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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   14821 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 19, 2025

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What a silly shitshow. Thanks for writing it out, that was a fun read.

My question is why doesn't the board or president or whoever just launch a crackdown on pro-Palestinian protestors? Students have almost no political power in universities -- they're customers, not constituents. Most of them have political views that are only thinly-held, so just start issuing expulsions for some of the ringleaders and the rest will likely get over the whole thing. If they don't, keep issuing expulsions. Columbia has enough prestige that it won't realistically run out of students willing to go there. Faculty might be a trickier matter and some might protest out of principle, but if the students aren't protesting then that would probably take the wind out of their sails.

My question is why doesn't the board or president or whoever just launch a crackdown on pro-Palestinian protestors?

Because the administrators and people in charge agree with the protestors. I honestly think it's (mostly) that simple.

Because Ivy League students see themselves as minor royalty and the campus administration agrees.

The people involved don’t see themselves as autocrats empowered to run the university however they see fit in order to ensure the maximization of grant-winning. The idea, “Jews have lots of political power, so we need to expel anyone who speaks out against Israel in order to stay in the good graces of the powers that be,” didn’t even occur to them in October 2023.

Why don’t universities simply put out fake studies with made up data that flatters the current administration’s priorities in order to get money? That’s just not how universities think. Even if there are incentive gradients that push in that direction, no university has a department of data fabrication.

no university has a department of data fabrication.

You don't need a department of data fabrication to fabricate data, just as you don't need a "department of antisemitism" to be antisemitic. It happens naturally as a product of incentives and cultural trends. There's enough horrible studies, especially in woke "sciences" (though reality-based ones are in no way exempt also). I haven't tracked how Columbia specifically performs on this, but there's no reason why they in particular would be an outlier.

Why don’t universities simply put out fake studies with made up data that flatters the current administration’s priorities in order to get money?

Assumes facts not in evidence. I think you'll find they do exactly that.

no university has a department of data fabrication

Well sure, if you call it that it would give away the game.

no university has a department of data fabrication

Except they do? Soft sciences all suffer massively from replication crisis, but faked data is a huge problem that goes unchallenged and covered up till it could not be hidden anymore. Francesca Ginos work on behavioral science was totally fabricated and earlier attempts to highlight it were quashed till 9 years later. Roland Fryers work on black outcomes was quashed because he went against the orthodoxy of white supremacy being responsible. Hard sciences also suffer from dubious research overenthusiastically seeing shadows in slides.

I think its fair to see the prestige of academic research as a dead end if they don't stand the test of the real world. The endowments and sinecures lavished are rewards for satisfying the emotional wants future billionaires whose nostalgia overweights the contributive effect of their university years to their success. The actual practical knowledge of university is either relevant only to the arcana of the universities internal minutae or only temporarily substantive as the world is so dynamic. Spending eight years locked in your lab to dissect nanoparticle impregnation becomes irrelevant when corning glass comes up with 5 different product iterations in the meantime.

Why don’t universities simply put out fake studies with made up data that flatters the current administration’s priorities in order to get money? That’s just not how universities think.

Given the general direction of the replication crisis in the the social sciences, retracted questionable applications of statistics, and the number of high-profile plagiarism accusations against university leadership in the humanities, are you sure they don't? I don't think anyone is doing it out loud, but it's at least happening in practice through some combination of only studying problems that could have the flattering solution, or just hiding the report when you don't like its results.

What a silly shitshow. Thanks for writing it out, that was a fun read.

Thank ye. That was the goal.

My question is why doesn't the board or president or whoever just launch a crackdown on pro-Palestinian protestors? Students have almost no political power in universities -- they're customers, not constituents. Most of them have political views that are only thinly-held, so just start issuing expulsions for some of the ringleaders and the rest will likely get over the whole thing.

My impression is it's not just the students, but the teachers. Part of the article goes into Columbia's self-perceived vulnerability of losing teachers not only the other Ivy Leagues, but foreign universities.

They are (not quite implicitly) concerned that if they go hard on the protestors, the protesting-supporting teachers will go abroad as well. Part of this could be because of 'fascistic' concerns that could be a 'push' factor-

Bearman said, “She also pointed out that the security guards were unpleasant, kind of fascistic, and that she was going to make it a rule that they said ‘Good morning’ and ‘Thank you.’ And you know what? They did.”

-and other parts are the 'pull' factor of other higher education employers. From paras not raised-

After another embittered class has its commencement on May 21, Columbia will lurch into a summer of ugly possibilities. Students are still attempting major disruptions on campus, and the school has laid off 180 employees whose pay relied on federal funding. Scientists are hoarding supplies. “Everything is pretty much being held together with Scotch tape,” the director of a research institute at Columbia said. “The only thing that’s saving us from a wholesale exodus is they’re not funding any new grants at Harvard either, but we’re very worried about the flight of our most outstanding people. The Europeans and Chinese are both circling like mad.”

A lot of the article reflects a subtext / basis of comparison with the other Ivy Leagues, especially Harvard.

Columbia’s feebleness this spring has dismayed the many students, faculty, and alumni who wish it would wage a more principled fight against Trump — as Harvard has done by suing his administration in federal court. But even Trump’s allies failed to predict how much of a pushover it has been. “I was surprised by how quickly and how completely the university folded,” Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute who helped develop the strategy to crush Columbia, told me.

Early on, Shafik had been lucky to dodge a congressional hearing at which the presidents of Harvard and Penn addressed reports of antisemitism in lawyerly terms and later resigned. But it meant that when the House Committee on Education and the Workforce returned to the issue, it held a hearing focused exclusively on Columbia. Shafik, Shipman, and Shipman’s board co-chair, David Greenwald, went to Washington to testify. On the morning of April 17, 2024, before they arrived on Capitol Hill, they learned that pro-Palestinian students had taken over the university’s South Lawn.

In the 30 hours that ensued, Shafik’s presidency was lost and Columbia plunged into true crisis, never to recover. During the hearing, Shafik struck a far different pose from Harvard’s Claudine Gay.

In the meantime, the Columbia community is waiting to see whether Shipman can reverse some of the university’s reputational loss. Harvard is basking in the glory of fighting Trump in court, and Princeton’s president, Chris Eisgruber, gave a humiliating interview to the Times offering his fellow Ivy notes on character. “I understand why Columbia might feel that they had to make concessions under the circumstances,” he said. “You have careers at stake. You have jobs at stake. You have the ability to educate your students at stake. And you may say, ‘Look, I wish I could take a stand on principle, but given what’s at stake, I can’t.’ But then you need to say that.” Cogburn, the social-work professor, suggested that the people running the school are too compromised to be credible: “I don’t know what their intentions are, whether they actually want to dismantle the senate or whether they earnestly want to consider the best way to govern, but they are consistently underestimating how much they’ve damaged their reputations and trust.”

And during that final Board-student meeting, I skipped a paragraph (for character limit constraints).

Early on, a student asked, “Why are you not taking action against the government — ” leading to several overlapping calls of “Like Harvard!” “Harvard!” “Harvard!” and “We want you to fight!” Goggin pointed out that Harvard had received more invasive demands from Trump than Columbia had. “If we can do something that we were going to do anyway without having to litigate, and restore the things that we care about here, that is in our opinion — or in my opinion — our best path,” he said. “That is where we are today. It doesn’t mean we’ll be there tomorrow.”

So- in a sense- pride. Or ego.

There would be a deep irony if the money making professors all bailed for China, thus having the opposite effect Trump intended

China seems unlikely, but the EU, on the other hand…

EU wouldn't be much of a problem. If they are in Harvard inventing cool shit, the profits from it sponsor the wokes in Harvard. The cool shit probably would make my life better, but the wokes would make it worse. If they move to EU and keep inventing the cool shit, I'd likely benefit from it no less - maybe I'd pay a bit more because tariffs or get it a little later, but on the bottom line it wouldn't make me substantially worse, as I don't get direct profit from Harvard owning cool shit and indirect profits are nearly the same. On the other hand, all the wokeness will be then concentrated in EU, and it hardly can be worse there already, so to be honest, I don't see much downside. Of course, it would be cool if I could get the benefits without the wokeness at all, but I'm not sure how to achieve that option.

They are (not quite implicitly) concerned that if they go hard on the protestors, the protesting-supporting teachers will go abroad as well

I always enjoy when I read such statements. Go where? Everywhere else in the world they pay less. Almost everywhere in the world there is less tolerance.

Not having read the original source (which may explain the appeal of foreign universities), I'd also be skeptical that foreign universities are equally attractive, in general, but other Ivy-Plus schools being a threat to faculty recruitment seems like a reasonable fear: If you're trying to make a career at a school, you want to be confident that the school will support your professional goals, and Columbia probably isn't very confidence-inspiring, at present. (And the kind of people who would go to foreign universities don't evaluate tolerance the way you do.)

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