Social Trump Going After Academic Autonomy

[cottagecheesefan]

Right, but you conveniently miss the part where the proposed mandate says they should empower tenured professors who follow the mandate while taking power away from adjunct faculty and students. Which are the farthest thing from rich, and who are the ones doing the bulk of teaching and grading. Increasingly so.

You live in a fantasy world concocted by ignorance and bias.

I think you missed the point where they dont need 9 billion in government funding to teach and grade papers.

They can do their mandate without government funding (and massive tax breaks) if it is a service is worth it and people are willing to pay.

Nothing is stopping them

 

[BFoe]

Harvard makes billions in revenue, last year had a 9.6% return on its endowment pushing it up to 53 billion and has an operating surplus in the hundreds of millions.

I won’t cry that they won’t get a tax advantage or federal funding.

If we’re going to take their tax exemption status, I think there’s a whole lot of churches and religious institutions that should be losing theirs for the same exact reasons Trump laid out of Harvard.

Trump needs to keep his little stubby midget hands off of education funding. Harvard is an extremely important and leading research university and at least some funding is in our best interest.

 

[Rob Battisti]

If we’re going to take their tax exemption status, I think there’s a whole lot of churches and religious institutions that should be losing theirs for the same exact reasons Trump laid out of Harvard.

Trump needs to keep his little stubby midget hands off of education funding. Harvard is an extremely important and leading research university and at least some funding is in our best interest.

This feels like a lazy response.

Harvard is more akin to a hedge fund than a university. Your local church doesn’t have a 53 billion dollar tax free fund.

If your argument is “some of the research is beneficial to society and Trump shouldn’t pull funding because of politics” I’d entertain it and likely find common ground.

However, I have always held the belief institutions like this are taking advantage of tax loopholes. Usually those on the left want “millionaires and billionaires” to pay their fair share.

 

[Zazen]

Crazy seeing multiple posters defend this by saying "woke this, woke that". It's the same story with them every time, at this point they'd justify anything using wokeness as an excuse. No, this is how authoritarians take over. They hate education because it means that people are less likely to be loyal to him. It's all about control, you control education and you control what people learn and I'm sure this regime wants people to learn that there was no slavery, Trump saved America, God made Adam and Eve, etc. He doesn't want anyone critical of him.

No American should be supporting this. Our nation is founded on the principle that there should be no kings.

 

[Witchhunt]

Has anyone mentioned this?
Any business with more staff than customers is being wildly mismanaged.

At Harvard, there are 2,600 more administrators than undergrads | The College Fix

About 1,352 full-time administrators for every 1,000 undergrads.

www.thecollegefix.com

 

[Soggust]

This feels like a lazy response.

Harvard is more akin to a hedge fund than a university. Your local church doesn’t have a 53 billion dollar tax free fund.

If your argument is “some of the research is beneficial to society and Trump shouldn’t pull funding because of politics” I’d entertain it and likely find common ground.

However, I have always held the belief institutions like this are taking advantage of tax loopholes. Usually those on the left want “millionaires and billionaires” to pay their fair share.

But they aren’t canceling their tax exemption status/federal funding or threatening to stop foreign students because Harvard is rich or a hedge fund and they are just trying to reduce the federal burden.

They are canceling it because the admin doesn’t like their ideology, right?

 

[Rob Battisti]

But they aren’t canceling their tax exemption status/federal funding or threatening to stop foreign students because Harvard is rich or a hedge fund and they are just trying to reduce the federal burden.

They are canceling it because the admin doesn’t like their ideology, right?

Yes. I have less support for pulling all funding than I do for removing tax exemption. I don’t support removing the tax exemption based on anything political. More that they simply shouldn’t have it.

 

[BFoe]

This feels like a lazy response.

Harvard is more akin to a hedge fund than a university. Your local church doesn’t have a 53 billion dollar tax free fund.

If your argument is “some of the research is beneficial to society and Trump shouldn’t pull funding because of politics” I’d entertain it and likely find common ground.

However, I have always held the belief institutions like this are taking advantage of tax loopholes. Usually those on the left want “millionaires and billionaires” to pay their fair share.

Ha, I was maybe two sips into my first cup of coffee when I posted—so not intentionally lazy, but maybe not by best work lol.

When I speak of millionaires and billionaires not paying their fair share, I’m speaking of people who should be paying taxes at a certain rate but are using loopholes to avoid them. Harvard isn’t doing that, they have a tax exemption. Now if we want to make the case that they shouldn’t have that because they allegedly espouse political views, I am fine with taking that away provided we do so for every church or religious institution which espouses political views, of which there are many.

Now that said, they do pay taxes are their endowments. They are not akin to a hedge fund, although I have seen that idea make its rounds among the Right. The research they do is vital (e.g. cancer research), and I think the government has a vested interest in making sure that is funded.

Fact check: Harvard's endowment is taxed, has limitations on spending

Though Harvard's endowment is tens of billions of dollars, it by no means is a hedge fund. The money can only be used to benefit the university.

www.usatoday.com

 

[MMA IAN]

fostering clear lines of authority and accountability

reducing the power held by faculty (whether tenured or untenured) and administrators more committed to activism than scholarship"

ruling out criteria based on race, ethnicity, gender, or nationality

 

[MMA IAN]

Reality has a well-known liberal bias, so I guess that justifies some DEI conservative hires.

I always hear that, but it certainly seems when you leave school and enter into the real world of work, assholes, tax and everything else, kids with conservative parents are better prepared with what to expect and how to react.

Liberals have this rose tinted glasses view of the world, which is nice and all, but certainly not reality.

 

[HomeCheese]

This feels like a lazy response.

Harvard is more akin to a hedge fund than a university. Your local church doesn’t have a 53 billion dollar tax free fund.

If your argument is “some of the research is beneficial to society and Trump shouldn’t pull funding because of politics” I’d entertain it and likely find common ground.

However, I have always held the belief institutions like this are taking advantage of tax loopholes. Usually those on the left want “millionaires and billionaires” to pay their fair share.

I'm all for doing away with their tax breaks but we should do the same for all private schools and churches. Make them pay their fare share, especially for property taxes. I also think the rich and corporations take advantage of the tax code and loopholes.

You can't just single out Harvard because Trump doesn't like how they think.

 

[CantCucktheTuck]

I tell you what is shocking to me....

That $54 billion endowment is funded from over 10,000 foreign students. I think this is about to expose a lot more going on than we realized.

"academic autonomy" my ass......

 

[krelianx]

I think you missed the point where they dont need 9 billion in government funding to teach and grade papers.

They can do their mandate without government funding (and massive tax breaks) if it is a service is worth it and people are willing to pay.

Nothing is stopping them

And you actually are so dense that you think the majority of the money is spent on salaries for teachers and adjuncts that grade?

Did it ever occur to you that universities carry out research, and that research is very, very costly? A single experiment can cost millions of dollars. Harvard is one of the most prestigious research universities in the world. They spend enormously on cutting edge scientific research and have some of the most distinguished scientists and experts in every field of study.

But this is not a conversation about whether Harvard has enough funding to pay its bills. It's about decided efforts from the government to control how the universities operate, who gets hired, what kind of research gets done, the kind of organizations they can form, the opinions they can take, while taking away resources from minority students.

 

[krelianx]

Also, to all the morons complaining about the rate of foreign students, they should probably realize that the reason institutions like Harvard and Columbia are so prestigious is because they bring the best students and researchers from around the world, and not only from the U.S. They produce high level professionals and experts in all domains of study that work everywhere in the globe, carry out leading research within and outside the U.S. and publish in the most prestigious journals and presses across dozens of languages. Meritocracy at the highest level is internationalist, and nationalism destroys it. Science doesn't care about nationality. Go to any lab or research group and you will find people from around the world, and that's how it should be.

Routinely, the best students I have are foreign students, since they come from schooling systems that foster strong meritocratic and disciplinary standards from primary education onwards. They are usually far overqualified in relation to American students. Why? Because while research and PhD/MA programs at top universities in the country are the best in the world, writ large the American education system is broken from the bottom-up. The majority of students I have from the US are borderline illiterate. They cannot write proper sentences in their native language, let alone write coherent arguments. Their attention spans are decimated by smartphones and social media, and they are dopamine addicts. Every semblance of meritocracy in the schooling system has been pulverized, primary and high-school education has become so diluted it produces young adults incapable of reading, while most universities hand over diplomas for tuition to students that ought never to pass. This is the situation for the great majority of students in this country in the great majority of universities. Not Harvard, not Columbia.

So, we have a pretty brutal duality: extraordinary research and intellectual capital in top universities, and a completely broken education system at the local level fueled by a clientelist model in higher education that affects the majority.

None of this is addressed or even acknowledged by the DOE.

Nothing, not one thing the government has announced, done, or proposed addresses these issues. They have not spoken about how to strengthen meritocratic standards in evaluation since primary education, how to assist the bottom-up generation of qualified students in the national sphere, how to make American students competitive in relation to foreign students, and how to actually fortify rather than weaken the pedagogical role carried by universities. Some indication about smartphone regulation seems to be in discussion, and that's a good thing. Everything else goes against the ideal. Their single concern is political: to turn the university into a site friendly and supportive of conservative discourse and its nationalist, xenophobic ideology. Nothing else.

The government's response to threaten to pull funding and close doors on foreign students-researchers is not a way to strengthen meritocracy, but a way to destroy it. As I mentioned, some of the brightest and most promising Ph.D prospective researchers from around the world looked to come to American universities. Now, people are staying away because of the precarity of the government. This is intellectual capital flight. You don't generate better national students and researchers magically by waving a magic wand and shutting the doors on foreign talent.

 

[CantCucktheTuck]

Also, to all the morons complaining about the rate of foreign students, they should probably realize that the reason institutions like Harvard and Columbia are so prestigious is because they bring the best students and researchers from around the world, and not only from the U.S. They produce high level professionals and experts in all domains of study that work everywhere in the world, carry out leading research within and outside the U.S. and publish in the most prestigious journals and presses. Meritocracy at the highest level is internationalist, and nationalism destroys it. Science doesn't care about nationality. Go to any lab or research group and you will find people from around the world, and that's how it should be.

Routinely, the best students I have are foreign students, since they come from schooling systems that foster strong meritocratic and disciplinary standards from primary education onwards. They are usually far overqualified in relation to American students. Why? Because while research and PhD/MA programs at top universities in the country are the best in the world, writ large the American education system is broken from the bottom-up. The majority of students I have from the US are borderline illiterate. They cannot write proper sentences in their native language, let alone write coherent arguments. Their attention spans are decimated by smartphones and social media, and they are dopamine addicts. Every semblance of meritocracy in the schooling system has been pulverized, primary and high-school education has become so diluted it produces young adults incapable of reading, while most universities hand over diplomas for tuition to students that ought never to pass. This is the situation for the great majority of students in this country in the great majority of universities. Not Harvard, not Columbia.

So, we have a pretty brutal duality: extraordinary research and intellectual capital in top universities, and a completely broken education system at the local level and clientelist model in higher education that affects the majority.

None of this is addressed or even acknowledged by the DOE.

Nothing, not one thing the government has announced, done, or proposed addresses these issues. They have not spoken about how to strengthen meritocratic standards in evaluation since primary education, how to assist the bottom-up generation of qualified students in the national sphere, how to make American students competitive in relation to foreign students, and how to actually fortify rather than weaken the pedagogical role carried by universities. Some indication about smartphone regulation seems to be in discussion, and that's a good thing. Everything else goes against the ideal.

The government's response to threaten to pull funding and close doors on foreign students-researchers is not a way to strengthen meritocracy, but a way to destroy it. As I mentioned, some of the brightest and most promising Ph.D prospective researchers from around the world looked to come to American universities. Now, people are staying away because of the precarity of the government. This is intellectual capital flight. You don't generate better national students and researchers magically my waving a magic wand and shutting the doors on foreign talent.

Cool story, but it sounds like they don't need my money to accomplish that.

 

[cottagecheesefan]

And you actually that dense that you think the majority of the money is spent on salaries for teachers and adjuncts that grade?

Did it ever occur to you that universities carry out research, and that research is very, very costly? A single experiment can cost millions of dollars. Harvard is one of the most prestigious research universities in the world. They spend enormously on cutting edge scientific research and have some of the most distinguished scientists and experts in every field of study.

But this is not a conversation about whether Harvard has enough funding to pay its bills. It's about decided efforts from the government to control how the universities operate, who gets hired, what kind of research gets done, the kind of organizations they can form, the opinions they can take, while taking away resources from minority students.

Intardasting

 

[Rob Battisti]

I'm all for doing away with their tax breaks but we should do the same for all private schools and churches. Make them pay their fare share, especially for property taxes. I also think the rich and corporations take advantage of the tax code and loopholes.

You can't just single out Harvard because Trump doesn't like how they think.

I can single out a hedge fund with a university attached with 54 billion in investments versus the local church.

 

[Last Falconry]

"World famous dumb guy goes after prestigious school" is the kind of news item that only an actual retarded person would even care to defend. And yet here people are, doing it of their own free will. Cool country

 

[Mr Holmes]

She makes the argument that Trump is following Obama's playbook and that Harvard doesn't operate like a non-profit.

 

[MMA IAN]

Routinely, the best students I have are foreign students, since they come from schooling systems that foster strong meritocratic and disciplinary standards

None of this is addressed or even acknowledged by the DOE.

Did you forget about this part in your OP you were complaining about?

Admissions procedures are supposed to be 'meritocratically' decided and assessed by the government, ruling out criteria based on race, ethnicity, gender, or nationality.

Sounds like you will be getting the best students soon instead of the barely literate ones that got given a Harvard pass because of their backstory as opposed to their skills.