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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   15094 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.

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.

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

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.

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