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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   6246 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 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.

Whew boy, now this is really some waging of the culture war.

Has Terence Tao actually engaged in any political activism other than sharing his opinions, or are you purely criticizing him for having anti-right political opinions and working for a California university?

Saying that being a professor at a California university is like being a soldier of the new Red Army is hyperbole. It's the same kind of hyperbole that committed Soviets used against their own ideological enemies in the Soviet academic system.

Sure, I don't think that Terence Tao is entitled to taxpayer money. I don't think even he is trying to claim that he is entitled to taxpayer money. Surely there's some room for nuance in looking at this situation.

TracingWoodgrains has a thread on the topic here: https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1957878299146993821

Terence Tao, signing an open letter in 2020: "We are enraged at the everyday operations of a white supremacist society. ... Complicity with these systems of oppression is deeply rooted in the origins of this country."

He also wrote a blog in 2016 entitled "It ought to be common knowledge that Donald Trump is not fit for the presidency of the United States of America". He might want to put forth the image of a politically neutral mathematician now that his funding is at risk, but that does not reflect his previous behavior.

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2016/06/04/it-ought-to-be-common-knowledge-that-donald-trump-is-not-fit-for-the-presidency-of-the-united-states-of-america/

Signing an open letter and writing an article that attacks Trump is pretty innocuous behavior, in my opinion. Is there any evidence that he tried to, for example, cancel anyone?

Attacking Trump on his private blog as a candidate for President is Tao's right as an American citizen. Putting a pseudo-mathematical spin on that (as he does) to try to back his political views with his mathematical expertise is a version of getting Eulered, but while it's bad epistemology that's all it is.

Signing an open letter like that one, on his authority as a professor of mathematics at a university -- a public university at that -- is politicizing the institution. When people with the opposite politics get in power, it is perfectly reasonable for them to decide that no, they do not want to provide government funding for institutions that are fighting them politically. The letter isn't innocuous at all.

When people with the opposite politics get in power, it is perfectly reasonable for them to decide that no, they do not want to provide government funding for institutions that are fighting them politically.

I agree! And I agree that the open letter is pushing it, and I find the letter pretty obnoxious.

I think that Tao by signing the open letter was, deliberately or not, unfairly taking advantage of the fact that non-leftist academics who signed an open letter supporting different politics would possibly expose themselves to career-endangering consequences.

That said, I still think that @Sunshine's take goes overboard. Identifying your own political side with America as a whole and calling for the wholesale demolition of the other side is a bit much of a reaction to what amounts to an academic most people have never even heard of putting his name on a politicized open letter.

I've heard of none. Why do you believe that should matter?

Most people here are familiar with the Herbert quote:

“When I am Weaker Than You, I ask you for Freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am Stronger than you, I take away your Freedom Because that is according to my principles.”

That is a reasonable approximation of my model of Blue Tribe. Over the past ten years, I've watched Progressivism attempt a full-fledged social revolution through methodical weaponization of our society's institutions and centers of value. The revolution they attempted was merciless and insane, caused incalculable harm, and cannot at this date truly be said to have failed. They are on the back foot, momentarily, but they very clearly have learned nothing and will go right back to their revolutionary march the instant they see an opportunity to do so. They must not be given that opportunity. Their political movement must be entombed, their centers of power torn down and destroyed, any possible route back to social dominance foreclosed.

It seems madness to me to pretend that, having seen what we have seen, we should go back to "the way things were before", turn our backs and let them have another swing at our necks. If forestalling that threat means a few years of reduced scientific output, so be it. That is a small price to pay compared to another Blue offensive. To the extent that "neutral" institutions wish to protect themselves from the depredations of unrestrained culture war, common knowledge is necessary that such a defense is achieved through rigorous neutrality, not unlimited Blue appeasement.

You appear to be approaching this from a frame of "how can we remove the worst outliers from the academic system, so that we can get back to the work at hand". I approach it from the angle of "Even ignoring the worst outliers, the Academy has become a vast system for converting taxpayer money into Progressive political power and social control". "Cancelation" is a single facet of that machine. The machine, as a whole, must go.

The nuance was available for Tao and other academics doing "good" work to police their own and not let their own research to be used to launder pure advocacy and propaganda under the guise of research. You can't be a part of "no enemies on the left" for the better part of your career and then act shocked when people put weight on your words and actions.

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