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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   18971 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.

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.

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.

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

Civil Rights Act.

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