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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.
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.
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.)
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.
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