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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   5831 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 18, 2025

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Terence Tao: I’m an award-winning mathematician. Trump just cut my funding.

In just six months, the United States has seen a wholesale assault on the scientific infrastructure that helped make it a world leader in innovation. Grants have been cancelled mid-project, fellowships for the next generation of researchers gutted, and federally funded institutes stripped of the resources they need to operate. These decisions are not the result of scientific review or Congressional debate, but of abrupt political directives that bypass long-standing norms, disrupt multi-year projects, and erode the independence of our research ecosystem.

In that time, I have seen first-hand how sustained federal investment—channeled through agencies like the National Science Foundation (NSF)—powers the collaborations that link universities, government laboratories, and industry. At UCLA's Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM), where I now serve as Director of Special Projects, those collaborations have laid the groundwork for both theoretical breakthroughs and practical technologies. My own research at IPAM, for instance, helped lead to the algorithms that now cut MRI scan times by a factor of up to 10. This is the America I chose as my adoptive home: a place where science is valued as a public good, and where researchers from around the world come to contribute their ideas and energy.

It is therefore stunning and devastating to discover that the new administration, in just its first six months, has deliberately attacked and weakened almost all the supporting pillars of this ecosystem. Executive actions have cancelled or suspended federal grants with unprecedented scale and speed, with billions of dollars worth of ongoing research projects and experiments disrupted. This is not because of a negative scientific assessment of the work, but instead by seemingly arbitrary justifications. Critical funding has been pulled for as insignificant a reason as the presence of a key word in the original proposal that is retroactively deemed unacceptable.

Federal support is, of course, a privilege, not a right; and Congress has the constitutional authority to set the budgets and rules for any expenditure of public funds and resources. But many of these executive actions have not waited for either explicit or implicit Congressional approval, and in some cases have even directly ignored past Congressional mandates for appropriations. Relative to the sheer size of the federal government as a whole, the amount allocated for supporting science is not massive. The NSF mathematics and physical sciences (MPS) directorate, for instance, is the largest of the subdivisions of the NSF, and has an annual budget of approximately $1.7 billion. This looks significant until one realizes that it amounts to about five dollars per US citizen per year, and less than a tenth of a percent of the federal budget as a whole.

He seems to be referring to how the admin took an axe to science funding by ctrl+F-ing for 'woke' dictionary terms: underrepresented, minority, diverse, etc. The problem is that the effects seem to be about indiscriminate regardless of whether you were a true believer or merely box checking. Will we see upgraded diversity science pledges in the next democrat admin? Researchers might have to carefully consider the political leanings of their funding proposals in election years.

Being a professor at a California university is like being a soldier on the front lines of the new Red Army. Terence Tao signed the open letters, took the government money, parroted the party line, and made the libations. He should not act so shocked that the other team is treating him as an enemy soldier, because he is one.

Hasn't he ever heard the saying, "And them that take the sword shall perish by the sword"?

The academic establishment has sinned against America and America must administer its punishment. Burn it all! Fire and sword and no mercy! Let the funding be cut, let the tenured professors be thrown out to seek work in the private sector, let the student loans no longer be backed by the government, and let the hollowed-out ruins of the academic establishment of the 2020's stand forever as a warning to future scientists about the dangers of taking sides in politics. Taxpayer money is a privilege, not a right.

If Terrance Tao wants my support for his academic research, he can start by writing a substack comprehensible to a STEM undergrad explaining what the deal is with inter-universal Teichmüller theory. Until then, have fun in the private sector buddy. Meta is hiring.

Anything that harms "higher" education, the NGO complex and the politically captured "scientists" is good by me. This guy checks all three.

The Science chose to align itself with wokeness, and it put itself in the crosshairs. How many people who knew better, within this scientific infrastructure, held their tongues when we were told covid would not spread if you were protesting for racial justice? How much serious rigor goes into racial justice narratives that justify a need for more black doctors, damn the merit? Science is subject to pressures that betray its very purpose, and there seems to be no interest in stopping these threats from within. Eventually, you're going to draw attention from an outside force, when the corrupting element becomes a driving force.

With that in mind, the fact of the matter is that anyone who's pro-America and pro-"Science" just doesn't seem to have much in the way of common goals these days. Science's first loyalty is to academia, not the country. And academia is dominated by a culture of rootless cosmopolitanism, which doesn't see any special value in any particular country (least of all America). I have extreme doubt as to The Science's commitment to America being a world leader in anything when they only ever kowtow to their humanities overlords in lieu of fact-finding - overlords who typically hold America in absolute contempt. There's obvious value in science and all, but if they wanted America's unconditional support, they should have been more willing to bat for America themselves when they had the chance.

Very well-said. The thing about inviting cleansing fire is that it's not exactly discriminate.

That's the point of cleansing. You don't discriminate between filth.

Scientists are born subjects.

If the delusional fever dreams of democrat true believer karens come true and a Christian theocracy rises to power, the scientific establishment will simply publish appendixes to their papers reconciling them to the current state of creation research. Woke is the same damn thing. Trump should be demanding they include 'murica, fuck yeah! loyalty pledges instead of yeeting them for kowtowing.

As someone in the sciences (doing my PhD at Hopkins) these cuts have hit us quite hard. The NSF has basically been dismantled, and the NIH funding system has become much more restrictive. To me, none of this makes a whole lot of sense. These grants were pennies on top of the giant stacks of dollars that the military, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security represent. Yes you get a bunch of duds, but a lot of the research funded has an extremely high ROI. I get that Trump wanted to shut down "woke" research, but he could have done that without cutting overall funding (just mandate that the NIH can't fund transgender research, shutdown the diversity grants, etc.).

This is also bad because it explicitly politicizes scientific research. Which I can't really blame the Trump administration for. It was the idiot professors and students who tried to make the department officially pro-Palestine, admit a bunch of diversity PhD students who aren't up to snuff, and antagonize the administration because they thought Trump was a fascist who started this whole thing.

So it seems to me once again a case of Trump punishing the people who tried to screw him over, rather than something that genuinely would be the best move for the country.

I get that Trump wanted to shut down "woke" research, but he could have done that without cutting overall funding (just mandate that the NIH can't fund transgender research, shutdown the diversity grants, etc.).

Could you? One of the morbid bits to this saga has been how often people have pointed to what they saw as clearly misaimed anti-DEI efforts that must have been motivated by an LLM or a bad grep, and then oops.

Yes, there are research areas with neither blatant political abuse or outright woke goals. But the people who want to do the woke research can, as warned, lie: there’s far less signal than anyone thinks to a research’s quality from how sober the grant application.

I get that Trump wanted to shut down "woke" research, but he could have done that without cutting overall funding (just mandate that the NIH can't fund transgender research, shutdown the diversity grants, etc.).

The problem is that there isn't only some single class of "diversity grants". Every grant has some sort of DEI stuff written into it, including the main IPAM grant. It's a Gordian knot tying research to DEI, and there's only one way to deal with those.

rather than something that genuinely would be the best move for the country

professors and students who tried to make the department officially pro-Palestine, admit a bunch of diversity PhD students who aren't up to snuff, and antagonize the administration

This is also bad because it explicitly politicizes scientific research.

So to avoid politicizing scientific research, we should water down the quality of the researchers and let a bunch of activists take over the institutions, and that would genuinely be the best move for the country?

Am I reading that right?

Sorry I think my response was a bit confusing because I don't want to pin the blame solely on Trump for this. Universities have played with fire for a long time and somehow seem surprised to be getting burnt. I just lament that the administration seems to be cutting down the tree rather than pruning some of the worst branches. We can punish woke without destroying the research apparatus.

The tree needs to go, dig up the dirt, salt the hole and burn anything still crawling.

There are no good branches. APAB.

If you were part of the Trump administration, how would you punish academics for their woke excesses without negatively impacting useful research? The federal government does not directly control how universities manage their own affairs and any penalties assessed on the universities as a whole can be cast as damaging research in some way.

The only thing that I can think of is some sort of rule like "any university that violates XYZ policy automatically becomes federal property", which would allow the federal government to directly fire and hire, but nationalizing the universities comes with a million other problems.

That makes more sense. Thank you.

The problem is the whole ecosystem is corrupt and tries to launder political propaganda by citing to things like Tao's work and other stuff like it. This is what happens when good people operate within a bad system, they become part of the problem.

This is also bad because it explicitly politicizes scientific research.

If it's paid for by taxes it's political.

The main grant for IPAM is already unsuspended anyway (possibly because UCLA bent the knee).

Further, the grant DID fund DEI programs in the past, such as (from the latest annual report):

“PUNDiT: (P)racticum for (Und)ergraduates (i)n Number (T)heory” is a 2-day intensive program which will showcase number theory broadly interpreted at the introductory level. A goal of this program is to expose Southern California students traditionally underrepresented in number theory (such as women and historically marginalized minorities) to the beauty of the subject.

And as tracingwoodgrains points out, Tao already chose a side His complaints about "political directives" ring hollow.

He did good finding that letter but Trace is definitely a huge tool for not posting the actual link - I believe this is correct: http://atripati.bol.ucla.edu/May2020AntiRacismLetter.htm

Isn't UCLA's math department built on ancestral and unceded land violently stolen from the Tongva by white settler colonialists? By actually dismantling oppressive structures instead of just giving lip service, Trump is implementing the woke program.

I'm a bit more sympathetic to Tao: he lives and works in a milieu where not signing that letter would have made many of his colleagues and students (maybe even his wife) shun him; and if he didn't, he would absolutely have been hounded and targeted to to make some statement because of his stature. He still had more agency in the matter than most, but it's a mitigating factor. Do we condemn Kolmogorov?

Do we condemn Kolmogorov?

I don't condemn enemy conscripts. "The enemy" is not necessarily synonymous with "evil", and that's something lots of people have forgotten (the Nazis are a foundation of how the American Empire justifies its right to rule to itself, so it's kind of unavoidable)- if my enemy forces all of its constituent parts to, for example, wear a blue shirt or die, I don't blame anyone for putting the blue shirt on [whether or not they share all of my enemy's goals is irrelevant].

Yet, I don't think friendly forces are evil for killing them either- even in an environment where the enemy has intentionally frustrated identification of those who cause the enemy's cause (those who would rather die before ceasing to be the enemy), and those who would abandon those principles to not be dead (this includes those who only joined for the meals).

It is not, and cannot be, the enemy's fault that circumstances forced your uniform upon you; your only hope is that your own side advances its interests in such a way that your enemies do not decide to violently destroy you if and when they obtain the power to do so.

He does not necessarily deserve the consequences of being an enemy (contra traditionalist thought, where he does), but at the same time it is not immoral to destroy enemies (contra progressive thought, where it is), so I guess it depends on what you actually mean by "condemn".

I'm a bit more sympathetic to Tao: he lives and works in a milieu where not signing that letter would have made many of his colleagues and students (maybe even his wife) shun him;

"Letter? What letter? Oh there was an email? I must have missed it. Can you send it again I'll definitely put it at the top of my queue for sure."

Academics are absolute masters at ghosting and dodging, as everyone who has set foot in a school can attest to. And I'm 100% confident that there are plenty of other UCLA professors who didn't sign the letter. So given that he didn't just ignore it, he's fully responsible for the consequences of signing that letter.

Edit: I'm not going to bother checking the entire list, but the very first 2 professors in the math department aren't on the letter: https://web.archive.org/web/20200807214114/https://www.math.ucla.edu/people/ladder

That's pretty convincing that he wasn't merely coasting along but more enthusiastic (or, at least, more hopeful of positioning himself politically for more spoils) than the average. Quite disappointing: I had a recollection of him speaking against the new equity based California math standards, which improved my opinion of him, but I can't find that anywhere so I must be misattributing. Sad.

I don't see anybody in my field there, either.

Do we condemn Kolmogorov?

Scott doesn't. I do.

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