Comment by wincy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wincy | Hacker News Reader

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If I’m a Republican legislator and I’m seeing my kids enroll at a state college where gender and queer studies classes are a requirement to get a computer science degree, I’m going to want to defund too. I remember my Republican high school peers arguing with our liberal debate coach, and he’d just laugh and say “wait until you go to college, then you’ll get it”. Sure enough, she went to Harvard Law and became a Democrat. The indoctrination is there and if monetary compensation isn’t the reason professors get into teaching, what is? If you have a mission to “educate young minds” to reject their “problematic” notions, that can be a strong motivator.

There’s a strong culture war aspect to defund colleges, because you’re essentially funding the opposition if you’re a conservative and you’re paying the salaries of the extremely liberal college professors. Then people say obnoxious, arrogant things like “well reality has a liberal bent” and other platitudes to explain away why conservatives voices have been systematically excluded from college campuses over decades.

Perhaps if the conservative voices would stop saying stupid stuff like this, they wouldn't be systematically excluded from the conversation. In my particular subfield of CS, there's a "self-identified conservative" who's been more or less utterly rejected from the community because, in addition to their bonkers political opinions, it turns out they also have bonkers scientific opinions. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that they reject the scientific process. It's hard to find that compatible with doing science. Perhaps I have many secret conservative colleagues in my field, but the only one I've seen is not someone who I would ever wish to collaborate with.

Can you name a major college or university where "gender and queer studies classes[0] are a requirement to get a computer science degree?"

[0] Specifically, please. Two semesters of English, which is pretty standard, doesn't count unless few other options.

State schools in US are often the best STEM schools.

I have cried myself hoarse on HN trying to make this simple point - but except for Cornell, every Ivy League is ordinary in engineering and the hard sciences.

I'm not sure that's true for science.

Harvard is a biomedical behemoth, especially once you include the affiliated hospitals (MGH, Brigham and Women's, Dana Farber, Beth Israel Deaconess, etc) and research institutes (Broad, Roland). Harvard proper and MGH each receive about a half billion dollars a year in NIH funding. These are usually listed separately in those "league tables", but the whole system must bring in nearly $2B/year (out of a total NIH extramural budget of ~$28B).

The other Ivies aren't as big (though not much else is), but all of them have well-regarded medical schools (except for Princeton) and biomedical research programs. Yale, Havard, and Princeton have pretty credible chemistry programs too. Princeton also has the Institute for Advanced Study, which has hosted a crazy number of Nobel/Fields/Wolf/Cole prize winners; it's formally independent but...right there.

It may be debatable how much this matters for undergrad teaching--is it better to have a world-renowned expert or someone invested in teaching?--but for anything involving research (including undergrads), they are definitely way up there.

(No argument that JHU, Stanford, and other places (CMU, UMich, NYU, etc, depending on field) also have intensive research too).

NIH funding data from here: https://report.nih.gov/award/index.cfm

Do we include math and physics in there? If so there might be a couple other exceptions there.

Basically Harvard, and maybe Columbia and that's it. UIUC, Wisconsin-Madison, Berkeley, Michigan-Ann Arbor are orders better schools in the sciences than Dartmouth or Brown.

In math, Princeton tops all the non-Ivy's you list, and UPenn has at least a fighting chance, maybe depending on speciality.

Once you're at that level, the differences are marginal. It matters if you want to go to graduate school, I suppose, but we're talking about people who just want to get a degree and go into the workforce here. For them, Princeton vs. Michigan won't matter a bit if they're studying to become an engineer.

My point was specifically about studying math.

If you want to study applied math and go into the workforce, then my point still stands, going to Princeton vs. Michigan simply doesn't matter. If you want to go to graduate school, it's unclear if it matters all that much. Princeton tends to draw the most talented young mathematicians in the world, and has for decades. Presumably if a student of that caliber went to Michigan, they would do just as well, because Michigan also has talented mathematicians who do good research and can write good letters of recommendation for graduate school.

Specialty fields yes. But Princeton engineering is ordinary, and the state schools often have exceptional faculty across multiple departments - leading to way more collaborative, cutting-edge work.

The undergraduate students at Dartmouth and Brown are generally much better than the ones at those large publics. The rankings are largely due to the department size and what the professors and their PhD students are publishing.

FWIW, I was a lifelong conservative Republican but in recent years have slowly become a liberal independent (leaning very much Democratic) because of A) the gradual takeover of the GOP by fact-scorning white nationalists who used to be banished to the fringes of the party; and B) what I've experienced and seen in life over the decades, which has made me much more sympathetic to others who didn't get the breaks that I and my ancestors did.

As just one, powerful example: Go visit the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis sometime, at the Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. They have life-changing exhibits about the Jim Crow system; about the civil rights era — which I remember from childhood; and especially about slavery. I was fighting back not just tears but sobs. Twenty years ago I scoffed at the idea of reparations for African Americans; now I'm very much open to the idea because of the corrosive compound-interest effect of what was done to their ancestors. To be sure, neither I nor my forebears kept people enslaved, AFAIK — in fact, one of my ancestors was crippled in the Union Army, according to family lore — but all we whites are still benefiting from what was done to the A-As. (Yeah, yeah, I know, other minorities were treated badly too, including some of my recent ancestors; none, none, were treated as badly as enslaved Africans and their descendants.)

That's just one example. I could go on ....

"Educated people become liberals" isn't the knock against liberals, or education, that you seem to think it is.

Universities are also the place that turn out STEM graduates and Ph.Ds: engineers (the non-software kind, where you actually need and use the education), physicians, scientists and researchers of all flavors (like the kind trying to find a cure for COVID-19), and so forth. These people are the pillars of progress and innovation necessary for a country to be great. Ironically, by defunding universities, culture warrior conservatives are effectively slitting their own country's throat.

(Personally, I had no use for the ideologues either but managed to avoid them by simply not taking any of their classes; foreign language courses are a great way of filling humanities requirements with something actually useful.)

Did you find anything in the previous comments for needing to write this nonsensical opinion?

"Crippling the young with lifelong debt to win the campus culture-wars and own the libs."

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