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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24829 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 29, 2025

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Continued Evolution on "The Plan" to Deal with Universities

WaPo cites two anonymous "White House officials", one of which is described as a "senior White House official". They claim that the purpose of anonymity is "because [the plan] is still being developed". So obviously, take that for what it is. Plausibly just a trial balloon to see how it plays; plausibly just a push by one faction within the WH to change direction.

“Now it’s time to effect change nationwide, not on a one-off basis,” said a senior White House official

At least somebody at the WH is observing that doing things like indiscriminate chemotherapy wasn't working, and now little targeted things might be struggling, too.

The new system, described by two White House officials, would represent a shift away from the unprecedented wave of investigations and punishments being delivered to individual schools and toward an effort to bring large swaths of colleges into compliance with Trump priorities all at once.

Universities could be asked to affirm that admissions and hiring decisions are based on merit rather than racial or ethnic background or other factors, that specific factors are taken into account when considering foreign student applications, and that college costs are not out of line with the value students receive.

Huh. I wonder who suggested this sort of thing eight months ago. Of course, that person was also showered in downvotes for continuing to suggest something like this over "indiscriminate chemotherapy".

This was pretty straightforward all along. The playbook was already there. The hooks were already there. There are ways to affect change that are actually oriented toward the goals you want to accomplish. It seems like at least some people in the administration are continuing to find their way to it.

Of course, the wild response is wild:

Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, said the outlines of the proposal amounted to an “assault … on institutional autonomy, on ideological diversity, on freedom of expression and academic freedom.”

“Suddenly, to get a grant, you need to not demonstrate merit, but ideological fealty to a particular set of political viewpoints. That’s not merit,” he said. “I can’t imagine a university in America that would be supportive of this.”

Spoken as if universities weren't asked for ideological fealty to the left in the past. Some academics basically just tried to stay silent on the matter, while others jumped all over it.

A slightly less insane response:

Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California at Berkeley’s law school, said “no one will object” if the White House simply requires universities to pledge compliance with existing law.

But Chemerinsky, one of the attorneys representing UC researchers in a lawsuit challenging terminated federal research funding, also said the administration’s view of what the law requires could be at odds with other interpretations: “It all depends on what the conditions are, and whether those conditions are constitutional.”

Chemerinsky said it would be a First Amendment violation to put schools at a disadvantage in competing for funding if they profess a belief in diversity, for example, because government is not allowed to discriminate based on viewpoint. He said it “would be very troubling” if the White House proposal deviates from the standards that have been used in awarding grants based on the quality and importance of the science, peer review and merit, and uses ideology as the judgment standard instead.

Still sort of lacking, as there was previously a (more-or-less, depending) soft disadvantage in competing for funding if one didn't profess a belief in diversity. If you want me to take this complaint seriously, then you should also say that the left having done that before was wrong. You should say so publicly and publicly commit to a position that the previous regime was, indeed, subject to the exact same concern that they were discriminating based on viewpoint.

But indeed, the Trump admin is in a legally privileged position here. They can, indeed, just demand that universities comply with existing law. I think Prof. Chemerinsky is being a bit coy about whether some universities will complain; my sense is that UCal has already been on a tighter leash for some of these things than many other unis... and yes, even just actually complying with the actual law is going to be a fight for some of them.

my sense is that UCal has already been on a tighter leash for some of these things than many other unis

Yeah, California famously voted to make racial preferences illegal decades before SFFA v Harvard, and reiterated that in a recent vote.

It's one of those strange thing politically, that UCB might be far more progressive than (e.g. Brown) along a number of axes (Chesa failed upwards from his recall in SF to law prof) but has long had a far more meritocratic (albeit still biased) admissions process.

I'm currently adjacent to an R1 research university, and here's what's been happening:

  1. After the administration cancelled grants which contained diversity-speak, faculty who were supporting DEI due to social pressure have quietly stopped promoting it, while the true believers have started communicating by FOIA-untraceable means. Outreach and education programs which had been set up to give special scientific mentoring opportunities to black students have suddenly dried up due to a lack of faculty support; the minority of faculty who still want to support these programs are still running them, but at much reduced headcount. The programs are only discussed in meetings and not by email.
  2. Everyone is concerned about funding. NIH restructuring earlier this year will result in at least one full unfunded "gap year" between grants, if not more. Furthermore, the federal government has not been paying out on its existing grant obligations, so the institution has been covering staff salaries out of its endowment. This will continue during the government shutdown, but at some point the institution may need to dip into its investments to pay salaries (instead of funding salaries off the interest on those investments), and at that point layoffs are on the table.
  3. The foci of scientific research are shifting with the political winds. A faculty member who last year gave a talk about "the ethics of whole-genome studies on minority groups", which heavily implied that Native Americans are due some special degree of genetic privacy, this year talked about an actual study design and how they support study participants for long-term follow-up. A staff member whose poster last year was about diversity in science gave a poster this year about the opioid epidemic.
  4. "Diversity, equity, and inclusion" as a term has disappeared. Its institutional replacement is "inclusivity".
  5. Mandatory training was nice this year; it focused on harrassment and publication ethics, and HR lady removed the snide remarks about "white men".
  6. Racial and gender interest groups still exist, but they are no longer advertising their meetings in traceable ways. The departmental "women's cafe" is now advertised on posters in the corridors, rather than by (more FOIA-able) email and intranet.
  7. Humanities students remain absolutely woke-brainwashed; during class discussions, the younger and humanities students will try to shoehorn any and all concepts into DEI jargon, or derail the discussion to be about minorities. A discussion about "what makes teaching effective" ends in "Student learning depends on their identity and positionality."
  8. In contrast, older students (whose day jobs involve work in radiology or physical therapy) and engineers are more likely to remove woke jargon and project woke claims into a concept-space where things actually make sense and testable claims can actually be made.
  9. I'm editing an effort-post on this, but the actual scholarship for the DEI position is incredibly intellectually weak. Every intervention on behalf of diversity is claimed to have huge positive effects in multiple dimensions; the actual citations go to junk studies (small N, self-reported results, no control group) which only support a fraction of the broad claims made. I think this is due to the same effect which results in woke movies sucking: the focus on diversity is a shield against criticism which would otherwise improve the scholarship. There is also a survivorship bias for early-career faculty whose research supports woke positions.

So, as someone who once wanted to be a professor but gave up on it because I'm a white male with some non-woke beliefs and the whole thing seemed hopelessly rigged against me... is there any chance for me to go back into academia now and get a position? or is it still just clogged with way too many grad students chasing way too few tenured positions, and the whole system rigged in favor of woke types?

Giving up academia because of idpol is like escaping a burning building because you’re worried about getting ash on your shoes.

The economics of postdocs and tenure have not changed. What constitutes polite society amongst your peers has not changed. Every reason you’d have to avoid it is still there, except you might get a welfare payment from Vance for your trouble.

Yeah that's what i figured. Still almost no chance of getting a good job there i think (mwaning tenured and working on something interesting)

Field and institution are everything. Are you seeking a professorship at Yale in the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies department? If so you'll be waiting for a cold day in hell. Are you seeking a professorship at Colorado School of Mines in Petroleum Engineering? If so you were never at risk.

As for whether or not a position is attainable, odds are grim, for multiple reasons. The evergreen issue of academia being a pyramid scheme where successful P.I.s and labs are built on the back of the dirt cheap labor of grad students and post docs still applies, and most of those people will still never hold a professorship, and most of those professors will never receive tenure. Things are slightly worse now because of the job market (when private industry tightens purse strings staying in academia always becomes more appealing), but only by degrees.

If you want to shoot for a professorship, be prepared to work very hard to compete against other people who are among the very best in the world at the very thing you are doing. The system nearly as much rigged in favor of woke types, as it is rigged in favor of people willing to nolife grind out a strong publication history early in your career.

The only thing that has even a remote chance of working is forcing universities to hire thousands of young right-wing tenured faculty for ‘ideological balance’. The left will still try to allow them to all be fired when they come back to power, but you can at least try to hold that up in the courts. The grant stuff is meaningless, they will swear fealty to this regime to get money and in a few years will swear fealty to the next. The only thing that works is getting your people into the machine.

Why can't the right-wing create their own universities, or "Antiversities"? And grow them by redirecting the funds from existing universities (NIH, NHS, etc.) while only hiring outside academia.

There's two answers to this question.

@The_Nybbler gave one, network effects and prestige make the "Harvard product" non-fungible.

The other is that to make a superior product; that is, a university that produces higher quality education than Harvard does today, is essentially illegal.

You'll recognize here the classic structure of oligopolies: make the brand not the product a requirement of policy, and add requirements to production that can't be easily scaled to prevent the entry of competitors. This is usually constructed in terms of "safety" but any excuse is valid so long as you can make sure that becoming a competitor is more expensive than buying you outright.

Social media has this problem too, and here maybe we can find a pattern for how institutional capture could work. Universities are vulnerable because their funding is sourced from the government and government backed loans. Rather than try to redirect the funds to new institutions, you could just turn the spigot off to collapse their value and buy the brand cheap in an austerity drive that allows you to fire 80% of the staff, in particular the political activists.

Short term I agree, it won’t work, but keep in mind that ATM, Theres a monopoly on university level job training. The old university system was all there was, and so they never faced much competition for post graduation job placement. If the new academic system can produce higher quality education and therefore better graduates, eventually it will be noticed that graduates of these institutions do better in the workforce than traditional college graduates. Depending on the school and major the new academy doesn’t need to be that good to outpace the current university system. Most people coming out of the university today are probably less educated than high school graduates of the 1960s. They are not well-read, they don’t understand the scientific method (unless they happen to graduate in STEM) and don’t know how to do serious academic research or write logically coherent papers. Heck, even the professors seem to be less able to do serious academic work.

Does anyone actually want to hire a humanities degree holder? I can’t imagine anyone looking at the current crop and wanting them in any part of the business. They’ve mostly majored in being liberal, campus protesting, and becoming a litigation nightmare. If there were alternatives, they’d be completely unemployable simply because even minimal job-related competence (doing dispassionate research, doing the work assigned, staying on topic, and knowing better than to be a walking, talking bag of grievances all of which are based on something the company could be sued for) those people would be snapped up. Why hire a blue hair when Hillsdale grads can do better work and act like professional workers?

If the new academic system can produce higher quality education and therefore better graduates, eventually it will be noticed that graduates of these institutions do better in the workforce than traditional college graduates.

Therein lies the problem. Universities are not about education, they are about selection. Until you can reliably demonstrate you are getting better admittees than Stanford, Stanford will be better than you. And no one will agree to go to your school instead of Stanford until you show you can place them...

So the burn it down plan is the only plan that has a chance of working. Once people are dubious about going to the current universities because they cant take out loans to go there and no one else can either, so why bother? Then something else can spring up.

The other is that to make a superior product; that is, a university that produces higher quality education than Harvard does today, is essentially illegal.

Can you elaborate? I see the structural analogy, but how is it implemented in this case?

It's mostly down to CRA related Calvinball.

If you try and start your own university with, say, rigorously merit based admissions and no grievance studies departments, you'll instantly become a mostly east-asian lawsuit magnet.

Now, the way that the CRA is written, by the letter of the law you'd actually be more compliant than Harvard, but what matters isn't what the law says, it's what judges believe it says and how many lawsuits your organization can defend itself against until it shuts down.

In more operational terms, for your degrees to be worth anything you need accreditation, and accreditation bodies are controlled by your enemies. Granted, the Trump administration understands this which is why Trump signed April's EO that directs Secretary of Education Linda MacMahon to frustrate any accreditor that requires DEI initiatives and the like.

This is why I add "essentially", as usual in such cases, the hurdles aren't technically impossible to meet, just practically impossible.

Don't places like BYU and Liberty university kind of disprove this? I actually don't think this would be a failure mode. I think the right wing vs neutral would be a bigger problem. Anyway BYU is accredited reasonably well regarded and kicks out students for drinking, premarital sex and homosexuality I doubt a Motte approved right wing university would be more conservative then that.

I think the point is that if your institution is over a century old, like BYU, (cue Fiddler: "Tradition!") you can get away with a lot more than if you're starting something today. Liberty seems to do okay, but Bob Jones University has gotten a lot of litigation for its beliefs (which I personally don't subscribe to, not defending it here).

The problem is that you can't start century-old institutions overnight. Maybe the second-best time is now, but that's not a huge solace. I guess "find a vestigial existing one and wear it as a skin suit" could be done --- haven't there been a number of liberal arts colleges going up for auction in the last decade?

Liberty seems to do okay, but Bob Jones University has gotten a lot of litigation for its beliefs (which I personally don't subscribe to, not defending it here).

Didn't they both get into fundamentally the same trouble over bans on interracial dating? I thought the difference was that Bob Jones fought all the way to the Supreme Court but Liberty folded.

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Thé motte wants a different kind of conservatism than BYU has.

What the hell is ”CRA”? Googling mostly turned up Cyber Resiliency Act and something from Canada.

Civil Rights Act.

Incumbent advantage in the university field is extreme. Last prestigious universities to be founded were shortly before the turn of the 20th century (Stanford and the University of Chicago)

But isn't seizing the universities and gifting them to the right wing just like some sort of reverse socialism and affirmative action?

Yes. So?

With UCLA (1919) comfortably the most prestigious 20th century foundation in the US. If you consider the other UCs satellite campuses of Berkeley, then the most prestigious 20th century foundation in the US is Rice (1912), which puts you a long way down the rankings. Outside the US, it would be Imperial College London (1907) or possibly Tsinghua (1911).

Post-1920 the rankings are dominated by specialist research institutes and standalone medical schools which count as "universities" by bureaucratic fiat.

You know what would work even better? Destroying academia and burning the university system to the ground.

Declare war on college. Remove all government funding of higher education. Stop issuing student visas. Make hiring on the basis of degrees illegal.

College delenda est. This will not end until the last university building is reduced to ashes, the last college campus has been sowed with salt, and the last tenured professor's head sits on a pike.

That would only work if Russell Vought-tier MAGA conservatives had an unbroken hold on the Executive branch for the next 20 years. They won’t. Their policies will be reversed within five seconds of the next Democrat president taking power, or within about six months of a George Bush-tier Republican taking power. Removing funding would require Congressional approval and they won’t get that.

Next best thing is, as 2rafa says, fill the machine with your people. Next best thing is to bloat higher education with new constituencies favorable to your side. That means more funding to ROTC programs, collegiate athletics, and red-tribe-adjacent disciplines like business and engineering.

Reversed stupidity is still not intelligence.

In this case, I’d also expect it to be a flagrant 1A violation in a way which the status quo is not. But I’m not up to date on my “viewpoint neutrality” jurisprudence, and I’d be quite willing to believe that there’s some awful precedent here. It would still be an extraordinarily petty, expensive, short-sighted way to imitate the Cultural Revolution.

Reversed stupidity is still not intelligence.

Sure it is. The stupidity of the tribes doesn't overlal much, so if you can get them to counter each other, everyone ends up better off.

That just means you’re paying more for less!

And if they don’t overlap, how exactly are they countering? Is there someone out there who would drop grievance studies if only they had more creationist papers to read?

That just means you’re paying more for less!

Customer: "$25 for a T-bone? That's outrageous! The butcher down the street sells his for $15!"

Butcher: "Then why didn't you buy it from him?"

Customer: "Because he's all sold out."

Butcher: "Well, when I'm all sold out, I sell mine for $7!

And if they don’t overlap, how exactly are they countering?

Both sides call each other our when they're acting stupid, constraining their behavior to the non-stupid set. "Centrists"/"moderates"/etc. have shown they can't do that, as they lack motivation and even a spine.

Is there someone out there who would drop grievance studies if only they had more creationist papers to read?

As others pointed out: how about HBD papers?

Ok, but getting right wing faculty is… difficult, and in practice would look like making universities hire creation scientists and give them tenure.

A modest proposal: Replace all social science professors with economists.

They have the methodological training and interests to fully replace sociology, political science, and much of anthropology, psychology, etc.

They're only moderately left leaning instead of being dogmatically so.

And there's currently a surge of economists desperate for work thanks to the government hiring freezes. Now is the perfect time to strike!

Notre Dame supplies a template for purging marxists from the academy. They formed a new "econometrics" department, gave them the courses that students actually need to take. Then after enrollment in the old "heterodox" econ department withered, they binned the entire thing. (Tenure only protects individual faculty; entire departments can still be shut down if they aren't financially viable.)

Thanks, this is a good idea

Is that really so much worse than hiring tenured STEM faculty who actually just write zero-value low-impact papers for sci-ed journals about the history of race in science? Mr Creationist can sit in his nice office at Harvard and write papers for the Kansas Journal of Creation Science and teach a class on creationism that 5 students a year (4 of whom are just curious about this strange ideological subculture) will take and that's fine. In time though, even his presence will, in a small way, counter the equally poor equivalents on the left.

No. The Journal of Creation already exists, you can read it right now if you’d like to.

As an alternative, how about we simply stop funding universities that have been spending public money on things as ridiculous as creation science? They can even keep the tenure, so long as they fund it themselves.

Trying to defund woke by instead funding creationism honestly seems like a pretty likely outcome!

It isn't as if "woke" is particularly distinct from creationism. Both ideologies essentially agree on the impact that evolution had on group differences and cognition after all.

You have, correctly, arrived at a single similarity between the two ideologies- the idea that genetic differences between races(and for creationists sometimes species) are too minimal to explain differences in behavior.

I have yet to see demonstration of others. I mean, yeah, there's not-creationist woo with lots of similarities(ancient aliens theory is quite often literally just creation science with a search and replace function). But woke isn't among them.

Wait I’m confused. Wasn’t creationism just being suggested here because it’s a right-wing theory with roughly equivalent public support to the core wokism (like the actual serious all whites are racist etc type) and with roughly the same level of grounding (which is to say, a lot of circularly cited papers and few ground facts that don’t have better alternative explanations) and so would be a ‘fair’ replacement?

I don’t think the point was ever that there’s actually a 1-1 prevalence of every single problem between the two of them.

Creationism is about twice as popular as woke ideas in opinion polls.

This could conceivably work, but the more-likely result is the same thing that always happens with affirmative-action, where there is a clique of “real” researchers doing “real” science, and then a bunch of affirmative-action hires producing slop that no one actually cares about.

I think that you are spot-on that @2rafa's proposal is exactly affirmative action, and it will work out just as badly, while also destroying any credibility of MAGA as a principled opponent to affirmative action and setting the precedent for the left to do the same when they come back into power.

I am all for hiring without regard to the applicants political positions, just as I am for hiring color-blind, but I am doubtful if the right has the academic manpower to restore political balance to the academic system with merit-based hiring.

Basically, certain occupations select for certain political leanings. For example, I would expect pacifists to be severely underrepresented in the military.

The road to tenure is long, hard, and not particularly rewarding, financially. While there are some walking it purely for the love of science (or humanities or whatever), most will at least partly have some ideological reason for preferring academics to industry. For the left, there are plenty of reasons to prefer academics:

  • A dislike for capitalism and thus industry. A company working to make a profit might be seen as at least evil-adjacent. By contrast, being funded by taxes of people who work for such companies might seem cleaner.
  • Academics being somewhat of a lefty echo chamber, which they can feel at home in (and play their stupid status games).
  • A genuine desire to make the world better through basic research.
  • A belief that education is a bottleneck to human welfare, and a willingness to spread their knowledge to as many people as they can (especially the disadvantaged ones).

By contrast, a conservative researcher will likely believe that earning a lot of money is generally good and will detest the lefty academic environment. If he is doing research, he will be more likely be motivated by the competitive advantage of his country, which makes working in industry or restricted government facilities more attractive.

So if the fallacy of the left is to expect that any inequality of the racial distribution of tenured faculty is proof of unfairness, the fallacy of the right is to believe that any inequality of the political distribution of tenured faculty is proof of unfairness.

MAGA as a principled opponent to affirmative action and setting the precedent for the left to do the same when they come back into power.

What are you talking about?? Do you honestly expect “the left” to not hit the defect button the instant MAGA-style conservatives are out of power? “Wow, looks like Trump restrained his base from using affirmative action and remaking educational institutions to benefit their side! What a noble precedent—now we will also abandon DEI and uphold Trump’s lofty ideals of meritocratic achievement.”

I am doubtful if the right has the academic manpower to restore political balance to the academic system with merit-based hiring.

Somehow I doubt that too. Also, what does merit mean in academia? A cultural institution so totally dominated by neoliberal progressives that merit can only mean being published in one of their journals, or speaking at one of their conferences, or getting tenure at one of their blue blooded Ivy League schools.

Hey I have an idea: let’s make journalism merit based! We’ll measure merit by how many articles you’ve written for the Epoch Times, or your number of appearances on One America News network!

So if the fallacy of the left is to expect that any inequality of the racial distribution of tenured faculty is proof of unfairness, the fallacy of the right is to believe that any inequality of the political distribution of tenured faculty is proof of unfairness.

There's a distinct asymmetry here, though. In that there are loads of documented recent evidence of people in power explicitly and openly encouraging unfairness of the latter kind, while you have to go back quite a few decades before you encounter anywhere near the same density of such official documentation (well, at least in the direction that is being discussed, anyway; certainly there's no shortage of recent official documentation that explicitly calls for discriminating against members of white/Asian races in academia). Perhaps, more importantly, diversity of political orientation is material to an organization's ability to perform academic research (and more generally to discover truth) in a way that one's race isn't. As such, there's an argument in favor of AA in cases of political orientation that doesn't exist for race or other immutable-characteristic-based ones.

I still think this would cast MAGA as hypocrites and unprincipled, but mainly because (a) they're unprincipled hypocrites anyway for independent reasons and (b) the people who would judge MAGA as unprincipled based on this are motivated to be sloppy in their thinking in order to judge as such no matter what, anyway.

I think that you are spot-on that @2rafa's proposal is exactly affirmative action, and it will work out just as badly, while also destroying any credibility of MAGA as a principled opponent to affirmative action and setting the precedent for the left to do the same when they come back into power.

Nobody gives MAGA any credit for principles anyway, and the precedent is long since set.

If the best anyone can do is balance left-wing wokeys with right-wing Q people, it's STILL better than the status quo ante.

It won’t be Q people. There’s a reservoir of right wingers trying to do science already- creationism(and climate change skeptics). You would have to make universities hire people like Ken ham and give them tenure.

if giving Ken Ham is the solution to left wing bias in universities' I think I'll just stick with annoying liberal groupthink.

It is at the very least less harmful to broader society than grievance studies.

As someone who doesn't regret his "obnoxious atheist" phase of his online life from about 15 years ago, it saddens me to say that I'd take that tradeoff in a heartbeat, because I can't honestly judge Ham's "scholarship" as any worse than the mountains of "scholarship" that is produced by modern academia. And, unlike the latter, the Hams of the world don't actively try to subvert the ability of other fields to do good scholarship by denigrating basic concepts like "logic" and "empirical evidence" as tools of White Supremacy that must be discarded for us to get at the truth. So if we can reduce the latter at the cost of increasing the former, I'd see it as an absolute win.

But I don't think increasing the former would reduce the latter anyway, so I think the plan would be bad if implemented with Creationism. As someone else alluded to, if we could get good HBD research along with the nonsense critical theory "research," it would be a strict improvement, since it'd be helping to reduce the dilution of academia's truth discovery by the critical theory nonsense.

[modern academia] denigrating basic concepts like "logic" and "empirical evidence" as tools of White Supremacy

If you believe the truth of HBD, this claim is objectively correct.

if we could get good HBD research along with the nonsense critical theory "research," it would be a strict improvement, since it'd be helping to reduce the dilution of academia's truth discovery by the critical theory nonsense.

It is not in the short-term (or even medium-term) group interest of non-white groups to abandon the critical theory frame, even putting the matter of group dignity aside. If nonsense is the only thing keeping Liberia at bay, then nonsense shall be spread.

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There's actually an even bigger and much more interesting cohort of right wingers trying to do science - HBD, evo psych, etc. I'd put money on them getting in as representatives of the right rather than the creationists. Personally I'd be looking forward to mandatory "diversity" classes that are actually HBD rather than the regular tripe.

But no one likes them. Trump has no reason to favor dissident right science. Their supporters are a negligible group of people who aren’t enthusiastic about him. They are incredibly unpopular with the general public.

Hey, I like them! I think he does in fact have a reason to favor dissident right science, because the political environment for the right becomes substantially better when HBD is the universally accepted wisdom with regards to differences in group achievement. The supporters of "woke" were incredibly unpopular with the general public too - that didn't stop them from using academia to change the world.

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Personally I'd be looking forward to mandatory "diversity" classes that are actually HBD rather than the regular tripe.

"OK class, we're going to start with a little exercise. How many of you -- raise your hands -- have parents who are dumb?" (Half the hands go up, with a little laughter). "Now, I don't mean they don't understand you, or can't figure out the new apps on the iPhone 20. I mean really dumb. Like they can't read, or understand compound interest... at least enough to pay for this school" (all the hands go down but one). "Ms. Johnson? Really? By any chance were you adopted?"

"<gasp> How did you know?"

The most unrealistic part of this is that illiterate morons could ever navigate the insane paperwork to adopt a kid.

Ken ham

Well, certainly not him, he's Australian. I'm sure we can find some American creationists. Maybe Anthony Watts would like a sinecure in the Climate Studies department.

Universities could be asked to affirm that admissions and hiring decisions are based on merit rather than racial or ethnic background or other factors, that specific factors are taken into account when considering foreign student applications, and that college costs are not out of line with the value students receive.

Huh. I wonder who suggested this sort of thing eight months ago. Of course, that person was also showered in downvotes for continuing to suggest something like this over "indiscriminate chemotherapy".

It's still as dumb as it was eight months ago. They can just lie. You'll have a blue-haired university administrator affirming to whatever it is they are told to affirm at the same time that they do whatever they want anyway.

Lying in applications for federal funding comes with significant institutional and personal penalties. That machinery is already in place.

Lying in applications for federal funding comes with significant institutional and personal penalties.

It never has before, why would it start now? Any punishment that isn't felt keenly before Trump leaves office in 3 years is no punishment at all. I don't think that's enough time for the court case and ten appeals that would follow any attempt to punish liars.

Slight correction: You've never seen it before. Some of us have.

Punishment for the lying depends on

  1. The lying being discovered and proven and

  2. Political misalignment between the punisher and the lies

That won't happen here. The lie will be very difficult to discover and prove to the standards necessary, and a friendly administration will almost certainly take over and put a halt to the attempts at punishment.

To the extent it is a problem, (1) is a problem for any scheme of enforcement. (2) is another form of a "government is sometimes held by my opponents" problem.

But you're distracting from the real question, of course. It appears that even the Trump administration is coming around to the idea that it's best to go after specific things, where they are strong, and enforce them broadly, using the hook of federal funding and existing mechanisms. As I suggested months ago. Not indiscriminate chemo for no purpose, no rhyme or reason, just blasting randomly. It's not like blasting randomly is going to solve these concerns you're now bringing up. It's just silly misdirection.

To the extent it is a problem, (1) is a problem for any scheme of enforcement. (2) is another form of a "government is sometimes held by my opponents" problem.

Which is why this method cannot work.

If indeed the Trump administration is "coming around" to the idea that things like having ideologues pro forma swear they aren't doing things according to their ideology rather than the formal rules will help, the administration is screwing up.

this method

is undefined, so one cannot determine how generally scoped your claim is. My comment was very clearly making a scope argument (about your own argument), so this is just non-responsive.

Alternatively, the most natural of the charitable interpretations is that you agree with my scope claim and acknowledge that your own proposal suffers at least the same defects.

Slightly less charitably, you're just doubling down on misdirection and obfuscation. Bad faith argumentation stuff.

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Yes, but enforcement actions will likely cross from one administration into the next, in which case a friendly administration will just drop it. We've seen this repeatedly. All deeply embedded Democratic partisans need to do is run the clock out until one of their guys gets back in power, and then all is forgiven and things can ratchet another degree.

If that's your worry, then I'm all ears for your plan on how to reduce the ability to use the federal government as a weapon for partisan purposes against universities. Or, well, anything else for that matter. This isn't even a university problem. It's a "government is sometimes held by my opponents" problem.

It's a "government is sometimes held by my opponents" problem.

Which is best solved by an Augustus or Bonaparte, who can then go full Henry VIII (with maybe a little Qin Shi Huangdi) on academia.

Recreating the Cultural Revolution to own the libs?

You got a better plan for how the Red Tribe can utterly crush the Blue Tribe, and erase Blue culture from the face of the earth?

Thé natural process of time. Blue culture eventually eats itself.

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MAGA Maoism isn't a meme it's very real

I'd rather not get rid of democracy to fight the libs in academia.

Then find some other way to solve the Culture War before it comes to that. Coordinated Meanness without limit pointed at half the country is not survivable long-term.

I slightly worry that if and when we do get one of those folks, it's not going to be good for me. Not because I think it's going to be someone who you think is in your image. It's probably not going to be that either. But it will likely be the forever boot in the face that @The_Nybbler is always concerned about.

Yeah that works great until it doesn't. Revolutions can be pretty swingy once your favored dear leader dies the next one can reverse his policies. It's totally legal to start up an opposing university now. Less so in authoritarian Catholic land.

I don't think this is necessarily true. Most dictators die peacefully in their sleep. Stalin left behind a Stalinist empire that outlived him by decades which was peacefully replaced by a 10 year halfhearted USA larp and finally the current dictator whose ideology is "OK maybe actually applied Stalinism doesn't work but it shouldn't diminish our love for the Stalin Who's In Our Hearts".

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Meh, it’s practically impossible to run a right wing authoritarian regime in thé US without support from my community, in particular, we’re not the only one, I’d suggest you join one.

To which community do you belong?

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Well, during the Obama administration, their plan to harden the policy objectives against a hostile government was multi pronged.

Slightly in bounds, but still corrupt as hell, they began suing companies and structuring the settlements such that Democratic aligned NGOs were paid out exorbitant warchest. It was a naked shake down, and Bill Barr ended the practice, but then the Biden admin brought it right back. It allowed NGOs to have deep, deep pockets to fight in court everything Trump ever did.

Of course, they didn't stop there. They also fabricated a criminal conspiracy that the Trump administration had to spend virtually their entire presidency fighting in court.

The Biden administration of course emptied the government coffers, throwing money to NGOs as quickly as they could and left the incoming Trump administration right up against the debt ceiling. I think the Trump admin was able to claw some of this back, but it's also being used by leftist organizations to fight them in court.

Since these tactics are just so damned effective, I think Republicans should adopt them. I want to see more political prosecutions, and I want to see more naked corruption between republican governments and their aligned NGOs. Let Trump's DA start suing universities left and right, and structure the settlements so that they have to give some Elon headed NGO all the money, so he can sue them some more long after Trump is out of office. It's a strategy that clearly works since the D's have run it successfully for over 10 years now.

I want to see more political prosecutions, and I want to see more naked corruption between republican governments and their aligned NGOs

Emulating the worst aspects of communist governments... to own the libs?

I'm perpetually amused by the argument of "the Dems shot our country in the foot, therefore, when we're in charge, we should make sure we shoot the other one even harder"

Aren't you supposed to be patriots? You clearly don't want what's best for it

Yes, there is always the danger that enlightened centrists like yourself will be so disgusted by our behavior that they will side with the tribe that has been engaging in such behavior without consequence for a decade. At some point, one must accept that such enlightened centrism is indistinguishable from Blue partisanship, shrug, and proceed with the best strategy available.

Aren't you supposed to be patriots?

The Constitution is dead. America is dead. Loyalty is for the living, not for rotting abstractions.

The Constitution is dead. America is dead.

Man, fuck that noise. America is the best country. We have problems, but there's nowhere else in the world I'd rather be. The whole reason this thread exists in the first place is that America is a great place and too many people want to live here.

I am beginning to wonder if patriotism is going to flip towards being blue coded, it sure seems to be trending that way.

Fair enough as a description of your preferences. I think the right, in general, is debating to what extent to engage in a similar strategy, due to the risk of never-ending reprisals and descent into further banana republic (which I think folks who are somewhat aligned with you in this question would say the country already was). Nevertheless, there's nearly nothing in here about universities. I mean, I guess there's a sentence about somehow getting settlement money from them to Elon, but not a single sense of what that sort of thing might actually look like. How the mechanics of it could work. I'm not even looking for a complete strategy, but some sort of something that a person can squint at and say, "Ah yes, I can mayyyybe imagine how that might work." Call it, say, "concepts of a plan".

indiscriminate chemotherapy wasn't working,

American R1 universities are scarily efficient machines. So efficient that they could support admin excess and woke parasitism without harming their productivity one bit.

In comparison, Washington has been an incompetent mess for a while. To extend the analogy, the US economy is the scarily productive machine that sustains Washington's parasitism and budget excess. A reformist (however incompetent) can get away with rearranging Washington, as long as they don't take a hammer to the economy. Similarly, MAGA should be careful about taking a hammer to the productive parts of the university system. Education reform needs to be surgical.

Spoken as if universities weren't asked for ideological fealty to the left in the past

I know ! During peak woke, math papers needed to fill out social-impact forms. 'Diverse' professors were getting hired left-right-and-center. It might hypocritical for the home of Weather-Underground professors to claim that Trump was the one to cast the first stone.

It all depends on what the conditions are, and whether those conditions are constitutional

More reasonable, but still rich coming from institutions that prided in running afoul of the 14th amendment.

UCal has already been on a tighter leash for some of these things than many other unis... and yes, even just actually complying with the actual law is going to be a fight for some of them

UCs are the biggest violators and the most at risk. They're the world's most prestigious public schools and have more to lose. They'll now have to compete with private universities with 1 hand tied behind their back. (IMO, for the best). They are the most expensive and most bloated public schools. (In comparison to mid-west elite public schools which are less wasteful). The over-performance of resident Asians means that UCs have large gaps between the median Asian/White and affirmative action candidates.

I welcome it.

The over-performance of resident Asians means that UCs have large gaps between the median Asian/White and affirmative action candidates.

Hasn’t California banned AA in university admissions for nearly 3 decades now? I don’t doubt that university administrators/admissions committees will try every trick in the book to put a thumb on the scale in favor of “diverse” applicants, but there are hard limits on how far they can move that needle, particularly given Asian academic performance as you mentioned. The top 2 UC campuses (Berkeley and LA), for instance, are near-majority Asian and have vanishingly low numbers of Black students.

California's affirmative action ban is the perfect example of how personnel equals policy. The UCs have been flagrantly violating the affirmative action ban for essentially the entire time it's been in effect. It's just laundered through a "holisitic" admissions program where everyone knows the "personal statememt" all applicants write is where you talk about how much Kwanzaa drag shows meant to you growing up.

The combination of a fig leaf ban and a system where the top 10% of high school students (not sure if state-wide or per school) are guaranteed admission in at least one UC means they have marginally more white and Asian enrollment than they would prefer, but the schools are still doing everything within their power to put their thumbs on the scale.

It might hypocritical for the home of Weather-Underground professors to claim that Trump was the one to cast the first stone.

A requirement to employ equal numbers of terrorists from the left and the right as professors would be so very Trumpian.

Universities could comply by just not having terrorist professors.

But they’d probably comply by hiring Gitmo detainees and classifying them as on the right because of their religious motivation.

American R1 universities are scarily efficient machines. So efficient that they could support admin excess and woke parasitism without harming their productivity one bit.

Certainly not the case. The admin excess and woke parasitism vastly increased the amount of money they required, and the woke parasitism reduced the value of their output (by diluting it with nonsense)

the woke parasitism reduced the value of their output (by diluting it with nonsense)

Depends on what you mean by "value," doesn't it? If you consider the primary value of universities to be truth discovery/generation, then yes, woke parasitism reduced the value of the output to arguably negative (even the good stuff is no longer credible, because the ability to discriminate between the good stuff and the bad stuff has been corrupted). But if you consider the primary value of universities to be to validating your worldview and political ideology, then, depending on your ideology, it substantially increased the value. In fact, in that case, it took it from negative to positive, since truth discovery was an existential threat to your ideology.

But if you consider the primary value of universities to be to validating your worldview and political ideology, then, depending on your ideology, it substantially increased the value.

This is like measuring labor productivity by what comes out of the hind end of the laborers. Sure, if I use a totally worthless measuring stick the statement could be "true", but by using such a measure the point that it's BS is already conceded.

Democratic vote share of college graduates. There's even a dose dependent effect.

Hardly a worthless measuring stick, since it has substantial impacts on government and corporate management.

American R1 universities are scarily efficient machines. So efficient that they could support admin excess and woke parasitism without harming their productivity one bit.

Can you expand on this? My impression is that these universities have endowments that should give them all the funding they need in perpetuity, but still require ever-increasing tuition that is payed by the government with debt. This debt cannot be discharged with bankruptcy which is distorting the market. It doesn't seem efficient to me, just more of the Beltway woes exported across the country. But maybe you were thinking of something different?

No universities can fund current expenses indefinitely through their endowments. Only a couple rarefied ones could last a decade.

Eh, most universities do not have Harvard or UT level endowments. Those universities have crazy tuition costs because they can get away with it, but they don’t need to charge high tuition.

In contrast most universities do not have much of an endowment, and they need to charge high tuition, which they then justify with ever better accommodations, which in turn jacks tuition up further.

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