviously DEI for conservatives.

Obviously this new emphasis of viewpoint-inclusion is intended to benefit conservatives here and now, and I’m fine with that. I would be much happier with race-based AA if the ratio of white to black had become 300:1 as with conservatives in the humanities.

To be fair, it’s technically viewpoint neutral. In comparison to DEI for BIPOC which very clearly names the beneficiaries, the beneficiaries here would depend on the composition of the field at any given time.

Thus:

Do we want an economics course to be forced to hire a literal Chinese Marxist to teach Xi Jingping Thought? A German history class to be required to be taught by a Holocaust denier? A biology class led by someone who thinks dinosaurs are a hoax and evolution is a lie?

Xi Jinping thought may be many things, but I’d be hard pressed to call it conservative. And I would be in favour of much of this - it seems clear that those in charge have been misusing their ability to label viewpoints as ‘stupid’ or ‘respectable’ to favour their side. See for example the ‘women are only weaker than men because of nutrition’ stuff that was going around. A lot of the stuff that is treated as absurd is vetoed by inertia and politics - for example I have no idea what Xi Jinping thought is, or what arguments creationists make.

Even assuming that it's 100% viewpoint-neutral, and even in a hypothetical scenario in which there isn't a raging culture war being wages - how would you even classify people? How do you measure viewpoint diversity? How do you quantify conservative-ness or liberal-ness? What even is the spectrum on which to measure viewpoints, and what is the target value for balance?

I think this is the same point that @FCfromSSC sometimes gestures at: this is a relatively straightforward problem to solve in a cooperative non-adversarial environment and a very difficult one in an adversarial environment.

Given a list of candidates, I’m confident that either of us would be able to put together a reasonable analysis of which candidates have views broadly in line with the current consensus and which don’t. I’m also confident we could work together and create a merged analysis with perhaps a bit of bickering and horse-trading but no fundamental issues.

I’m NOT confident that I could write a set of rules that would be serviceable and not easily abused at scale. Perhaps a mathematical sentiment analysis, but that’s obviously less ideal.

In general, I think that once you start thinking about how to do the latter, your civilisation is already in deep trouble. Thus the meme about law as an incredibly rickety construction propped up by one beam called ‘the word [reasonable]’.

It absolutely is, and the response to it has left me feeling rather ambivalent and frustrated.

I oppose any kind of intervention like this. At the same time, I have been listening to voices on the left, even outside the US, objecting that this is like Russia, autocratic, despotic, McCarthyite, the government imposing an ideology, unconstitutional, violating the very principles of the American experiment, and so on.

And all I can think is - boy, I'm sure glad that the American government wasn't making ideological demands of universities in the name of diversity before this. Can you imagine how horrifying that would have been? Lucky nothing like that has ever happened before!

What the Trump administration is doing is bad, and pretty indefensible. However, it is only a fraction of what his opponents have been shamelessly doing for decades. 'Viewpoint diversity', while a good ideal in the abstract, cannot be imposed like this without horribly undermining the very purpose of a university as an educational and research institution. But the exact same things are true of racial diversity, gender diversity, and so on. May we at least hope that this will cause people to react against the entire notion of imposed diversity requirements?

Well, we may hope anything. But I doubt anything will happen. No one of significance is going to notice the hypocrisy. The right will keep on saying "it's okay for us to do it because they did it first", and the left will keep on saying "this is nothing like what we did how dare you even compare them", and principles will remain alien to this entire discourse.

When Arnaud Amalric said 'Kill them all, God will know his own', there was a recognition that at least some people in the city were good Christians and not heretics. It's an olive branch from the Red Tribe to have at least some tokens within the institutions to have them not recognized as partisan enemies: a university full of gay race communists has no Reds within it and can be attacked without regret or pause.

Well, congratulations, academia: you drove out all the witches, and now Trumpemort is here to destroy you. Universities have lost tax-free exemptions and their endowment because of racial prejudice before: certainly the universities have uncontroversially engaged in such as the Asian lawsuits have revealed. If they're not even capable of denouncing their own radicals then what are they good for? As Pol Pot wisely said: 'to keep you is no benefit: to destroy you is no loss.'

Perhaps a steel man could be that if humans of different races are interchangeable then race-based quotas let you spread academic caress between races without affecting the serious business of thinking that goes into them. Whereas viewpoint quotas affect the actual business of the academy. But I don’t see how to square that view with ‘diversity is our strength’ and ‘lived experience’.

Anyone have any takes on how the legal battle shakes out?

No government – regardless of which party is in power – should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue

(Garber quote from the first article)

Harvard struck a blow for academic freedom today when they stood steadfast against the civil rights act. Asked for comment on the matter, Harvard president Alan Garber replied "there is not a single value I hold I wouldn't throw away to make Trump look bad on CNN."

Harvard struck a blow for academic freedom today when they refused to stop asking the JQ, despite threats from the Trump administration. Asked for comment on the matter, Harvard president Alan Garber replied "according to the studies we've been doing over the past few weeks we won't need as much federal funding anyway without ALL THESE MISERLY KIKES around."

Harvard struck a blow for academic freedom today when they refused to allow the Trump administration to dictate policy, despite the threat of a freeze on federal funding. Asked for comment on the matter, Harvard president Alan Garber replied "I originally thought maybe we could moderate a little, but I have been reliably informed that this is the only path that still gets me invited to parties."

Jokes aside this is a negotiating tactic, just like Trump's overbearing demands.

One can't require merit-based admissions and hiring while also requiring viewpoint-diversity admissions and hiring

Once again I'm glad that over here university admissions are based purely on matriculation exam / entrance exam scores (barring a few small arts institutes) and the universities couldn't favor some groups even if they wanted to.

If they hold on to that, and the admin holds too and cuts them off, I think it's a win. I loathe current Harvard dominating ideology, but I support the principle that in a free country, which America still one day may become, people are free to hold any ideology, even extremely loathsome, as long as it does not involve infringing other's rights. Taking my money to do stuff that is loathsome to me comes pretty close, in my opinion, to infringing my rights, but if Harvard stops taking tax money (or at least takes them in no other sense than a cab driver transporting a government official takes the tax money) then I'd be ok with such setup. Secretly, in my heart, I'd desire for them to disappear in the flames of Hell, but I realize that the reality can't be so because everybody has their own desires and they are contradictory and the way to have a society is to have some desires moderated by the existence of others. The tricky part is how to ensure they don't just keep their ideology and resume taking my money once Trump is gone.

I would have loved to see that viewpoint diversity report on an Abstract Algebra class.

In the context of the woke academia, "viewpoint diversity" is largely bullshit. The premise of the wokism is that genetical diversity somehow magically generates viewpoint diversity (as long as there aren't too many people of European descent because somehow they are all defective in this way) and that is supremely beneficial. Of course, nobody even bothers to support this claim because this is an axiom, and nobody even bothers to check there's an actual viewpoint diversity because nobody in fact wants it. This requirement just looks like calling the bluff on it - "ah, you love diversity? OK, let's measure you on that". Of course they'd refuse since neither they can measure it nor they ever wanted to.

Unlike Columbia, Harvard is willing to send a costly signal that it is, indeed, an elite private university, and it plans to stay that way.

Good. Emphasis on the private. They can join the ranks of colleges which refuse federal funds. They can also lose their 501(c)(3) status the same way Bob Jones University did, and for the same reason.

I’m actually impressed by this, they really tried on the ideology, they recognize how important the ideological leanings of faculty members at Harvard in particular really is.

They failed (for now), but a respectable and valiant attempt nonetheless, and more than I had expected. This is the kind of stuff we spoke about 5 years ago on the board as pie in the sky, moderately fanciful stuff, ‘what would you do if you became president’ kind of filler.

Who exactly is "they" in this comment?

Good for them. Hopefully they grow a pair and throw title 9 out the window while they at it.

Sometimes I look at this stuff and wonder if this what it was like to be pro Civil-Rights back in the day. Just watching all of these pillars of society being told "don't be racist" and hearing "no" in response while much of the influential nod their heads along like it's a good thing.

It is a chilling feeling.

The default position of humanity is sexist and racist (the only question is whose sexism is privileged, and to what degree).

We had a time when that was less true, back when we were rich and our philosopher-kings were half-decent people, but that's no longer true.

Columbia caved and didn't get their funding back, so there's not much reason for Harvard to accommodate the Trump administration's demands that they install right-wing commissars to monitor the university for wrongthink.

The Fed's letter included contradictory demands. One can't require merit-based admissions and hiring while also requiring viewpoint-diversity admissions and hiring:

Woke Right theory wins again?

… the Trump administration's demands that they install right-wing commissars to monitor the university for wrongthink.

I think that this is a reasonable characterization, but it’s complicated by the fact that they’re demanding right-wing commissars to shoot the left-wing commissars. It’s commissars all the way down. As a conservative, I have deeply mixed feelings about all of this.

I’ve been thinking a fair bit about the conservative movement and how its idea of the relationship between private organizations and the state has changed since the middle of the twentieth century. (That’s not to say that the Trump coalition is identical with the conservative movement, of course.) We’ll see if those thoughts ever become solid enough for an effortpost.

Aside from the obvious, there are two big differences between this and the civil rights era that make it much harder to do anything: First, the activists are in favor of the discrimination. Second, the people doing the discriminating won't admit they're doing it.

Agreeing with @Skibboleth - I don't think the exact nature of the Danegeld being requested is the point - the question is whether paying the Danegeld delivers any relief from the Dane or not.

If Harvard's read of what happened to Columbia (I don't understand the detail of the deal, but I assume Harvard do) is that they caved and the Trump admin immediately came back for more then they the only demands they should concede are to do things they wanted to do anyway but couldn't for internal politics reasons.

There's reporting that Colombia basically internally started messaging that nothing would change despite the deal. IE, that they weren't actually conceding to the Trump demands, and that business would continue as before.

That sort of messaging is a lie in at least one direction- either that the Colombia administration was lying to the Federal government, or that it was lying to the people it was telling nothing would change for. I could believe the later, but would understand why people would believe the former.

We tried not having commissars. It doesn't work. It's a power vacuum ready and waiting for one side's commissars to move in. And nature abhors a vacuum.

Liberalism is a unstable pipe dream. The side that wants to win always beats the side that wants to be left alone. Someone's ideology is going to rule. All you can do is decide which side you'd rather see in charge and support it.

As a conservative, I have deeply mixed feelings about all of this.

This is deeply the most important question in conservative thought!

Columbia caved and didn't get their funding back, so there's not much reason for Harvard to accommodate the Trump administration's demands that they install right-wing commissars to monitor the university for wrongthink.

The Trump admin has the power to crush Harvard. They have HUGE reasons to play ball, the things that the administration can do to them are existentially threatening. They can probably fight and defeat a lot of Trump's demands in the courts, but I don't think they can fight them all.

-The total amount of funding to Harvard under review is 9 billion, 2 billion was just frozen, so there is another 7 billion for them at risk.

-Trump has also threatened their tax exemption status (501c3) per the BBC. From what I can tell there is precedence for stripping tax exemptions status due to racial discrimination in admissions. See the Bob Jones case below. Now connect the dots with SFFA vs Harvard.

-They can also threaten their accreditation status - no accreditation, no federal student loans.

-Another avenue would be sicing the DOJ on Harvard Professors. If you receive a federal grant and plagiarize or fake data then that is fraud. There is history of professors getting prison time in egregious cases. A bit further reach that I am not fully sure of would be charging plagiarists with wire fraud - if you knowingly plagiarize a paper, put that paper on your CV, and then got a job with that CV then wire fraud charges might be possible. I think it would be hard though, from what I can tell you would have to prove that the plagiarist got the job from your plagiarized paper. You'd have to prove knowingly plagiarism too, and I think that might be hard to prove to a jury. Even in the case of someone like Claudine Gay.

-Last, but still impactful, would be revoking or denying student visas. They have already been doing this. Foreign students are a quarter of the student body.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz01y9gkdm3o https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Jones_University_v._United_States

Revoking Harvard's accredited status wouldn't harm Harvard, it would destroy the concept of accreditation.

Good. Accreditation is a scam anyway

I think it would harm Harvard a lot. For one they would no longer be eligible for the US News college rankings list. Going from a consistent top 5 to not in contention doesn't seem good for admissions or donation solicitation.

The story will not fully be "Trump targeted us unfairly and stripped our accreditation". It will also include "they already got sued and lost for being racist (SFFA v. Harvard), they refused to stop being racist, now they lost their accreditation. Also antisemitism." Yes Harvard will always be a prestigious institution, yes it would survive the loss, but its still a pretty big egg in the face. I'm not sure they can spin their way out of it. Especially after SFFA v. Harvard.

Students losing ability to transfer credits, losing federal subsidized loans, no student aid would all follow the loss. None of which I think would matter too much, of course everyone will still clamor for Harvard. But accreditation as a concept will survive for these things alone, Pell Grants and subsidized loans may not matter to Harvard students, but they sure do matter for almost everyone else.

And if accreditation were destroyed - what does the current administration lose?

For one they would no longer be eligible for the US News college rankings list. Going from a consistent top 5 to not in contention doesn't seem good for admissions or donation solicitation.

The US News rankings would cease to be relevant if Harvard wasn't on them. They basically started the rankings by figuring out that Harvard, Yale, Princeton should be at the top and backwards engineering how to rank the other schools by what metrics make those schools the top schools. It's like taking the obvious undisputed champion out of your boxing federation, or FIFA kicking out UEFA.

None of the rankings or loans or grants really matter, as long as businesses keep hiring from Harvard, bar associations keep admitting Harvard Law grads, Medical Boards keep licensing Harvard Med grads, other schools keep admitting Harvard undergrads to grad school or hiring Harvard PhDs for professorships, etc.

If 90% of Harvard Law grads get prestige jobs out of school, but the rankings don't include Harvard, we'll just get new "true" rankings somewhere.

And that's pretty much the story top to bottom.

Ok in the context of what you are saying US News doesn't matter. I think Harvard and Yale etc. care for bragging rights. But big picture doesn't matter.

None of the rankings or loans or grants really matter, as long as businesses keep hiring from Harvard, bar associations keep admitting Harvard Law grads, Medical Boards keep licensing Harvard Med grads, other schools keep admitting Harvard undergrads to grad school or hiring Harvard PhDs for professorships, etc.

If Harvard Law loses accreditation then Harvard Law grads will absolutely not be hired. In most states, by law, you can't sit even sit for the bar if you don't graduate from an accredited law school. Likewise with Harvard Medical - graduation from an accredited medical school is a requirement for a license in most states. So if accreditation is lost, these schools are done.

https://www.princetonreview.com/law-school-advice/law-school-accreditation https://lcme.org/about/

The agencies that accredit HLS and HMS are given approval from the Department of Education. The DoEd has a lot of power over these institutions, but not direct power to just go in and delist Harvard. But it can apply a lot of pressure. Enough to kick out Harvard? No idea. My guess is not unless forced. The ABA seems very liberal, they're already fighting Trump tooth and nail.

The thing is Harvard Law grads basically want to work in like three or four places (coming out of law school) and they're all in blue states. NYC and Cali big law and clerkships alone could easily absorb a few HLS classes. I'd imagine on the med school side it's similar. New York and California professional associations are unlikely to go along with Trump on the topic.

More likely Trump could manage to drag down the whole concept of accreditation and college rankings in this scenario. Which would be a good thing for the world, actually. But the schools most harmed would be schools like UVA or some of the UC campuses or Michigan, schools that have national profiles thanks to rankings, not the ivies Berkeley Stanford, which have a national profile independent of rankings. If anything the lesser ivies would benefit from a world where Ivy league carries more cache again without the rankings to interfere.

At any rate I support them for the same reason I supported Musk buying Twitter: what's the point of Fuck You money if you never say Fuck You?

This only works as long as everyone who currently demands accreditation decides to edit it to be "accredited or Harvard", which might work for some duration (and also scales in difficulty as the list of exceptions lengthens), but probably still drops their prestige as red state post-graduate schools (law, medical) no longer accept their degrees and red administrations have a seemingly viewpoint-neutral ("non-accredited degree!") way to scour the civil service of their graduates: suddenly a degree from Yale is "just as good as Harvard, with a few more doors open" and its actual outcomes suffer.

Not saying all those outcomes are likely, but none of them strikes me as unforseeable. The alternatives would be the wholesale devaluation of accreditation, but I think that's spread widely enough (how many state laws would have to change?) that it'd be more painful than Harvard-aligned organizations tracking exceptions.

The thing about it is basically every Harvard undergrad would most want to go to Harvard grad school, and most of the rest of their choices will be other blue state schools. Blue states certainly have enough grad schools to keep it running.

Accreditation literally doesn't matter for Harvard or Stanford except as a technicality, it matters to East Sheepdick Bible College.

The US News rankings would cease to be relevant if Harvard wasn't on them.

Are they "too big to fail"?

No, but if a sports league gets rid of the best team, it hurts the league because you now know that the league champion is getting a tin belt, they're not the real best in the world.

Magnus Carlson chose not to defend his world championship. Sucks to be Ding Liren.

I think it would harm Harvard a lot. For one they would no longer be eligible for the US News college rankings list. Going from a consistent top 5 to not in contention doesn't seem good for admissions or donation solicitation.

They're Harvard. The US News college rankings list is irrelevant to them. US News would probably modify their policies to keep them there, because not having Harvard on the list would hurt the authority of the list more than it would hurt Harvard.

Thinking otherwise is, ironically, a form of woke reasoning.

I’m curious what you mean by this (sincerely).

Progressives see a measure of prestige that implies a hierarchy with some people or institutions ending up with less, and try to "fix" this by rejiggering the measure to be more fair on the grounds that prestige will then be more fairly divided, ignoring that some hierarchies are not purely arbitrary and can't be molded that way.

Yes, it would create further divergence between academia’s idea of legitimacy and the ways the federal bureaucracy has created to make academic legitimacy legible and manageable. It would harm Harvard insofar as it made the bureaucracy unable to grant it money because Harvard’s reputation was no longer formally legible.

That raises the question: Does this form of legibility do more good or harm?

That sounds like a positive to me.

The Trump admin has the power to crush Harvard. They have HUGE reasons to play ball, the things that the administration can do to them are existentially threatening.

The Trump administration has made it abundantly clear that showing your belly is the wrong move, because it won't earn you the tiniest shred of leniency. When the barbarians tell you to throw open your gates and surrender or be destroyed while you can see the smoke rising from the last city to surrender, you're not going to comply. You're going to hunker down and put out calls for aid.

Harvard has a lot of wealthy and influential alumni, and they may reasonably believe that making themselves a beacon of opposition will allow them to weather the storm more or less intact.

The Trump administration has made it abundantly clear that showing your belly is the wrong move, because it won't earn you the tiniest shred of leniency.

I don't agree with this, at least in terms of the war on higher education. Can you substantiate? Take what happened with Columbia:

March 7th: $400MM funding frozen to Columbia. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/trump-administration-cancels-400-million-grants-columbia-university-rcna195373

March 21st: Trump admin sends CU a list of demands to unfreeze funding. Columbia publicly agrees to Trump admin's demands. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/21/nyregion/columbia-response-trump-demands.html

March 26th: Leaked conversations reveal that, internally, CU was singing a very different tune than what they publicly agreed to. CU president Katrina Armstrong minimizes and downplays changes. https://freebeacon.com/campus/what-columbia-university-president-really-told-faculty-members/

April 1st: CU president Katrina Armstrong deposed by congress and questioned, among other things, about the faculty meeting. Transcript (again) leaks. https://www.columbiaspectator.com/news/2025/04/09/federal-government-questioned-armstrong-over-campus-antisemitism-on-april-1-according-to-leaked-transcript/

April 6th: Katrina Armstrong steps down as interim president of CU

April 9th: CU gets hit with another $250MM funding freeze https://www.insidehighered.com/news/government/politics-elections/2025/04/09/nih-freezes-millions-more-funding-columbia

This sequence of events does not read as CU gets hit, capitulates, and then gets hit with their belly showing. It reads as CU gets hit, lies that it will make changes, gets exposed for lying, and then gets hit again. There was never any capitulation by CU.

Do you have any examples of colleges who actually capitulated and got hit again?

Wrong think policing should only ever point in one direction, obviously.

I don’t know what the Ivy League is so worried about anyway, their endowments are equivalent to the GDP of a small country and they make more money every year due to their exorbitant tuition fees.

Having to suspend or scrap tons of ongoing research projects is fairly bad for them, and probably also society. I suppose they can float them out of endowments but not permanently.

It would be nice if we were laying off biochem grads for good reasons and not ideological shit test reasons.

If Harvard values racist discrimination so highly that they would rather allow funding for valuable research they're doing to be cut than to stop that, it really is a damn shame and, TBH, rather perverse. I'd hope that non-racist institutions could pick up the slack, but obviously researchers and research institutions aren't fungible, and that sort of adjustment would take a lot of time. Optimistically, it's possible that falling behind some years on this kind of research will be a decent trade-off for reducing racist discrimination in society's academic institutions in the long run, though even time might not be able to tell on that one.

Well if it’s such a terrible blow to society why don’t they liquidate .00001 percent of their endowment to cover the costs of these research programs?

University endowments are not general purpose slush funds for the University administration. They can't just allocate money from the endowment to replace research funding.

it's like 4% of their endowment

anyway, they could, and maybe they should spend more of their endowment on their own research, but that still doesn't mean "failed dumb ideological shit tests" is a solid reason for government to cancel science funding

'Science funding' isn't what is cancelled. Existing contracts allocating science funding to specific organizations gets cancelled.

The distinction is that- with the bureaucratic cycles- the funding that previously went to organization A can now go to organizations B, or C, instead.

The Supreme Court, at the behest of civil rights activists, cut a massive hole in prohibitions against government viewpoint discrimination because of "[t]he Government's fundamental, overriding interest in eradicating racial discrimination in education". The activists who pushed for this, and the Supreme Court justices who voted for it, no doubt thought this would never be used in a way they wouldn't approve of. It's taken a while, but now the Devil has turned tail.

Technically this would be the devil rounding on them, not turning tail. Both mean spinning around, but the opposite direction.
Either way, where will you hide, Roper?

Because 0.00001% of their endowment amounts to 5,000$.

The fact that my ridiculously, hyperbolically small percentage is still worth $5000 says a lot.

I would have loved to see that viewpoint diversity report on an Abstract Algebra class. It should at least require the elimination of radical ideals.

I've long thought it would be amusing to portray (as farce) an Inquisition within the Math Department to root out heretics that accept the Axiom of Choice. Probably as a musical.

I've long thought it would be amusing to portray (as farce) an Inquisition within the Math Department to root out heretics that accept the Axiom of Choice. Probably as a musical.

Sokal rather famously published a paper discussing (among other aspects of the Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity) the inadequacy of the Axiom of Choice to solve the problems caused by females being the ones who gestate and breastfeed as part of a more general example of the inadequacy of liberal solutions to solve the problems of kyriarchy. It got published in a formerly respectable journal, too.

Or constructivism, which rejects proof by contradiction.

That 53 billion dollar endowment is looking deliciously taxable

How so? It should be just as 501(c) immune as before.

Actually, it looks like Trump enthusiasts would like to raise the existing tax on endowments established in the 2017 tax bill. So yes, I could see Trump adopting that as a vendetta.

The IRS has stripped 501c status from universities for racial discrimination in the past.

"Neither petitioner qualifies as a tax-exempt organization...[i]t would be wholly incompatible with the concepts underlying tax exemption to grant tax-exempt status to racially discriminatory private educational entities. Whatever may be the rationale for such private schools' policies, racial discrimination in education is contrary to public policy. Racially discriminatory educational institutions cannot be viewed as conferring a public benefit within the above 'charitable' concept or within the congressional intent underlying 501(c)(3)."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Jones_University_v._United_States

In SFFA v. Harvard Harvard's admission policies were found to be in violation of the 14th amendment, and racially discriminatory. Which seems like it could threaten its 501c3 status.

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