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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:
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.
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.
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.
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.'
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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’.
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