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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   16368 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.

The response to Tao's article pointing out times he's talked about politics before in the past is interesting to me, because nowhere at all (that I know of) has Trump or his administration stated that he is targeting funding over a professor's personal beliefs. And yet somehow it seems everyone just takes it for granted, of course it's targeted government punishment coming down over personal wrongthink they say, Tao's beliefs are definitely relevant to the cuts.

Very odd, I don't think I've seen this happen much before where even the main defenders are like "ok yeah we all think Trump is lying but the libs deserve it. It's obviously angry revenge first and foremost"

As others have already noted, Tao isn't specifically targeted here. UCLA got its funding cut on the basis that it was illegally discriminating on the basis of race in admissions and creating an anti-semitic environment (among other things, UCLA sat back and allowed pro-Palestinian protestors to block Jewish students' access to classes, something which it resolved with a settlement of $6 million dollars). Then Tao throws a shitfit.

The broader issue here is that academia serves a couple of interrelated functions. The first is performing research and discovering truths about the world that can be used to help others down the line. The second is one of using academia to "liberate" people socially based on a certain political ideology, which the proponents of said political ideology conflate with the first aim because they have already subscribed to a number of tenets their opponents don't hold. This kind of thing has serious knock-on effects in academia, where people will often discriminate against conservative candidates - in fact only 18% of respondents within academia state they would not discriminate against conservatives, and that's only capturing what they are explicitly willing to state; the actual prevalence of bias against conservatives is probably higher. Papers that support the liberal instead of the conservative view are more likely to be published instead of file-drawered. Etc.

In effect the left turned academia into their political tool, and made it such that it was impossible for conservatives to defang them of their influence without also indirectly crippling knowledge-producing institutions. This puts conservatives in quite the bind - every time they wage war on the institutions that also serve as factories for leftist propaganda, they also run the risk of stopping up legitimate research and can be attacked on that basis. It's a situation the left created, not the right, and one can hardly blame the right for deciding "fuck it, we're going to flamethrower everything anyway".

As others have already noted, Terrence Tao isn't specifically targeted here.

I agree! So it's really odd that everyone keeps seeming to mention his personal political beliefs. It feels like they want it to be a story of suppressing the wrongthinkers so they can justify why their censorship is special.

I don't think most of the people making this argument believe Trump is doing it because he specifically wanted to penalise Tao. They're just making the point that Tao did insert himself into the culture war and can't claim he was Just A Normal Guy Doing Research Things until politics found him, that in the "tranquil past" he did not solely "focus on technical or personal aspects" of his own research, teaching, and mentoring, nor did he "leave the broader political debate and activism to others".

I mean the context here is Tao expressing disgust at the Trump administration's supposed imposition of politics upon academia and thus crippling it, something which is difficult to see as anything other than exceptionally hypocritical when Tao himself actively participated in the politicisation of academia (the open letter). The point of bringing it up is not to justify Tao's defunding but to respond to what he wrote about it.

Would he have kept his job had he refused to sign the open letter? Remember Steve Hsu.

For the purpose of discussion I'm just taking his assertions at face value and assuming they're sincere. If you ask me though, I'm cynical enough about academia and the kind of environment it fosters that I don't think it's a given that any of the statements he's made about politics can be assumed to be genuinely held (including this writeup that's attracted so much controversy). It's possible they're all informally coerced in one way or another.

Somebody with a profile like him probably gets harangued by colleagues to "speak up" and "do some good" a lot, and it's not hard for me to believe that making the right mouth sounds is a low enough price for him to pay to keep doing the maths he likes.

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