Well Tom, how about any sympathy for the potentially thousands of students who may be kicked out of our country for zero fault of their own? You may have no sympathy for Harvard, but Trump moves like this, that are so out of proportion and lacking in humanity, only further undermine the reputation and direction of our country.
Not if they're anti-American, anti-West, pro-Hamas sympathizers, and let's be honest, Harvard exists in no small part to create those kinds of people.
Furthermore, there was never going to be a way to reform these institutions that liberals were going to like, and I’m glad Trump isn't even trying to reason with them.
“I won. You lost. I can do it. You can cry if you don't like it.” should be the administration's attitude for the next 1300 days.
Gosh. Apparently no nothing about Harvard or most universities. Look, I am an American Jew and I definitely think this is over the top and out of control(Trump). Encouraging work to improve climate and improve relationships between different groups Jews and Arabs on campus for example is something that was already underway at Harvard. In fact, if you read the 300 page report on antisemitism and the similar report on Islamophobia there it is sad story. At one point these groups used to talk to each other, even be friends and have civil discussions. Eventually this eventually fell away. Harvard is a reflection of a country that has become more extreme and less tolerant. The attack of October 7 was devastating. My university acknowledged it as such. To be honest, we have never acknowledged a single civilian Palestinian death, as if they have not happened. With such a horrific terror attack it is hard to say anything but Israel do what you feel is necessary to prevent another attack. What young people across the United States were concerned about was the intensity of the Israeli response. Not all protesters were simply protesting Israeli policy, some were engaging in antisemitism.
The Israeli response was driven by a decision of the IDF that they were going to have deal with significant civilian casualties in order to hunt Hamas with bombs. They have built their hiding places under hospitals and other civilian buildings to hide from Israelis. As a result, they the IDF has made Gaza unlivable and killed thousands. The politics in this decision is clear. Far right supporters of the Netanyahu government want this area cleared to remove a threat and to expand Israel. This is not some secret document, but open political discourse and policy in Israel. I remember the hope of peace accords and how Rabin was gunned down not by a Palestinian, but by a Jew. I have family and Israel. Their view of Arabs is less than human. It is hard to see the humanity in someone who keeps attacking you. Netanyahu’s war on Gaza is about appeasing his political right. They have long defeated Hamas. I remember watching a young 13 year old Palestinian girl smiling for the TV camera in a hospital because her leg was blown off. I couldn’t believe how she smiled under such circumstances. She offered such hope. The next day an Israeli bomb hit the hospital where she was staying. She was killed. This girl was not Hamas. She was just a little girl. This is what our young people were upset about. Prosecuting a war with the enemy that hides among its civilians makes for difficult choices. All the same, this little girl and many like her are dead. Gaza is in ruins. Harvard wants people to engage with each other again. The federal government cannot help with that. Further, there agenda is a political litmus test to get a job. Teach what the administration believes is correct. That is not the job of a professor or a way to run a university. Because Truckers mostly voted for Trump we don’t say, well we need to hire more liberal truckers. No, there speech is protected. To do what Trump proposes is to make second class citizens out of professors. To strip them of their rights. If successful, it will be a massive mistake. Harvard was already working to improve climate. I don’t see how cutting off funding from Jewish students helps their cause.
There is one problem here. “Pro-Hamas” seems relatively easy to define, but even then there is gray area. Almost nothing is monolithic- as in, I’m sure there are youngsters who cannot find Israel or Gaza on a map. I am concerned about people putting Hamas and Israel on equal footing, but that is just my opinion.
What is anti-American? We’ve been at odds with each other for our entire history. America is different things to different people, yet the words of our Constitution hold it together. For many it is worth dying for; for others, America is a business opportunity. It has always been this way.
Finally, what is anti-West? To me, it is simply various forms of democracy tracing back to ancient Athens. Others think Christianity is a part of it, yet I have failed to find that in the Constitution.
I believe people have read or watched too much media written in the style of heroes & myths, like the Iliad, which presents a distorted picture. Kind of like the romance people have with the “Wild West”, the problem is history itself. Latching on to a narrow view of history is unhealthy.
Tom: “Furthermore, there was never going to be a way to reform these institutions that liberals were going to like, and I’m glad Trump isn't even trying to reason with them.”
Objective reality-dissociated, psychopath Trump trying to ‘reason’? That has be one of the most uproariously risible delusions one could possibly eruct here or anywhere. No wonder that Harvard is going to decisively win this fascist-manufactured imbroglio and hand Trump, Stephen Miller and the cult martinets their backsides on a gold-plated platter!
Not if you take the DOGE approach and permanently wreck things in a way so fundamental that the liberals can never put them back together.
There is a reason Machievele said, “If an injury has to be done to a man, it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared.” I hope Trump does precisely that to Harvard and all of their allies.
Sounds like this is personal for you, Tom. Your hatred--doesn't seem like too strong a term--for Harvard seems to preclude reasonable thought about the consequences of Trump's rampage.
Well, Lesley, you can think what you like, but my guy won running on precisely this kind of agenda against a cabal of evil freaks who tried to take everything that he owned, send him to jail, and then, when that didn't work, rile up some lunatics to have him murdered.
So, you'll have to forgive me if I’m not in the mood to sympathize with these people.
Yeah I hope you get your way and us evil liberals, the worst thing in the entire world that you spend all your time solely sitting around screaming at because you lack all virtue and moderation, I hope we are never able to put beach together America's university system, and we as a country are never allowed to have an education system again. Then we can all just be slaves for you like you want, we won't get in trouble any more for knowing things you don't want us to know. That's fundamentally why you hate us: because we know too much, we're too hard for you to control. And you would destroy your own nation because of this. The family destruction, mass murder of their own families, done by bitter patriarch who did not receive from life all they think they deserve and so decide to destroy it. Congrats for destroying the republic, enemy of the nation. You people are totalitarian Maoists and enemies of freedom who hate all knowledge and liberty. You will not stop until we're all slaves of your network state.
Speaking of humanity, Charles, I'd ask that you consider switching your perspective from America as a country to America as an empire when speaking of the thousands of students who may be kicked out of our country. The key question to ask yourself is why are they coming, and what type of students get into Harvard. I've lived in Peru for a long time, and since Fujimori and his constitution, it has followed neoliberalism to a T. It's government has a 2% approval rating currently. Click the following, then the link under "Marzo 2025."
Why is their approval rating so low? One reason is because they have sold out its most vulnerable to allow multinationals to ransack the environment and take its resources, without properly reinvesting in public infrastructure projects that would benefit all. It is not the poor and vulnerable of Peru who get into Harvard. It is the children of the Peruvian elite, and many of them are vile. Their children get into Harvard so they can learn how to coordinate economic policy with the United States so that the American empire can access vital resources. Then it can construct the international order, and, you know, invade Iraq if it wants to.
Of course I am simplifying, of course not all are vile, but I hope you reconsider the innocence of the so-called poor international students who may or may not be kicked out of the country. Many of them are the sons and daughters of the elite in tyrannical societies.
Those threatened students know that they will be OK if their university Presidents protect their interests by working responsibly with the duly elected President of the United States. If they do not then they are no better than the antisemitic antidemocratic, women-hating Hamas murderers. Trump is conducting a public prosecution because he knows that is what most Americans want to see.
The entire point of this piece is that you should feel sorry for yourself! You're not being harsh when you "punish" Harvard; you're being short-sighted.
Physicists still complain about the brain drain from not building the big supercollider that Europe eventually did. If you're afraid of the strength that universities gave Woke, then you should be TERRIFIED OF GIVING THAT POWER TO CHINA INSTEAD OF KEEPING IT FOR OURSELVES.
It’s so funny when Liberals talk about physics research funding as if that is the point of disagreement.
The problem is everything else. The anti-American indoctrination, the totalitarian thought policing, the dead last free speech ranking from organizations like FIRE, the violation of White and Asian students' civil rights, etc.
Ciscero said, “If you want to persuade me, you must think my thoughts, feel my feelings, and speak my words.”
People like you do none of that and then wonder why no one is even the tiniest bit persuaded by your arguments.
I don't give a fuck if you don't specifically agree when the destruction of our physics research capability. You're doing it. Actions speak louder than words. You just want to destroy all knowledge do the you can control people. This is fundamentally a war against truth and knowledge by a decadent and entitled elite who drove themselves to madness on group chats. Run back to your group chat you whiny elite, you destroy our nation chasing your fantasies and stupid rumors on X and all you can do is tell us to feel what you feel. I find it difficult to feel the feelings of an idiot and a psychopathic monster. I just don't feel that way myself. I'm very sorry for disagreeing with someone of your elite station, who's so much above the rest of us. I'm very sorry that Harvard accepted too many black people for your tastes, clearly there should be caps on the entry of black students to get rid of your awesome, self imagined persecutions. And you run around flailing wildly and having panic attacks and destroying everything like an idiot God, including our physics, and you expect me to be most focused on your thoughts and feelings. That is apparently what I am supposed to think of at this time, with all the destruction you've wrought in your ignorance, cruelly, and evil throughout the past months. You are completely absent all moral virtues, our republic is dying precisely because all of our elites are moral vacuums without a single virtue such as yourself. So that you just sit around all day smacking scapegoats and feeling self satisfied while the world burns. Sick, decadent individual.
You didn't understand me— I'm talking about the proposed American supercollider that was eventually built in Europe (there named the Large Hadron Collider; you may have heard of it).
Your ability to incorrectly round what I was saying off to something else, which you answered with a Ciscero [sic] quote is not to your credit.
Yep. And all those students bear complete blame for Harvard’s sins. Yeah, fuck those kids. They have it coming, the foreign scum, right?
Really dude, did you even read the article? Not only are kids who had nothing to do with anything being punished, the US is also going to lose out on a lot of intellectual capital and development by following this unconstitutional scheme.
Apart from being unconstitutional, it’s cutting off your nose to spite your face. It’s just idiotic and stupid. But hey it owns the libs! Think of the lolz!
It's demonstrably false to say that a large number of international students aren't supporting anti-American, anti-West, pro-Hamas organizations, so they're not all precisely innocent bystanders just caught up in something they have nothing to do with.
However, I completely reject the premise that we've got to bring in international students because they're the "best and brightest."
Are some impressive? I'm sure they are, but when we spend 0.0001% of our federal budget on gifted and talented programs, banning AP/honors classes, middle school algebra, etc., in some parts of the country, we're clearly not even trying to maximize the talent we already have in the country. That's to say nothing of the implicit condescension baked into this whole argument: "Americans are too dumb and lazy, so that's why we have to replace them."
Furthermore, you have people writing statements of purpose that are nothing more than "#BLACKLIVESMATTER" 100 times in a row, getting accepted to our so-called most prestigious institutions, it's just so clear that developing the best and brightest isn't the goal here.
And while yes, it's fun to own the libs and get what, in my opinion, they have coming, that's not the goal. The goal is to reform these institutions and curtail the left-wing extremism that has been funded on the taxpayers' dime for decades now.
Again it doesn’t matter if they’re protesting for a cause I personally don’t agree with. It’s First Amendment protected speech. And that’s just the ones protesting. The ones “supporting,” in your words, “anti-American, anti-West, pro-Hamas organizations” are maybe doing so by protesting or writing or even in their own head, but again it’s not an actionable offense. Yes aliens have some circumscribed rights, but they have the majority of them and this is one of them. So whatever percentage you believe fall into this category, you still cannot deport an entire class of people for thought crimes. We are supposed to be better than that. I spent almost a decade in the Border Patrol and deported more than a few illegal aliens and even resident aliens who committed felonies. But to deport people because of wrongthink is not only unconstitutional in my mind, but just plain wrong. The First Amendment is set up for opinions that are not popular or mainstream. That’s the entire point. Much less to just sweep up everyone and ship them off, irrespective of whether they’re involved or not.
You also are confusing H1B visa holders with foreign students on a F visa. Those are very different things. As it goes I’m with you on the work visa issue. I’m not a huge fan of them for a number of reasons. That would be a different post and altogether longer. But that is not this. This is students and deportation and, in some instances, deportation without due process.
That I can’t get behind.
As to funding, these are private institutions. They do get government funding but as I understand it that’s mostly for research and development, not core curriculum. I’m certainly no fan of the left wing lunacy that’s taken hold on many institutions, but replacing it with right wing lunacy isn’t any better, which many in MAGAland seem to desire. Either way, dictating what to think and what to teach isn’t any better remedy or process than what is currently going on.
Building encampments on university property, discriminatorily blocking access to facilities, disrupting classes and libraries, vandalizing and occupying buildings, and harassing other students for their ethnic identity or simple difference of worldview is not protected speech. And some of those things are outright crimes. Aliens can be deported for crimes and they can CERTAINLY be expelled from school and lose the privilege of being welcome in the US and benefiting from our country for less. Nearly every opinion haver on this topic seems to be willfully ignorant of the fact that the first amendment is NOT the standard for student speech. There are all kinds of applicable standards that proscribe student conduct, which stop short of 1A speech. This is done for the very obvious and necessary reasons of fostering a productive learning/research environment, maintaining the standards of quality that got those students accepted into the uni in the first place, and simple issues of safety and trust.
Foreign students don’t live in some all-encompassing bubble of the university. They become part of the community of the cities and towns they live in. They benefit from all sorts of American amenities and features, and it is a privilege for them to do so entirely premised on the value they’re supposedly bringing to our country. The premise is an exchange of value - they’re get access to our education system and our society’s affluence and stability, and we get the benefit of their talent and potential contributions to our culture, technology and economy. When their side of the bargain is not held up, i.e. they’re causing chaos and disorder and disrupting the general learning environment, they lose the benefits of the exchange.
The points you made about the First and students are salient, yet if it’s government coming in to deport people absent removal from the university, then the First Amendment IS the relevant issue at hand. Yes the school can expel students, particularly at a private university, for speech issues under a far less stringent standard than the First.
But they hadn’t. So then if the federal government wishes to come in a deport students, the First Amendment very much comes into play.
Your point about violent protests and harassment are also relevant and not covered under First Amendment jurisprudence. However, there has to be some kind of proper process. Not just saying things happened and that some foreign students were involved therefore ALL foreign students at a particular school will be either deported or self deport or have to find another school to attend. There has to be an actual process with hearings and evidence and an opportunity to respond to allegations. Not just - we say it’s so and therefore we are gonna punish you. Accusations deserve the opportunity to respond and refute. We are not an autocracy. Presenting these allegations as fully-formed conclusions at the outset undermines the very notion of due process.
This is a blatant power move designed to punish a university. And I say this as someone not particularly enamored with that university and its processes of late. They have been operating under clear double standards and embracing some troubling ideologies as I see it.
But this bullshit isn’t the answer. The administration stripping Harvard’s ability to enroll foreign students is an unconstitutional retaliation.
It’s always so revealing to read that “It's demonstrably false to say that … blah, blah, blah” then read absolutely nothing following that statement that demonstrates its falsehood. There is nothing there that supports the empty claim. All this kind of nonsense amounts to is a huge waste of time for anyone who thinks they may be enlightened by comments on this truly fair and balanced article about the issue at hand.
So, if I just agreed that Harvard was great, completely in the right, and the Ivys had no problems, would that make me more human? My humanity is contingent on agreeing with the opinions of these so-called elite institutions?
You know what, man. You’re right, I’m convinced. There are no totalitarian impulses driving anything going on at Harvard.
Not at all, just that as a large, complex organization, it is as silly to say of Harvard, “I have no sympathy” as it would be to say “I have complete, unconditional sympathy.” Whatever the sins of its leadership, you seem fine with innocent students, faculty, and staff having their educations/lives/livelihoods disrupted and worse…toward what end? Eliminating antisemitism? That’s the barest and most cynical fig leaf there is.
You seem fine with innocent Jewish students, faculty, and staff having their educations/lives/livelihoods disrupted and worse…toward what end? Tax payer funded education for some Belgian princess? That’s the barest and most cynical fig leaf there is.
We're not concerned about the woke area studies professors losing their funding. We're concerned about the fact that our current president and ~50% of the electorate are stupid enough to sabotage our entire scientific research apparatus, along with a major source of high-quality immigrants, just to piss off said area studies professors.
It's not "boo hoo, poor lefties" it's "our country is being hollowed out by the short sightedness and tribal ape brains of the dumbest people alive."
I'm less mad at dumb "death to amerikkka" lefties than I am at the even dumber rightoids who are *actively harming the United States* for petty culture war reasons
Trump’s direct frontal assault on Harvard University and the liberal education it represents is first and foremost the most un-American state weaponization of the lamentable pathology of irrationalist anti-intellectualism in American history. What renders it particularly pernicious and evil is Trump deceit of Trump, the world’s most powerful antisemite and racist acting as the tribune Jewish people as a Trojan Horse for his grander crusade to destroy the bastions of liberal thought in America in service of the white Christian nationalist movement and its theocratic End Times eschatology.
Oddly enough considering your headline, you make an excellent argument for what the Trump administration is doing to Harvard and the rest of the educational sector.
The problem with Trump and his team is that they are not building anything new or talking in an inspiring and vital way that makes young men want to enroll in Hillsdale or the U of Chicago. They just hate coastal, social justice academia (which I understand) but they aren't funding new schools or offering incentives to state schools to teach Christopher Lasch. Why do they have to pick these fights in public? Why not quietly drain funding away from left wing universities year by year, while offering money to schools that only admit Americans, don't reverse discriminate, and teach legit conservative thought and patriotic American history?
Great thought, in theory. I can see that Trump approaches the issues with a sledge hammer, not a wrench. In other words, he wreaks havoc rather than making minor adjustments. That upsets people's sensitivity, but it's probably the only way to be effective. People have been attempting minor adjustments for decades. Those minor adjustments get sloughed off and never have any effect. The Trump way has an effect. It's been too long in coming.
You can take a sledgehammer in better ways. Shut down the grievance studies and humanities departments responsible for the craziness and move their funding and resources to science departments that do the research we actually need and aren't nearly as full of crazies.
Honestly, I dont think you can overstate it. My daughter went to an Ivy League, has several friends at Harvard and Yale. I know from first hand information how extreme those schools are. Example: A Yale dean was hounded out of school ( resigned I believe, after getting no support from admin). His crime: He suggested that for Halloween ( which is a big decadent campus wide affair at Yale) students should try to be sensitive in terms of not wearing costumes that might offend ( like dressing up as a Native American chief or wearing a sombrero). But he added that students should have a sense of humor... That provoked hysterical outrage from the wokesters which led to his resignation.
To clarify, Nicholas Christakis resigned from his role as head of Silliman college, which is a kind of pastoral role. He did not resign from his academic position as a professor; he still has a lab and teaches classes. I believe Erika Christakis doesn't have any further affiliation with Yale, but her initial affiliation was basically connected to her husband being head of the college.
I think that episode was a dark moment, and probably played some causal role in getting us to where we are with trust in higher ed cratering.
Thank you both Daniel and Priya for clarifying. I will just add that being a dean brings prestige and higher earnings. So losing that position was definitely a blow to his career path ( and pocketbook) and I am sure that other deans and professors took note.
What about the tens of thousands of people who were immediately summarily fired because somebody trawled through a database and saw the word diversity in something they had written and then immediately fired them without even bothering to check with them or their manager? What about that? That actually didn't happen a decade ago either, it was just now. They were b making up stories about cancelations entirely too justify this, knowing that people would be too stupid and lazy to double check any lie that pleased their prejudice.
Both Nicholas and Erika (his wife) Christakis are still at Yale. It was a ridiculous thing that happened and totally unfair to them, but Yale hasn't hounded them out.
Don't stop the persecuted while they're spinning their usual yarn. They saw it on X, they saw it in their group chat, and then it's true. My trusted friend could never have added fake details! A Dean can't get fired, they signed a contract right, it's not legal. Only if they're a liberal is that legal. Conservatives actually get the benefit of the law and the contracts they signed, they only make up stories about conservatives getting fired so they can generate excuses for what they want to do.
So says the enemy of the Republic. I will stand by the constitution, not your totalitarianism and tyranny. You rightists constantly fantasize injuries to justify your endless aggressions. You started this. We'll finish it. We will not die slaves like you have chosen, traitor. Apostate.
The educational system in this country has become aggressively anti-American and anti-semitic. The taxpayers have no obligation to support this racist enemy within.
What about oligarchs like Bill Ackman who are monarchists and oppose the republic under the instructions of Yarvin? Why shouldn't we destroy them? Wasn't this nation founded as a rebellion against monarchists? And yet the Trump worship that has displaced the Christian religion in this nation insists that nothing comes before the will of Trump, that we should be happy to be his slaves and surrender our freedom and liberty to him. This is a treasonous ideology and apostasy from the civic religion. The elite oligarch infestation with monarchists, white supremacists, and neo nazis should be a big deal and a big national security threat, but you seem entirely intent on destroying their scapegoats they tell their lies about instead. Most people are ignorant sheep and easy to control like this.
I think academic institutions are so corrupted at this point, that burning them down and starting afresh would be less effort than trying to reform them.
Harvard's capitulation to Wokeism should go down in history as the thing which destroyed their university.
Then build theor replacements in the United States before pushing international students to seek comfort from other ideologies! If American Wokism scares you so much, imagine how terrible the indoctrination is that China will happily offer instead
The words of our decadent elite are hilarious. Yes this will be great for you, don't let us stop you. Just tell more ghost stories about wokeness on your racist group chats while Rome burns. You people are the definition of decadence, a prime example of the vacuum of virtue that consists of our elite oligarch class.
Per the NYT, currently 27% of Harvard’s student body consists of foreign nationals, up from 19% in 2010. That is a pretty big increase. Surely Harvard was could have managed with the 2010 level of “talent;” I would argue that what it couldn’t manage without was all that money, in no small part from Qatar and China. These students pay full freight, courtesy of their government. I am sure that is totally unrelated to Harvard’s other problems highlighted by the administration, particularly the antisemitism and its failure to address it adequately. (Attorneys for a student who was harassed and mobbed at a demonstration have repeatedly demanded reports from the Harvard administration regarding the investigation it promised to do of the students involved; to date they have received no response, and there are reports that the local authorities dropped their own investigation when Harvard refused to provide them with information on the students.)
It should also be noted that Harvard has been given 72 hours to comply with the administration’s requests before the ability to grant student visas will be taken away. These requests are reasonable and include providing records of disciplinary actions against foreign students. Lest you think this is an unnecessary overreach, as noted above, there is evidence that Harvard is obstructing and/or delaying such action against foreign students.
Please stop covering this issue as though the actions by the Trump administration were happening in a vacuum, by a rogue vindictive individual who just has it in for the Ivy League doe some reason.
Yes, Trump’s personal manner is distasteful to many. Yes, he may be guilty of overreach. But it is an act of intellectual dishonesty and a dereliction of journalistic duty to elide significant and relevant information about what has happened at Harvard which is needed to fully explain what is happening. Making this story about Trump, and the “talent” which will be lost, is not helpful. Again, “Trump is bad” is the laziest and most stale take in 2025.
I doubt there are any graduate students (the majority of international students in Harvard) that pay full freight. Typically such students enroll in “professional” MS programs. The vast majority of PhD grads, domestic or international, are supported via teaching assistantships or research fellowships.
You've changed the topic from the student body in general to graduate students, as you couldn't be bother to pay attention, I will not dignify your comment with a reply.
I have to admit that I found Mounk's post to be just slightly better than incoherent. Perhaps it is because he has tried to jam too many thoughts into an OpEd sized essay that he comes across as a two-handed political scientist (or, in this case, cultural commentator). He ends up putting a good face on bad faith actions.
So we get the now familiar shibboleths about Harvard's leftist cultural elitism, its hypocrisy on matters of free speech i.e. intolerance of conservatives, its dependence on federal funding to give its students and faculty an unjustifiably high standard of living and so on. That was one hand. But now, on the other hand, the old saw of geopolitical rivalry at the highest level of technological supremacism requires Harvard and its kind to be funded to be in service of national security.
The bogus charges of antisemitism and anti-Western Civilization and anti-Judeo Christian type nonsense can be put aside. The attack on America's most venerable institution of higher education is evidence of a return to Gilded Age values (as is now amply clear from the overall thrust of the Administration's actions), where businesses and private corporations seize control of every aspect of the nation. The force that is taking shape stands for hierarchical individualism, untrammeled economic freedom for those at the top and a regimented society in service to a techno-financial elite. It is a Social Darwinist form of organization and control, a belief system not unfamiliar to the Anglo-American world, which ran in parallel to an ascendant liberalism in the late 19th century only to fade way. If it is a meritocracy, it is a brutal, misshapen one.
And there is no place for education and reasoned debate in this worldview.
I think you’re being a bit hard on Yascha. We’re living through a once-in-a-century populist backlash rooted in legitimate grievance, and it's reached a boiling point. People on all sides increasingly believe the time for conversation is over—that we’ve entered an era of resistance and confrontation. In such a volatile and unstable climate, anyone trying to unpack events in good faith is walking a razor’s edge. You’re facing the same dilemma.
I don’t say this to criticize, but even your response includes a certain amount of stock rhetoric and shibboleths and shows how hard it’s become for even our sharpest minds to make sense of things. Your take is as valid as any, given the circumstances.
For what it’s worth, my hot take is this: the Harvard episode seems part of a larger pattern in which Trump has effectively abandoned any shot at building a lasting political realignment. His movement may end up echoing Nixon’s—fiery, consequential, but ultimately fleeting. His opponents will rejoice, but I doubt the country will escape the broader downward spiral we're caught in.
We will break the fascists, and then we will restore the law, the constitution, freedom, and the republic WHETHER OR NOT THEY LIKE IT. We will defeat their totalitarian imposition of political and thought controls, we will not submit to their totalitarian DOGE political commisars and their arbitrary unlawful ideological diktats. We choose freedom. Those that choose slavery and Trump worship can fuck off. Even they foreswore and spat on the constitution, they renounced their citizenship. I do not *just* find them to be traitor, they are also apostate from the civil religion, which forbids monarchism and anti constitutionalism, which are the only beliefs of the traitors and the enemies of the . The founders could imagine no greater shame than observing these anti American totalitarian psychopaths and parasites polluting their nation and assaulting freedom on all fronts. All those who are WITH AMERICA, are WITH US. Enemies of the Republic, be on guard, the eyes of God are watching you, as you commit your wickednesses and evils, God is watching and we will know the truth.
Please tell God that Nathan apologizes for his past support of the liberal elite over-reach that so obviously caused this populist backlash. Tell her that I especially regret culturally ostracizing half the country after having economically disenfranchised them. Thanks! :)
I regret telling lower class Americans that their racist when clearly the our elites are all racist and the problem stops at the top. It was a waste of time to look at racism and misogyny at lower levels of American society when this was the whole time all of it was coming straight from the top. Neither was systemic racism a good tack: the problem ultimately isn't the system, it's that our leadership and oligarchs are character vacuums and control the world mostly by lying and inventing scapegoats in order to distract idiots. How could a society controlled by such evil and ideologically extreme neo fascists at all levels survive? Rightists are always creating problems to sell people on the solution. You tell lies and make up a fake problem precisely to justify your own aggressions. And laugh as your innocent scapegoats suffer, you know they're innocent and this makes you hate and despise them more.
I can't wait to tell my family that I am a rightist now. They will be so excited. Honestly this is the first I've heard of it so I'm pretty excited about it myself. :) Do I get some kind of tax break or something? :)
God loves JD Vance because JD loves him. God doesn't like usurers and bureaucrats who confiscate hard earned money and use it to indoctrinate children.
A Canadian who just voted for more mass migration, more censorship, more financialization of the economy and more left-wing "education" telling Americans that WE voted for "national suicide" is really rich. When will the left wing make the connection between the decline in quality of life in their cities and their politicians dismantling the nuclear family, forgiving bad behavior by "oppressed groups", celebrating sexual deviancy and inviting the whole world in to cities?
We are awash in the speculative future, and Mounk's piece is just another example. The New York Times runs one story after another that is not actual journalism--the reporting of events after they have occurred--but the extrapolation of the future from a slender set of premises, all of them ideologically driven. This short on facts, long on prophesy approach adds to the hysteria, raises blood pressure, and makes the world a demonstrably worse place.
Neither the NY Times nor Mounk is a soothsayer, and at least in the Times' case, their predictions have been so wrong, so many times, with so little accountability that it is a wonder anyone takes anything they say seriously.
Foreign students will face greater scrutiny. But the visas are part of a negotiation, and they will not, under any circumstance, all be revoked. It is astonishing that Mounk does not give even a passing nod to this as a possibility.
Yeah thanks I got tons of facts from this, you're so much smarter. Let's just replace universities with racist oligarch group chats and racist podcasts, then we will have a cultural revival. Enemies of the Republic.
I haven't seen good arguments for why the federal government needs to fund and direct research outside of defense. The federal bureaucracy around science is actually fairly recent thing and has correlated closely the decline of educational institutions since the 60s. The opportunity cost of putting scientists under the thumb of the government has been rot and stagnation in academic culture as scientists have become pawns in political fights.
The standard economic argument is that basic research--research that may eventually lead to applications, but is too many steps removed from patentability for the researchers to directly profit from it--has positive externalities, and so will be undersupplied by a free market. Many of the most influential contemporary technologies--AI, mRNA vaccines--have their roots in research that happened in universities. Would that have happened in the private sector in a world where universities didn't get government support? Maybe? But there's no obvious reason why it would have, and simple economic logic suggests we'd have less blue sky research and more research focused on immediate patentability in a world without government funded university labs.
Government support was essential to enabling our conversing via the internet.. without ARPA government support, talented people like Vint Cerf never would have developed TCP/IP. Also Daniel, I love your philosophy YouTube videos😁
I'm curious what the argument for the undersupply is though. Like how do we actually know the private opportunity cost? Universities conducted general research before federal funding. The other comments are mentioning things like cancer, but if you don't believe crazy medical conspiracies about pharma intentionally withholding a cure - it seems like there's plenty profit motive for long-term cure research at companies and universities as well as nonprofits.
I agree that government helps and has a place in emergencies (COVID) and moonshots (like our literal race to the moon), but those aren't an argument for longterm federal general research funding that already takes place at private universities - or the disastrous accreditation interference that's lead to a lot of the damaging woke stuff. If anything, those specific security adjacent emergencies seem like the opposite.
I think the theoretical case I gave in the above comment is pretty straightforward--basic research involves value creation only a small fraction of which is captured by the creator. When you're doing research for a particular application that can be patented and commercialized, you can capture lots of the value, and you should expect the private sector to supply it. But when there's research whose outputs will become public, and the value of which will be dispersed, you should expect the private sector to undersupply it. So that's an argument for some kind of subsidy (doesn't necessarily have to go via universities, but that seems like a natural place for it).
I think the real-world practical question is much harder. It's not just that universities did research--though a lot less--before the post-war funding boom. It's also that that there has historically been more basic research in the private sector than you might expect from what I called "simple economic logic." Everybody likes to use Bell Labs as an example, because it's a good one. Lots of stuff came out of there, and while some of it was immediately practical (e.g., the transistor), you also had Claude Shannon who founded the entire field of information theory, which certainly had lots of downstream applications, but I imagine very little of its value was captured by Bell Labs, so there wasn't a narrow profit-motive for them to fund stuff like that.
And we certainly still have stuff like that today. Microsoft funds lots of basic research, as does Google. Maybe we'd get more of that in a world where the NSF and the NIH funded much less. I don't know.
Right but you're just stating a generic case. By this logic you could put anything under government control. For example, Windows OS fits this description - but windows still makes a profit and a government OS would be a terrible idea. I've never heard any justification for pulling scientists out of the private sphere and the normal university system to work for the government on literally "whatever". This only makes sense if you can point in process, not in hindsight, what we're going to get out of it. "We happened to stumble on a bunch of good stuff in 1960 and 1980" doesn't cut it when accounting for opportunity cost
I really don't see why this justification strikes you as applying to windows. Windows has no trouble capturing the value it creates, because their product is a discrete, closed source bit of software that is protected by IP law, and so they can charge for it.
The point is that what they can charge for is a fraction of the value other companies make by relying on Windows to make software, games, enterprise server architecture etc.
But sure, let's take something totally abstract. Is there any concrete evidence that the amount and value of the theoretical physics we produce at universities has any correlation to grantwriting volume vs. normal private/nonprofit university funding? I'm not a denier here but I'm really skeptical when I've never seen anything approximating data on it.
I think the case is by far strongest in STEM, but that's not a dodge, because that's where the federal money goes. There's a reason Harvard and Columbia have been in the news, but Amherst and Swarthmore have not. Liberal arts colleges depend on the federal government far far less than research universities. It's not because humanities at Amherst and Swarthmore are all that different from humanities at Harvard and Columbia. Rather, it's because STEM at small liberal arts colleges is just a matter of undergrad education, while STEM at research universities is a whole different beast, more focused on (expensive!) research than on undergraduate education.
They hate STEM because they hate America and wish to destroy the republic and constitution. They wish for a state takeover of all universities to universally impose political and thought controls to align with their fascist ideology and beliefs.
It's worked this way you're whole goddamn life and you're like whaa this is a recent thing. It is fairly ridiculous as well that you apparently think scientists do not seek private grants already, apparently all their projects are 100% federal grants with no other source.
But honestly, government funding can have a multiplier effect for development in private industry. Pharmaceuticals are a good example, government funded research on risky areas often leads to private drug manufacturers to develop life saving or life improving drugs. And top schools seem to have a good track record using this money.
President Trump has a history of going after those who have offended or those he preceives have offended him. Could it be as simple as Harvard and Columbia denied him admission to their university when he applied when he was young?
No hate for NYU. Both of my parents went there and it probably has just as strong a faculty as the Ivies, but Donald and everyone else around him - Vance (Yale) and Musk (Penn) like the badge of elite education but now love to hate on it! It is so funny how people glory in putting a crown on their head and then the next moment start ranting and railing against the whole Kingdom.
I agree with much of this article. But I find the claim that "whole academic disciplines" are teaching nothing but "hogwash" because they are inundated with "post-modern theory" without any attempt to substantiate the claim through a discussion of actual texts, arguments, or other sorts of evidence, to be profoundly anti-intellectual. Why the gratuitous lazy slander against un-named disciplines and un-explicated ideas?
The entire concept of the Cathedral comes from Foucalt. Yarvin literally just plagiarized Foucalt and was given applause and endless awards by our idiot elites. Shows to go show the true source of the moral and intellectual rot in our society - it comes from the oligarchs. They have always been stabbing the nation in the back from the shadows, while lying about their beliefs on public. That is the conspiracy against the republic that is underway by traitors and their mindless sheep.
Whoever thinks “Harvard deserves this”, is clueless and clearly doesn’t understand the implications. This is not about “Harvard”, it’s about decimating the highest possible level of institution, in order to force everyone else into absolute submission without further effort.
While the dismantling and annihilation of universities is the unavoidable stepping stone towards autocracy and dictatorship, in the case of American universities this will not only do irreparable harm to America, but to the entire world of science and liberal arts, given that some of the world’s top academic institutions are right here.
We are looking at an unimaginable brain drain from the United States to Europe and China, including also the ultra wealthy Arab countries who have the means but never had the pull to build the world’s greatest research universities imaginable.
America as a beacon of higher education, research, discoveries and advancement will disappear, and never come back.
Trump knows exactly what he is doing in order to save the nation: applying shock therapy to bodies that are so infected with the Woke virus that they only function as the nutrients for the virus. Cutting off the nutrients is one of many cures necessary to revive the body, if possible. Obviously, Yasha has not recovered yet.
We need to apply stock therapy to our oligarchs, not our universities. Our oligarchs need to be taught a lesson. Liquidate then, if the right of property and freedom of speech don't belong at our universities, I see no reason to respect the private property of cancerous institutions like Tesla. You started this.
"Unbundling" is a good idea. I am off to an Ivy League campus for Grad school in the fall and I certainly wish I could cut my bill by thousands of dollars and only pay for the classes and turn down the gym membership, meal plan, administrators.
Yasha je ne comprends pas cette obsession à pointer les excès “progressistes” des institutions qui seraient censés expliquer l’avènement d’une dictature populiste. Les régimes facistes ont toujours pris pour cible les centres du savoir, les artistes, les médias, tous ceux qui ont le tort de penser. La vulgarité et l’agressivité invraisemblable de ce gouvernement Trump et de ses représentants n’a d’autre justification que l’anti-intellectualisme primaire d’individus incultes et quasi illettrés. Point final !
There are plenty of us in universities who hold PhDs and are part of the professoriate, and who yet despise the illiberal, discriminatory, and yes anti-intellectual trend that universities themselves have adopted in the last few decades.
To claim a binary of anti-intellectual fascist thugs versus enlightened, open-minded universities preserving the democratic good is simply false.
It you opposed illiberalism and supported the law and constitution and freedom of thought, you would oppose trumps attempt at establishing total state control over universities, as well as political and thought controls on allowable ideas. Since you are instead introducing these things, I must only conclude that you are liars who made all of that up precisely to impose your thought controls. You were opposed to freedom of speech the entire time, this was actually your entire problem, was that students are allowed to think and say things you don't personally approve of.
One of your best observations. Harvard Columbia Tufts and the rest were put on notice, by the Supreme Court, the on campus riots, the election, and the words of Trump. In their arrogance they refused to issue a mea culpa and went on with their noses in the air. Many including myself, think they need to be taken down a notch or two. Trump was elected to break plates, and he learned from his first administration not to play by the oppositions rules.
Breaking plates is one thing, but your comment would also imply that Trump and crew do not need to play by the rules of the Constitution either? History points to this being a dark, and yes arrogant, path to go down.
Was it Constitutional for Biden to allow our border to be invaded? Was the clearly contrived trial in New York constitutional? And therein is the crucible, By not adhering to a strict interpretation of our constitution, perhaps by Kennedy/Biden breaking with Senate tradition in the Bork nomination, we started down the dark path to no rule of law only its imaginative interpretations by ideological lawyers.. It's a long way back,but Trump's work is required to start that process.
Yes just invent more fake grievances to justify your aggression and evil nature. That is why you spit on the constitution of your nation, and seek to destroy your republic. That's why. You are a traitor and enemy of the Republic. I will not apologize for supporting the law, the constitution, and republic, even as you spit on all three and seek to replace our traditions with totalitarian thought controls and mindless worship of one man. You'll make up more bullshit regardless of what we do, any time you wish to aggress against us (which is always), you will make up a new lie. But the source of all your lies is itself, it isn't God, it isn't reality. It certainly isn't morality or the law, which you traitors hate more than anything. Enemies.
What exactly is the “ideological hogwash” you see taking over parts of the academy? Neoliberalism? Human rights? Decolonialism? Utilitarianism? IR realism? Feminism? Postmodernism? Originalism? Social Constructivism? …it would be good to know….
Can you please enumerate to me which thoughts I'm allowed to have? What books am I allowed to read? What am I allowed to say, oh Nobel one? Please give your list of politically correct ideas. Or are you just going to continue telling lies on group chats and X and confusing that with knowledge?
Harvard knows why this is happening, and they have no one to blame but themselves. I have zero sympathy for them.
Well Tom, how about any sympathy for the potentially thousands of students who may be kicked out of our country for zero fault of their own? You may have no sympathy for Harvard, but Trump moves like this, that are so out of proportion and lacking in humanity, only further undermine the reputation and direction of our country.
Not if they're anti-American, anti-West, pro-Hamas sympathizers, and let's be honest, Harvard exists in no small part to create those kinds of people.
Furthermore, there was never going to be a way to reform these institutions that liberals were going to like, and I’m glad Trump isn't even trying to reason with them.
“I won. You lost. I can do it. You can cry if you don't like it.” should be the administration's attitude for the next 1300 days.
Gosh. Apparently no nothing about Harvard or most universities. Look, I am an American Jew and I definitely think this is over the top and out of control(Trump). Encouraging work to improve climate and improve relationships between different groups Jews and Arabs on campus for example is something that was already underway at Harvard. In fact, if you read the 300 page report on antisemitism and the similar report on Islamophobia there it is sad story. At one point these groups used to talk to each other, even be friends and have civil discussions. Eventually this eventually fell away. Harvard is a reflection of a country that has become more extreme and less tolerant. The attack of October 7 was devastating. My university acknowledged it as such. To be honest, we have never acknowledged a single civilian Palestinian death, as if they have not happened. With such a horrific terror attack it is hard to say anything but Israel do what you feel is necessary to prevent another attack. What young people across the United States were concerned about was the intensity of the Israeli response. Not all protesters were simply protesting Israeli policy, some were engaging in antisemitism.
The Israeli response was driven by a decision of the IDF that they were going to have deal with significant civilian casualties in order to hunt Hamas with bombs. They have built their hiding places under hospitals and other civilian buildings to hide from Israelis. As a result, they the IDF has made Gaza unlivable and killed thousands. The politics in this decision is clear. Far right supporters of the Netanyahu government want this area cleared to remove a threat and to expand Israel. This is not some secret document, but open political discourse and policy in Israel. I remember the hope of peace accords and how Rabin was gunned down not by a Palestinian, but by a Jew. I have family and Israel. Their view of Arabs is less than human. It is hard to see the humanity in someone who keeps attacking you. Netanyahu’s war on Gaza is about appeasing his political right. They have long defeated Hamas. I remember watching a young 13 year old Palestinian girl smiling for the TV camera in a hospital because her leg was blown off. I couldn’t believe how she smiled under such circumstances. She offered such hope. The next day an Israeli bomb hit the hospital where she was staying. She was killed. This girl was not Hamas. She was just a little girl. This is what our young people were upset about. Prosecuting a war with the enemy that hides among its civilians makes for difficult choices. All the same, this little girl and many like her are dead. Gaza is in ruins. Harvard wants people to engage with each other again. The federal government cannot help with that. Further, there agenda is a political litmus test to get a job. Teach what the administration believes is correct. That is not the job of a professor or a way to run a university. Because Truckers mostly voted for Trump we don’t say, well we need to hire more liberal truckers. No, there speech is protected. To do what Trump proposes is to make second class citizens out of professors. To strip them of their rights. If successful, it will be a massive mistake. Harvard was already working to improve climate. I don’t see how cutting off funding from Jewish students helps their cause.
There is one problem here. “Pro-Hamas” seems relatively easy to define, but even then there is gray area. Almost nothing is monolithic- as in, I’m sure there are youngsters who cannot find Israel or Gaza on a map. I am concerned about people putting Hamas and Israel on equal footing, but that is just my opinion.
What is anti-American? We’ve been at odds with each other for our entire history. America is different things to different people, yet the words of our Constitution hold it together. For many it is worth dying for; for others, America is a business opportunity. It has always been this way.
Finally, what is anti-West? To me, it is simply various forms of democracy tracing back to ancient Athens. Others think Christianity is a part of it, yet I have failed to find that in the Constitution.
I believe people have read or watched too much media written in the style of heroes & myths, like the Iliad, which presents a distorted picture. Kind of like the romance people have with the “Wild West”, the problem is history itself. Latching on to a narrow view of history is unhealthy.
Tom: “Furthermore, there was never going to be a way to reform these institutions that liberals were going to like, and I’m glad Trump isn't even trying to reason with them.”
Objective reality-dissociated, psychopath Trump trying to ‘reason’? That has be one of the most uproariously risible delusions one could possibly eruct here or anywhere. No wonder that Harvard is going to decisively win this fascist-manufactured imbroglio and hand Trump, Stephen Miller and the cult martinets their backsides on a gold-plated platter!
Not if you take the DOGE approach and permanently wreck things in a way so fundamental that the liberals can never put them back together.
There is a reason Machievele said, “If an injury has to be done to a man, it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared.” I hope Trump does precisely that to Harvard and all of their allies.
Sounds like this is personal for you, Tom. Your hatred--doesn't seem like too strong a term--for Harvard seems to preclude reasonable thought about the consequences of Trump's rampage.
Well, Lesley, you can think what you like, but my guy won running on precisely this kind of agenda against a cabal of evil freaks who tried to take everything that he owned, send him to jail, and then, when that didn't work, rile up some lunatics to have him murdered.
So, you'll have to forgive me if I’m not in the mood to sympathize with these people.
Yeah I hope you get your way and us evil liberals, the worst thing in the entire world that you spend all your time solely sitting around screaming at because you lack all virtue and moderation, I hope we are never able to put beach together America's university system, and we as a country are never allowed to have an education system again. Then we can all just be slaves for you like you want, we won't get in trouble any more for knowing things you don't want us to know. That's fundamentally why you hate us: because we know too much, we're too hard for you to control. And you would destroy your own nation because of this. The family destruction, mass murder of their own families, done by bitter patriarch who did not receive from life all they think they deserve and so decide to destroy it. Congrats for destroying the republic, enemy of the nation. You people are totalitarian Maoists and enemies of freedom who hate all knowledge and liberty. You will not stop until we're all slaves of your network state.
They were good enough to get into Harvard, they're good enough to get into any US University.
Speaking of humanity, Charles, I'd ask that you consider switching your perspective from America as a country to America as an empire when speaking of the thousands of students who may be kicked out of our country. The key question to ask yourself is why are they coming, and what type of students get into Harvard. I've lived in Peru for a long time, and since Fujimori and his constitution, it has followed neoliberalism to a T. It's government has a 2% approval rating currently. Click the following, then the link under "Marzo 2025."
https://iep.org.pe/noticias/iep-informe-de-opinion-marzo-2025/
Why is their approval rating so low? One reason is because they have sold out its most vulnerable to allow multinationals to ransack the environment and take its resources, without properly reinvesting in public infrastructure projects that would benefit all. It is not the poor and vulnerable of Peru who get into Harvard. It is the children of the Peruvian elite, and many of them are vile. Their children get into Harvard so they can learn how to coordinate economic policy with the United States so that the American empire can access vital resources. Then it can construct the international order, and, you know, invade Iraq if it wants to.
Of course I am simplifying, of course not all are vile, but I hope you reconsider the innocence of the so-called poor international students who may or may not be kicked out of the country. Many of them are the sons and daughters of the elite in tyrannical societies.
Humanity?
Those threatened students know that they will be OK if their university Presidents protect their interests by working responsibly with the duly elected President of the United States. If they do not then they are no better than the antisemitic antidemocratic, women-hating Hamas murderers. Trump is conducting a public prosecution because he knows that is what most Americans want to see.
The entire point of this piece is that you should feel sorry for yourself! You're not being harsh when you "punish" Harvard; you're being short-sighted.
Physicists still complain about the brain drain from not building the big supercollider that Europe eventually did. If you're afraid of the strength that universities gave Woke, then you should be TERRIFIED OF GIVING THAT POWER TO CHINA INSTEAD OF KEEPING IT FOR OURSELVES.
It’s so funny when Liberals talk about physics research funding as if that is the point of disagreement.
The problem is everything else. The anti-American indoctrination, the totalitarian thought policing, the dead last free speech ranking from organizations like FIRE, the violation of White and Asian students' civil rights, etc.
Ciscero said, “If you want to persuade me, you must think my thoughts, feel my feelings, and speak my words.”
People like you do none of that and then wonder why no one is even the tiniest bit persuaded by your arguments.
I don't give a fuck if you don't specifically agree when the destruction of our physics research capability. You're doing it. Actions speak louder than words. You just want to destroy all knowledge do the you can control people. This is fundamentally a war against truth and knowledge by a decadent and entitled elite who drove themselves to madness on group chats. Run back to your group chat you whiny elite, you destroy our nation chasing your fantasies and stupid rumors on X and all you can do is tell us to feel what you feel. I find it difficult to feel the feelings of an idiot and a psychopathic monster. I just don't feel that way myself. I'm very sorry for disagreeing with someone of your elite station, who's so much above the rest of us. I'm very sorry that Harvard accepted too many black people for your tastes, clearly there should be caps on the entry of black students to get rid of your awesome, self imagined persecutions. And you run around flailing wildly and having panic attacks and destroying everything like an idiot God, including our physics, and you expect me to be most focused on your thoughts and feelings. That is apparently what I am supposed to think of at this time, with all the destruction you've wrought in your ignorance, cruelly, and evil throughout the past months. You are completely absent all moral virtues, our republic is dying precisely because all of our elites are moral vacuums without a single virtue such as yourself. So that you just sit around all day smacking scapegoats and feeling self satisfied while the world burns. Sick, decadent individual.
You didn't understand me— I'm talking about the proposed American supercollider that was eventually built in Europe (there named the Large Hadron Collider; you may have heard of it).
Your ability to incorrectly round what I was saying off to something else, which you answered with a Ciscero [sic] quote is not to your credit.
Yep. And all those students bear complete blame for Harvard’s sins. Yeah, fuck those kids. They have it coming, the foreign scum, right?
Really dude, did you even read the article? Not only are kids who had nothing to do with anything being punished, the US is also going to lose out on a lot of intellectual capital and development by following this unconstitutional scheme.
Apart from being unconstitutional, it’s cutting off your nose to spite your face. It’s just idiotic and stupid. But hey it owns the libs! Think of the lolz!
Goddamn some people just don’t think at all
It's demonstrably false to say that a large number of international students aren't supporting anti-American, anti-West, pro-Hamas organizations, so they're not all precisely innocent bystanders just caught up in something they have nothing to do with.
However, I completely reject the premise that we've got to bring in international students because they're the "best and brightest."
Are some impressive? I'm sure they are, but when we spend 0.0001% of our federal budget on gifted and talented programs, banning AP/honors classes, middle school algebra, etc., in some parts of the country, we're clearly not even trying to maximize the talent we already have in the country. That's to say nothing of the implicit condescension baked into this whole argument: "Americans are too dumb and lazy, so that's why we have to replace them."
Furthermore, you have people writing statements of purpose that are nothing more than "#BLACKLIVESMATTER" 100 times in a row, getting accepted to our so-called most prestigious institutions, it's just so clear that developing the best and brightest isn't the goal here.
And while yes, it's fun to own the libs and get what, in my opinion, they have coming, that's not the goal. The goal is to reform these institutions and curtail the left-wing extremism that has been funded on the taxpayers' dime for decades now.
Again it doesn’t matter if they’re protesting for a cause I personally don’t agree with. It’s First Amendment protected speech. And that’s just the ones protesting. The ones “supporting,” in your words, “anti-American, anti-West, pro-Hamas organizations” are maybe doing so by protesting or writing or even in their own head, but again it’s not an actionable offense. Yes aliens have some circumscribed rights, but they have the majority of them and this is one of them. So whatever percentage you believe fall into this category, you still cannot deport an entire class of people for thought crimes. We are supposed to be better than that. I spent almost a decade in the Border Patrol and deported more than a few illegal aliens and even resident aliens who committed felonies. But to deport people because of wrongthink is not only unconstitutional in my mind, but just plain wrong. The First Amendment is set up for opinions that are not popular or mainstream. That’s the entire point. Much less to just sweep up everyone and ship them off, irrespective of whether they’re involved or not.
You also are confusing H1B visa holders with foreign students on a F visa. Those are very different things. As it goes I’m with you on the work visa issue. I’m not a huge fan of them for a number of reasons. That would be a different post and altogether longer. But that is not this. This is students and deportation and, in some instances, deportation without due process.
That I can’t get behind.
As to funding, these are private institutions. They do get government funding but as I understand it that’s mostly for research and development, not core curriculum. I’m certainly no fan of the left wing lunacy that’s taken hold on many institutions, but replacing it with right wing lunacy isn’t any better, which many in MAGAland seem to desire. Either way, dictating what to think and what to teach isn’t any better remedy or process than what is currently going on.
Building encampments on university property, discriminatorily blocking access to facilities, disrupting classes and libraries, vandalizing and occupying buildings, and harassing other students for their ethnic identity or simple difference of worldview is not protected speech. And some of those things are outright crimes. Aliens can be deported for crimes and they can CERTAINLY be expelled from school and lose the privilege of being welcome in the US and benefiting from our country for less. Nearly every opinion haver on this topic seems to be willfully ignorant of the fact that the first amendment is NOT the standard for student speech. There are all kinds of applicable standards that proscribe student conduct, which stop short of 1A speech. This is done for the very obvious and necessary reasons of fostering a productive learning/research environment, maintaining the standards of quality that got those students accepted into the uni in the first place, and simple issues of safety and trust.
Foreign students don’t live in some all-encompassing bubble of the university. They become part of the community of the cities and towns they live in. They benefit from all sorts of American amenities and features, and it is a privilege for them to do so entirely premised on the value they’re supposedly bringing to our country. The premise is an exchange of value - they’re get access to our education system and our society’s affluence and stability, and we get the benefit of their talent and potential contributions to our culture, technology and economy. When their side of the bargain is not held up, i.e. they’re causing chaos and disorder and disrupting the general learning environment, they lose the benefits of the exchange.
The points you made about the First and students are salient, yet if it’s government coming in to deport people absent removal from the university, then the First Amendment IS the relevant issue at hand. Yes the school can expel students, particularly at a private university, for speech issues under a far less stringent standard than the First.
But they hadn’t. So then if the federal government wishes to come in a deport students, the First Amendment very much comes into play.
Your point about violent protests and harassment are also relevant and not covered under First Amendment jurisprudence. However, there has to be some kind of proper process. Not just saying things happened and that some foreign students were involved therefore ALL foreign students at a particular school will be either deported or self deport or have to find another school to attend. There has to be an actual process with hearings and evidence and an opportunity to respond to allegations. Not just - we say it’s so and therefore we are gonna punish you. Accusations deserve the opportunity to respond and refute. We are not an autocracy. Presenting these allegations as fully-formed conclusions at the outset undermines the very notion of due process.
This is a blatant power move designed to punish a university. And I say this as someone not particularly enamored with that university and its processes of late. They have been operating under clear double standards and embracing some troubling ideologies as I see it.
But this bullshit isn’t the answer. The administration stripping Harvard’s ability to enroll foreign students is an unconstitutional retaliation.
It’s always so revealing to read that “It's demonstrably false to say that … blah, blah, blah” then read absolutely nothing following that statement that demonstrates its falsehood. There is nothing there that supports the empty claim. All this kind of nonsense amounts to is a huge waste of time for anyone who thinks they may be enlightened by comments on this truly fair and balanced article about the issue at hand.
I’m guessing you have zero sympathy for anything or anyone, period. Try getting some. It helps make you human
So, if I just agreed that Harvard was great, completely in the right, and the Ivys had no problems, would that make me more human? My humanity is contingent on agreeing with the opinions of these so-called elite institutions?
You know what, man. You’re right, I’m convinced. There are no totalitarian impulses driving anything going on at Harvard.
Not at all, just that as a large, complex organization, it is as silly to say of Harvard, “I have no sympathy” as it would be to say “I have complete, unconditional sympathy.” Whatever the sins of its leadership, you seem fine with innocent students, faculty, and staff having their educations/lives/livelihoods disrupted and worse…toward what end? Eliminating antisemitism? That’s the barest and most cynical fig leaf there is.
You seem fine with innocent Jewish students, faculty, and staff having their educations/lives/livelihoods disrupted and worse…toward what end? Tax payer funded education for some Belgian princess? That’s the barest and most cynical fig leaf there is.
We're not concerned about the woke area studies professors losing their funding. We're concerned about the fact that our current president and ~50% of the electorate are stupid enough to sabotage our entire scientific research apparatus, along with a major source of high-quality immigrants, just to piss off said area studies professors.
It's not "boo hoo, poor lefties" it's "our country is being hollowed out by the short sightedness and tribal ape brains of the dumbest people alive."
I'm less mad at dumb "death to amerikkka" lefties than I am at the even dumber rightoids who are *actively harming the United States* for petty culture war reasons
The traitor blocked me.
Trump’s direct frontal assault on Harvard University and the liberal education it represents is first and foremost the most un-American state weaponization of the lamentable pathology of irrationalist anti-intellectualism in American history. What renders it particularly pernicious and evil is Trump deceit of Trump, the world’s most powerful antisemite and racist acting as the tribune Jewish people as a Trojan Horse for his grander crusade to destroy the bastions of liberal thought in America in service of the white Christian nationalist movement and its theocratic End Times eschatology.
So you too were rejected 🙅 😆
Oddly enough considering your headline, you make an excellent argument for what the Trump administration is doing to Harvard and the rest of the educational sector.
The problem with Trump and his team is that they are not building anything new or talking in an inspiring and vital way that makes young men want to enroll in Hillsdale or the U of Chicago. They just hate coastal, social justice academia (which I understand) but they aren't funding new schools or offering incentives to state schools to teach Christopher Lasch. Why do they have to pick these fights in public? Why not quietly drain funding away from left wing universities year by year, while offering money to schools that only admit Americans, don't reverse discriminate, and teach legit conservative thought and patriotic American history?
Great thought, in theory. I can see that Trump approaches the issues with a sledge hammer, not a wrench. In other words, he wreaks havoc rather than making minor adjustments. That upsets people's sensitivity, but it's probably the only way to be effective. People have been attempting minor adjustments for decades. Those minor adjustments get sloughed off and never have any effect. The Trump way has an effect. It's been too long in coming.
You can take a sledgehammer in better ways. Shut down the grievance studies and humanities departments responsible for the craziness and move their funding and resources to science departments that do the research we actually need and aren't nearly as full of crazies.
Yes, but he grossly overstates the case against higher education. It's his shtick and he sticks to it.
Honestly, I dont think you can overstate it. My daughter went to an Ivy League, has several friends at Harvard and Yale. I know from first hand information how extreme those schools are. Example: A Yale dean was hounded out of school ( resigned I believe, after getting no support from admin). His crime: He suggested that for Halloween ( which is a big decadent campus wide affair at Yale) students should try to be sensitive in terms of not wearing costumes that might offend ( like dressing up as a Native American chief or wearing a sombrero). But he added that students should have a sense of humor... That provoked hysterical outrage from the wokesters which led to his resignation.
To clarify, Nicholas Christakis resigned from his role as head of Silliman college, which is a kind of pastoral role. He did not resign from his academic position as a professor; he still has a lab and teaches classes. I believe Erika Christakis doesn't have any further affiliation with Yale, but her initial affiliation was basically connected to her husband being head of the college.
I think that episode was a dark moment, and probably played some causal role in getting us to where we are with trust in higher ed cratering.
Thank you both Daniel and Priya for clarifying. I will just add that being a dean brings prestige and higher earnings. So losing that position was definitely a blow to his career path ( and pocketbook) and I am sure that other deans and professors took note.
What about the tens of thousands of people who were immediately summarily fired because somebody trawled through a database and saw the word diversity in something they had written and then immediately fired them without even bothering to check with them or their manager? What about that? That actually didn't happen a decade ago either, it was just now. They were b making up stories about cancelations entirely too justify this, knowing that people would be too stupid and lazy to double check any lie that pleased their prejudice.
Both Nicholas and Erika (his wife) Christakis are still at Yale. It was a ridiculous thing that happened and totally unfair to them, but Yale hasn't hounded them out.
Don't stop the persecuted while they're spinning their usual yarn. They saw it on X, they saw it in their group chat, and then it's true. My trusted friend could never have added fake details! A Dean can't get fired, they signed a contract right, it's not legal. Only if they're a liberal is that legal. Conservatives actually get the benefit of the law and the contracts they signed, they only make up stories about conservatives getting fired so they can generate excuses for what they want to do.
Yeah I'm sure that's an accurate summary of things, can you enumerate more than one specific claim?
So says the enemy of the Republic. I will stand by the constitution, not your totalitarianism and tyranny. You rightists constantly fantasize injuries to justify your endless aggressions. You started this. We'll finish it. We will not die slaves like you have chosen, traitor. Apostate.
The educational system in this country has become aggressively anti-American and anti-semitic. The taxpayers have no obligation to support this racist enemy within.
What about oligarchs like Bill Ackman who are monarchists and oppose the republic under the instructions of Yarvin? Why shouldn't we destroy them? Wasn't this nation founded as a rebellion against monarchists? And yet the Trump worship that has displaced the Christian religion in this nation insists that nothing comes before the will of Trump, that we should be happy to be his slaves and surrender our freedom and liberty to him. This is a treasonous ideology and apostasy from the civic religion. The elite oligarch infestation with monarchists, white supremacists, and neo nazis should be a big deal and a big national security threat, but you seem entirely intent on destroying their scapegoats they tell their lies about instead. Most people are ignorant sheep and easy to control like this.
Are you proposing violence?
I don't know, I was paraphrasing you. Let's just say I meant whatever my source meant on this particular subject?
Your comment is unintelligible. I
I think academic institutions are so corrupted at this point, that burning them down and starting afresh would be less effort than trying to reform them.
Harvard's capitulation to Wokeism should go down in history as the thing which destroyed their university.
Then build theor replacements in the United States before pushing international students to seek comfort from other ideologies! If American Wokism scares you so much, imagine how terrible the indoctrination is that China will happily offer instead
Chinese students absorbing Woke poison will make China arguably even more dangerous.
Chinese universities are less of a cancer on the world than the American university system.
The words of our decadent elite are hilarious. Yes this will be great for you, don't let us stop you. Just tell more ghost stories about wokeness on your racist group chats while Rome burns. You people are the definition of decadence, a prime example of the vacuum of virtue that consists of our elite oligarch class.
Per the NYT, currently 27% of Harvard’s student body consists of foreign nationals, up from 19% in 2010. That is a pretty big increase. Surely Harvard was could have managed with the 2010 level of “talent;” I would argue that what it couldn’t manage without was all that money, in no small part from Qatar and China. These students pay full freight, courtesy of their government. I am sure that is totally unrelated to Harvard’s other problems highlighted by the administration, particularly the antisemitism and its failure to address it adequately. (Attorneys for a student who was harassed and mobbed at a demonstration have repeatedly demanded reports from the Harvard administration regarding the investigation it promised to do of the students involved; to date they have received no response, and there are reports that the local authorities dropped their own investigation when Harvard refused to provide them with information on the students.)
It should also be noted that Harvard has been given 72 hours to comply with the administration’s requests before the ability to grant student visas will be taken away. These requests are reasonable and include providing records of disciplinary actions against foreign students. Lest you think this is an unnecessary overreach, as noted above, there is evidence that Harvard is obstructing and/or delaying such action against foreign students.
Please stop covering this issue as though the actions by the Trump administration were happening in a vacuum, by a rogue vindictive individual who just has it in for the Ivy League doe some reason.
Yes, Trump’s personal manner is distasteful to many. Yes, he may be guilty of overreach. But it is an act of intellectual dishonesty and a dereliction of journalistic duty to elide significant and relevant information about what has happened at Harvard which is needed to fully explain what is happening. Making this story about Trump, and the “talent” which will be lost, is not helpful. Again, “Trump is bad” is the laziest and most stale take in 2025.
I doubt there are any graduate students (the majority of international students in Harvard) that pay full freight. Typically such students enroll in “professional” MS programs. The vast majority of PhD grads, domestic or international, are supported via teaching assistantships or research fellowships.
You've changed the topic from the student body in general to graduate students, as you couldn't be bother to pay attention, I will not dignify your comment with a reply.
Trump sucks
I have to admit that I found Mounk's post to be just slightly better than incoherent. Perhaps it is because he has tried to jam too many thoughts into an OpEd sized essay that he comes across as a two-handed political scientist (or, in this case, cultural commentator). He ends up putting a good face on bad faith actions.
So we get the now familiar shibboleths about Harvard's leftist cultural elitism, its hypocrisy on matters of free speech i.e. intolerance of conservatives, its dependence on federal funding to give its students and faculty an unjustifiably high standard of living and so on. That was one hand. But now, on the other hand, the old saw of geopolitical rivalry at the highest level of technological supremacism requires Harvard and its kind to be funded to be in service of national security.
The bogus charges of antisemitism and anti-Western Civilization and anti-Judeo Christian type nonsense can be put aside. The attack on America's most venerable institution of higher education is evidence of a return to Gilded Age values (as is now amply clear from the overall thrust of the Administration's actions), where businesses and private corporations seize control of every aspect of the nation. The force that is taking shape stands for hierarchical individualism, untrammeled economic freedom for those at the top and a regimented society in service to a techno-financial elite. It is a Social Darwinist form of organization and control, a belief system not unfamiliar to the Anglo-American world, which ran in parallel to an ascendant liberalism in the late 19th century only to fade way. If it is a meritocracy, it is a brutal, misshapen one.
And there is no place for education and reasoned debate in this worldview.
I think you’re being a bit hard on Yascha. We’re living through a once-in-a-century populist backlash rooted in legitimate grievance, and it's reached a boiling point. People on all sides increasingly believe the time for conversation is over—that we’ve entered an era of resistance and confrontation. In such a volatile and unstable climate, anyone trying to unpack events in good faith is walking a razor’s edge. You’re facing the same dilemma.
I don’t say this to criticize, but even your response includes a certain amount of stock rhetoric and shibboleths and shows how hard it’s become for even our sharpest minds to make sense of things. Your take is as valid as any, given the circumstances.
For what it’s worth, my hot take is this: the Harvard episode seems part of a larger pattern in which Trump has effectively abandoned any shot at building a lasting political realignment. His movement may end up echoing Nixon’s—fiery, consequential, but ultimately fleeting. His opponents will rejoice, but I doubt the country will escape the broader downward spiral we're caught in.
We will break the fascists, and then we will restore the law, the constitution, freedom, and the republic WHETHER OR NOT THEY LIKE IT. We will defeat their totalitarian imposition of political and thought controls, we will not submit to their totalitarian DOGE political commisars and their arbitrary unlawful ideological diktats. We choose freedom. Those that choose slavery and Trump worship can fuck off. Even they foreswore and spat on the constitution, they renounced their citizenship. I do not *just* find them to be traitor, they are also apostate from the civil religion, which forbids monarchism and anti constitutionalism, which are the only beliefs of the traitors and the enemies of the . The founders could imagine no greater shame than observing these anti American totalitarian psychopaths and parasites polluting their nation and assaulting freedom on all fronts. All those who are WITH AMERICA, are WITH US. Enemies of the Republic, be on guard, the eyes of God are watching you, as you commit your wickednesses and evils, God is watching and we will know the truth.
Please tell God that Nathan apologizes for his past support of the liberal elite over-reach that so obviously caused this populist backlash. Tell her that I especially regret culturally ostracizing half the country after having economically disenfranchised them. Thanks! :)
I regret telling lower class Americans that their racist when clearly the our elites are all racist and the problem stops at the top. It was a waste of time to look at racism and misogyny at lower levels of American society when this was the whole time all of it was coming straight from the top. Neither was systemic racism a good tack: the problem ultimately isn't the system, it's that our leadership and oligarchs are character vacuums and control the world mostly by lying and inventing scapegoats in order to distract idiots. How could a society controlled by such evil and ideologically extreme neo fascists at all levels survive? Rightists are always creating problems to sell people on the solution. You tell lies and make up a fake problem precisely to justify your own aggressions. And laugh as your innocent scapegoats suffer, you know they're innocent and this makes you hate and despise them more.
I can't wait to tell my family that I am a rightist now. They will be so excited. Honestly this is the first I've heard of it so I'm pretty excited about it myself. :) Do I get some kind of tax break or something? :)
God loves JD Vance because JD loves him. God doesn't like usurers and bureaucrats who confiscate hard earned money and use it to indoctrinate children.
Mounk is jumping the shark with this lame excuse for analysis. You are right.
The personal consequences to students are truly terrible.
But USians voted for national suicide and it is what they are getting (only 31% of eligible voters voted against this).
As a Canadian, I am grateful for this opportunity to attract top researchers and students to our universities.
A Canadian who just voted for more mass migration, more censorship, more financialization of the economy and more left-wing "education" telling Americans that WE voted for "national suicide" is really rich. When will the left wing make the connection between the decline in quality of life in their cities and their politicians dismantling the nuclear family, forgiving bad behavior by "oppressed groups", celebrating sexual deviancy and inviting the whole world in to cities?
We are awash in the speculative future, and Mounk's piece is just another example. The New York Times runs one story after another that is not actual journalism--the reporting of events after they have occurred--but the extrapolation of the future from a slender set of premises, all of them ideologically driven. This short on facts, long on prophesy approach adds to the hysteria, raises blood pressure, and makes the world a demonstrably worse place.
Neither the NY Times nor Mounk is a soothsayer, and at least in the Times' case, their predictions have been so wrong, so many times, with so little accountability that it is a wonder anyone takes anything they say seriously.
Foreign students will face greater scrutiny. But the visas are part of a negotiation, and they will not, under any circumstance, all be revoked. It is astonishing that Mounk does not give even a passing nod to this as a possibility.
Yeah thanks I got tons of facts from this, you're so much smarter. Let's just replace universities with racist oligarch group chats and racist podcasts, then we will have a cultural revival. Enemies of the Republic.
I haven't seen good arguments for why the federal government needs to fund and direct research outside of defense. The federal bureaucracy around science is actually fairly recent thing and has correlated closely the decline of educational institutions since the 60s. The opportunity cost of putting scientists under the thumb of the government has been rot and stagnation in academic culture as scientists have become pawns in political fights.
The standard economic argument is that basic research--research that may eventually lead to applications, but is too many steps removed from patentability for the researchers to directly profit from it--has positive externalities, and so will be undersupplied by a free market. Many of the most influential contemporary technologies--AI, mRNA vaccines--have their roots in research that happened in universities. Would that have happened in the private sector in a world where universities didn't get government support? Maybe? But there's no obvious reason why it would have, and simple economic logic suggests we'd have less blue sky research and more research focused on immediate patentability in a world without government funded university labs.
Government support was essential to enabling our conversing via the internet.. without ARPA government support, talented people like Vint Cerf never would have developed TCP/IP. Also Daniel, I love your philosophy YouTube videos😁
I'm curious what the argument for the undersupply is though. Like how do we actually know the private opportunity cost? Universities conducted general research before federal funding. The other comments are mentioning things like cancer, but if you don't believe crazy medical conspiracies about pharma intentionally withholding a cure - it seems like there's plenty profit motive for long-term cure research at companies and universities as well as nonprofits.
I agree that government helps and has a place in emergencies (COVID) and moonshots (like our literal race to the moon), but those aren't an argument for longterm federal general research funding that already takes place at private universities - or the disastrous accreditation interference that's lead to a lot of the damaging woke stuff. If anything, those specific security adjacent emergencies seem like the opposite.
I think the theoretical case I gave in the above comment is pretty straightforward--basic research involves value creation only a small fraction of which is captured by the creator. When you're doing research for a particular application that can be patented and commercialized, you can capture lots of the value, and you should expect the private sector to supply it. But when there's research whose outputs will become public, and the value of which will be dispersed, you should expect the private sector to undersupply it. So that's an argument for some kind of subsidy (doesn't necessarily have to go via universities, but that seems like a natural place for it).
I think the real-world practical question is much harder. It's not just that universities did research--though a lot less--before the post-war funding boom. It's also that that there has historically been more basic research in the private sector than you might expect from what I called "simple economic logic." Everybody likes to use Bell Labs as an example, because it's a good one. Lots of stuff came out of there, and while some of it was immediately practical (e.g., the transistor), you also had Claude Shannon who founded the entire field of information theory, which certainly had lots of downstream applications, but I imagine very little of its value was captured by Bell Labs, so there wasn't a narrow profit-motive for them to fund stuff like that.
And we certainly still have stuff like that today. Microsoft funds lots of basic research, as does Google. Maybe we'd get more of that in a world where the NSF and the NIH funded much less. I don't know.
Right but you're just stating a generic case. By this logic you could put anything under government control. For example, Windows OS fits this description - but windows still makes a profit and a government OS would be a terrible idea. I've never heard any justification for pulling scientists out of the private sphere and the normal university system to work for the government on literally "whatever". This only makes sense if you can point in process, not in hindsight, what we're going to get out of it. "We happened to stumble on a bunch of good stuff in 1960 and 1980" doesn't cut it when accounting for opportunity cost
I really don't see why this justification strikes you as applying to windows. Windows has no trouble capturing the value it creates, because their product is a discrete, closed source bit of software that is protected by IP law, and so they can charge for it.
The point is that what they can charge for is a fraction of the value other companies make by relying on Windows to make software, games, enterprise server architecture etc.
But sure, let's take something totally abstract. Is there any concrete evidence that the amount and value of the theoretical physics we produce at universities has any correlation to grantwriting volume vs. normal private/nonprofit university funding? I'm not a denier here but I'm really skeptical when I've never seen anything approximating data on it.
Do you have any examples outside STEM?
I think the case is by far strongest in STEM, but that's not a dodge, because that's where the federal money goes. There's a reason Harvard and Columbia have been in the news, but Amherst and Swarthmore have not. Liberal arts colleges depend on the federal government far far less than research universities. It's not because humanities at Amherst and Swarthmore are all that different from humanities at Harvard and Columbia. Rather, it's because STEM at small liberal arts colleges is just a matter of undergrad education, while STEM at research universities is a whole different beast, more focused on (expensive!) research than on undergraduate education.
They hate STEM because they hate America and wish to destroy the republic and constitution. They wish for a state takeover of all universities to universally impose political and thought controls to align with their fascist ideology and beliefs.
It's worked this way you're whole goddamn life and you're like whaa this is a recent thing. It is fairly ridiculous as well that you apparently think scientists do not seek private grants already, apparently all their projects are 100% federal grants with no other source.
I haven't lived that long, not has anyone on a policy scale. "This is tradition" isn't an argument
But honestly, government funding can have a multiplier effect for development in private industry. Pharmaceuticals are a good example, government funded research on risky areas often leads to private drug manufacturers to develop life saving or life improving drugs. And top schools seem to have a good track record using this money.
Show me a scientist "under a thumb"... concrete examples please!😆
Because we have things like cancer to eradicate. Pretty sure bombs are not the answer 😁
President Trump has a history of going after those who have offended or those he preceives have offended him. Could it be as simple as Harvard and Columbia denied him admission to their university when he applied when he was young?
More likely Harvard and Columbia turned down Barrons applications a few years ago. So Barron went to NYU and his dad got mad
No hate for NYU. Both of my parents went there and it probably has just as strong a faculty as the Ivies, but Donald and everyone else around him - Vance (Yale) and Musk (Penn) like the badge of elite education but now love to hate on it! It is so funny how people glory in putting a crown on their head and then the next moment start ranting and railing against the whole Kingdom.
Pretty sure it’s personal 😆
I agree with much of this article. But I find the claim that "whole academic disciplines" are teaching nothing but "hogwash" because they are inundated with "post-modern theory" without any attempt to substantiate the claim through a discussion of actual texts, arguments, or other sorts of evidence, to be profoundly anti-intellectual. Why the gratuitous lazy slander against un-named disciplines and un-explicated ideas?
The entire concept of the Cathedral comes from Foucalt. Yarvin literally just plagiarized Foucalt and was given applause and endless awards by our idiot elites. Shows to go show the true source of the moral and intellectual rot in our society - it comes from the oligarchs. They have always been stabbing the nation in the back from the shadows, while lying about their beliefs on public. That is the conspiracy against the republic that is underway by traitors and their mindless sheep.
That’s it!
Whoever thinks “Harvard deserves this”, is clueless and clearly doesn’t understand the implications. This is not about “Harvard”, it’s about decimating the highest possible level of institution, in order to force everyone else into absolute submission without further effort.
While the dismantling and annihilation of universities is the unavoidable stepping stone towards autocracy and dictatorship, in the case of American universities this will not only do irreparable harm to America, but to the entire world of science and liberal arts, given that some of the world’s top academic institutions are right here.
We are looking at an unimaginable brain drain from the United States to Europe and China, including also the ultra wealthy Arab countries who have the means but never had the pull to build the world’s greatest research universities imaginable.
America as a beacon of higher education, research, discoveries and advancement will disappear, and never come back.
This is just common sense respect for an institution that really has incredible value to our society
Trump knows exactly what he is doing in order to save the nation: applying shock therapy to bodies that are so infected with the Woke virus that they only function as the nutrients for the virus. Cutting off the nutrients is one of many cures necessary to revive the body, if possible. Obviously, Yasha has not recovered yet.
We need to apply stock therapy to our oligarchs, not our universities. Our oligarchs need to be taught a lesson. Liquidate then, if the right of property and freedom of speech don't belong at our universities, I see no reason to respect the private property of cancerous institutions like Tesla. You started this.
"Unbundling" is a good idea. I am off to an Ivy League campus for Grad school in the fall and I certainly wish I could cut my bill by thousands of dollars and only pay for the classes and turn down the gym membership, meal plan, administrators.
Congratulations, Harry!
Yasha je ne comprends pas cette obsession à pointer les excès “progressistes” des institutions qui seraient censés expliquer l’avènement d’une dictature populiste. Les régimes facistes ont toujours pris pour cible les centres du savoir, les artistes, les médias, tous ceux qui ont le tort de penser. La vulgarité et l’agressivité invraisemblable de ce gouvernement Trump et de ses représentants n’a d’autre justification que l’anti-intellectualisme primaire d’individus incultes et quasi illettrés. Point final !
There are plenty of us in universities who hold PhDs and are part of the professoriate, and who yet despise the illiberal, discriminatory, and yes anti-intellectual trend that universities themselves have adopted in the last few decades.
To claim a binary of anti-intellectual fascist thugs versus enlightened, open-minded universities preserving the democratic good is simply false.
It you opposed illiberalism and supported the law and constitution and freedom of thought, you would oppose trumps attempt at establishing total state control over universities, as well as political and thought controls on allowable ideas. Since you are instead introducing these things, I must only conclude that you are liars who made all of that up precisely to impose your thought controls. You were opposed to freedom of speech the entire time, this was actually your entire problem, was that students are allowed to think and say things you don't personally approve of.
One of your best observations. Harvard Columbia Tufts and the rest were put on notice, by the Supreme Court, the on campus riots, the election, and the words of Trump. In their arrogance they refused to issue a mea culpa and went on with their noses in the air. Many including myself, think they need to be taken down a notch or two. Trump was elected to break plates, and he learned from his first administration not to play by the oppositions rules.
Breaking plates is one thing, but your comment would also imply that Trump and crew do not need to play by the rules of the Constitution either? History points to this being a dark, and yes arrogant, path to go down.
Was it Constitutional for Biden to allow our border to be invaded? Was the clearly contrived trial in New York constitutional? And therein is the crucible, By not adhering to a strict interpretation of our constitution, perhaps by Kennedy/Biden breaking with Senate tradition in the Bork nomination, we started down the dark path to no rule of law only its imaginative interpretations by ideological lawyers.. It's a long way back,but Trump's work is required to start that process.
Yes just invent more fake grievances to justify your aggression and evil nature. That is why you spit on the constitution of your nation, and seek to destroy your republic. That's why. You are a traitor and enemy of the Republic. I will not apologize for supporting the law, the constitution, and republic, even as you spit on all three and seek to replace our traditions with totalitarian thought controls and mindless worship of one man. You'll make up more bullshit regardless of what we do, any time you wish to aggress against us (which is always), you will make up a new lie. But the source of all your lies is itself, it isn't God, it isn't reality. It certainly isn't morality or the law, which you traitors hate more than anything. Enemies.
What exactly is the “ideological hogwash” you see taking over parts of the academy? Neoliberalism? Human rights? Decolonialism? Utilitarianism? IR realism? Feminism? Postmodernism? Originalism? Social Constructivism? …it would be good to know….
You have named much of it.
Can you please enumerate to me which thoughts I'm allowed to have? What books am I allowed to read? What am I allowed to say, oh Nobel one? Please give your list of politically correct ideas. Or are you just going to continue telling lies on group chats and X and confusing that with knowledge?