hckrnws

https://archive.ph/a9ie5

Some personal highlights:

"They’re excellent schools, and they have excellent scientists, and if one of Vice-President Vance’s kids is sick, he’s going to want the doctor to have gone to one of these schools; he’s not going to want them to have gone to Viktor Orbán’s university."

"People have said to me, “Well, you take all that money from the government, why don’t you listen to them?” The answer is, because the money doesn’t come with a loyalty oath."

"I don’t have to agree with the mayor to get the fire department to come put out a fire. And that’s what they’re saying to these international students: “Well, you came to this country. What makes you think you can write an op-ed in the newspaper?” Well, what makes you think that is, this is a free country. "

> The answer is, because the money doesn’t come with a loyalty oath

But it does come with some reasonable level of consideration and appreciation.

You don't know how they feel, so what you're saying is "they have to show/express appreciation," which is synonymous with a loyalty oath.

Why do you think this?

"you didn't say thank you!!!"

Appreciation? Appreciation to who?

Donald "Rapist slash Charity Stealing Halfwit" Trump and his barking little idiot dog JD Vance?

Not in a million years.

Federal largess is overwhelmingly funded by the so-called "blue states" like Connecticut. The hateful, poorly educated welfare states -- the ones where demagogues with a long history of lying and criminality tend to do well -- do not need to be thanked for their hate or ignorance.

Oh hey, Wesleyan on HN! I’m an alumnus (matriculated a year or two after Roth became president). Wesleyan has a rich history of activism and protest, and not always entirely peaceful (Roth’s predecessor, Doug Bennet, had his office firebombed at one point).

I’ve had a few opportunities to speak with Roth since the Gaza war started, and I’ve always found him particularly thoughtful about balancing freedom of expression with a need to provide a safe and open learning environment for everyone on campus. In particular, he never gave in to the unlimited demands of protestors while still defending their right to protest.

In part, he had the moral weight to do that because—unlike many university presidents—he did not give in to the illiberal demands of the left to chill speech post-2020, which then were turned against the left over the past year.

I don’t see any particularly good outcome from any of this; the risk of damaging the incredibly successful American university system is high. Certainly smart foreign students who long dreamed of studying in the US will be having second thoughts if they can be arbitrarily and indefinitely detained.

But I hope the universities that do make it through do with a stronger commitment to the (small l) liberal values of freedom of expression , academic freedom, and intellectual diversity.

ah, some both sides claims while people are disappeared

People are being abducted off the street for writing tame op-eds and we're still complaining about the left chilling speech post-2020? What are we doing here?

We're doing a dictatorship, cosplaying as having freedoms.

The left banning the use of certain words and the right banning the use of certain words are flip sides of the same coin.

Of course, if you point that out, you get yelled at by both sides.

Except one side of the coin complains on twitter and maybe gets you fired from your job whereas the other side of that coin systematically removes over a hundred million dollars of research grants based on language and is literally disappearing people for their writing

but yeah, same thing. sorry someone put you through the absolute hell of saying they/them at work

Your attitude and inability to see anything but your own view is exactly the problem we've seen in the new left.

"Maybe gets you fired from your job" is someone's entire livelihood you're trivializing.

Any attempt to control speech and silence opposition is wrong, no matter how you slice it. "Your side" isn't any better than the other's.

>"Maybe gets you fired from your job" is someone's entire livelihood you're trivializing.

>Any attempt to control speech and silence opposition is wrong, no matter how you slice it.

I don't know why "Hey company, this person you employ sucks, you should fire them" doesn't qualify as speech that should be protected. It shows that you aren't asking for free speech, you are asking for speech without consequences.

Well for brevity I did trivialize it but I will expand:

The left side got people fired. This is objectively not as bad as getting people disappeared. You can get a new fucking job. You can’t get freedom from detention and you cannot easily return to the country (if at all)

Additionally there is the motivational factor behind both sides:

The lefts argument in policing language was to reduce harm to marginalized groups. You may not agree with it, but that is the rational.

The rights argument is to erase those marginalized groups.

These are extremely different in motivation. Asking you to respect a persons gender identity in professional contexts is far different than forcing someone to not be able to express it on federal documentation.

One side of this was “we want to create inclusive spaces that make people comfortable and if you don’t want to participate in that there is the door”. The other side is “we did not want to participate in that so go fuck yourself and we will do whatever we can to deny your right to express your identity”

“Any attempt to control speech” is an absolutist statement that is absurd in its fallacy. So I can say I can murder you? I can say you’re planning a terrorist attack? I can say you want to kill the president? Of course not. Speech is limited contextually and by law

You're still trivializing. The cancel culture would often follow the people it wanted to cancel to make it hard for them to get another job again.

Also, I'll add that the "there is the door" comment is entirely wrong. There are countless stories of open source maintainers being harassed to make language changes to their code base, master/slave, whitelist/blacklist. The harassers never offered to do the work themselves just demanded it be done for them or they'll keep harassing. These were people matching into someone else's "safe space" to police their private language.

The government disappearing people and dismantling the country is very bad, and nothing good can be said about it. What I'm talking about are the individuals on both sides not formally in power, and their equal efforts to stifle what they see as "bad speech". It's that mentality, on both sides, that led us to where we are.

Harassment is bad. Extraordinary rendition is bad. One of them is significantly worse than the other. And the side complaining about A whilst celebrating B is significantly more hypocritical.

What about the side that complains about A and complains about B, and complains that constant polarizing rhetoric has been ratcheting up to get us from the less bad A to the very bad B?

Ah yes, it is the left's fault the right is spiraling the country into despotism. Feeling a lot of "Why do you make them hit you?" energy in this thread.

You’re the one trivializing things by putting job loss and prison on the same footing.

> never offered to do the work themselves just demanded it be done for them or they'll keep harassing.

I mean if you've worked much in open source, that is pretty much how nearly every feature request and bug report goes unfortunately.

How many of the conservatives complaining about it would support government regulations preventing people from being fired for expressing controversial viewpoints? AFAIK those complaining are the same people who support ‘at will’ employment and the liberty of religious organizations to impose more or less arbitrarily discriminatory hiring standards. So yeah, in that lax regulatory environment, your employer might decide to fire you if you (e.g.) feel the need to be an asshole to your trans colleagues.

Wilhoit's Law strikes again!

"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."

Conservatives are completely fine with restricting others while not applying the same standards to themselves.

They got themselves fired. People who wrote things didn't get themselves disappeared to a holding site in Louisiana.

[dead]

Very refreshing to finally see people on HN call out the ridiculousness of the "both sides" arguments when it comes to this topic.

Extremism on any side is bad, period. 'But they are worse' is sort of moot point and most people don't care about details, you simply lose normal audience and maybe gain some fringe.

Telling your employer you were a dick is extremism?

You really don't see a problem with this? I consider myself more on the left, but this practice has always seemed highly antithetical to liberal values to me.

If somebody in their off hours says something assinine, and telling (some might call that "snitching to") their employer in a public forum like Twitter (in a clear attempt to get a social media frenzy going to ultimately get them fired) is a good thing, then wouldn't it logically follow that an employer should not only be permitted but actively encouraged to monitor employees 100% of the time so they can fire them if they ever step out of the corporate line? Amazon does this to many low-level employees just on-the-job and most people think that's creepy and unfair, I can't imagine extending that to off-hours as well. At a minimum wouldn't it follow that it would be great for employers to set up a snitch line so anybody could (even anonymously) call to make reports on people? Is that a world you'd want to live in?

On the next line, let's say the person is fired from their job for a gross tweet. Should they be able to get a new job after that? If so, how does the previous history get erased so the prospective new employers don't see it and avoid them (this very type of thing is by the way, a huge problem for formerly incarcerated people especially felons). Add in that there was no trial, no standard of evidence, no due process, just a swinging axe from an executioner. Should this person (and often their families) just be relegated to extreme poverty the rest of their lives? Blacklisted from employment like the communists in Hollywood were?

In a free country, private employers should be allowed to choose who they employ, with very narrow exceptions for discrimination based on race, religion, etc.

In a free country, citizens should be allowed to read what other citizens write in public.

Those both seem pretty obvious, but put the two of them together and it means people can lose their jobs or not be hired for stuff they tweet. How do you resolve that?

IMO the real issue isn’t that employers can make decisions based on this stuff. It’s that employers are far too big. If we had 20 Amazons, getting fired from one of them wouldn’t be such a big deal.

I agree the pervasiveness of at-will employment and the gig economy, when combined with the way our economy is set up to require employment for survival, are a problem.

You can’t win with these people. They don’t care if they aren’t personally impacted. The “sjw boogeyman” that could theoretically impact their cushy livelihood matters more than the very real right wing government that exists right now and is disappearing people.

But as long as they can still say the n word on twitter and call of duty everything will be okay. Who cares about those disappeared people anyway, they weren’t even citizens

[dead]

Thanks for proving his point...

This strikes me as someone on the left complaining that they fucked around and now they are finding out. I don’t mean this in a malicious way but the lack of self reflection and perspective is staggering.

One ban consists of the exercise of their right to... Not associate with you.

The other sends you to a Salvadoran gulag. (The silence from all the 'free speech' folks on this point is deafening.)

It's odd that one ban operates within the constraints of freedom (the freedom to associate requires the exercise of the freedom to not associate), while the other does not. It's almost like there's a categorical distinction.

It's utterly pointless to say that the starting point is the same, when one is an utter sabotage of all of society's rights and values... While the other is people affirming those rights.

> One ban consists of the exercise of their right to... Not associate with you.

Many people have been fired / expelled / and many more silenced by those examples. If you can't tell the truth about your side (from how you're writing I assume you think in sides) then there's no point saying it.

> The other sends you to a Salvadoran gulag. (The silence from all the 'free speech' folks on this point is deafening.)

I haven't heard about this. Who has been sent to a Salvadoran gulag for speech?

Is wearing an "autism awareness " tattoo considered speech?

If the past decade is any indication, nothing has stopped the long list of cancelled right wing grifters, racists, and various other flavors of fools and bigots from finding gainful employment and signal boosting and platforming among like-minded people who do exercise their right to associate with them, despite their behavior.

For (allegedly) being so persecuted and silenced, it's weird how so many of them have so much more power, reach, and wealth than ever before.

Perhaps getting booed at in the last college campus they held a rally at is not quite the yellow star, or the mark of Cain that they convinced you it is.

In the past decade, the left got so cancel-happy that "cancellation" by the left-wing activist crowd lost pretty much all of its weight among anyone who isn't an ideologue. In 2016-2018, if you got canceled, you would have a very hard time finding any white-collar job afterward.

Well what did they do to get called out?

This is called "victim blaming".

If a bigot acts like a bigot then gets outed, that's their own fault. They're not victims.

I agree that at-will employment is a problem. So is a lack of safety nets. Do you know who supports at-will employment and a lack of safety nets?

Reminder to anyone triggered by a “both sides” comment:

just like you, we are all aware of how the sides are different, it is valid to be more annoyed by the ways they are the same

> it is valid to be more annoyed by the ways they are the same

Is it? One side has a vocal minority who took defense of minorities to the point of harassment and was ultimately rebuffed. The other side controls the government and is enthusiastically renditioning legal residents to prisons and defying the constitution and courts to keep doing it.

To be more upset about both sides being imperfect than the injustice of irreversible deportations to foreign prison seems ... absurd.

all parties are beneficiaries of the institutional structures that allow for a party to do those things

so the things you are bothered by and demand everyone to prioritize are actually solved by addressing the underlying mechanisms, as opposed to simply trying to propagate your preferred party's numbers

something... both sides... might actually be into. if the other party is afraid of the opposition party doing the same thing to different people, then there might actually be overwhelming consensus to change the thing that a "both sides" person is trying to point out

I'm making no demands. Only pointing out an absurd false equivalence.

Change to the polarizing system would be great. I doubt that will happen by softening protests to obscene injustice. Rather it's likely to reenforce the shifting Overton window further into authoritarianism and kleptocracy.

To break the two party system we need things a large portion of the populous has been (falsely) taught are bad for them: same day primaries, ranked choice voting, making campaign bribery illegal, unwinding corporate personhood, etc. Can you guess which side is most attached to the system of political machines and the lies that reinforce them?

you didn't point out a false equivalency, you pointed out ways the parties are different in a conversation about the other ways they are the same. I'm not sure which semantical term you would chose here, but you are saying its 'absurd' that the differences aren't prioritized and its 'absurd' to consider these parties - one of which you hate - have some similarity. As if they couldn't have any overlapping aspects of a venn diagram because one party did something authoritarian. I'm talking about the overlapping aspects in the venn diagram.

additionally the underlying things to change also aren't limited to just the two party system. if any party can do something you are afraid of, focus on the enabling factors that allows them to do that. an additional party to represent more varied opinions isn't the solution to that.

look, the senate has been 50-50 for over a decade. maybe your approach isn't garnering your party any power no matter how you word it. no additional people in the right geographies are swayed by a single one of your arguments so why not try something different. nobody is going to prioritize your problem. we can bridge consensus on what everyone is afraid the other party might leverage, as its likely an underlying flaw in our governance structure to begin with.

That's because the extent of the illiberal behavior of the radical left was yelling and "cancel culture" while the present behavior of the illiberal right is abductions and overseas slave camps. You can see why people might find having the two equated a little ridiculous, right?

It's not an equation in what it does to people. Yes, abduction is worse than being yelled at.

However, it's pointing out that the general principle has been established: "People whose opinion I don't like can be banned from society." At first, it's only removing individuals from public discourse (cancel culture), then it's removing people physically (deportation).

This is always the endgame of eroding core liberal values. This has been pointed out to the illiberal left time and time again, to no avail.

[flagged]

Part of the problem here is that you're abstracting the actions of a handful of relatively powerless people to a principle: "People whose opinion I don't like can be banned from society." The 'I' here is, from your framing, the 'left' or something.

Strawman. The fired people you're talking about weren't banned from society by the people pointing them out on the internet. If someone's on an international flight yelling racial slurs and causing a commotion, and someone else publishes video of that person yelling racial slurs on an international flight, it's not the people commenting on the video who fired that person from their job. It's their employers. What would be the alternative? No one takes video of the person yelling racial slurs? Or, if the video is posted, no one comments on it? Or, maybe, the person yelling racial slurs could simply avoid losing their employment by not yelling racial slurs on a flight full of people with their phones out? Or maybe the employer could choose to ignore the negative publicity and keep the person on staff despite the risk to their revenue? Who exactly is the responsible party here?

I generally find it pointless to point out that 'right' perspectives suffer from a lack of practical logic--pointing out the fundamental irrationality of a position rarely changes the mind of the person holding that position. But, your position ignores power differential between people--your argument is a matter of 'principle,' but this isn't fundamentally about principles.

Is your argument then that a person yelling racial slurs on a full airplane shouldn't have their employment threatened by their behavior? That their employer shouldn't fire them?

[dead]

First it’s people disagreeing with me, then it’s deportation to the death camps. There is zero nuance and the slippery slope is basically guaranteed so I should have freedom of consequence for everything I do!

talk about zero nuance, people here started comparing to concentration camps, and now you are at death camps

just a quick reminder, the ghettos which had far better living conditions than concentration camps (not death camps), had people living on 180 calories a day and ended with more than a half a million dead

so please, proportions, this is an insult to history

> That's because the extent of the illiberal behavior of the radical left was yelling and "cancel culture" while the present behavior of the illiberal right is abductions and overseas slave camps. You can see why people might find having the two equated a little ridiculous, right?

You are correct - one is objectively worse than the other.

The unfortunate truth is that, also, one is a consequence of the other.

Trump is simply doing what his voters wanted[1]. And they voted for him precisely because `of the illiberal behavior of the radical left was yelling and "cancel culture"`.

Had the first thing not happened, then the consequence would have been a fictional story in an alternate timeline.

But here we are, and we don't get to say "Sure, we were assholes to 50% of the population, but your response is worse".

[1] Spoiler - they may not even want it anymore!

Eh, you can prove anything but starting history at a particular point.

For instance, "GamerGate", where a bunch of anonymous people on the internet tried to get a number of women in the game industry fired, predates "cancel culture" by a year or two.

Or how the whole #MeToo movement was, you know, a response to powerful people abusing people in their power, and firing or otherwise limiting their careers if they resisted.

If <insert famous talking head from ten years ago> didn't want to be "canceled", well, he could have always just not sexually harassed his underlings.

Not really. In both cases, compulsion is the problem. Neither side has the right to compel anyone to do anything, but they operate on the premise that they do, usually characterized by indignant self-rightiousness. The irrational extremists of both sides, the ones screaming the loudest, naturally, seek to enforce their version of "how things should be" on to other people, regardless if their objections are rational or not, while also constantly changing the rules or shifting goal posts, which keeps us forever locked in a state of not knowing if we are breaking them. It's mind-numbing to a degree that apathy starts to seem like a perfectly valid option. It's also a tactic historically used by totalitarianism.

They are two sides of the same monster, like Jekyll & Hyde.

Surely one can find ways to fight the irrational, inconsequential leftists (which there are many) without bullying institutions by cutting their funding, or kidnapping people in broad daylight in the street?

Civilized western countries do it all the time.

Absolutely. A functional civilization hinges on rational, equitable and cooperative solutions. Extremists are not interested in those things, though. They want what they want and they want it now with all the petulance and emotional regulation of a spoiled toddler.

> while the present behavior of the illiberal right is abductions and overseas slave camps

Can you provide examples of people getting abducted and sent to "overseas slave camps" purely for their speech?

Took me all of 5 seconds to find an example. Tattoos are a form of protected speech: https://archive.is/2025.04.03-041258/https://www.theatlantic...

[flagged]

You have no intention of having a discussion in good faith. You're going to use whatbaoutisms, pedantry, and goalpost moving. Kindly stfu

Here’s another one: https://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2025/03/24/what-to-kno...

The administration admitted that they deported a legal resident to a fucking concentration camp in El Salvador! How is this something we’re like “oh but the illiberal left!” This is literally Stalinism!

Good luck in that case ;)

Everything is a flip side of the same coin if you abstract away from all the important details.

Oh the right say that some things are bad? Well the left say that some things are bad too!

These lazy equivalencies only breed cynicism and give intellectual cover to the Trump administration’s executive power grab. By all means criticize the left as much as you like. But the specifics are important. The current administration’s deportation of green card holders without due process isn’t somehow a mirror image of whatever excesses of left wing ‘cancel culture’ you may be upset about.

Oh bugger off with your both sides horsewash

You can’t overlook the distinction between US citizens and non-citizens. The US has the prerogative to filter immigrants based on their views and affiliations. For example, the Supreme Court has upheld provisions of immigration laws that allow deportation of communists: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/342/580. Similarly, 8 U.S.C. 1182 enables the Secretary of State to exclude aliens based on "the alien's past, current, or expected beliefs, statements, or associations." The government can't punish Americans for just being a communist, but the government isn't required to invite non-citizen communists into the U.S. or allow them to stay.

It’s not a speech issue, just as it’s not a speech issue if you’re interviewing for a government job and the government denies you because you said you hate america. Non-citizens have speech rights, just as they have other rights, but that’s circumscribed by the fact that they’re only allowed to be in the US at the invitation of the government. Donating to political campaigns is free speech, but non-citizens aren’t allowed to do that either. Similarly, nobody denies that non-citizens are protected under the equal protection clause. But nobody seriously argues the immigration laws nationality quotas are unconstitutional discrimination.

The government may be within its legal rights. As an expression of values however it's hard not to see the expulsion of these students as petty politicalized retaliation. The sort of thing you would see in an electoral autocracy as opposed to a liberal democracy.

That only Americans have the right to participate in our political system is an expression of values. And it’s entirely compatible with democracy. The citizen versus non-citizen distinction is fundamental to democracy.

If you're a guest, act like a guest. Anti-Israel protests are by extension a protest against the US foreign policy, so yeah... You protest your host in a violent and disruptive manner, you probably shouldn't have been allowed in to begin with.

Not in my America.

I welcome any and all persons from anywhere in the world if they want to come and protest the American war machine

Our forefathers would be absolutely ashamed at what you just said. Protesting a totalitarian government that lacks proper representation is the most American thing you can possibly do, and that makes these immigrants more American than you will ever be, as long as you hold such views.

Edit: It seems you have edited your post in order to remove the extremely distasteful language you originally expressed. I assume you still hold such views or you'd not have expressed them to begin with, and as such my comment still stands.

Fuck that!

We have this thing called the First Amendment. It applies to all people under the jurisdiction of the United States. There’s no exception for “guests.” Criticizing the government is a time-honored American tradition. Throwing people out for it is absolutely vile.

Americans can criticize their government all they want. Foreigners shouldn’t have no input in the american political system. The first amendment is the exception to the democratic rule, not the other way around.

Foreigners aren't allowed to vote or donate. They should be allowed to voice their opinions on the government, though. In my opinion, anyone who says foreigners in the country shouldn't criticize the government is less American than said foreigners.

>the First Amendment. It applies to all people under the jurisdiction of the United States.

Not according to the Supreme Court it doesn't.

[dead]

> The US has the prerogative to filter immigrants based on their views and affiliations.

What comes before “filter[ing] immigrants” is due process. Resident aliens have the right to due process which the current US administration is not providing.

Alien residents with every right to be here are being removed from the US illegally and mistakenly.

I am not sure there's technically a due process right in the case of immigration visa revocation and the ensuing deportation. There is a due process right in the case of crimes, but getting your visa revoked is not a crime.

The best argument I have heard is that visa revocation may be like firing: the US can do it for almost any reason and you can fire someone for no reason, but can't do it for specific prohibited reasons. Speech would probably be one of those bad reasons under the US's civil rights framework.

> The best argument I have heard is that visa revocation may be like firing: the US can do it for almost any reason and you can fire someone for no reason, but can't do it for specific prohibited reasons. Speech would probably be one of those bad reasons under the US's civil rights framework.

No, the U.S. has the prerogative to pick and choose foreigners who are allowed to immigrate based on categories that would be impermissible for employers. That includes nationality, e.g. our green card quota system, as well as speech and affiliation. The Supreme Court has upheld deporting communists who are foreign nationals: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/342/580/.

This is reflected in the statute. Aliens can specifically be excluded for political beliefs and views if the Secretary of State determines that is necessary: "An alien, not described in clause (ii), shall not be excludable or subject to restrictions or conditions on entry into the United States under clause (i) because of the alien's past, current, or expected beliefs, statements, or associations, if such beliefs, statements, or associations would be lawful within the United States, unless the Secretary of State personally determines that the alien's admission would compromise a compelling United States foreign policy interest." 8 USC 1182(a)(4)(C)(iii).

I think the real argument here is a constitutional one about that statute, not about the statute itself. It is unlikely, though, that the supreme court would reverse its stance here.

The current statute reflects the Supreme Court’s precedents on the issue. The Supreme Court precedent, in turn, reflects the fundamental difference between citizens and non-citizens. The government has plenary power, constitutionally, to decide who is permitted to enter the united states and on what terms.

If there's no due process for everyone, that distinction literally does not matter in the slightest!

Dozens of citizens could have been sent into slave labor for all we know, and no judge has been able to provide the constitutionally mandated oversight. It has been upheld many times and for hundreds of years that the Due Process clause applies to non-citizens for this reason.

Due process only means “This is the minimum required process for the government to act”. It doesn’t mean that every non-citizen is entitled to a jury trial that can escalate to the USSC.

In some cases, “due process” is “Your name made it into a spreadsheet, the President can drone strike you”

Due process doesn’t require judicial process.

> The US has the prerogative to filter immigrants based on their views and affiliations.

Just to point, the prerogative to "filter" immigrants does not allow the US to keep them in jail, torture, or send them to foreign countries non-supervised labor camps.

Ok, I'll bite: in your view, what were the illiberal "demands" post-2020? Reading tfa, this kind of rendering feels a little too pat for him. Namely, its one thing to argue against the kind of knee-jerk moralism of well-meaning woke liberal arts kids, its quite another to imply a kind of "capital L" program to "chill speech."

Like, c'mon, are we really still doing this now? Roth himself is sensible enough to not be, in his words, "blaming the victim" at this point, what calls you to essentially do it for him anyway? It's nothing but out of touch at this point, and adds nothing to the discourse but conspiratorial noise. If I may assume a rough age based on your forthrightness, any single kid in school in 2020 was and is a lot less culpable for this current moment than you or I. We can set an example and be mature enough to own that, instead of, I don't know, forever being tortured by the real or perceived condescension of kids.

It is a smaller step to further the justifications than to deal with the often severe implications (to the self-image) of having been wrong. The more obvious it becomes having been wrong, the more necessary the justifications are and the more absurd they become. As having someone accepting your absurd justifications becomes proof of being blameless.

I should add that I'm not referring to beepbooptheory, but in response to "are we really still doing this now?".

It's nothing but out of touch at this point, and adds nothing to the discourse

Exactly. Its a communications problem.

Its hard to have a decent critical conversation when one side has a biased view about $symbol. Both communicating parties need to reach the same interpretation of a message, otherwise the conversation is broken. Thats why you shouldnt say the N-word or throw out a heil heart on stage (unless you want to hide behind this ambiguity). Or why its so difficult to have critical conversations with strong believers, for you its just evolution or vaccines but for the other side it may affect the core of their identity and the ape goes defense mode.

The result is that the discourse does not deal with differentiated cases but _only_ with simplistic labels like "chill speech", "woke", etc. because the more biased side drags it down into the mud.

For instance, the "chill speech" label is actually dependent on the "racist" label that initiated it. If a case shows clear racist behavior, then dismissing the lefts reaction as censorship is unjustified or biased. The other way works too, if there is no racist behavior, the censorship blame would be justified.

And since you cant look into peoples heads to clearly identify racist intentions, it falls back to interpreting messages. The problem with biased people is, they are not aware even of their unawareness. If you would ask Musk whether he is a neo-nazi, his response would be something like "hell no". Fast forward the dystopian timeline and his response might be "always have been".

The left has IMO more unbiased awareness about systemic issues -- but is not free of bias either. The right is in its core biased indentity politics about $culture -- but is not totally host to tribalism either.

My advise, avoid popular symbols at all cost and if you come close to using one, augment it with case specific background, even a vague "_unjustified_ chill of speech" would suffice. If someone opens with "the woke left" and shows no signs of differentiation -- or even better, acknowledgement of core leftist topics -- i mentally turn away. The comment you replied to was about personal anekdotes and projections and the one symbol that rubs me the wrong way too, even before trumps abuse.

[dead]

> Wesleyan has a rich history of activism and protest, and not always entirely peaceful (Roth’s predecessor, Doug Bennet, had his office firebombed at one point).

Arson is not protest. Arson is a VIOLENT type of activism, which is legally classified as terrorism.

Trump (or anybody) shouldn't be allowed to punish folks for speech or peaceful protest. Unfortunately, folks are calling VIOLENT acts like arson and battery "protest", and threats of bodily harm "speech" ("harassment" or "assault" under most US criminal law) -- we should be in favor of the government stepping in to protect people from arson, battery, and assault/ harassment.

> he did not give in to the illiberal demands of the left to chill speech post-2020,

Roth has been president since 2007. What was his response to Nick Christakis's struggle session (plenty of video of that) or Erika Christakis leaving Yale, after she penned an e-mail that students should be able to handle Halloween costumes they find offensive?

The American Left has been illiberal and going after speech for decades; it didn't start post-2020.

Just so. The First Amendment assures the right to peacefully assemble and speak your mind, not to commit arson. Violent attacks aren't free speech and should always be prosecuted.

It's not that hard as a foreign student to not join political protests in favor of terrorist groups. Also this isn't that unusual of a standard. Many countries completely ban non citizens from joining political protests, even ostensibly western countries.

>It's not that hard as a foreign student to not join political protests in favor of terrorist groups.

I obviously don't support terrorism, but people unambiguously have the right to protest in favour of terrorist groups. It's only when they provide material support to these groups that they actually commit a crime.

Who is supporting terrorist groups? Pro-Palestinian protesting is not support for terrorism.

Nothing in that article implies supporting terrorism. They support Palestine.

People conflating supporting Palestine with supporting terrorism should be ashamed of themselves, as Israel is the biggest terror state in the world.

Well, when it comes to conflating, I'll take your calling Israel a terror state as a standard: The democratically elected government of Gaza-Palestine is the Hamas, which is a terrorist organisation. Thus by your conflation regarding Israel to be a terror state, the Gaza strip part of Palestine is as well. Its population chose a known terrorist organisation, everything is run by a terrorist organisation, they did terrorist things such as bombings, abductions and murders of innocent civilians. Thus (Gaza-)Palestine is therefore a terror state. Supporting it is therefore supporting terrorism.

Thus either you apply your conflating standard equally, Palestine and Israel are both terror states, and any support of them is supporting terrorism. Or you rather differentiate, and separate Palestine as an abstract concept of a hypothetical future homestead of the Palestinians from the Hamas, the Fatah and other (mostly terrorist) organisations that govern it, and the population that, in parts, is governed by them and elects and supports or opposes them and their actions. But if you do that, you will also have to differentiate between Israel as a state, its military, government, parties, population and their respective support and actions.

In that second case you can support Palestine as an abstract idea without supporting terrorism, you can support the population and their rights, hopes and struggle. As you can do with Israel and their people. However, on pro-Palestine protests, I've never really seen this kind of differentiation applied, I've seen far too many Hamas flags, heard far too many calls to wipe Israel from the map, far too many praises for terrorists (called "martyrs"). Thus, in practically all cases, I'd without hesitation call supporters of Palestine supporters of terrorism.

> Hamas, which is a terrorist organisation.

According to the New York Times, Netanhayu was propping up Hamas in the weeks and months before the current conflict ( https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/10/world/middleeast/israel-q... ). This has been happening since the beginning of Hamas.

The government over there has been supporting Hamas since the beginning, because they don't want to deal with Fatah going to the UN. Everything recently is the result of that. So don't come around talking about Hamas. Especially since Netanyahu and his US counterparts are trying to sideline Fatah, and are persecuting secular Palestinians like Samidoun and the PFLP more than Hamas. The US, Canada, Germany etc. crack down on the seculat, left-leaning Samidoun so that only Hamas is left standing in Gaza.

"The antisemite does not accuse the Jew of stealing because he thinks he stole something. He does it because he enjoys watching the Jew turn out his pockets to prove his innocence."

Although I laud your unassailable argument highlighting yet another instance of double standards against Jews, ultimately there is little upside in engaging with the "no, no, technically there is a difference between anti-Zionism and antisemitism" crowd. I am sad that Hacker News is rife with this kind of bigotry, but I don't see the tide of this battle turning anytime soon.

In case, dear reader, you are one of the intellectually curious ones who holds the opposing viewpoint, ask yourself why you demand that only the Jews lack the right to self determination?

I think it's wise to separate the future of both Israel and Palestine from their present. In 100 years there will be surviving Israelis and surviving Palestinians and they'll have a view of the present generation.

This guy perhaps?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c934y9kv07eo.amp

Maybe Palestine should stop supporting Hamas. It looks like they couldn’t get enough of it.

> Many countries completely ban non citizens from joining political protests, even ostensibly western countries.

Which ones?

In the UK we don't discriminate based on citizenship, or even if the protests are political or not !

Protest marches - no wait, the term is less specific: "public processions" - can have restrictions imposed for basically any reason. Restrictions can be imposed if (this is just a selection):

- They basically generate noise

- May cause prolonged disruption of access to any essential goods or any essential service

- May cause the prevention of, or a hindrance that is more than minor to, the carrying out of day-to-day activities

- May cause the prevention of, or a delay that is more than minor to, the delivery of a time-sensitive product to consumers of that product

Not forgetting there are probably 10-20 general Public Order Offences that can be used against a person, such as wilful obstruction of a highway or public nuisance.

Then we also have Serious Disruption Prevention Orders (SDPOs). SDPOs are civil orders that enable courts to place conditions or restrictions on an individual aged over 18 (such as restrictions on where they can go and when) with the aim of preventing them from engaging in protest-related activity that could cause disruption. Breaching an SDPO is a criminal offence.

And the cherry on the cake: by law you must tell the police in writing 6 days before a public march if you're the organiser (which is to say, get the police's permission)

Laws around protests here in the UK are certainly problematic, but I haven't heard of ant cases where this would have been specifically used against students from abroad.

The subjects of His Majesty have never been free

Technically we're subjects but the King has zero executive powers. His soft powers are perhaps another topic. Point being we're in effect, citizens and subject to the (very variable) laws of the country like any other country. Currently freedom of expression in the UK is highly problematic but that's a temporary issue with the current administration. No subjects or citizens in any country are ever free as in free beer. So I suppose you're correct.

There are very very few people who can be classed as "British subjects", the vast majority are British citizens since at least 1983.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_subject :

"Currently, it refers to people possessing a class of British nationality largely granted under limited circumstances to those connected with Ireland or British India born before 1949. Individuals with this nationality are British nationals and Commonwealth citizens, but not British citizens."

Germany bans pro-Palestine protests (officially they're still legal, but they've been arresting people since it began and they've just started deporting people for participating in completely legal protests) but I think that's a slightly different criterion than the one you asked for.

Correct. Here's a DW video on it: https://www.dw.com/en/germany-to-deport-pro-palestinian-prot...

There is a fight over this being done with or without due process.

Incorrect:

"They are accused of indirectly supporting Hamas, which is designated as a terrorist organization in Germany."

2nd sentence from your link.

Supporting terrorist organizations is not legal in Germany. Supporting terrorist organizations is not the same a being Pro-Palestinian. Unless you think that all Palestinians are terrorists, which I do not.

Yes, and Germany considers protests against anything Israel does in Gaza to be support for Hamas, which is designated as a terrorist organization in Germany.

This newspaper may not think they're the same thing, but the police do.

While the protests are per se not illegal, the people arrested aren't accused of just protesting, they are accused of supporting a terrorist organisation. The right to free speech isn't as all-encompassing in Germany as it is in the USA, so shouting the wrong slogans can very well get you in trouble.

Also, the right to protest in public only applies to German citizens: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/gg/art_8.html

Foreigners are usually still free to do it, but they don't have a constitutionally protected right to public protests.

> While the protests are per se not illegal, the people arrested aren't accused of just protesting, they are accused of supporting a terrorist organisation. The right to free speech isn't as all-encompassing in Germany as it is in the USA, so shouting the wrong slogans can very well get you in trouble.

Yes, that's correct. Anyone who protests and grabs the attention of the police is accused of supporting a terrorist organisation. That's why I added the information that although they protest completely legally, they still get arrested and deported. The pretense for the arrest and deportation is that protesting to stop the carpet bombing of Gaza supports Hamas, which is designated as a terrorist organisation.

No. What is not allowed is calls for genocide ("From the river to the sea") and support for terrorist organizations.

And yes, if you are a guest in a country, supporting genocide and terrorism can get you deported.

But the police has been extremely lax in enforcement. These protests still basically always have these characteristics and there is no action by the police.

It is pathetic.

> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Supporting Palestinians that Israel has been killing for over a year (+50k killed, most were women and children), while starving the rest and ethnically cleansing them, is not supporting terrorism.

1. Hamas bears the moral responsibility for all of the suffering in the war they started on October 7th, and the Palestinian people bear the moral responsibility of electing and supporting them (and participating in the invasion, and not returning the hostages).

2. Even Hamas now admits most deaths have been military aged males: https://m.jpost.com/israel-news/defense-news/article-848592

3. How can you argue that Gaza has been starved and ethnically cleansed when the population of the Gaza strip has increased since the start of the war?

Too many have been killed, for sure, but you should probably use sources other than the Hamas Health Ministry:

https://www.euronews.com/2025/04/03/hamas-run-health-ministr...

>Too many have been killed

How many killed would have been "not too many"?

Not supporting Palestine is supporting terrorism.

Except that in USA "You're brown, I don't like you" is terrorism.

Except when the government is doing it.

I strongly agree, unfortunately they feel strongly differently after spending a lot of money to get on the courses. Frankly the law of the land is the latter, but this is one of the problems with cladding cultures and attitudes which needs addressing rather than glossing over...

[flagged]

Who was in the US illegally?

They'll make it through if they bend the knee. Otherwise the regime will destroy them, and the conclusion will be that it's all because of these darned radical leftists.

> They'll make it through if they bend the knee. Otherwise the regime will destroy them, and the conclusion will be that it's all because of these darned radical leftists.

Well, it is, isn't it? They required complete loyalty to the ideology before accepting any faculty: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/08/us/ucla-dei-statement.htm...

They shouldn't have gone that far.

Columbia has an endowment that stands (pre- Liberation Day) at 15 billion dollars.

They kowtowed to some of the militant Zionist interests involved in that endowment in order to attain a fractionally higher return, and betrayed their students.

They kowtowed to the fascist administration on the grounds that it was threatening 400 million dollars in grants, and betrayed their students to the point of facilitating a project to unilaterally deport many of them based on Constitutionally protected quasi-private speech.

At this point I don't think they want or deserve to be called a university. Let's go with "Tax-exempt investment fund".

Do you think calling for the genocide of Jews violates Columbia's codes of conduct on harassment and bullying?

I think people were upset about the hypocrisy. For years, every minor transgression against a marginalized group was met with swift disciplinary response and thorough investigation. And now they can't even offer a straight answer on a simple question and suddenly turned into free speech absolutists.

It's fine to be either one, but don't piss on me and tell me its raining.

There is an ongoing genocide in Gaza and genocidal language is commonplace in Zionist discourse. If there are cases of hate speech on the pro Palestinian side, they pale in comparison to speech from the other side.

Regardless we shouldn’t be rounding up and imprisoning folks if they disagree with your politics. This is what is getting lost in this specific case.

[flagged]

Your argument is so out of touch I can only assume it’s being made in bad faith.

Many of the pro-Palestinian protesters are also Jewish. Equating all Jewish people with Israel and Zionism is insidious and misleading.

What on Earth? How is their argument out of touch or made in bad faith? It's a reasonable and popular line of reasoning that you disagree with strongly. Assuming the best possible interpretation is one of our community guidelines, please follow it.

The punishment needs to be commisserate with the crime, and dealt with through due process; to do otherwise is distinctly un-american (see 1st amendment on freedom of assembly, 4th amendment on freedoms from unreasonable state actions: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons[...] against unreasonable searches and seizures", and especially the 5th amendment: "[no person shall] be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law").

What we are seeing at Colombia University (as well as the country at large) is the continual abridgement of these rights. Note that for the fifth amendendment specifically, the constitution refers to any person, not just citizens. Those here legally are entitled to due process protections under the law.

The following argument relies on the following: (1) Universities historically have been the the catalysts of change through student protest. (2) Peaceful protest is a right of the people that shall not be abridged. (3) Public Universities (being government institutuions themselves; see campus police and jurisdiction) have a duty of care to protect their students.

With the above holding true, the argument against this being a "betrayal" falls facially flat, as it is a severe consequence that the university capitulated to, and had a duty to prevent. The arument boiled down to "they were being disruptive, so we should get rid of them," because the betrayal amounted to the jailing and deportations (or attempted deportations, in some cases) for the "crime" of being nonviolently disruptive in a public place.

Without articulating a legally rationed basis for a criminally sanctionable offense, an equivalent is threatening to jail and deport construction workers when they block a business entryway. In general, you do not have a right to be merely inconvienced by others in a public space.

The second paragraph answers your second question, actually.

Except they're not mainstream Jewish. Jewish Voice for Peace has been linked to known terrorists and receives support from anti-Jewish interests. At best, they're "useful idiots" but more realistically they were long corrupted by anti-semitic interests.

https://www.adl.org/resources/backgrounder/jewish-voice-peac...

> What you're looking for is a town square where everyone can protest to their hearts content. You're not looking for a place of quiet contemplation and study.

The university quad, a multipurpose public space designated for students, is basically the only type of public, physical town square left in this entire country.

I’m Jewish. If you want to support me, you’ll let people protest and definitely not throw people out of the country just because they wrote something supporting Gaza.

As another Jew, the way non-Jews are using us as a cudgel to crack down on free speech certainly doesn't feel like "support". As one of history's leading targets when it comes time to scapegoat a minority, I get more antisemitic vibes from the "we have to sacrifice our American ideals to protect the Jews" folks than the "stop killing Palestinians" ones.

Right on. And the conflation of anti-Israel and anti-Jew feels really dangerous, considering the current state of affairs in Israel.

I'm an American, thankyouverymuch. I've been to Israel once. I don't care a whole lot about the place either way. Acting like I must be aggrieved when someone attacks that country is doing far more damage to me than the attack.

I remember first hearing of the "not in our name" protests (very early on) and thinking "I'm so glad I'm not the only person who realizes that what is being presented as patronization is blame."

A significant number of Columbia students are Jewish and were largely protesting the genocide. Almost the entirety of this movement had zero issue with Jews, only with the actions of Israel and Zionism. A significant number of outside agitators were older Jewish Zionists or (often) Zionist evangelicals who lived within driving distance and wanted to start a fight. 50 year old drunk men wearing Israeli flags and pushing into the crowd in groups.

I watched this narrative get created and promoted without any evidence; Video after video showed peaceful and surprisingly media-savvy students (I mean, it is Columbia). Every politician and most media organizations taking direct input from Israeli government officials or AIPAC. On MSNBC and CNN we heard voice after voice after voice pronouncing expert opinions on the shame of this protest/terrorism in an Israeli accent. Administration officials trying to expel anybody caught on camera who was identifiable. While the bombs dropped on Gaza.

I can't say with any confidence that there was absolutely zero conflict, but the absolute confidence that every figure of authority immediately brought to bear on the subject of all Jews being purged by Hamas terrorists from Columbia and needing the National Guard to be called out to protect them? It was beyond the pale.

All of the video I watched of actual Zionist students (or student-aged people) had them victim-posing for social media after throwing themselves into the protest and being largely ignored.

It bothers me how frequently these Jewish students and organizations are erased.

The complaint was passed through the US President.

Against a liberal university.

And ICE is picking students up.

—

I mean… this isn’t the kind of liberal university I think of; places which have fought regularly for their ideas and for advancement.

Harvard's rolling over was particularly annoying, they have a 52 billion dollar endowment! If any university could afford to make a stand and lose funding over it it's Harvard. What's the point of this massive pile of money if you never dip into it in exceptional circumstances?

Harvard is a hedge fund that happens to do some education and research as a tax-advantaged side gig.

who gets to withdraw that money?

I don't see much talk of donors? My impression is that, as in many situations, the super-wealthy are forming a dominant class - as if it's their right - rather than respect democracy and freedom, and attacking university freedom. Didn't some person engineer the Harvard leader's exit?

Roth says the Wesleyan board is supportive; maybe they are just lucky.

Being a super wealthy alum is a prerequisite for being a Trustee, and University Trustees are the group that University Presidents report to.

This is why I always have and always will prefer community colleges. Their boards are elected officials. Not perfect, but 1000 times better than just having wealth.

Election is a bad way to choose almost anything. The enthusiasm of Americans for adding yet more elected roles rather than, say, having anything done by anybody competent is part of how they got here. The only place elections are even a plausible choice is political office - with an election and as close as you can to universal suffrage now the idiots running things are everybody's fault, although Americans even managed to screw that up pretty good. Sortition would probably be cheaper, but elections are fine for this purpose.

> Election is a bad way to choose almost anything.

Except the alternatives! No form of government is more effective, competent, just, or free of corruption.

That's false. Everything comes down to good leadership. Monarchies with good leadership very well might have incredibly effective anti-corruption techniques and competency. China is managing a billion people and their infrastructure and tech is incredible.

The problems are two fold. The first is vetoing of bad ideas. No leader is right 100% of the time, and when they are wrong, someone must have the power to veto. There must be some way for reason to triumph over power, and a leader who chooses to be responsible is capable of deferring to expertise.

The second is succession. A good leader today may be succeeded by rotten leader tomorrow, but both have the same legitimacy, because the legitimacy comes from power alone and not reason.

> effective, competent, just, or free of corruption.

These things are a result of culture, not a result of the government itself. The government influences culture, but they are first and foremost functions of culture, specifically a culture of tolerating speaking truth to power, dissent, critical thinking, tolerance, and solidarity.

I think people get confused into thinking that democracy is about voting when it is should be about reducing prolonged concentrations of power, because of the innate tendency for it to be abused and hoarded. So to support your point, if your culture does not support the concept of good "democratic" governance, and no one strives for the institutions and constitutions to support it, you might be better off with a benevolent dictator, for as long as they last before a not-so-benevolent one.

Timothy Snyder would encapsulate this idea as "Democracy is not something you are, but something you do."

Which makes a lot of sense if you say the same thing about Christianity. Christian isn't something you are, Christianity is something you do.

Both have hallowed dogmas that are poorly understood by their followers, the constitution and the bible/teachings of jesus respectively.

That's the point the parent made. Elections are suitable for political officers.

Once you start electing other jobs, like judges or plumbers, then you get whoever you elected, rather than necessarily a person able to do the job.

In other words, getting elected is a specific skill set. Doing the job is a different skill set. In most fields those skill sets do not overlap.

Even in govt the overlap is marginal. Which is why some elected officials are pretty useless at actually "governing".

To my American friends all I can say is "you voted for this".

This is a dangerous axiom which will take you to wrong conclusions. Elected officials may be better, more efficient and less corrupt at a local level, but this does not scale.

> free of corruption.

There are just plenty examples of corruption among the people we elect, everywhere.

democracy is bad but its still better than more autocratic systems because it encourages change which keeps succession well-oiled and also acts as a vent for tyranny to curtail its worst excesses. This applies as much to politics as it does a school board.

Democracy doesn’t entail having tons of minor roles being elected. That’s actually completely unique to the US, as far as I know. A lot of the positions that are elected in the US would be neutral civil servants in any other democratic country I can think of.

> neutral civil servants

Look I'm not saying we don't have these but the set of positions that are neutral is much smaller. Thanks to the political whipping boys de jour any position of power within academic or educational institutions has become politicized.

Having judges and university trustees hired on merit rather than campaigning to be elected does not make a system autocratic.

Being super rich != merit. This is what seems to be happening in practice.

Who chooses them? What makes you think they choose them on merit?

It's the whole theological foundation of northern european and american protestantism = being rich means good loves you, so you're a good person.

How they got there from jesus saying rich people can't go to heaven is one of those theological acrobacies they criticise so much in catholics, but don't disregard doing themselves when suits them.

What better merit is there than public approval for positions like that?

If you ask five people who can't speak French to tell me which French-language essay deserves a higher grade, you'll quickly discover that their merit-finding abilities are a coin flip.

The whole purpose of elections is tangential to merit. There's important reasons to have them, but finding the 'best' candidate isn't one of them.

[dead]

A lot of Americans support these attacks on universities. Why do people harbour this much animosity towards these institutions? Is there anything they could have done differently in the past decade or two to have broader sympathy now, or is people's ambivalence towards elite universities 100% irrational?

There are some reasons that I think you probably know, which don't receive enough time and attention

1) Despite an appearance of being "left leaning" (according to polls of faculty political sentiment) they continue to gatekeep education behind prohibitively expensive tuition that is out of reach of lower economic strata without crippling debt, and have simultaneously struggled to produce graduates whose economic differential easily makes up for that expense and lost work time.

2) They enjoy a tax free status while receiving significant tax money despite many failing to grow their student bodies in tandem with the growth of the US population, leading to people questioning whether they deserve those benefits as institutions that serve the public.

3) There is a sentiment that basic literacy and numeracy of graduates has dropped over the last decades outside of a narrow area of studies, because of a shift to a model where students are customers buying a credential instead of getting an education.

(These are all interrelated, of course.)

I have multiple family members that are frustrated with higher learning because their children came out of the system more liberal-minded than when they entered. In this politically divided climate they feel like the university system “stole” their children from them.

In reality I don’t think people’s political opinions change very much and they are just mad that their children individuated.

> In reality I don’t think people’s political opinions change very much and they are just mad that their children individuated.

I think this probably the case as well. If I look back at how my own views shifted, the shift very likely would’ve happened regardless of if I’d attended university, assuming everything else was the same. It wasn’t the university that resulted in the shift as much as it was my getting out of my local bubble out into the world and experiencing it for myself.

Basically any kind of life experience that brings a young person to actually think and more deeply consider the world around them is likely to result in some level of individuation and shift away from inherited views. It’s perfectly natural and healthy.

But the most likely life experiences to do that are ones that put a person in touch with new ideas and new situations. Universities are much better positioned to generate such experiences than, say, most jobs. To some degree, those that have attempted to be at least nominally more diverse (economically/racially/...) are also the sorts of places where students are more likely to meet other people who are not like them in some important ways, and this has always been the sort of experience that preferentially tilts most people towards liberal/progressive ideas.

I believe students are much more homogenic than you find in school (eg dumb people are around) or in joining the military (you meet conservative people).

There are many axes on which to measure homogeneity or diversity.

I don't think you're wrong about the axes for "academic intelligence" or "political outlook". But those are just two of many. Geographic, racial, economic, class (in the European sense), language, culture .. these are all equally valid, and likely to vary more in a university than in a workplace (even in the military).

People's political opinions definitely change, especially with age and wealth.

They do change to some degree, but I believe that age and wealth are not nearly as strong of factors as popular culture might have one think.

I guess it depends. 40 years later, I vote completely opposite to what I did when I was 18-20 years old.

That sort of breaks out as to personal values versus Overton window. It has been an extreme shift towards authoritarianism in the US -- to the point where case after case of folks with moral courage call it out despite where they stood even 10 years ago.

Just curious: in which direction on the political spectrum have your preferences moved?

Younger people with student loans, credit card balances, and good health might eventually become older people with retirement savings, investments, and poor health.

> In reality I don’t think people’s political opinions change very much and they are just mad that their children individuated.

That seems to be missing the elephant in the room - they sent kids in their most formative intellectual years to immerse themselves in a culture where there is a very high child:adult ratio. Then the kids come back with this wild culture that would make a lot of sense to a bunch of teenagers and young adults. It isn't just that the kids individuating, it is dumping them into one of the most elitist, authoritarian and artificial subcultures society maintains - populated mostly by near-juveniles I repeat - giving them independence to form themselves and discovering that dislocates them from their parents subculture.

It should be obvious that will happen but parents tend to be pretty dumb. No real training course for parenting I suppose.

Also to some degree there is anti-elitist backlash after being told you need to have a bachelor's, which is very expensive at these universities, but also it's basically impossible to get an entry-level white collar job without one these days; and for a while the economy bifurcated with different outcomes for white-collar knowledge vs. blue-collar workers.

And this anti elitist backlash will lead to… greater wealth inequality as the middle class is forced to cash out their equity and investments in a down market to be gobbled up by the top 1% like Elon Musk.

While I know this, I will say there is a communication issue in which sneering and lecturing is not really an effective way to persuade others.

60% of the US workforce these days is white collar, and it's one of the great illusions of our time. Most of these jobs only exist to keep busy the 60% of the US workforce that has a degree. In the 1940's about 30% of the US workforce was white collar and only 5% had degrees. What caused this change? It's probably because blue collar workers made so much money and had so much leverage that businesses shipped all their jobs overseas. Blue collar people actually make real things and perform useful toil for society, whereas now they're working fake jobs for less money which they're told has higher social status. It's genius the way the system works. The way it takes from people (student loans, less pay) while persuading them they got a better deal. But how can you have a society where the majority of workers are administrators? Well you needn't look any further than America to find your answer. One day the music is going to stop and other nations, like China, whose workers held no such delusions of grandeur, will have the advantage. Their illusion is that the government is a dictatorship of proles, which makes people think it's high status to be a prole. Plus when your government is officially one big labor union, you can effectively ban unions from interfering with production.

"White collar" labor, in a service / knowledge economy doesn't mean "not making real things". Most (?) people on this board do something software or science or product related. Software is real, even if it's intangible. Research is real, even if it's inscrutable. Heck, Design is real, even if it's ineffable.

(Yes, yes, there's vapor-ware, and useless products, and certainly "fake jobs". Those existed in the '40s, too, and in any other time period or economy you care to look at.)

In my view, the problem is that white collar workers stopped thinking of themselves as Workers. Any of us who rely on a company for a paycheck (and, perniciously, in the US for health insurance) aren't Capital, even if we make high salaries. Maybe we're aspiring to join that class - we'll hit the startup lottery, or FIRE, or our IRA portfolio will go up forever - but we ain't yet. (That's fine, by the way: I'm using Marxist terms, but I'm not a Marxist. Pursuing financial independence, and the real - even if remote - possibility of attaining it is what's made the US such a dynamic economy.)

However, allowing our aspirations for wealth, or the relative comfort of white-collar jobs, to lead us to identify with the political goals of Capital - or worse, to adopt an elitist attitude towards people who work in what you call the "real economy" - is what's got the US into the mess we're currently in. That's the "genius" you identify in the present system, and the origin of the cruelty within it.

In reality, we're all Working Class (well, 99% of us are - although that proportion is way out of whack on this board, of all places!), and we need to (politically) act like it.

great illusions of our time, like there's not data to back it up?

He's saying that the economic viability of the model is illusory.

Lower economic strata doesn't take on debt, they get aid and free rides, cherry work study jobs to put some money in the pocket too. It is the middle class or upper middle class that insists in eschewing their state school benefit for a more or less comparable school in another state (or without favorable scholarship and aid package) that take the brunt of the loans.

I sure had to. Work study sure was nicer than the crap jobs I'd had but no cake walk: I graded a lot of homework and exams as well as helping a lot of rich kids ace their class.

[edit: I should admit that it's been 20 years, things may have shifted a lot]

> many failing to grow their student bodies in tandem with the growth of the US population

this is mostly true of elite schools (who nowadays are mostly selling a brand more than an education), not so much of state schools

Ironically, many elite universities are actually either free or nearly free, for lower-income students. The super-rich probably don't care. While we middle-class families don't qualify for need-based aid, and are on the hook to pay outrageous sums, largely to subsidize the aid for others.

While not about resentment towards universities specifically, I thought this article in The Baffler [1] did a good job of framing a dynamic that, I think, contributes to this phenomenon.

My interpretation: As the country has entered the post-industrial era, holding a college degree has increasingly become a table-stakes credential for entering the white collar labor force. The higher education system has struggled or failed to grow to meet increased demand for these credentials, which both drives up the cost and increases selectivity of higher-ed institutions. A lot of people get burned by this and become locked out of and, crucially, geographically separated from labor markets that now constitute the majority of US GDP. This split causes non degree holders to view degree holders as their class enemies, and the universities as the class gateway that divides them.

[1] https://thebaffler.com/latest/one-elite-two-elites-red-elite...

Remember all those people who are resentful (of course that word) towards degree-holders because they wish they had one themselves? Me neither. That’s a they-hate-me-cause’-they-ain’t-me kind of logic.[1]

True othering comes from people living in different worlds and hating the other person’s world.

[1] I did not read the the article but I’ve read this argument in a Graeber article.

I don't think you're necessarily drawing the right conclusion from what the GP said. It seems more likely to me that non-degree-holders aren't resentful about not having a degree, but are resentful that white collar work more or less requires a degree these days. It wasn't always that way; degree holders used to be a minority in white collar work.

Why has that shifted? Can we blame the university system and their "marketing" that has pushed a degree as the One True Way of leaving the working class? If so, that's an understandable reason to be anti-university.

> Can we blame the university system and their "marketing" that has pushed a degree as the One True Way of leaving the working class?

I’m not sure Universities are to blame for this so much as lazy ass HR departments looking for an easy filter.

> degree holders used to be a minority in white collar work.

That's still nearly true, if not true. 60% of jobs are white collar. 40% of the workforce has a degree. Data quality starts to decline somewhat here, but it is expected that 20% of degree holders work in trades or manual labour jobs. So, degree holders only just barely make up a majority on that basis. And maybe not even that as blue collar is usually considered to be more than just trades and manual labour, not to mention that we haven't even delved into other collars (e.g. pink collar) that further take from the degree holding population.

> because they wish they had one themselves

I don't think the OP actually said this specifically. But the economy truly had, for a while, bifurcated in outcomes for people with degrees vs. everybody else. You shouldn't need a degree to live a decent life, but now we are in a timeline where you can put DoorDash on Klarna installments.

> Remember all those people who are resentful (of course that word) towards degree-holders because they wish they had one themselves?

I think the fair comparison isn't they have a degree and I don't, it's they have a better life/savings/house/car than me, which is enabled in general by getting a degree, which becomes the common contention point.

Or more directly: many people with degrees are given management positions unjustifiably.

It's bizarre to see it all playing out in the open.

The political and ideological divide speaks for itself, but on behalf of the common folk universities have been failing their core mission - to provide the people with a quality education. The inversion and disconnect between the cost of tuition and economic outcomes is stunning. Too many kids who don't know better are pressured into pursuing higher education and taking on massive debt, only to graduate without any job prospects or reasonable hopes of paying off their loans. The salt in the wounds is that universities are flush with cash, yet its spent on anything and everything except for the welfare of the students.

> The salt in the wounds is that universities are flush with cash, yet its spent on anything and everything except for the welfare of the students.

Maybe the elites. State schools and small colleges are not flush with cash and many have been shuttered or severely downsized recently. Though they could still spend their limited funds better.

Spending massive amounts of money on sports is something state schools are very much into.

They will shutter academic departments but continue to pay a football coach more than the University president.

Not all schools do this but it is part of the conversation, sports spending has grown out of control along with everything else.

Recent events alone do not fully represent the affairs of the past 2+ decades. Community, state, ivy, all levels were gorging themselves on federal funding and endowments. I have no comment on the current admin, but blatantly inefficient use of funds is an understatement.

What does "gorging themselves on endowments" even mean? If they did that, they wouldn't be very endowed in quick order.

Charitably, they may mean "the proceeds from their endowments" (or maybe "engorging their endowments", if that's even a proper use of the word), but I think that's a weak point. Proportionally very, very few institutions have significant endowments.

You're both wrong. I'm saying they're engorged AND well endowed. Many consider this a strong point.

It feels to me like part of the disconnect is that education and job training isn't necessarily the same thing. For many majors improving economic outcomes is not the core mission.

Its an implicit promise, and we can already see the pendulum swinging back in the form of lower enrollment as more people catch on.

> Its an implicit promise

It's an inferred promise, not an implicit promise. Lots of schools do try to make it an explicit, qualified promise (e.g. "80% of grads work in their field!"), and even more are shifting towards becoming what are effectively vocational schools, but this was never the intended purpose of a liberal arts education.

Have they been failing at their core missions, though? You say there has been an inversion/disconnect between cost of tuition and economic outcomes, but looking at the data doesn't back that. At least, I have yet to see anything that supports an inversion. Diminished returns maybe. Certainly a good case to not take out loans to get into school if you don't have a reasonable chance of graduation.

But that is true of everything we do loans for, nowadays. The amount of consumer debt that people contort themselves into justifying is insane. If you want to use that as evidence that grade schools are failing in education, I can largely agree with you.

Tuition is skyrocketing and wages are stagnant. I'm not making a hard claim about inversion of ROI, but I don't need to. What's the reason for college becoming so expensive?

You claim it is inverted. That is a hard claim, full stop. One that is, notably, not supported by any figures.

I can largely agree that it, similar to other things, has become too expensive. I cannot agree that it is not worth it for folks that can do it.

> but on behalf of the common folk universities have been failing their core mission - to provide the people with a quality education.

I see this a lot and it’s a concerningly reductive argument. Say what you want about a lot of colleges but when you talk about that mission you are talking about public colleges. Most have far lower endowments and most are very reasonably priced or free for instate students.

Georgia and California are great examples of this. The support for these institutions that used to come from states has gone down enormously while the cost of goods has gone up.

As a result it is not unreasonable to me for them to charge out of state and international students much much more. Georgia shouldn’t be subsidizing the college degrees of Alabamans, nor California of Arizonans.

All that to say the economics here are far more variable than people give much thought to and it’s easy to point at headline grabbing numbers that don’t reflect reality.

Schools rent the ones pressuring kids…their parents and society is.

Their core mission is to provide society with a endless surplus of food and energy from air

No such thing as a free lunch! Universities exist for the benefit of society, not the other way around.

The right's problem with universities is the same as the left's problem with churches:

1. They are institutions of "indoctrination" by the other side. Faculty are something like 98% registered democrats and many subjects ("X studies") have an explicitly left-leaning bent.

2. They have tax advantages and other significant government subsidies.

3. They exercise significant amounts of ideological control over the narrative for their groups of people.

4. They are exclusionary of people outside the club.

Add to that the fact that universities are getting increasingly expensive and real life outcomes for college-educated people are getting worse. The perceived costs used to come with significant benefits, but the costs are getting higher and the benefits are reducing, so there is less tolerance for giving them favored status.

Maybe I just live in a bubble, but I don't think "the left" has acted as strongly against churches as "the right" has against schools.

[flagged]

> Universities today, though, have a status that religious organizations have never reached. Not only being tax free but also heavily taxpayer-funded, and with a university credential being virtually required for most jobs.

It's almost like they produce something of actual value.

This is a conversation about American politics, so I don't think how other countries acted is relevant.

The political landscape also changes regularly - I don't think the Republicans of a few decades ago were attacking schools so vigorously, so I'm not sure going further back than that for examples is relevant either.

> efforts of left-wing people in the 60's-90's to reduce their influence on society.

Can you elaborate on this?

> Universities today, though, have a status that religious organizations have never reached. Not only being tax free but also heavily taxpayer-funded, and with a university credential being virtually required for most jobs.

I suspect that if you go back not even that long ago, you'd find religious institutions having nearly as much importance, particularly in how faiths would prevent others from joining the workforce or society itself. In any case, I wonder what % of jobs actually do require a university education these days. I would not expect a majority of them to, but maybe I'm wrong.

I can't speak to universities specifically, but I've always felt there has been a strain of anti-intellectualism underlying a great deal of mainstream America for as long as I can remember.

It's the little things like tv shows or movies with characters who seem to glorify ignorance, people who state self deprecating things like "I'm bad at math" and wear it like a bizarre badge of honor, etc.

It was the progressive push of theoretically neutral institutions taking stands on moral politics. People who were fine with universities being staffed with liberals, but neutral in practice, realized their tax dollars were subsidizing institutions that were actively taking a side in national politics.

For example, universities burned a lot of political capital, and opened themselves up to a great deal of legal liability, with aggressively pursing affirmative action policies. When you depend on public grants, it’s probably a bad idea to publicly discriminate against the racial group that comprises the majority of taxpayers.

As to what universities should have done, the answer is “just dribble.” Universities should be places that are just as eager to research effective approaches to mass deportations as all the DEI stuff they do.

Sure, and why not open an Institute of Enhanced Interrogation Studies while you’re at it? Ugh.

Because torturing people is illegal and contrary to our fundamental values, while deporting illegal immigrants is a very popular and sensible policy that is uncontroversial everywhere except the United States of Exceptionalism.

Torturing people was considered very cool and very legal until quite recently. Some of the leaders involved in Iraq and Afghanistan era torture are still in positions of power. And I would not be shocked in the slightest if it came back under Trump II.

[flagged]

If you are shocked you might consider getting out of your bubble. A recent poll shows Americans support Trump’s deportation program 58-42: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/opinion-poll-trump-economy-tari...

Meanwhile, 68% support the Supreme Court’s ban on Harvard’s affirmative action admissions policies: https://thehill.com/homenews/education/4411246-majority-supp...

Universities, as institutions, were actively working against the public on both of these issues, from legal clinics trying to block deportations to extensive programs of racial preferences. It’s not surprising many people don’t want the taxpayer to subsidize that.

Millions of people think the Earth is flat and that dinosaurs roamed the Earth alongside humans. Should universities be teaching that as well?

Popularity is a poor barometer for educational value and policy.

Yes you are right. They shouldn't be researching how to racially discriminate at all. They should be focused exclusively on researching effective mass deportation instead of DEI.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings was arguably a worse time for universities.

Protesting attracts reprisals. Universities taught people, both explicitly and by example, to stand up for what they believed in, but have undersold students on how dangerous that is. Universities could have done a better job explaining that certain injustices are load-bearing, and that calling them out will make half the country hate you.

People in the 1960s were murdered for protesting. You might imagine that this motivated an end to protest, and everyone calmed down. But in fact, it didn't. The very best way to motivate increased protest is to act like a bunch of monsters.

> certain injustices are load-bearing

This is an excellent way of explaining why some injustices are ignored and others decried. Thank you

One thing I haven’t seen anyone mention in the replies. There are millions of conservative parents who sent their children to college and then “lost” those children when they turned into a “liberal.”

The ideas that it’s ok if your child becomes a liberal, or that there might be good reasons why people who undertake higher education often become less conservative, are too horrible to contemplate. So they settle for “universities are bad.”

Provide a way to get a lower-cost credential without using the tuition to subsidize research/athletics/arts/social programs.

But that might be counter to their whole nature. Doesn't mean anyone's being irrational though. They're now de-facto gatekeepers on entering the professional class. I don't think it's unreasonable for the gate-kept to have opinions about the -keepers.

I've got the ticket to get in the gate and I'm pretty resentful of having to get it. Looking back there were a lot better ways to spend 4 years and 100k.

Resentful of what? Directed at whom? There are lots of options that cost less and many are shorter than four years.

Honestly, it feels like the kind of thing that companies which actually want merit-based graduates should want to subsidize more aggressively.

If you're a billion-dollar company that only hires college grads, it feels like there's gotta be value to you in making sure there's more meritocracy in the process of getting degrees.

It would also change who the customer is so that the university doesn't "owe" the student a degree which makes the evaluation that universities do a little less rigorous.

Why do they want meritocracy? The companies I've seen up close want "certified Smart Kid", in which case nearly any degree will do; "pre-trained worker", in which case they require a degree in a particular field; or "someone well-connected", in which case they want someone from a limited set of schools.

(Companies do subsidize that limited set of schools, and pretty heavily, but it probably has more to do with social connections than economic merit.)

The system might break down to the point that what you're suggesting makes sense. On the other hand, "Indebted Worker" (from any of the three types above) allows companies a lot of power over their employees, so it might not.

Most people don't care about university protests. They're largely a means to get laid while achieving nothing and at worst destroying their own university. As long as they don't spill out into the surrounding town any outrage is essentially theater.

>or is people's ambivalence towards elite universities 100% irrational?

    am·biv·a·lence  /amˈbiv(ə)ləns/ noun
    the state of having mixed feelings or contradictory ideas about something or someone.

>A lot of Americans support these attacks on universities. Why do people harbour this much animosity towards these institutions?

There are a lot of very real things that are rotten in academia if you exclude the social politics center to this article.

So when people see they're loosing federal funding... yeah, some will think along the lines of "eh, whatever, fuck 'em, maybe they'll figure out how to clean their own house." Especially if the university is also known for both sitting on a large endowment and for prioritizing self-serving administrators over doing academics.

Wait, there are attacks on universities? Or are we just using that word for any expression of free speech?

I'm referring to threats to pull hundreds of thousands of dollars of funding if certain demands aren't met. But yes, there are also plenty of rhetorical attacks.

It's about reclaiming lost social status. In their minds it's part of the liberal gollum that makes them feel alienated from society and disrespected.

There's a highly emotional Right-Left culture war going on in America. Many of our "flagship" universities conspicuously sided with the Left - at least on most of the "litmus test" issues. And where universities didn't do that, the Right found it advantageous to talk up the association & outrage anyway.

Any decent History Prof. could have explained to the U's that openly taking one side in long-term cultural wars was not a viable long-term strategy.

(Or, maybe that's why so many universities cut their History Dept's so brutally? Though "just shoot inconvenient messengers" is also not a viable long-term strategy.)

> Many of our "flagship" universities conspicuously sided with the Left

I wonder if that’s related to universities often being places where ‘reasoning’ is taught.

And then by extension, that tells you a lot about the arguments on either side…

I probably have a skewed sample, but in my observations those with the best reasoning skills tended to have a mix of views that would be labelled "left" and "right". The better the reasoning skills the less likely they were to just agree with things like "trans women are women" or "capitalism is the best economic system" and the more likely they were to dissect the statement and terms.

The culture war was over about sixty days into the Trump administration. Lots of people just haven't realized it yet.

Hum, kinda. Trump has tainted a lot of concepts by associating with them, and those should fall outside of our culture as soon as he loses power.

But there's an entire other set of equivalently bad-faith exclusionary and authoritarian ones that presented as in opposition of them. Those weren't actually very powerful before, but may get empowered depending on how things go.

Billionaires shifted the overton window by pouring money into extreme right-wing media outlets and social media platforms. Every other existing institution now appears "left-wing" by comparison. That's not universities' fault.

Not true, at least on social issues, which is what the universities are getting burned for. Policy positions that were mainstream in 2000 are now painted as far-right.

That's how society progresses though. Before 1865, slavery was mainstream and abolitionists were weird radical crazies. Before 1965, "Jim Crow" laws that said non-whites had to use different bathrooms and drinking fountains were mainstream, and people who opposed them were seen as unreasonable.

And back in the 1960s a planned economy was normal and reasonable, and many progressives openly called for normalisation of sex with teenagers. Sometimes shifts in attitudes are progress. Sometimes they're just a random walk. Sometimes the left is right, sometimes the right is.

Eugenics as in forcible sterilization of the “unfit” was similarly Progressive back in the early 20th.

> Policy positions that were mainstream in 2000 are now painted as far-right.

Such as?

gay marriage?

Presumably you mean opposition to gay marriage?

Yes, opposition to gay marriage was so mainstream that even Barack Obama campaigned supporting Clinton's Defense of Marriage Act. Even in the Democratic primaries, as late as 2008, being pro gay marriage was seen as a liability.

I don't know that it's painted as far right as much as conservative (which it is) and by some as bigoted.

The Overton Window moves. Upper marginal tax rates above 90% were not just a position but the actual law in USA during the 1960s, but now are seen here as "far left". Seatbelt requirements were initially felt to be over-intrusion by government, and are now seen by almost everyone as just common sense. And so on and so forth.

Honestly man since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the left in the US threw their whole weight into pushing the Overton window on identity politics/intersectionality to the point that "real" old time leftists and communists (like my father) were treated like some sort of conservatives, lol. They went way past the sustainable point.

I feel like the people who say things like "communists were treated like some sort of conservatives because of identity politics" are telling on themselves.

If you look at the people on the actual political left in the US (Bernie, AOC, etc) are they talking about identity politics? Last time I checked they were talking about the problems that impact non-billionaire Americans: Healthcare, Social Security, Raising Minimum Wage, and other efforts to improve quality of life for Americans.

The only times I ever hear about identity politics is when I listen to conservatives describe what people on the left are talking about.

> If you look at the people on the actual political left in the US (Bernie, AOC, etc) are they talking about identity politics?

Great example! So... what happened to Bernie in the Democratic party?

>Healthcare, Social Security, Raising Minimum Wage, and other efforts to improve quality of life for Americans.

But then why are they supported, for the most part, not by the most oppressed masses, but by the oppressive elites?

They talk about identity politics all the time. It is us vs them on everything. Worker vs employer is the quintessential example. Two groups that in the real world must work together, and do. But in the mind of the political left they are not just people that occasionally have adverse interests but mostly shared interests (my success is yours). No, they are sworn enemies.

From what I've been able to gather, a mix of jealousy for not being involved with institutions along with some form of Dunning Kruger effect thinking that the institutions have no merit or value (i.e. the individual thinks they could do better / have no need / are somehow subject to the outcomes of the institution).

They could try hiring some conservative professors.

https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/31/2/homogenous_the_p...

You can't really just hire some, though. You need to hire enough so that they don't get run out of the school for thought crime

https://www.thedoe.com/article/conservative-college-professo...

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-coddling-of-the-am...

A lot of these examples have been pretty thoroughly debunked as either non-existent, or about something other than the professors expressing "conservative views".

This one is, I assume intentionally, anonymized and so we can't actually verify that it happened or what the circumstances around it were. But I'll call out one of the most common "views" I've heard on college campuses from professors that got in trouble for something was that "professors should be allowed to sleep with their students." So if professors are taking heat for thinking that they should be able to take advantage of barely legal kids... I don't really care.

If there are legitimate examples of professors just expressing that they have conservative beliefs, then that is suspicious because school administrators and alumni tend to lean pretty conservative themselves, and often make the final decisions on such issues after a frustrating amount of investigation.

Why did the Germans burn books? Look there for your answers. And I mean that sincerely. There’s really nothing new under the sun.

Or the Cultural Revolution.

I think there's class warfare practically baked in with how paying for college works today. Imagine trying to determine how much a fancy car costs, and being told "it depends on how much money you have". That's on the upper-middle-class side.

The other side is just part of the worldview of the rampant anti-intellectualism which Trump rode to power.

Hard not to see this as a class war that has been fed by some of the personalities that were big in the "conservative" sphere for a long time. Modern podcast influencers are big, but this isn't exactly a new thing. Rush and his ilk were big on lashing out against "ivory tower" theories. And they didn't invent the idea. Just went after easy targets.

None of which is to say that mistakes weren't made in the institutions. They were. Mistakes were also made by the critics. Populism, sadly, has a habit of celebrating their worst and elevating them to heights they flat out can't handle.

They could have not been so partisan (https://readlion.com/93-of-college-profs-political-donations... ), supported rational discourse ( https://www.thefire.org/research-learn/2025-college-free-spe... ) , not used race to discriminate on certain out groups ( https://asianamericanforeducation.org/en/issue/discriminatio... ). Just for starters

>> Is there anything they could have done differently in the past decade or two to have broader sympathy now

> not used race to discriminate on certain out groups ( https://asianamericanforeducation.org/en/issue/discriminatio... )

Since we have documentation of discrimination in university admissions for over a century, I don't think this particular issue produces "broader sympathy now".

In fact, I will be speechless if I ever learn the new administration policies do not lead to even higher levels of, but I suppose different, discrimination. Check back in 6 months.

Fox News. I don't think it's 100% irrational but perhaps 99% irrational. These ideas usually contain a nugget of truth.

I think it's actually extremely simple.. because the herd mentality is extremely simple. Intellectuals think it's complex because intellectuals love complexity.. This is what happened..

The right witnessed riots over the past decade. These riots were in response to police brutality and perceived racism. The ideas behind anti-racism spawned a perceived new ideology - "wokism". This frightened the right. Intellectuals on the right mapped the origins of this new ideology to philosophies from elite institutions. Therefore, these institutions must be punished to be kept in check.

It's really that simple..

What I find interesting about this guy is that in a way he actually is "caving" to the demands of the administration. This uni president advocates for more heterodox thinking - which is in alignment with what the Trump admin wants as well... maybe that's why Wesleyan won't be punished..

Nothing about this is new - the right has harbored a particular hatred for "academics" and "intellectuals" since at least the anti-war and civil rights movements of the 1960s. Today's fear of "wokism" is just the prior generation's fear of "cultural marxism" with a new coat of paint.

But this kind of political talk is against the guidelines. Good hackers don't care about any of this. So Javascript is getting crazy, huh?

When the politics get crazy enough it bleeds into everything, which is why it's now acceptable to discuss here.

I think you'll find that no matter how crazy it gets or what it bleeds into, it's never going to be acceptable to discuss here. As soon as people get a whiff of "politics" they're going to start flagging. Especially if they see the "T" word.

The regime could be rolling dissidents into mass graves and the only valid point of discussion for most people here would be packing algorithms.

Forgive my ignorance, but what is the "T" word in this context?

China

Tigger

Trump.

> attacks on universities

This really feels like bad phrasing, when people read that they roll their eyes. Basically every major republican politician went to college, nobody is attacking universities, they're trying to help the students.

apologies, I meant to suggest that Trump & MAGA are very hostile towards universities and Trump is threatening to pull so much federal funding some colleges may have to close, and a lot of Americans seem OK with that. I'm not making a value statement on that, Trump was elected to run the government, hence him reallocating funds (in this case) is part of our democratic process. People chose to put him in charge because they wanted him in charge.

To tip my hand: I personally think universities don't have more people rallying to their defence because they have abdicated their responsibilities to provide space for open inquiry, and have instead allowed themselves to be institutionally & ideologically captured by a group of people with activist leanings and fringe beliefs not held by 90+% of Americans.

My answer to my question above is "in the past two decades, the universities could have done more to protect speech across the board and not pick favourites to protect and others to abandon, as they have clearly done. In the last two years they could have refused to tolerate lawlessness on their campuses (not just 'speech' but actual law-breaking, including assaults, going unprosecuted) instead of turning a blind eye when the criminality was from a favoured cause du jour." I think if Universities had not abandoned their leadership duties, they wouldn't have Trump bringing the hammer down on them with so much public support.

Yes they went to universities. No, they are not trying to help the students. They don't even pretend to be trying to do so. They are nit trying to make it cheaper and they are not trying to make it more accessible.

They agenda was either openly the opposite or they ignored the students. Except when they think they are too progressive and attack then verbally.

I mean, at a minimum, they think they're helping students. Nobody would vote for a politician who just makes things worse, that doesn't make sense.

In this case, they're trying to make universities more fair and to reduce government waste in universities by removing DEI programs. There's lots of logic to that.

>Nobody would vote for a politician who just makes things worse

Why not? One thing is the campaign, another one is exercising his power. To quote a famous Argentinian President: "If I said what I would do, they wouldn't have voted for me".

I can't find the source of that quote (possibly a misquote?), but if I had to guess, he's saying he sold people on the problem, knowing they wouldn't like the solution. Everyone likes the idea of fixing the budget deficit, and some people like the idea of cutting wasteful government spending, but the act of fixing the budget means people lose jobs, and lives are destroyed. Even though it has to happen, people don't like watching it happen.

I don't think your "quote" says what you think it says.

> Nobody would vote for a politician who just makes things worse, that doesn't make sense.

Yet, that's what they did. Repeatedly. After he already demonstrated how much worse he would make things.

Oh yeah, he denied that he would execute the planes for how he would make things much, much, MUCH worse, that had been very openly stated by his close associates.

That's enough for it to "make sense" to you, I suppose.

> They are nit trying to make it cheaper and they are not trying to make it more accessible

Should they be doing these things?

Maybe I've read too much Caplan, but credential inflation seems to be wasting the new generation's best years.

For the original argument above about Republicans and college I would focus more on things like who has been trying to make student debt as something special, something near impossible to get out of.

I don't accept an argument of personal responsibility in this case, because student loans target one of the most vulnerable groups: Inexperienced and with a great need. To me, this is malicious.

I'm all for personal responsibility, in this point I'm more on the conservative side, but reality also includes that humans are not perfect machines, and targeting their weaknesses is easy and impossible to avoid as an individual. This principle does not work when it's an individual against sophisticated well-funded organization (here, there is not one but many who influenced policy), even worse when it's someone too young or too old for their brains to be at their best (not yet experienced enough in the one case, the brain no longer working at its best in the other).

Then you're reading the right amount of Caplan. So you probably also want more babies and immigrants.

In what way does an intellectual race to the bottom help students? If students want to learn on the cheap they can use the internet.

Students want to feel like their time spent studying is worth it, not a weird blend of trivia, online classes you finish in a week or useless skills that you spend months practicing and lose 6 months after the class.

Millions of people could be working productive manufacturing jobs, instead they are doing effectively nothing all because of a disproven belief from 100 years ago that if you study enough you will increase your innate intelligence.

You're framing this in an odd way if you want neutral responses. Is withdrawing federal funding an attack? The government has always used the power of the purse as a lever to influence many institutions, including universities, and it often uses this mechanism to exert influence for ideological purposes. The most famous example is withholding funding for roads until states mandated a drinking age of 21. It's how the federal-state power asymmetry works. The disturbing thing is that Congress isn't really the one exerting it in this case, not that it's being used at all.

As for the roads example, which would go to my second point if I understand you correctly, I think the analogy is limited: roads aren't gate-kept by admissions committees for certain intangible criteria for who can ride on them, with an artificial limit on how many cars overall, while they receive federal funding. If that was happening, then you'd have a similar situation to what universities are doing.

It's not meant as an analogy for this case, so don't worry about it too much. My only point in bringing it up is an example of evidence for prior governments being more than willing to use funding as a lever to influence the policy of institutions they are not directly responsible for. I don't believe it was to be 1:1 to make that point, as indeed it is not.

America has done an absolutely terrible job of teaching people about rights.

If governments granted rights then they would be privileges not rights. In western tradition governments exist to protect rights, such as the freedom of expression, not to grant them. If you believe these are human rights, rather than your privilege as an American, then you must protect their rights to seek justice too.

People are already being robbed of due process, which means they are robbed of the process that determines their right to "protections" and citizenship status. Almost all authoritarian regimes presume the right to rob people of the protections of their state. You perceive citizenship to be some indelible legal status, but citizenship can be revoked either tacitly or explicitly which is a prelude to the violation of someone else's rights and their human dignity.

The law can't protect or enforce itself. If the ruling regime chooses not to be bound by law then what should happen or what is supposed to happen is supplanted by what can happen. Even a cursory look of what can happen in authoritarian regimes should turn anyone's stomach.

I think what's going on is a helpful reminder that there's no such thing as "rights" in the way you describe. Everything we have, everything we're permitted to do, is at the pleasure and permission of our governments. Constitutions and laws are only worth anything if the people in charge honor them. Might may not make right, but might does let you impose whatever you want on people who don't have your might.

You can try to design systems where one group of people don't have all the might, and so those who balance them are somewhat adversarial in their goals and desires. We always thought the US had such a system, but when you put law enforcement and the military under a single group, and give the other two groups no teeth, you really don't have that sort of system.

> Everything we have, everything we're permitted to do, is at the pleasure and permission of our governments.

Wrong! The people are ultimately responsible for reigning-in their governments and are the ultimate source of any rules or rights that the governments end up enforcing.

If you think that the ultimate authority is with the government, then you have justified every authoritarian regime out there.

There are two basic world views.

One is based on order and rule. You have a leviathan, an absolute ruler, who imposes order on society.

The other is one based on freedom and law/justice. A society based on affirmative mutual consent and a system orthogonal to power to handle disputes.

Unfortunately, power determining the outcome of disputes is the default, and a system of law or justice cannot enforce itself without the participation of those bound by it. The core founding principle of western society is solidarity via collective bargaining, what other option is there than other than to submit to someone more powerful than any individual?

Do you want to submit to a man, or submit to an idea? If you submit to an idea you must defend it. If you submit to a man, you deny your own agency and your own rights.

> The core founding principle of western society is solidarity via collective bargaining

What is the basis of that assertion? If you go back as far as the Greeks, this only holds true if you focus on one specific city-state, and ignore that said city-state disenfranchised foreigners and legally permitted the ownership of slaves. Similar problems occur if we attribute western civilization to the Romans.

I am far from a historian, but my understanding is that the protestant reformation birthed the enlightenment by shifting people's idea of god as something to be interpreted by an authority structure (the church) to something that is interpreted internally. Is your relationship with god mediated by a church or a direct relationship with god? The reformation is more closely related to "westenrism" than the Greeks or Romans who laid some of the philosophical groundwork.

Out of the enlightenment we get John Locke who provided much of America's founding philosophy:

Locke argued that a government's legitimacy comes from the citizens' delegation to the government of their absolute right of violence (reserving the inalienable right of self-defense or "self-preservation"), along with elements of other rights (e.g. property will be liable to taxation) as necessary to achieve the goal of security through granting the state a monopoly of violence, whereby the government, as an impartial judge, may use the collective force of the populace to administer and enforce the law, rather than each man acting as his own judge, jury, and executioner—the condition in the state of nature.

My claim is that this is isomorphic to solidarity via collective bargaining when you account for the idea that the government being an impartial judge is not black and white but grey.

I think it's fair not to say that it is not the core founding principle. I think it's probably more correct to say that it's the theory of power that must be true to support human rights or ideas of freedom.

> The reformation is more closely related to "westenrism" than the Greeks or Romans who laid some of the philosophical groundwork.

I can see where you're getting this, but I would disagree. Western civilization is inseparable from the Greeks and Romans. What you are describing sounds more like a particular development that occurred in Northern Europe which resulted in a radical re-engineering of social structures, ultimately culminating in parliamentary democracy. I don't know enough of the history well enough to determine whether this happened because of the reformation, a scientific revolution, economic changes, or whatever other reason we could come up with, but I do understand the trend that you're talking about. Today we would broadly associate it with Anglo-American liberal democracy. The issue I took with your comment was that I don't think there's a compelling case to be made that "the West" is predicated on these values, since historically speaking they are comparatively new.

There is some scholarship that tries to make this argument (e.g. I can remember reading an article many years ago which tried to argue that western civilization originates in the Near East after the adoption of massed-infantry by the Hittites), but the more of it that I read, the more convinced I became that it was simply an attempt to view history through the lens of contemporary attitudes (e.g. of Anglo-American liberal democracy being the culmination of all historical development).

> I think it's fair not to say that it is not the core founding principle. I think it's probably more correct to say that it's the theory of power that must be true to support human rights or ideas of freedom.

I don't have a strong opinion on this one way or the other, but you may be interested to know that there is a considerable tradition which rejects this conclusion in the reactionaries. Some element of the tradition rejects the premise of human rights entirely, but others are rooted in a far more critical reading of power and how it (ostensibly) must operate. Most people who have read into these issues will be familiar with the reactionaries who reject human rights as a principle, but very few are even aware of the sort who reject the prescriptions of the sort of governance you are describing while (at least nominally) sharing its aims re: justice and freedom.

It is not collective bargaining. You refer to the social contract.

The idea of the social contract has issues. For one, the fundamental of contract is consent, which is missing.

Realism tells us that we do not delegate anything to the state.

You’re making useful points but you’re also just choosing convenient definitions that make your point of view “correct”.

The parent comment has a definition of “rights” that admits their existence… and I think what you’ve demonstrated is that you have a different definition of “rights”. In other words, you’ve demonstrated that you haven’t really grasped the underlying meaning that the parent comment is getting at, and you’re instead responding to the words that they used to express it.

If you start with a definition for “rights” you can make arguments about whether they exist. But if you start with a different definition and get to a different conclusion, it doesn’t mean you’ve discovered some logical flaw in the argument, it just means that the two of you have failed to communicate with each other.

I appreciate your analysis, but another way to consider this discussion is that asserting the existence of "rights" is an unsupported conversational maneuver that frames the debate. The grandparent is defining a concept into existence, which is a questionable move IMO, despite being tradition.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

"I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK?"

These are the kind of men that founded our country, better men than exist today. This is the type of thinking that led to America, and these are the cultural echo's many young culturally American boys hear from their fathers and grandfathers.

These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated. Britain, with an army to enforce her tyranny, has declared that she has a right (not only to TAX) but "to BIND us in ALL CASES WHATSOEVER" and if being bound in that manner, is not slavery, then is there not such a thing as slavery upon earth. Even the expression is impious; for so unlimited a power can belong only to God. Thomas Paine - The Crisis

Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God - Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson (https://www.monticello.org/research-education/thomas-jeffers...)

If we were base enough to desire it, it is now too late to retire from the contest. There is no retreat but in submission and slavery! Our chains are forged! Their clanking may be heard on the plains of Boston! The war is inevitable and let it come! I repeat it, sir, let it come. It is in vain, sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death! John Henry -- Give me liberty or give me death.

You say you have no power and so let the world inflict itself on you, these were men that inflicted themselves upon the world. These men chose reason over comfort. These men chose not to be slaves through their action.

> In western tradition governments exist to protect rights, such as the freedom of expression, not to grant them.

You may be overgeneralizing here, only the US has enshrined freedom of expression in their constitution. Pretty much in any other western government such protections do not exist and freedom of expression has been under attack for a long time

Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights is enshrined in legislation in the UK and Ireland, and offers protections for signatories of the convention.

(Edit: Oh, and the Bill of Rights gives parliamentarians quite an extreme version)

Also Canada : https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/services/how-righ...

What a strange view. America has done a poor job of teaching you about rights. They are legal only - natural law (the proper name for the doctrine of so-called "human rights") is religion. God-given rights you may have but rights in law they are not.

The rule of law is crucial to a free, just, and good society but you conflate the rule of law with the law saying what you would have it say. If the law is changed or the powers given under law are used in a way you do not like then that is not unlawful.

Dictators vary in how much they rely on law. Some have used law to do their evil: take Hitler. Some do their evil outside the law. This tells us that in truth the rule of law is but one part of what we need to have a good society.

[dead]

They could fight back with, "We will not accept students from politicians that support anti-education policies". Further they could kick out any students currently enrolled, "if they wrote a college essay promoting their anti-education values, we wouldn't have let them in - so they were clearly lying and we're just remedying that mistake"

> "We will not accept students from politicians that support anti-education policies"

Given how many stories there are about children seriously at odds with their parents about political issues, I don't think that is a good idea. At all.

Do you want to be judged by how your parents think or behave, or think that is acceptable?

Cowardice is in the eye of the beholder and the article is self-serving.

The article makes the point that it's cowardly to cave to administration pressure to limit the activities of anti-Israel/Pro-Palestine protesters.

Someone on the other side of the issue could make the argument "it is cowardly to kowtow to a small but vocal minority who justifies interfering with other students' ability to learn, as 'free speech'".

It is dishonest to describe non-speech activity such as intimidation and forceful prevention of access, as "speech", even if you like the motivation or outcome. "Speech" is talking with words. Physically using your body to prevent someone else from acting in a desired way, is something other than "speech".

So far the fight/not fight decisions can be predicted in advanced based on whether an institution has a medical center with NIH grants.

He states in the interview that Wesleyan has NIH grants. They are preparing to let scientists go if it comes to it.

Wesleyan does not have a medical center and according to the NIH’s public reporting, they have under $2 million in NIH grants, compared to $600 million for Columbia. (Edited from $400 million, which is the value cut.)

Wesleyan has a $250 million operating budget, so the (from what REPORTER indicates) $1.6 million in NIH funding represents 0.6% of their budget. In contrast, the $600 million in NIH funding to Columbia represents about 10% of its $6 billion operating budget.

So both in terms of absolute numbers and relative numbers, the NIH contributions to Wesleyan are de minimis.

That makes a strong case for academic institutions not being substantially dependent on government research dollars.

No it doesn’t. The First amendment is supposed to prevent the government from conditionalizing access to government services based on the speech of the recipient. Private institutions are not subject to such restrictions. If we want to encourage academic freedom, we want to find this behavior by the government to be illegal.

If you're going to resort to Constitutional arguments, you shouldn't gloss over the fact that the federal government is supposed to be one of enumerated powers, and there's no 'bribing universities to do what you want' federal power.

Unfortunately, that's not true. Article 1 gives congress very broad budgetary powers. Basically congress can spend money how they want, including bribing universities.

> we want to find this behavior by the government to be illegal

of course we do - but we're sadly discovering how easy it is for the government to target and coerce these universities, with nobody stepping up to stop them

So we want universities to get their funding from private sources that are expressly entitled to impose the same kind of conditions? Or do we want universities to spend more time and overhead on cobbling their funding together from a large number of intellectually and morally diverse sources? Where will these sources get their money without the power of taxation?

It's ironic that we're re-discovering this in 2025, it was pretty transparent in the late 1960s and early 70s, to students protesting their govt-funded universities' involvements in supporting the Vietnam War. The demands of students back then involved withdrawing from govt-funded grants and programs.

If you take money from an entity, you become an extension of that entity.

It's nice to be against something, but incomplete to uselessness if you are leaving out your alternative suggestion(s). They will always be dependent on someone.

If you were to go the most direct route, you might want to let the actual "customers", the students, pay for it all, delayed until they have a job of course?

A different version of student loans, it's the university itself that lets them study for free to collect later. I have no idea how that would turn out, I'm sure there would be so many different cases, impossible for me to tell what this would mean and look like.

The biggest problem I can see right away is that it's probably going to increase inequality between institutions. Ever more sorting of the rich and the poor into different places, with huge disparity of funding. So, probably a terrible idea unless the goal is dystopia.

Which leads me back to my question: What is your alternative? I think the government is better than pretty much all others. Private donors are quite problematic to rely on, and you only get the 1% to have even more power over education.

What do you think that 10% of budget is paying for that the university is spending on? It's more or less paying for the building and all that goes into it for the research that the NIH called for grant proposals to happen in. This is the entire idiocy about indirect benefits. Yes, paying for the building is not spending money directly on research. But you can't exactly do lab work without a lab building you know.

And if they hire the right alumni lobbyists - major reason why you don't hear about Dartmouth in the news [0] despite a similarly active student activism scene.

Most other private universities could have easily managed the relationship, but a mix of inertia and vindictiveness from certain alumni (eg. Ackman) messed it up.

Mind you, Dartmouth is also kind of unique in that their alumni relations team actually TRY to maintain a relationship. The other high prestige colleges (excluding USC) ignore you until they need to hit fundraising KPIs.

A Tuck or Dartmouth College grad will always fight for an alum if they make it to the shortlist - most other Ivy grads don't (Wharton kinda, but that's only for Wharton). This really helps build loyalty.

[0] - https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/19/trump-is-bombarding...

The way I saw the Columbia protests was that Donny's trial was downtown, and because it was not televised, producers told their crews to stop filming the doors to the courthouse. So, looking for any story at all, they took the subway uptown to the hippies camping out on the quad. Hey, at least it's better than literally staring at a door, right? Next thing you know, the student protest thing blew up. Why? Because there was literally nothing else going on for the TV news crews to film those days. Soon as graduation happened and the trial wrapped up, we never heard another thing.

Dartmouth, sure, it may have a high energy protest scene and be smart and whatever. But no-one knows about it - not because they are crafty - but because it's in freakin Hanover.

Dartmouth is smaller and has, historically, had a stronger and more intense ongoing alumni connection in various ways than is probably the norm with the Ivies in general.

> Dartmouth is smaller

Yale and Dartmouth are similar in student body size, yet Yale has been hit by investigations [0] while Dartmouth has been spared.

[0] - https://www.ed.gov/about/news/press-release/office-civil-rig...

Fair enough. Yale has more/bigger grad schools--though Dartmouth has tended to expand in that respect (though it doesn't have a law school).

Dartmouth is also famously the "conservative" Ivy.

More "conservative" than Columbia but still fairly liberal - the overwhelming majority of students backed Harris [0] and support abortion rights [1]

The Israel-Palestine protests (which sparked this whole university culture war issue) were fairly active at Dartmouth as well, but messaging around it was better handled by their admin.

The only conservative-ish and kinda prestigious college (not university) I can think of is Claremont McKenna, but they are drowned out within the larger Claremont community.

[0] - https://www.thedartmouth.com/article/2024/11/2024-election-a...

[1] - https://www.thedartmouth.com/article/2023/11/2023-election-s...

Dartmouth's time may still come. Brown is apparently about to be targeted next. Trump is clearly not done yet.

And NSF grants?

I’m not familiar with the NSF funding mechanisms or how people track NSF funding. Not saying NSF is not relevant, just that I’m not using it for my personal heuristic right now.

https://dellweb.bfa.nsf.gov/awdlst2/default.asp shows the NSF funding for Wesleyan.

You can drill down and infer some of the details about the funding programs.

Thank you. So, another de minimis amount ($1.8 million): it's not exactly zero, but it's just about as much as their NIH support. Columbia, as a comparator, gets $100 million in NSF funding.

I also found a DOE grant, about $800K.

I think this is the full list, NIH looks like a subset of overall HHS funding, and NSF is the actual single largest (around $2.5M)

https://ncsesdata.nsf.gov/profiles/site?method=report&tin=U3...

Wesleyan falls into a really weird bucket: a private liberal arts university, generally considered a "little Ivy" with a modest, slightly better than its competitors (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ivies) in terms of research clout. The impact of losing all scientific federal funding would be noticeable, but presumably, not fatal; I don't think they structured the operating costs of the university to be dependent on federal research funding like many other schools.

I grew up at Wesleyan- both my parents worked there, it paid for my university education, gave me access to the internet in the 1980s (via NSF funding), and gave me insight into liberal education, all of which prepared me to go off to a California university, maximize my education, and deploy that into my career. I think many people don't recognize the intense second order effects (mostly positive) of federal funding of research.

Brown just got targeted next, after releasing a statement that it would "not compromise on academic freedom". We're about to find out how true that is or not. But if universities don't start fighting back, they will all find themselves in the same boat as Columbia -- and ultimately regret it.

The US's universities are one of its greatest assets, if not the greatest. The repercussions of this are highly damaging.

Not sure if Michael Roth is related to Philip Roth, but it somehow reminds me of American Pastoral and that era of protests against the Vietnam War and its aftermath. I'm not entirely sure how those demonstrations compare to the ones we’re seeing today, but the parallels are striking

Wild that he is some kind of exception. Rolling over, folding is not the university culture I remember.

There wasn't, historically, the level of enormous potential negative consequences legally and practically if the universities talked back.

Universities, like many institutions, have also become more like large incumbent businesses than previously - e.g. perpetuating their own existence over having strong core values.

This is really well articulated. It's like how a company uses fiduciary responsibility to shareholders to justify a pivot away from some kind of principled stance.

Biden was considering withholding federal funds from schools over their vaccine policies[1], and tried to withhold federal funds from schools based on how they treat transgender students[2], but that was blocked by a judge. Obama did a similar thing regarding transgender students[3].

Things like this are why Hillsdale College rejects all federal funds. So they can do what they want without threat of the government revoking funding[4].

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/biden-vaccines-delta...

[2] https://www.texastribune.org/2024/06/12/texas-title-ix-lgbtq...

[3] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/05/13/477896804...

[4] https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/07/the-co...

Sure, but my argument was not "the federal government has never done this", but that "colleges have usually felt secure that this would not be done to them if they defended student protests", or at least, if we're being cynical, "that they would have an opportunity to walk it back if their calculations were incorrect".

I don’t feel like the reasons behind this are the same.

Biden/Obama: We want you to accept and protect everyone

Trump: I want you to deliberately reject certain races and nationalities, and close all the departments studying stuff I don’t like.

> Trump: I want you to deliberately reject certain races

Which race are colleges not allowed to accept? Source for this?

The current administration refers to inclusion of PoC and women as "DEI", so when they talk about ending DEI, that's what they mean.

See https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/17/defense-depa... for one example where it's particularly blatant.

> The current administration refers to inclusion of PoC and women as "DEI", so when they talk about ending DEI, that's what they mean.

I call bullshit on them wanting to ban women and black people from colleges, that is not what they mean when they say end "DEI", you are crazy.

Can you post a single link where they even hinted at wanting to ban black people and women from colleges? That is such an egregious accusation that you need more than just that they took down a page about a black guy.

Might have been a mistake to let some of them turn into real estate hedge funds.

Not sure when you graduated, but I've seen a complete inversion.

Much like 90s rockers, they now rage exclusively on behalf of the machine.

1990, FWIW.

[flagged]

Well I think that is the point. The university now are rolling over, not protecting their student.

[flagged]

First we're not allowed to call the detention camps "concentration camps" because there aren't ovens, now we can't call them "disappearances" because they're not getting thrown out of helicopters. Forget that people are getting shipped to a foreign torture slave camp from which nobody has been released with, and with no due process.

I think this language policing may be because people don't want to allow opposition to these things, rather than out of honor for the dead. The way to honor the dead is to prevent the circumstances of their deaths from happening again.

Which is exactly why we must stand up against the disappearances, the camps, the collaborators, the secret police.

This is exactly how it went in Russia. First it was, ‘Well, this isn’t that bad.’ Then, ‘Okay, sure, this isn’t great—but it’s not like we need to take action yet.’ And bit by bit, people kept rationalizing, minimizing, delaying—until suddenly it was, ‘Well… we’re f’d.’ That’s why we should speak up now.

We’re already at the point where one side is openly arguing that due process isn’t guaranteed by the Constitution—because it's inconvenient. So how many rights do we have to give up before it’s acceptable to call it out? How many norms have to be broken? How many lines crossed?

It's not like (other than Elon) they're going to show up in Hugo Boss suits one day and announce 'we have crossed the line to where you can criticize us now'.

I agree. But did you stand up against discrimination against innocent people under the banner of DEI? Did you stand up against government directed censorship campaigns on social media?

The time to stand up was actually way before the extreme actions of the left inspired this extreme reactionary overcorrection from the right. You're supposed to stand up while you're still in power, not after you've lost it, it's a bit late. I still remember people insisting "but deplatforming works!" as they justified mass censorship of conservatives. Honestly if you have not stood up for the people you politically disagreed with as the noose tightened over the last 10 years you are part of the cause of this terrible over-correction.

I can only hope that people start noticing this pattern and the inevitable next "correction" is not so extreme and we get some damping on the seemingly accelerating pendulum back and fourth.

The government never prevented anyone from speaking. Free speech was not violated when assholes were banned from platforms for being assholes. The owners of those platforms are not the government.

https://leftycartoons.com/2018/08/01/i-have-been-silenced/

Read the Twitter files. The government was actively involved in censorship. Zuckerberg has also stated the FBI was demanding certain posts be removed / demoted, users shadow banned, etc. The CIA also infiltrates and subverts many organizations and platforms. Wouldn't be surprised if they operate here, they've definitely been manipulating Reddit for at least the past decade.

You mean the Twitter files, which relied on Matt Taibbi getting the name of a government agency wrong to form the key connection he then turned into a conspiracy?

You wouldn't have to keep referencing a tenuous connection in The Twitter Files (cue: X-Files theme music) if you came around to seeing government and corpos as quite similar creatures on a spectrum of coercion rather than as completely disjoint and disparate things.

So called "conservatives" were soooo close to being able to have this realization before they regained the power of the government, vested it all in a unitary execuking, and went back to seeing that extraconstitutional coercion as a feature (like many "progressives" had for ~10 years or so).

Yes actually, i've been ranting about this for a long time, sufficiently powerful corporations are a form of government. I'm not conservative though despite being anti-dei so make of that what you will, i think a lot of people on the left are being lumped in with people on the right because we oppose the types of discrimination and racism now popular with the "left".

Great! It sounds like we're coming from a similar place. I wouldn't describe myself as "on the left" - more of a general libertarian that sees the merits and flaws in both rightist and leftist thinking. I had never voted for a major party in a national election until 2020, after the Republican party went batshit crazy.

The reason I judge The Twitter Files as a rightist talking point is that it's trying to pigeonhole the motivation for censorship solely onto the government. If an argument is simply about the coercive power wielded by corporations and governments, you don't need a smoking gun of cooperation/direction to tie the two - seeing them as similar organizations with similar top-down motivations suffices. That evidence is only important if you're aiming for reform using the first amendment (an understandable desire, but the wrong tool for the job), or trying to absolve the corpos as mere victims of the de jure government (delusional).

Yes for the most part.

The fact that current 'conservatives' kicked out pretty much all the historical conservatives I know as being not actual conservative/rinos tell us that this isn't about 'conservative' speech but something much, much different that is being labeled as 'conservative' speech when it is not.

I was a (hippie) libertarian at one point. Today the party of 'merit' has as their figure head... a nepo baby. They can't even be bothered to pretend to be 'conservative' or 'libertarian' anymore.

I don't shop where Confederate flags are sold. Requiring stores I shop at not to celebrate/promote racist anti-american losers by selling Confederate flags isn't me deplatforming anyone (BTW Amazon? Lots of Confederate flags FYI) it's me having standards for how I use my time/attention/money.

Very different. They were not kidnapped by secret police or held in inhumane conditions in far away jails.

because invalid comparisons weaken your argument and make you seem like you are oblivious of truth

Did you go down to Plaza de Mayo to speak to some of las Madres and ask how they feel about it, or where is your idea coming from?

The fact that very bad things happened to the Disappeared of Argentina makes me more concerned about the Disappeared of US, not less.

Kidnapped off the streets? I think for “bodies burned in pits” I might prefer “slaughtered” or “butchered”. Disappeared sounds rather light for what we’re currently discussing to my ear.

"Disappeared" does strongly imply that those people are dead, because that's what usually to happen to people that the government decides to kidnap.

But then, that's what usually happen to the people that the government decides to kidnap. So the OP's usage is perfectly correct, and the expectation that those people are dead should exist. Including the people that we know that were sent to the concentration camp, because despite nobody claiming it's an extermination camp the leading one does strongly tend to morph into the later.

I agree getting shipped off to a concentration camp ("detention center") without resource to justice is not on par with getting thrown out of a helicopter, but it's starting to get pretty damn close. And Trump is only getting started. If he had 7 years like the Junta did, we might wind up with our own contingent of desaparecidos.

[flagged]

[flagged]

[flagged]

[flagged]

Many universities are more like family offices that operate schools. Columbia is historically one of the biggest slumlords in NYC through their various entities.

> not the university culture I remember.

that's because universities are now businesses first, research institutions second, and academic institutions third

This point gets to the heart of the matter. The more I look into it, everything else seems downstream from this.

And yet the US has some of the best universities in the world academically.

it absolutely does not. you pay for paper and the network. the education, except at few rare exemptions, is subpar. talk to any asian and european and ask what they think of attending uni in the US :)

The Trump administrations attacks are able to go so far now, because institutions already rolled over under a Democratic administration.

Take for instance University of Pennsylvania. In 2023, student anonymously projected "Let Gaza Live" onto a building. The next day then-college president Liz Magill publicly called in the FBI to investigate this as an "antisemitic hate crime". She was later forced to resign for "not doing enough" to combat alleged antisemitism.

The best solution here is for universities to become less involved with government money. They should have to compete for students and research on an even playing field, and we shouldn't be creating politically aligned fields through government spending.

Surprised at how it hasn't been pointed out here but - the "general public" wants the sausage, but not how it's made. They wouldn't if they knew what it entailed. Cutbacks to student aid, shuttering of departments, eliminating of PhD positions, etc.

No. Research Universities are about Research. There are non governmental sources of funding for research, but they pale in comparison with government funding. If you want to make the case that the private industry should take on research, the problem is that there is no immediate profit in it. It can take decades, and few companies can invest decades of funding hoping for some eventual breakthrough. Moreover, in that model, research is slowed because companies are notoriously bad at sharing research with competitors. So you either create national research centers, or you use research universities.

The issue with these ideas is they lack an understanding of anything really about how we fund research in this country. We collect taxes and disperse these taxes in the form of research grants that we have boards of experts in the field call for proposals about realistically achievable topics that would benefit the American citizen in health, wealth, or some other form of prosperity. We only have a few national labs and most of this research is conducted in the university system, which simultaneously trains the next crop of researchers.

Now you are proposing this work doing/training aspect be cut off. What is your replacement? You have to come up with one that gets trainees hands on experience, as well as provides economies of scale benefits for expensive experimental apparatus or sample or data/compute resources, fosters collaboration and idea generation, and shares this work with other grant funded researchers in the field so that they might further their own efforts.

Or, you could just not blow the whole system apart with a broadside strike, and enjoy the striking benefits in fields like medicine we have enjoyed over the decades.

The last year and a half in particular has exposed just what a sham the academic freedom fo colleges really is.

We've always heard that the college tenure system encourages freedom of expression and academic freedom without the pressure of potential job loss. Instead what we have iscollege professors and administrations who move is absolute lockstep and have acted like jack-booted Gestapos to crush and punish First Amendment expression where some people merely said "maybe we shouldn't bomb children".

Norm Finkelstein, who is a national treasure, does not have tenure. He is a world-authority on these issues. Why doesn't he have tenure? Because he embarrassed Alan Dershowtiz by exposing him as a rampant plagiarist and general fraud.

Int he 1960s we had the National Guard open fire on anti-Vietnam protestors at Kent State, killing several, to repress anti-government speech. I swear we're not far from college administrators open firing on protestors directly.

The collaboration between colleges (particularly Columbia) and the administration pales in comparison to the anti-Vietnam era. Colleges are standing by letting agitators attack protestors (ie UCLA) and then later using that violence as an excuse to crush the protest. They're cooperating with law enforcement to crush protests.

But they're going beyond that. These protestors who have been illegally deported have largely been named and targeted by college administrations as well as organizations like the Canary Mission.

Think about that: colleges are knowingly cooperating with people who are black-bagging people protesting against genocide, fully knowing they will end up in places like prisons in El Salvadore.

Norm is a hero.

I have not heard of any protesters ending up in El Salvador, source?

Some of that so-called activism seems to be closer to suppressing any thoughts someone dislikes. Removing that from university life is not cool, that „activism“ itself went off the rails too.

Freedom of speech necessarily implies that a group of people might team up and loudly announce that the people they don't agree with are incorrect and immoral and should be ignored or even ostracized. That's the price of freedom of speech, and it's a fair price.

Being annoyed, inconvenienced, or even negatively impacted by the speech acts of others is by design. To throw that out is to make a calculation that without freedom of speech, your perspective will be the natural default without activism to upset it. A dangerous assumption.

Problem is that in the past two decades university admins gave in to various deplatforming causes and enforced codes. If they had stood firm before, the arguments against them wouldn't be nearly as strong. Unfortunately, they didn't. So when they now use the "free speech" argument themselves it rings hollow.

No it doesn't ring hallow. It is just that the issue is old.

Those policies were designed to promote free speech from vulnerable groups. Political vulnerability has a huge influence on free speech (and freedom), and that's what they have been addressing.

(Picking two random groups:) If you are Pakistani and are in a room of all Indian people, and the others say how horrible Pakistanis are and how research shows that Pakistanis are less intelligent or prone to violence, that is a very intimidating atmosphere and it would be hard to endure, much less speak up.

If that one Pakistani says the same about Indians, it's obnoxious and annoying, but it's no threat to anyone. The many Indians are not vulnerable. That's the difference.

Furthermore, the dominant groups in a culture tend to create systems and knowledge that support them to the exclusion of others - sometimes explicitly and intentionally. That's systemic discrimination - the system naturally generates it if you follow the usual path. It takes some effort to create space for other points of view.

Whether the typical DEI policies are optimal is another question. I haven't heard anyone come up with a great solution. Some pretend it's not a problem and there is no prejudice, which is absurd and not a solution; it's just sticking one's head in the sand - because they can, because they are not vulnerable.

> (Picking two random groups:) If you are Pakistani and are in a room of all Indian people, and the others say how horrible Pakistanis are and how research shows that Pakistanis are less intelligent or prone to violence, that is a very intimidating atmosphere and it would be hard to endure, much less speak up.

Much like a right-winger or a Christian at one of these universities.

The policies didn't help the groups they were supposedly about helping, they helped the groups that were already dominant (race and religion matter a lot less in a group that's all upper class), whether by design or because they evolved to.

> The policies didn't help the groups they were supposedly about helping

Do you have any evidence?

> Much like a right-winger or a Christian at one of these universities.

So is the first quote not based on evidence, but based on your ideology? There's no reason any vulnerable minority shouldn't be protected, though 'right-wingers' and Christians (usually meaning conservative Christians) are hardly vulnerable in the US, even if they are a minority on many campuses. They rule the country and always have, have access to every job and privilege.

Nobody knows you're a Christian or right winger at a university until you open your mouth to let all the women and LGBT people know that you think they don't deserve rights, and it's not discrimination when people don't like you for being an asshole. The vast majority of Christians go to college, don't get mad that LGBT and non-Christians exist, and didn't get discriminated against.

The absolute narcissism on display here is crazy.

Not all conservative Christians and right wingers think "women and LGBT people ... don't deserve rights". I find that if I approach people that way, it brings out the worst in them - they feel cornered and they fight. There's not much room for discussion when someone dismisses 'crazy antifa terrorists'. Are you going to reason with them?

It destroys social trust, which is what the real radicals aim at. If you want to fight the far right, work to build it.

I think the DEI rule should be simply to ban intolerance, with some education about how norms can be intolerant of minorities, and the experience of being a vulnerable minority in a room of majority.

> Not all conservative Christians and right wingers think "women and LGBT people ... don't deserve rights

Weird how those specific Christians who think women and LGBT are people don't feel discriminated against.

> they don't agree with are incorrect and immoral and should be ignored or even ostracized

You have that right. But doing this is not always wise. Labeling people as immoral and ostracizing them, especially on 50/50 issues, is one of the reason why the American political system is so radicalized at the moment.

That's a question of tactics, though. Moral outrage can be extremely effective, and it can also be counterproductive. And striking the right balance has been a challenge in American politics as long as American politics have existed.

In his Second Inaugural, Lincoln threads the needle in a way that is frankly unachievable for even most skilled politicians. "Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God and each invokes His aid against the other" seems like an acknowledgement of moral nuance, but he follows it up with, "It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces but let us judge not that we be not judged."

Speaking to a nation in which a part of it is in open revolt over the right to keep other humans as slaves is certainly an extreme case. But it isn't categorically different from any other political struggle. People are going to accuse one another of being immoral. It's the human condition. A legal system that protects this behavior is the bedrock of democracy. It doesn't matter how annoying you find the people doing the judging.

> Freedom of speech necessarily implies that a group of people might team up and loudly announce that the people they don't agree with are incorrect and immoral and should be ignored or even ostracized. That's the price of freedom of speech, and it's a fair price.

Sure, agreed. But groups and institutions taking even a dime of tax money should not get to place a thumb on the scales of those arguments. US universities, in particular, chose a side and then silenced all opposing viewpoints.

It was inevitable that the silenced would eventually mobilise, and they did. And now the group has to abandon their arguments about allowing "punching up" and instead pontificate on "free speech".

Myself (and many others) argued over the last decade and more that the pendulum always swings back, so lets be a little less extreme in the left/right argument. I, on this site, got labeled a non-thinking right-winger apologist for pointing out that the mainstream views on transgender for minors does not match the views that the powers-that-be were pushing.

You can't push for normalising the silencing of views for well over a decade without you yourself eventually falling victim to the same normalisation.

What did US universities do to "silence all opposing viewpoints" on any issues? Did they kick students out of school because of their viewports? Claw back their financial aid? Get them deported? Physically harm them? I sure don't remember things like that happening in widespread manner to conservative students, let alone happening in a way that was organized top-down by the universities' leadership.

I want to assume you are asking in good faith and really aren't aware of academic administration's attempts to silence specific and common viewpoints.

Your comment surprises me, because at this point, there really isn't any contention over the fact that universities have been doing exactly this.

So while I am assuming that you don't actually know, I'll give you a short list of links (I'm not doing research that takes me more than 5m).

> What did US universities do to "silence all opposing viewpoints" on any issues?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/musbahshaheen/2024/06/05/stop-r...

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/diversity-statemen...

https://www.thefire.org/news/anti-free-speech-trends-campus-...

https://www.thefire.org/facultyreport

https://www.hrdive.com/news/stop-requiring-diversity-stateme...

(UK, but still the same idea) https://www.thetimes.com/uk/education/article/kathleen-stock...

https://www.thefire.org/news/speaker-disinvited-uncomfortabl...

https://www.businessinsider.com/list-of-disinvited-speakers-...

And, finally, some charts: https://www.thefire.org/news/blogs/eternally-radical-idea/ne...

    Analysis of the data FIRE has collected reveals a clear political trend in the likelihood that a speaker will be targeted with a disinvitation effort. Speakers are far more likely to face disinvitation efforts from opponents to their political left than from those to their right. Since 2000, those behind the disinvitation efforts targeted speakers with views more conservative than their own nearly three times more frequently (97 attempts) than they targeted speakers with views more liberal than their own (36 attempts).

It pains me to say it, but it aligns with my experience.

> Did they kick students out of school because of their viewports? Claw back their financial aid? Get them deported? Physically harm them?

None of that is required to silence opposing views.

> I sure don't remember things like that happening in widespread manner to conservative students, let alone happening in a way that was organized top-down by the universities' leadership.

"Allowing only one viewpoint" doesn't require that the university administration has a top-down directive to expel students, only that they allow one viewpoint and silence the other.

Once again, that this happened is not in dispute, so I am left wondering where you were going with this response.

I think it's vice versa. Some students prevent other students from exercising their free speech rights. E.g. try to prevent speakers they don't like from speaking on campus. Or harass some people for their ethnicity in context of Hamas/Israel war. Then universities look the other way.

I’ll defend other people rights to offend me. But nowadays some people think others, even just between themselves, can’t say what would offend them.

A lot of people are fair-weather friends of freedom of speech. It's all well and good if everybody is allowed to express themselves as long as everybody, if they don't like me, at least respects me.

I guess some people were never in favor of freedom of speech, they just wanted a world where they faced minimal interpersonal conflict, and the current order for a while was serving that purpose.

I know someone who works for a university in event planning. They were putting together an event for a civil rights icon. Because of the new policies, they were forced to go through all of the brochures and pamphlets and censor any use of words such as "racism" and "black" (when referring to the man's skin color).

They literally couldn't say "black man fighting against racism" about a civil rights icon without losing millions in funding. I have no idea how someone can argue that this kind of censorship targeting universities is acceptable

It is not acceptable. But at the same time the US „antiracist“ campaign itself looks just like (reverse) racism in many case. Two unacceptables don’t cancel each other out. But you reap what you saw.

Just my 2 euro cents.

> But at the same time the US „antiracist“ campaign itself looks just like (reverse) racism in many case.

And what do you propose instead? I'm not seeing the EU doing any better than the US with their lowest socioeconomic class groups.

Talking points are nifty. But, at some point, you have to propose an actual solution that does something.

Bigotry exists. What are you going to do about it? It seems that the most popular answers right now vary from "Not a goddamn thing" to "Fuck those bastards."

(In reality, I'm pessimistic that there is much that can be actively done. The bigots who threw slurs at my immigrant ancestors didn't so much get better as much as just change epithets and targets. Sadly, so it goes.)

> And what do you propose instead? I'm not seeing the EU doing any better than the US with their lowest socioeconomic class groups.

Key word „socioeconomic“ groups. It should not be racist policies based on skin color. Help poor people, help people growing up in shitty neighbourhods. True diversity is people with different life experiences. Sometimes it correlates with skin color, sometimes it doesn't. Just like poor economic situation and shitty upbringing.

> Bigotry exists. What are you going to do about it? It seems that the most popular answers right now vary from "Not a goddamn thing" to "Fuck those bastards."

Of course. Including among those so-called „anti racists“.

Slightly offtoic, but it's funny that modern „antifa“ is one of the most authoritarian-minded people I've met. While a good chunk of far-right people are full-on anarchistic-minded people. With about equal amount of bigotry on either side. People loooove abusing labels to further their agenda.

> (In reality, I'm pessimistic that there is much that can be actively done. The bigots who threw slurs at my immigrant ancestors didn't so much get better as much as just change epithets and targets. Sadly, so it goes.)

And then there're bigot immigrants who talk shit about locals. My country was a major source of migration two decades ago and it's horrible what our people would say about locals. Now tables switched and we got more incoming migration. And now we're on the other side of the same transaction guests not respecting our culture. Bigots are everywhere. But current policies tend to focus on one side of bigots which just breeds more resent on the other side.

> It should not be racist policies based on skin color. Help poor people, help people growing up in shitty neighbourhods.

That is, in fact, what a lot of those DEI programs did. The problem is that "lower socioeconomic status" is a high correlate proxy for "minority" in the US. There are simply a lot more minorities in the US in the lower socioeconomic brackets.

The problem, at the end of the day, is that the a lot of the market became zero sum. When there were lots of jobs and lots of college slots, nobody cared so much about affirmative action-type programs.

According to the Supreme Court ruling[1], college admissions where explicitly taking race into account, either as a proxy for or in addition to socioeconomic status.

[1] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/20-1199_hgdj.pdf

>They literally couldn't say "black man fighting against racism" about a civil rights icon without losing millions in funding. I have no idea how someone can argue that this kind of censorship targeting universities is acceptable

Sounds like they are being forced to take the Morgan Freeman Approach to Ending Racism: stop talking about race. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2RwJlQdzpE

> They literally couldn't say "black man fighting against racism" about a civil rights icon without losing millions in funding.

They could. They just preferred to play the victim.

Can you be a bit more specific what kind of "thought suppression" you mean?

We all know that isn't the kind of activism being targeted.

I don't mind saying this is some serious Nazi stuff going on. The federal government is trying to obstruct free speech, jailing people for free speech... we are in a bad place.

[flagged]

They are detaining people for op-Ed’s though.

What did I miss?

a Tufts student had her visa cancelled and then was kidnapped by ICE for publishing an op Ed saying "hey, maybe genocide is bad"

[dead]

[dead]

This is rich. The Universities that caved to student activists engaged in antisemitism and other egregious activities should now fight for their rights to be cowards? Or the Universities that engaged in racist DEI programs are now going to stand on principal?

Give me a break.

If tenure was designed to protect intellectual freedom, but academics are consistently the biggest cowards failing to stand up to anything - what does that say about academia?

[flagged]

Then they would need to tax nonprofit religious organizations too.

Why don't they just make the special interests pay their own multi-trillion dollar war bills instead of sabotaging US universities with surprise taxes?

If you increase expenses and cut revenue, what should you expect for your companies?

Why not just make a flat tax for everyone and end all the special interest pandering and exceptions for the rich. It is a poisonous misapplication of the time of our government to constantly be fiddling with tax code to favor one group or another.

Because a lot of people, including many economists, believe capital accumulating endlessly to the same class of thousand-ish people is bad. A flat income tax exacerbates wealth inequality considerably.

Our tax now is worse than flat. Warren buffet brags about paying less % than his secretary.

Either compare ideal tax structures with “no loopholes” (none of these exist in the real world) or compare actually-existing tax structures.

Comparing your ideal flat income tax with the current system is apples to oranges.

>>Why don't they just make the special interests pay their own multi-trillion dollar war bills instead of sabotaging US universities with surprise taxes?

>Either compare ideal tax structures with “no loopholes” (none of these exist in the real world) or compare actually-existing tax structures.

Hence I cannot compare your suggestion with the current system as it is apple to oranges because loopholes would exist.

My thesis is a flat tax would help to minimize the very loopholes you damn. The larger the tax code and the more it panders to particular interest, generally the more opportunity for 'loopholes.'

IDK if it's bragging or voiced concern.

I don't want to work for a business created by, uh, upper class folks that wouldn't have done it if not for temporary tax breaks by a pandering grifter executive.

I believe in a strong middle class and upward mobility for all.

I don't think we want businesses that are dependent on war, hate, fear, and division for continued profitability.

I don't know whether a flat or a regressive or a progressive tax system is more fair or more total society optimal.

I suspect it is true that, Higher income individuals receive more total subsidies than lower-income individuals.

You don't want a job at a firm that an already-wealthy founder could only pull off due to short-term tax breaks and wouldn't have founded if taxes go any higher.

You want a job at a firm run by people who are going to keep solving for their mission regardless of high taxes due to immediately necessary war expenses, for example.

In the interests of long-term economic health and national security of the United States, I don't think they should be cutting science and medical research funding.

Science funding has positive returns. Science funding has greater returns than illegal wars (that still aren't paid for).

Find 1980 on these charts of tax receipts, GDP, and income inequality: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43140500 :

> "Federal Receipts as Percent of Gross Domestic Product" https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S

> "Federal Debt: Total Public Debt as Percent of Gross Domestic Product" https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEGDQ188S

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43220833 re: income inequality:

> GINI Index for the United States: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SIPOVGINIUSA

Find 1980 on a GINI index chart.

Yeah, I mean, I think we agree on most points.

I think there’s too many confounding economic factors to look at GINI alone and conclude the 1980 turning point was caused by nerfing the top income tax bracket. But a compelling argument could probably be made with more supporting data, which of course this margin is too narrow to contain and etc.

Better would be to remove inheritance after death, instead distributing that wealth among the citizenship equally.

List of countries by inheritance tax rates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_inheritan...

I suspect it's about putting infrastructure in place to ensure loyalty in times of turbulence.

[flagged]

[flagged]

Endowments are typically restricted funds (imposed by the fund provider) and can't be used (unless the restrictions are removed) to be used for general operating budget.

Harvard generally uses the interest on the fund principal to pay for things and it was a massive internal controversy when folks proposed drawing down the (absolutely enormous) principal as payment for capital expenditures (among other controversies).

Those giant university endowments are partially used to allow those who couldn't afford it but otherwise have shown they have what the university is looking for in students to attend for significantly/entirely reduced costs. Meanwhile, the most visible billionaires are using their money to try to buy elections so they can dismantle the government for personal gain while oftentimes employing people with such low wages that they depend on the government to be able to afford such luxuries as eating three meals a day. It's pretty easy to see why the large parts of the public find one acceptable and the other less acceptable.

Everyone can afford it if given a loan. If the job you get after can't afford to pay back the loan, it's time to look for another career, and for the schools to be on the hook for the miss, not the taxpayer.

And yes you are right acceptability, because polls show that the government bailing out students making poor career choices and schools paying for bloated staff is definitely not acceptable to the majority of Americans.

[flagged]

[flagged]

The data do not support what you suggest being a widespread problem. There's a popular story about it being a big problem, but when people start trotting out examples most of them fall apart on closer examination, which is weird if lots of solid examples exist (why pick so many that are, at best a stretch if not simply wrong, if this is a widespread trend and not just a couple actual events that were maybe not great?). Folks have tracked things like speaker cancellations, and there are vanishingly few of those, conservatives, even fairly fringe ones, speak on campuses all the time.

I like how you claim data doesn't support this being a problem but at the same time can't be bothered to cite any data. I'll do it for you: https://5666503.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/5666503...

"Alarming proportions of students self-censor, report worry or discomfort about expressing their ideas in a variety of contexts, find controversial ideas hard to discuss, show intolerance for controversial speakers, find their administrations unclear or worse regarding support for free speech, and even report that disruption of events or violence are, to some degree, acceptable tactics for shutting down the speech of others."

"Less than one-in-four students (22%) reported that they felt “very comfortable” expressing their views on a controversial political topic in a discussion with other students in a common campusspace. Even fewer (20%) reported feeling “very comfortable” expressing disagreement with one of their professors about a controversial topic in a written assignment; 17% said the same about expressing their views on a controversial political topic during an in-class discussion; 14%, about expressing an unpopular opinion to their peers on a social media account tied to their name; and 13%, about publicly disagreeing with a professor about a controversial political topic. "

And as for examples, the sitting NIH director, Jay Bhattacharya, who in hindsight was far more correct on everything COVID-related than the CDC was: had this to say about his experience at Stanford: https://stanfordreview.org/stanfords-censorship-an-interview...

" I presented the results in a seminar in the medical school, and I was viciously attacked. ... It was really nasty: allegations of research misconduct, undeclared conflicts of interest… In reality, the whole study was funded by small-dollar donations."

"It was very stressful. I had to hire lawyers. I've been at Stanford for 38 years and I felt it was really, really out of character. At one point, the Chair of Medicine ordered me to stop going on media and to stop giving interviews about COVID policy. They were trying to totally silence me."

> Jay Bhattacharya, who in hindsight was far more correct on everything COVID-related than the CDC was

Bhattacharya who signed the Great Barrington Delaration, advocating for herd immunity and "focused protection" for the elderly? Just imagine how much larger the death toll would have been.

This page has a good list of concerns about Bhattacharya, including how the study mentioned in your link was flawed and one of the co-authors went on to admit the results were wrong: https://www.zmescience.com/medicine/jay-bhattacharya-has-a-h...

An honest seeker of truth wouldn't just say Jay's estimate was off, but compare it to other estimates of the time. Bhattacharya's IFP estimate was .2%. The WHO's IFP estimate was 3.0%. Which of the two had the more accurate estimate? The WHO, with billions in funding, or Jay operating by himself on a shoestring budget, all while the CDC in its bureaucratic incompetence couldn't be bothered to do any real studies? In fact, a positive outcome of Jay's study was to help understand just how bad the initial estimates were!

And as far as the great Barrington declaration is concerned, it is widely accepted now that the lockdown strategy failed, and that focused protection would have saved far more lives and caused far less economic harm and educational harm, which by the way, correlate with loss of life and loss of years of life. Even far left news outlets admit this now: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/covid-lockdowns-big-...

> it is widely accepted now that the lockdown strategy failed

Is it?

https://royalsociety.org/news-resources/projects/impact-non-...

You mean like afraid of being deported when they are here legally?

[flagged]

What?

[flagged]

How has this happened? What are your concrete examples of this having happened?

I suspect all of the example(s) you might have are going to be overblown news storie(s) But if there are decades of this, I'd love to see the evidence.

I don’t know that Universities cower before leftist ideology. They are leftist, and are the generators of leftist ideology. It’s more like the wallow in it than cower before it.

Universities have endorsed leftist ideas. Not cowered .

[flagged]

Also, they require academic applicants to submit mandatory diversity statements: https://www.wesleyan.edu/inclusion/whatwedo/recruitment-reso...

[flagged]

Literally none of that mind canon happened.

Are you referring to the most studied medicine in human history or the one that saved more lives than any other medicine in human history?

Maybe he is, but forcing teens to take the vaccination was still rather illiberal.

We knew perfectly well back then that bad cases of Covid were rare in teenagers.

We also knew perfectly well that allowing it to spread among teenagers would make it impossible to control. When I got vaccinated it was to protect elderly friends and family, not myself.

You've assumed that the vaccine reduces transmission risk, which is not the case:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39283431/

I'm not surprised when I google the author of that paper, it's a bunch of antivax nonsense because the idea that the mRNA vaccines didn't reduce transmission is one of the dumbest I've heard yet. Here's a slightly (ha) better study investigating the matter from real scientists;

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanwpc/article/PIIS2666-6...

> Full vaccination of household contacts reduced the odds to acquire infection with the SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant in household settings by two thirds for mRNA vaccines and by one third for vector vaccines. For index cases, being fully vaccinated with an mRNA vaccine reduced the odds of onwards transmission by four-fifths compared to unvaccinated index cases.

Doesn't matter if the cases were bad for them or not. They were still believed to be able to spread it.

"illiberal" or not, the COVID 19 vaccination mandates were good decisions that saved countless lives.

I'm referring to the medicine deployed against a pandemic whose death count is still entirely unknown.

How many people died because of COVID?

You don't know. No one knows.

Meanwhile, everyone who knows better pretends that the most fundamental data about the subject, on top of which all other data and decsions were built ... is garbage.

Do you think the rough death toll of pandemics are fundamentally unknowable to some approximation? Do you think the massive increase in mortality during the pandemic was a coincidence?

Interestingly, excess mortality levels continue to remain extremely high - around 10%. [1]

[1] - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores...

Might some of that be due to long-term medical conditions (such as cancer or dementia) that were treated less effectively during the pandemic, but which didn't cause immediate loss of life?

Was there another pandemic whose statistics were based on mandatory asymptomatic testing (via PCR tests with deliberately high Ct values)?

Was there another pandemic where 94-95% of all deaths involved at least one comorbidity, and 77% involved three or more underlying conditions?

This dying "of Covid" vs "with Covid" debate has long been debunked: https://www.reuters.com/article/world/fact-check-94-of-indiv...

TLDR: Those comorbidities are often complications caused by Covid in the first place – like pneumonia or respiratory failure. Sometimes they also include risk factors that could never be treated as a direct cause of death on their own, like obesity (which also happens to be extremely widespread in the US so it gets reported on many death certificates for many illnesses, not just Covid).

Pneumonia and respiratory failure are not comorbidities. Those would be the actual cause of death with COVID given the credit for bring them on.

--- Common comorbidities associated with COVID-19 deaths have been well-documented across various studies and data sources, primarily reflecting conditions that increase vulnerability to severe outcomes. Based on extensive data, especially from the U.S. and other heavily impacted regions, the most frequent comorbidities include:

- *Hypertension (High Blood Pressure):* This tops the list in many analyses. In the U.S., CDC data from March to October 2020 showed 56% of adults hospitalized with COVID-19 had hypertension [1], and it’s consistently cited in mortality stats. A New York City study of 5,700 hospitalized patients in early 2020 reported it in 56.6% of cases [2], while globally, a meta-analysis pegged its prevalence at 32% among all COVID-19 patients and 35% in fatal cases [3].

- *Diabetes:* Another major player, often linked to worse outcomes due to impaired immune response and blood sugar control issues. The same NYC study found it in 33.8% of patients [2], and CDC data noted 41% of hospitalized adults had metabolic diseases, including diabetes [4]. Globally, it ranged from 8.2% in China (early 2020 data) to 17.4% across broader reviews, with higher rates (up to 33%) in severe or fatal cases [5].

- *Cardiovascular Disease:* This includes conditions like coronary heart disease and heart failure. It appeared in 11.7% of cases in a 2020 meta-analysis [3] and was notably prevalent in fatal outcomes—26% of 814 COVID-19 deaths in Romania, for instance [6]. In the U.S., myocardial infarction and congestive heart failure were tied to higher mortality odds in a 2020 study of 31,461 patients [7].

- *Obesity:* A significant risk factor, especially in Western populations. The NYC cohort reported it in 41.7% of patients [2], and a 2021 CDC report flagged it as one of the strongest chronic risk factors for COVID-19 death among hospitalized adults, alongside diabetes with complications [8].

- *Chronic Pulmonary Disease:* Conditions like COPD or asthma showed up in 17.5% of U.S. patients in the 2020 Charlson comorbidity study [7] and were linked to higher mortality risk (e.g., HR 2.68 in China’s early data) [9]. Respiratory failure, often a direct result of COVID-19, complicates this category but underscores lung vulnerability.

- *Renal Disease:* Chronic kidney disease was a standout in multiple reviews, with a hazard ratio of 3.48 for death in a UK study [10]. It’s less prevalent overall (0.8% in some global data) but deadly when present, especially in older patients [3].

- *Cancer:* Malignancies, particularly metastatic ones, increased mortality odds (HR 3.50 in China, 2020) [9]. Prevalence was lower (1.5% globally), but the impact was outsized in fatal cases [11].

Other notable mentions include dementia, liver disease (mild to severe), and immunosuppression, though these were less common. Age amplifies these risks—over 65s with comorbidities faced death rates 4 to 10 times higher than those under 40, per UK data from 2021 [12]. Multimorbidity (multiple conditions) was also a game-changer; over half of fatal cases in some studies had two or more comorbidities, with one U.S. analysis noting an average of 2.6 to 4 additional conditions per death [13].

These patterns held steady from 2020 through 2023, with the CDC reporting that 94-95% of U.S. COVID-19 deaths involved comorbidities [14]. The virus didn’t just exploit these conditions—it often triggered acute complications (e.g., pneumonia, ARDS) that were listed alongside chronic issues, muddying the “cause of death” debate. Still, the data’s clear: these comorbidities didn’t just coexist; they stacked the deck against survival.

### References [1] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6943e3.htm [2] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2765184 [3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7365650/ [4] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7010e4.htm [5] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landia/article/PIIS2213-8... [6] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-84705-8 [7] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7439986/ [8] https://www.cdc.gov/pcd/issues/2021/21_0123.htm [9] https://erj.ersjournals.com/content/55/5/2000547 [10] https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n1648 [11] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanonc/article/PIIS1470-2... [12] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan... [13] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/health_disparitie... [14] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm

about 7 million people died of COVID according to the WHO: https://data.who.int/dashboards/covid19/deaths

AFAIK, that number more accurately reflects the number of people who died within two weeks of testing positive using PCR tests at high Ct values (35-45), inflating case counts.

94-95% involved at least one comorbidity.

Over 75% had at least four comorbidities.

From further down the page:

> A COVID-19 death is defined for surveillance purposes as a death resulting from a clinically compatible illness in a probable or confirmed COVID-19 case unless there is a clear alternative cause of death that cannot be related to COVID-19 disease (e.g. trauma). There should be no period of complete recovery between illness and death

It does not include cases like someone dying in a car crash who happened to be COVID-positive.

> It does not include cases like someone dying in a car crash who happened to be COVID-positive.

Maybe not, but it definitely includes millions of elderly or otherwise comorbid subjects who developed pneumonia and never recovered. Sad is it is, that happens year-in and year-out when the initial virus doesn't have a household name.

It also happens with the influenza virus ... except 2020 and 2021, where we had a miraculous reprieve from flu deaths.

> where we had a miraculous reprieve from flu deaths

It's not so miraculous to think that lockdowns, distancing and mask-wearing affected flu prevalence as well as COVID prevalence.

Methods used to combat COVID-19 (social distancing, masking, moving indoor events outdoors) really are quite effective at reducing the transmission of respiratory viruses. Big changes can come about from small changes in r.

This is what statistics is for? We rarely ever “know” (in the sense of your restrictive epistemology) the precise value of ANY demographic measure.

We don’t know how many people live in the United States at any particular moment, but the Census is still useful.

It's useful when done in good faith. During COVID there were numerous decisions that even if not intended to inflate mortality figures, then they did so inadvertently. In particular the CDC gave extremely broad guidance on what to classify as a death "of" COVID, and the government was giving hospitals additional funding per COVID death. So for the most ridiculous example of what this led to, in Florida some guy died in a motorbike crash and ended up getting counted as a COVID death because he also had COVID at the time. [1] He was eventually removed from their death count, but only because that case went viral.

Even in more arguable cases, preexisting conditions and extreme senescence are ubiquitous in deaths "of" COVID, and at this point there's probably no real chance of ever untangling the mess we created and figuring out what happened. For instance Colin Powell died at 84 with terminal cancer, Parkinson's, and a whole host of other health issues. His eventual death was flagged as 'caused by complications of COVID.' I mean maybe it really was, but I think the asterisk you'd put there is quite important when looking at these stats.

[1] - https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/florida-motorcyclist-covid...

I’m neither an epidemiologist nor a statistician (just a mathematician pretending to be a coder and/or butterfly), but I do not believe there are no mathematical tools to mitigate the statistical impact of comorbidities and accidental misreporting.

To contextualize this: my position is “weak signals are possible even with noisy data”; I read your response as “but the data is really noisy,” which, sure, agreed; the user I was responding to seems closer to the solipsistic position “there is effectively no data at all.”

Ah yes, because we don't have the exact numbers your appeal to idiocy must be normalized.

Do you know how many people are saved by antibiotics RIGHT NOW? You don't know?! NO ONE KNOWS!

Give me a break, we don't need to dissect every corpse to see how effective the vaccine is.

What are you referring to?

He is making a stink about Covid vaccine requirements during a period where hospitals were overflowing and bodies were being stacked in refrigerated trailers.

Vaccines were a miracle. The state medical examiner converted one nearby university’s arena to a temporary morgue at one point in 2020. It’s mind boggling that people were and still are in denial about how bad it got before large parts of the population started getting vaccinated

For real. The sibling comment is flagged now but people seem to have memoryholed the impact of COVID on the healthcare system.

Hospitals were absolutely overwhelmed at many points during parts of the pandemic, outside of the first month. That was a major concern during the "surges" and spread of new variants.

I know this because my state routinely publishes hospital census levels and at many points during the pandemic elective and even non-elective procedures had to be cancelled due to lack of bed and staff capacity. The facility I work at was regularly impacted.

Search hospital related COVID stories during 2021 and 2022 and you'll find plenty.

> memoryholed

The people who voluntarily glued themselves to propaganda TV never paid attention to it in the first place. They'll believe whatever they need to because they're mad about lockdowns.

Are we living in the same world? I had a child born about that time which was one of the few ways to actually get into a hospital. When I went in the fucking place was barren. A bunch of medical professionals shaking in their shoes waiting for something that never came. I knew then and there I knew i was being sold a lie and the news was carefully orchestrating snippets of misrepresented footage. And then went about my business as normal.

They were not putting COVID patients anywhere near the maternity ward and you certainly were not allowed to leave the maternity ward so I'm not sure what you were expecting. A busier than usual maternity ward?

Those protocols were apparently not in place yet, or security wasn't aware of them, or no one wanted to stop me. I walked around damn near every hallway of the hospital, which was smallish.

What month was this then? Because there was a time when you were not even allowed to be with your wife at the hospital

I did a Google search because a wife not being allowed to have her husband present during childbirth sounded too egregious to be true. I found a single Today article about one specific hospital in New York enacting that policiy (NewYork-Presbyterian). That's not nearly widespread enough to apply to any story of a COVID-era childbirth you hear about, FYI.

April

The graph here could be instructive:

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-coronavirus-hospitalizat...

It varies widely by state/county, etc, but in most of the US, hospitalizations were pretty low still in April. The first peak was around August which was my experience, and the second peak was around January 2021.

So as far as "A bunch of medical professionals shaking in their shoes waiting for something that never came", they were waiting for what was actually coming.

The chart you posted conveniently cut off april, which was higher than August.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/figures/mm7112e2-F1-l...

Your chart only includes a subset of states. Again, when things peaked varied widely by state. Here's a good one from California that includes April:

https://calmatters.org/health/coronavirus/2020/06/california...

Number of patients in April peaked around 3000, then August around 7000, then Jan 2021 around 21,000.

> I knew then and there I knew i was being sold a lie and the news was carefully orchestrating snippets of misrepresented footage. And then went about my business as normal.

It’s extremely poor reasoning to rely on your individual anecdotal experience of your hospital visit to conclude that there is a global conspiracy on a massive scale. Was all the footage of overflowing hospitals and makeshift morgues fabricated?

Fwiw, I went to a Boston hospital in April or May of 2020 to get tested for a Covid exposure and they kept non-covid patients quite separate. They relocated entire offices to different buildings to avoid cross-exposure. They don’t want to put Covid patients near people giving birth or their infants for obvious reasons. Also our emergency department had a million signs up telling people who had certain respiratory symptoms to go to a different location (which I went to and was indeed much busier).

…But I didn’t base my belief on the things I was hearing from literally every source on that experience. I did it because that many people simply can’t coordinate a lie on that scale that convincingly. Skepticism is good, but respectfully and in my opinion, believing it was all a hoax requires a great deal of arrogance and gullibility.

For inexplicable reasons I was about the only one there with free reign of the hospital. They seemed so starved of guests and happy someone was there for good reasons that the hospital didn't stop me from walking around most the hallways, so I did. Small town hospital with few enough security that they all knew who I was.

There was so much bad data and propoganda coming in at the beginning thar ultimately the only thing I could depend on was what I personally investigated. I'm not using it to sign off on a research paper.

> Small town hospital

And you generalized this to the world as a whole? I admit I don’t have a citation for this, but I’d be shocked if small towns didn’t have markedly slower spread rates than cities. I feel like this was brought up frequently during the pandemic.

> There was so much bad data and propoganda coming in at the beginning thar ultimately the only thing I could depend on was what I personally investigated.

How and which things did you decide were propaganda and bad data?

Perhaps so but I ultimately use data I collected to make my own choices in my own environment, not to force choices upon you. If you had different data I would not judge you for acting differently.

No one exists alone in a society. People who ignored the overwhelming evidence of the pandemic’s severity were more likely to spread the disease to other people because of their poor judgement.

The evidence being peddled by our state health director at the time to justify lock downs was largely computerized projections that were not based on overwhelming evidence and were ultimately wildly wrong even without vaccines.

Sorry, I’m not an expert in the field, but are computerized projections not the norm in disease spread modeling?

I don’t really feel like continuing this argument, so the last thing I’ll say is that I don’t know how else experts are supposed to have made decisions at the time. Makeshift morgues were opening to handle the overflow of bodies. They acted on the evidence they had at the time, and readjusted recommendations as new evidence came to light. This is part of why social distancing protocols changed so much during the first year of the pandemic.

My contention was never so much experts making recommendations based on projections built on weak evidence, but rather experts issuing orders on these wildly false projections that imprisoned and fined people for something as simple as dancing on a sidewalk in protest.

Experts should be free to advise the public. Thankfully the health director issuing the order that jailed and charged this man with a felony had to resign in disgrace.

https://archive.is/KhIQx

Look at the timeline of literally any plague, as they all follow a very similar pattern. For instance here [1] is the one for the Spanish Flu. There are a number of peaks and valleys that gradually recess to noise as viruses tend to evolve to less virulent forms while people also simultaneously develop broader immunity. This makes observational data highly unreliable for determining the efficacy of a vaccine during a plague.

The same is true of mortality/severity rates by vaccination status in hospitals. People who opt in to a vaccine are generally going to be more inclined to seek hospital treatment than those who opt out of such. So if somebody unvaccinated went to the hospital for COVID it would naturally be, on average, a much more severe case than a vaccinated person going to the hospital, with worse overall outcomes. And so you skew the results when looking at hospital data.

These biases and trends are facts most people may not be aware of, but big pharma certainly is.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu#/media/File:1918_s...

> These biases and trends are facts most people may not be aware of, but big pharma certainly is.

I have a hard time believing that “most people” also means “most epidemiologists” or “most medical organizations” would be unaware of such an obvious problem. It seems like it would be day one of school stuff.

It seems trivially obvious to me, someone whose closest qualification to being able to debate the actual science here is having a bachelor’s in physics and very technically being involved in some academic research. I’m not going to second guess the overwhelming majority of scientists and medical professionals I’ve heard comment on this because of something like that.

I mean laymen. All epidemiologists and the like are certainly aware of such problems. You'll see these biases and many others buried in the discussion/limitations or other such section in any study. Here's [1] a random one from the CDC:

- "confounding might exist because the study did not measure or adjust for behavioral differences between the comparison groups"

- "these results might not be generalizable to nonhospitalized patients who have ... different health care–seeking behaviors"

Along with many more. The problem is that there was no meaningful public debate whatsoever. You were on board with absolutely anything and everything, or you must be an "anti-vaxer" and just wanted everybody's grandmother to die, and probably also thought COVID was caused by 5G.

[1] - https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7044e1.htm

There are no stories about this outside the first month. The hospitals were initially ill equipped but were so well equipped after March/April that the giant boat they sent as a backup to New York was barely used.

Almost no healthy people died from COVID, most had co-morbidities and they should have been the only ones forced to vax and stay home.

> I don't remember dissent being tolerated, let alone encouraged.

How many people were jailed or disappeared for their dissent?

Being able to dissent doesn't mean that people accept your opinion, it means that you are allowed to make your point using your own means.

People still get to disagree with you, point out where you are dishonest or mistaken, etc. etc. etc.

The idea that dissent wasn't tolerated is absolute BS. It was tolerated far more than it should have been, far more accommodations were made than necessary, such as in the military, which injects people with all sorts of vaccines but somehow decided that this well-tested one didn't have to be because some people were scared.

[flagged]

[flagged]

And pray tell how did they harass jewish students?

How is this connected to the submission? Or is a random tangent because the article mentions "student activism" and "Trump" in the opening? The only part mentioning anyone Jewish is:

> You have prominent Jewish figures around the country who get comfortable with Trump, it seems to me, because they can say he’s fighting antisemitism: “He’s good for the Jews.” It’s pathetic. It’s a travesty of Jewish values, in my view.

But I'm not sure how that is connected to what you wrote.

Most simply this all boils down to two entirely incompatible models of a university. One institution produces thinkers who can innovate and lead. The other is a training camp that produces docile workers for the oligarchs. Regardless of allowing students free speech on campus universities have been heading toward the latter for three decades. It's a little late to be preaching courage thirty years after selling-out the core tenets of pedagogy. There is so much more to this than just "Trump". The fascists in power now are the result of 30 years of moral cowardice.

[flagged]

> Mahmoud Khalil lied on hus visa application about being a member of UNRWA.

He was briefly an unpaid intern.

https://studyinthestates.dhs.gov/2015/11/uscis-explains-if-u...

> USCIS is frequently asked whether an unpaid intern needs to complete Form I-9. In general, an unpaid intern does not need to complete Form I-9 unless he or she will receive remuneration, which is something of value such as no-cost or reduced-cost meals, lodging or other benefits in exchange for his or her labor or services.

I can see how someone'd leave that off a green card application for that reason, which is more plausible than hiding an association with a UN agency while applying for a green card during the Biden years. (If anything, work for the UN and a close ally's embassy should increase trust here.)

Given https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/forms/i-4... says things like "Have you EVER been a member of, involved in, or in any way associated with any organization, association, fund, foundation, party, club, society, or similar group in the United States or in any other location in the world?" there's a good chance every single green card applicant has forgotten to list something. Do I include my kindergarten? The music club I was in as a toddler? Joining a political party's subreddit? Donating $10 to a charity ten years ago?

Hell, I'm "associated with" Hacker News, but it wouldn't go on my I-485. Should that get me deported to an El Salvadorean slave camp?

I'm not arguing in favor of el salvadoran prisons, but he's not in an el salvadoran prison. He's being charged with being in violation of his Visa. And yes, I do expect you to report the time that you "Interned" at the UNRWA. This organization has always operated tightly with Hamas and the PA, and if I'm establishing your background, I need to know about it so that I can investigate it, period. I don't need to know about your affiliations with hackernews, because hackernews is not closely affiliated with designated terror organizations. Now that the UNRWA is properly designated as a terrorist organization itself, do you think it would be appropriate to lie about your affiliations with them on a visa application?

Mahmoud Khalil is in an American jail awaiting trial. A New Jersey court will rule on his status.

> I'm not arguing in favor of el salvadoran prisons, but he's not in an el salvadoran prison.

He might wind up there; a judge has halted the deportation process for now. The administration is demonstrably sending folks (some with no criminal record: https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-polit...) there, including via "clerical error" they can't undo (https://apnews.com/video/white-house-says-maryland-resident-...). Oopsie daisy!

> He's being charged with being in violation of his Visa.

He has not been charged at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detention_of_Mahmoud_Khalil

"Khalil has not been charged with a crime and is not alleged to have engaged in any activity legally prohibited to U.S. residents... Removal procedures were initiated under section 237(a)(4)(C)(i) of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which permits deportation of lawful residents if the Secretary of State believes their presence risks "potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences"."

> I don't need to know about your affiliations with hackernews, because hackernews is not closely affiliated with designated terror organizations.

The form doesn't say that. It says anything, ever.

> Now that the UNRWA is properly designated as a terrorist organization itself, do you think it would be appropriate to lie about your affiliations with them on a visa application?

When did the US designate UNRWA as a terrorist organization?

I don't think they ever have, but they certainly hadn't back in 2023 when he applied.

(The US was UNRWA's single largest donor that year, in fact. https://www.unrwa.org/sites/default/files/top_20_donors_over...)

> Mahmoud Khalil is in an American jail awaiting trial.

Having not been charged with any crimes, he is in immigration detention awaiting a court hearing.

> And in the last two months, it’s become painfully apparent that wanting to have nice conversations is not going to stop people who are bent on authoritarianism. Right now, I’m not sure what will stop them, except successful court challenges, and even that seems precarious.

Winning elections could work.

> Watching the video of this poor woman at Tufts who was abducted by federal agents —I wrote my blog today about that. I think the government is spreading terror, and that’s what they mean to do.

Brother, a blog post is, quoting you, a “nice conversation.” A New Yorker interview is a nice conversation.

Getting rid of legacy admissions… guess who wins elections? The sons and daughters of politicians! Whereas grandstanding on X or Y achieves nothing.

As far as I'm concerned universities lost the moral high ground when they prioritized ideology over truth-seeking, elevated identity over excellence, ostracized political outsiders, and lost all viewpoint diversity.

Which are not things they did.

I consider UC's statement of diversity (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/08/us/ucla-dei-statement.htm... and then 6 months later https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/20/us/diversity-statements-u...) to be a form of ideology over truth seeking: """Candidates who did not “look outstanding” on diversity, the vice provost at U.C. Davis instructed search committees, could not advance, no matter the quality of their academic research. Credentials and experience would be examined in a later round."""

Regardless of your stance on affirmative action, it should be very suspicious that all prestigious universities implemented it until it was banned while support in the general population is mixed.

I'm not sure how that follows. Do elite universities typically track the general population?

> I'm not sure how that follows. Do elite universities typically track the general population?

He's saying that the universities are out of touch with the general population, which is never a good thing.

Was it ever the case they were in touch the with the general population... they are elite after all...

Does it matter if they did or didn't? Universities have indisputably lost the mandate of heaven, have they not? Arguing over whether they actually did any of those things is irrelevant, if a politically powerful group of people think they did! None of them have an objective definition, so it's going to come down to values, and universities / academics as a class have alienated themselves from a substantial portion of the population.

... or have anti-intellectual media whipped up that resentment as part of their culture war?

These are grand Fox News talking points! What reality are they from?

Universities don’t have to roll over, they also don’t have to accept federal funds

Easy

So, after long years of accepting cancel culture, kicking off people from universities since they happened to write a twitter comment that was not aligned with the current "right" way of thinking, universities suddenly are protectors of free speech. Well...

Who is going to buy this?

If you don’t want to be subject to the whims of whoever is in office, don’t take the poison pill of government money.

If only politics was limited to affecting those who opted in. But mostly government shouldn't be the whims of one individual, it should be much more considered than that.