Social Trump Going After Academic Autonomy

[cottagecheesefan]

lol, the president or whatever Claudine Gay was, blatant plagiarists. At least this freak lost her tenure and was fired and not still Making almost a million a year.

 

[LeonardoBjj]

Trump administration to cut remaining US federal contracts with Harvard​

Government escalates row with university over demands to curb pro-Palestine student activism and change racial diversity policies.

The administration of US President Donald Trump will move to sever remaining federal contracts with Harvard University, escalating a row centred on issues such as pro-Palestine student activism and racial diversity.

The New York Times and Reuters news agency reported on Tuesday that a draft letter from the General Services Administration (GSA) instructs all federal agencies to review and possibly cancel existing contracts with Harvard, worth an estimated $100m.

A copy of the draft letter shared by the Times states that Harvard has continued to engage in “race discrimination, including in its admissions process” and that the university’s failure to halt alleged acts of anti-Semitism suggests a “disturbing lack of concern for the safety and wellbeing of Jewish students”.

The move would be the latest effort by the government to use federal funds to force universities to accept changes sought by the Trump administration, including greater control over curricula, harsher steps against pro-Palestine students, and an end to policies that encourage racial diversity and greater opportunities for racial minorities.

The Trump administration has portrayed efforts to encourage greater racial diversity at US universities as a form of discrimination that prioritises racial identity over merit. Supporters say that such efforts, such as using race as one factor of many in admissions decisions, are necessary to remedy long histories of racist discrimination and exclusion in US higher education.

“GSA understands that Harvard continues to engage in race discrimination, including in its admissions process and in other areas of student life,” the letter reads.

The administration has also taken an aggressive stance on pro-Palestine activism on university campuses, which erupted after the beginning of Israel’s most recent war in Gaza in October 2023.

Critics have portrayed those steps as part of a larger assault on US universities, which Trump has depicted as hotbeds of political dissent and radical ideas at odds with the goals of his administration.

“The Trump administration has gone after Harvard because of the pro-Palestinian protests, and also has made a list of demands that goes far beyond any of that,” Al Jazeera correspondent Patty Culhane reported from Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Harvard is located.

“It wants detailed information on foreign students that Harvard is refusing to give. It wants basically a political audit to see where people’s ideologies are. So Harvard University has sued in court to stop many of these moves, and this will undoubtedly be the next one that goes before a judge.”

In March, the GSA and the Departments of Education (DOE) and Health and Human Services (HHS) announced an official review of $255.6m in Harvard contracts and $8.7bn in multi-year grants, stating that the review was part of an effort to combat alleged anti-Semitism on college campuses.

The administration also cut $400m in grants to Columbia University in New York City in March, despite a series of concessions to government demands.

The administration has said that campus protests against Israel’s war in Gaza and the US provision of billions of dollars of weapons to Israel are driven by anti-Semitism and create an unsafe environment for Jewish students on campus.

Several international students have been arrested and detained by the administration for their involvement in pro-Palestine activism, including a Turkish international student named Rumeysa Ozturk at Tufts University, who was arrested on the street by federal agents for co-signing an op-ed calling for an end to the war.

Trump has consistently threatened to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status, and moved last week to block the university’s ability to accept international students, who currently make up about 27 percent of the university’s total enrolment.

A judge blocked that effort, which Harvard had called an act of retaliation for “our refusal to surrender our academic independence and to submit to the federal government’s illegal assertion of control over our curriculum, our faculty, and our student body”.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025...t-remaining-us-federal-contracts-with-harvard

 

[Siver!]

lol, the president or whatever Claudine Gay was, blatant plagiarists. At least this freak lost her tenure and was fired and not still Making almost a million a year.

Sounds like you've got Harvard Derangement Syndrome.

 

[oldshadow]

- The governament has more benefits by suporting a school, than the other way aroud. The contry gets to kep scientific discoveries, medical breaktroughs.

Yes but not ar the cost of discrimination and threatening other students then doing nothing about it.

The same if any school doesn't abide by title IX. If they choose not to then federal funds should be cut.

 

[cottagecheesefan]

- The governament has more benefits by suporting a school, than the other way aroud. The contry gets to kep scientific discoveries, medical breaktroughs.

Not when faculty and students are influenced by the CCP and steal intellectual property to subvert US dominance, which is a very common thing.

All the people that cry that thisnis all about “free Palestine” and such, will not comment on that.

CCP actively subverting South Korean, about to invade Taiwan, and we have to shut them down, plain and simple. This is one of many first steps

 

[LeonardoBjj]

Not when faculty and students are influenced by the CCP and steal intellectual property to subvert US dominance, which is a very common thing.

All the people that cry that thisnis all about “free Palestine” and such, will not comment on that.

CCP actively subverting South Korean, about to invade Taiwan, and we have to shut them down, plain and simple. This is one of many first steps

- China doent even ned to steal anything from US. Theres has ben a cult to idiocracy on the last decades. You guys go gender studies for trannies, and other courses that doesnt even exist outside US.*

 

[cottagecheesefan]

- China doent even ned to steal anything from US. Theres has ben a cult to idiocracy on the last decades. You guys go gender studies for trannies, and other courses that doesnt even exist outside US.*

I mean I completely agree. I am actually surprised to see you mention this, as most of these types of policies and influence as from CCP and Iran/Qatar influence groups. You typically seem to side with those things, or at least opposed at the very least to the Trumpian and CCP/Iran-hawks.

I think I have seen your are from Brazil? What is happening to bolsonaro is awful. They doing the same thing on all the countries in the EU with upcoming elections. South Korea.

You wannabe moderates need to wake up and realized that not only are you being invaded by migrants, but they are legit interfering with elections, both with voting machines and apparatuses, as well as clear political lawfare.

 

[CatchnShoot]

It's right out of Hitler's little fascist handbook.


Vilify migrants/vilify the news/ vilify the justice system/vilify the intelligencia.
Folks were pointing this shit out Loooooong before the Orange Antichrist got re-elected.

 

[CatchnShoot]

I'm overjoyed to see DEI programs dismantled. It's a racist-based philosophy, and a scourge.

The "viewpoint diversity" stuff I don't care for even if I don't particularly pity academics in the humanities who have for far too long clearly built a political groupthink culture within their own ranks.

Of course you are... because being in the bottom intellectual quarter of Caucasians, you would be the most effected by the prospect of giving other cultures a chance of creating a culture of advanced education. It's in your interest to keep minorities down.

Efforts to counterbalance decades and decades of overt racism and systemic discrimination across the board.... yep, that's a bad thing.

 

[Sage NorthGOAT]

delete

 

[TankAbbott4Eva]

Of course you are... because being in the bottom intellectual quarter of Caucasians, you would be the most effected by the prospect of giving other cultures a chance of creating a culture of advanced education. It's in your interest to keep minorities down.

Efforts to counterbalance decades and decades of overt racism and systemic discrimination across the board.... yep, that's a bad thing.

Since you're playing the educated card you might want to work on your grammar mate.

 

[CatchnShoot]

Since you're playing the educated card you might want to work on your grammar mate.

You prefer affected, I do not,. It implies the involvement of emotion, or affect, which I did NOT wish to impart.

Still, I accept your view.

 

[Kingz]

Columbia was just an appetizer compared to this

 

[DanSavage]

In an attempt to try to police university autonomy and try to directly intervene admissions and hiring policy, and the operation of university life by student and community organizations, the government is threatening major educational institutions to pull funding unless several demands are met.

How autonomous can a university really be if they rely on government funding to operate.

As I've always heard, with government funding comes government control.

If you don't want the government poking their nose into your affairs, don't ask for government money.

 

[krelianx]

How autonomous can a university really be if they rely on government funding to operate.

As I've always heard, with government funding comes government control.

If you don't want the government poking their nose into your affairs, don't ask for government money.

Getting federal or state grants/scholarships is common practice in every single country in the world, and it stands to reason that the US government as rich as it is would help finance research in its university system which is the most prestigious in the world. It has always done this, not only with Harvard but throughout the nation. Harvard gets exceptionally high funding because, lo and behold, it's the most renowned research university in the world. Google what breakthroughs have come out of Harvard before you write something as anodyne.

There is nothing dodgy or suspicious about earning a federal grant. The ideal is to have the commissions that overlook grant applications be composed of non-partisan independent experts across various fields. This is how it usually works. Sometimes fund allocation is not optimal, but still research gets done.

The idea that with "government funding comes control" is a caricature and dumb simplification of how research is funded. It's either funded publicly or privately, and while political or corporate interests can pollute the process, this is not the rule. Where else is money going to come from, if not government agencies or private enterprises? That every institution has interests doesn't mean everything that is funded is under the control of those interests. Or else science would never get off the ground, and the US would not have leading research universities across all domains of study.

It benefits the state beyond ideological reasons to have the cutting edge research in the world and attract the best brain power. What this government is doing is brain drainage, perfectly commensurate to the intellectual quality of its leadership. Defund anything that ideologically conflicts with the party politics, and cut opportunities for the best international students and professionals to come train and work here.

I have had different scholarships and research grants over the years in the academy with no "control" of dubious sort. And I really doubt research into model theoretic epistemology is of any service to either party.

 

[Soggust]

How autonomous can a university really be if they rely on government funding to operate.

As I've always heard, with government funding comes government control.

If you don't want the government poking their nose into your affairs, don't ask for government money.

If a Dem gets elected in 2028, hypothetically, could they then extort the institutions by threatening admissions regulations, based upon prior anti-DEI policies given a new government policy shift?

did we just unlock an infinite money glitch

 

[PBAC]

It is well known that the large majority of academy faculty is progressive-liberal leaning, in literally every field of study, across all states and institutions, public or private. Many are independent, many are centrists. Few are republican.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Neil-Nevitte/publication/40823273/figure/tbl1/AS:670704118800387@1536919731331/Political-identification-of-college-professors-by-field_W640.jpg

In an attempt to try to police university autonomy and try to directly intervene admissions and hiring policy, and the operation of university life by student and community organizations, the government is threatening major educational institutions to pull funding unless several demands are met.

https://www.harvard.edu/research-funding/wp-content/uploads/sites/16/2025/04/Letter-Sent-to-Harvard-2025-04-11.pdf

They want a reduction of the power of students and untenured faculty, faculty who engages in activism, and among tenured faculty giving prerogatives to senior faculty those who abide to the guidelines of the government.

"Harvard must make meaningful governance reform and restructuring to make possible major change consistent with this letter, including: fostering clear lines of authority and accountability; empowering tenured professors and senior leadership, and, from among the tenured professoriate and senior leadership, exclusively those most devoted to the scholarly mission of the University and committed to the changes indicated in this letter; reducing the power held by students and untenured faculty; reducing the power held by faculty (whether tenured or untenured) and administrators more committed to activism than scholarship"

Adjunct faculty, as is well known, are the most vulnerable economically in the academy, and work as contractual workers who are closely associated with unions and the most active members of syndicate struggles for what is truly a grossly underpaid sector of our education system (look at the salaries of adjunct professors and you will hardly believe what you see). And of course, by "those who engage more in activism than research" we know what they mean.

Additional provisions include, predictably, the dismantling of all DEI divisions, regardless of any assessment of performance or services provided, with no data or evaluation given with regard to why they are being forced to be shut down, and no indication as to how the services currently provided can be replaced or met otherwise. Of course, these are not only providing services for minorities, but are tracking active cases of racism, bigotry, abuse in campuses.

Admissions procedures are supposed to be 'meritocratically' decided and assessed by the government, ruling out criteria based on race, ethnicity, gender, or nationality. Of course, overwhelmingly, foreign students are against American republicanism, as are racial and gender minority groups. No indication of how metrics of evaluation (which are obviously field-discipline dependent) are supposed to function across hundreds of thousands of applicants and dozens of different expert disciplines by the Department of Education.

Needless to say, anyone with a morsel of cognitive prowess understands that this is not about meritocracy at all, which is a laudable ideal (which I agree has been lost in the American education system to worrying degrees), but rather about ideological control. Absolutely nothing, not one single sentence, describes any policy or measure proposed by the government to strengthen research and educational opportunities for students and faculty.

It is true that the universities (particularly the humanities) have strayed quite close to specific paradigms of research and thought that are very strongly sympathetic to contemporary leftist progressivism, like gender studies, literature departments, and cultural studies; but these cases, which compose the majority of the humanities and arts, represent (also worryingly) a relatively small sector of the academy, which has nothing to do with the work of the sciences and other fields like economics, medicine, law, etc. The 'woke' humanities are in actuality an extremely fringe phenomenon.

The proof? There is one exception to the pseudo-meritocratic standard that allows for discrimination:

They seek to enforce what is called viewpoint diversity. This obviously doesn't mean bringing in people who hold different views about quantum mechanics, or divergent views about epistemology in philosophy, Marxist and Liberal theories in economics, or making psychology departments equal parts behavioral and cognitive. Certainly not diverse viewpoints on the role of American interventionism or millitary support to Israel. That's not what they want.

What this means in this document is that they are trying to force hiring committees to bring in conservative-leaning faculty.

Put simply: the government wants to control the admissions and hiring procedure of every department and faculty, to turn it into a politically sympathetic domain. Of course, nothing is said about who would be carrying these evaluations or auditing, or how they propose to have experts for every single specialty and department. No indication of the criteria for evaluation either. It is evidently an attempt to try to gain ideological control over the academy by seizing their autonomy.

And last but not least, the forced dismantling of every single pro-Palestinian and Human Rights organizations, again hiring auditors to ensure compliance to the preservation of school order and American values.

It is worthy of note to see just exactly which institutions are being targeted.

"August 2025, the University shall commission an external party, which shall satisfy the federal government as to its competence and good faith, to audit those programs and departments that most fuel antisemitic harassment or reflect ideological capture. The programs, schools, and centers of concern include but are not limited to the Divinity School, Graduate School of Education, School of Public Health, Medical School, Religion and Public Life Program, FXB Center for Health & Human Rights, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Carr Center for Human Rights at the Harvard Kennedy School, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, and the Harvard Law School International Human Rights Clinic."

These are not just organizations of Palestinian students or Muslim adherents. They represent every single Human Rights and Public Health organization in the university, which are unanimously against the Israeli intervention in Gaza (as is every single international human rights agency in the world). Because, of course, being against the Israeli role in Gaza is, somehow, to be "anti-American" and "pro-Hamas", which is to say pro-terrorist.

Not a single similar provision is indicated or even recommended for Islamophobic institutions or actions in campuses targeted against the discrimination of other groups or minorities.

If Harvard does not comply to these demands, federal funding is threatened to be pulled by the billions. If this doesn't work, as Harvard seems to be playing hardball, accreditation hurdles will follow. The same is to be expected for every major university in the country, and then some.

The actual result? A decimation of departmental stability leading to the paralysis of research, admissions, and hirings. And a massive flight of intellectual capital from the end of both prospective students, faculty, and researchers.

I am at UCLA and also work at CSUSB and CalArts, and have colleagues and relatives in Cornell, NYU, New School, Berkeley, Princeton, Duke, and other institutions.

Most departments have essentially frozen all hirings for faculty until further notice. Many have rescinded offers from graduate students. All the hirings at the atmospheric science department at UCLA, for instance, have been suspended, and grants for research have across the board been paralyzed. Adjunct professors are in limbo across the board.

Since funding is completely up in the air and departments face a future of extreme economic and political volatility, facing censorship, intellectual control, and precarious funding, research initiatives are freezing and the academic labor market which was already in shambles is now further agonizing. Columbia already gave in.

The situation is even worse at public-state universities, which do not have the immense philanthropic revenue of institutions like Harvard or Columbia. In California, Sonoma, CSULB, and CSUSB, among others, are closing down departments and undertaking massive layoffs since the economic prospects have wilted. Across the board, researchers and prospective students are looking elsewhere since the future of the American academy, and intellectual freedom, is jeopardized.

Of course, there will be imbecilic, racist, homophobe shills who snort everything this government does who will applaud this as part of the amazing plan to make education "safe from woke ideology," and rooted in meritocratic American values.

well yeah, they tend to be better educated and holding a liberal mindset is seen as academically useful.

 

[cincymma79]

- China doent even ned to steal anything from US. Theres has ben a cult to idiocracy on the last decades. You guys go gender studies for trannies, and other courses that doesnt even exist outside US.*

Aren’t you Mexican? You said you were in another thread. You spend a lot of time studying America. Like a lot. Maybe you should look around your house a little bit more.

 

[LeonardoBjj]

Aren’t you Mexican? You said you were in another thread. You spend a lot of time studying America. Like a lot. Maybe you should look around your house a little bit more.

- I'm brazilian. Arent you thinking about @Rod1? But i admit i would love to know lucha. I even assume that mexicans that dont like lucha arent real mexicans. Don't care if that ofends them.

 

[LeonardoBjj]

I mean I completely agree. I am actually surprised to see you mention this, as most of these types of policies and influence as from CCP and Iran/Qatar influence groups. You typically seem to side with those things, or at least opposed at the very least to the Trumpian and CCP/Iran-hawks.

I think I have seen your are from Brazil? What is happening to bolsonaro is awful. They doing the same thing on all the countries in the EU with upcoming elections. South Korea.

You wannabe moderates need to wake up and realized that not only are you being invaded by migrants, but they are legit interfering with elections, both with voting machines and apparatuses, as well as clear political lawfare.

- I trie to be logical. I dont take gender studies and the likes serious. China does ivest a lot on teaching kids wood-wrok, how to lay bricks, siunce construction is one of my passions, maybe i am biased.

I think I have seen your are from Brazil? What is happening to bolsonaro is awful. They doing the same thing on all the countries in the EU with upcoming elections. South Korea.

- Bolsonaro did dirt to his suporters, those people ruinde their lifes. Lula acted more madure of taking his bulet, blame and jail time.