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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.

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)

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