Colleges must give up federal funding to achieve true intellectual freedom
thehill.com
thehill.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_corde_Ecclesiae
https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/apost_constit...
That’s exactly thought policing.
Recall that these are grants issued to specific universities for specific reasons, not generally available services it funds provided to everyone. Why are taxpayers required to allocate his money to organizations that (in the view of elected officials) don’t serve the public interest?
On top of that, it’s well accepted that the government can use the threat of revoking federal funds force universities to regulate speech: https://cei.org/blog/obama-administration-undermines-free-sp.... Under Title VI and Title IX, the government can force schools to regulate speech in ways that the government couldn’t regulate directly among private citizens.
If you’re a student or even random staff, you’re not likely even asking for a grant, but you are subject to having your viewpoint assessed under the system demanded by the current administration, for no reason other than the federal government demands it.
Presumably based on the letter prospective students would have to have their viewpoints assessed to make sure they have the correct viewpoints.
Again, this is within precedent. Universities are already required—under threat of loss of federal funds—to have a compliance framework for Title VI and IX that requires, among other things, universities to police campus speech that would be beyond the government’s authority to regulate outside of campus.
This is just so off the wall insane. "These grants are issued to specific universities for specific reasons," indeed. "Why are taxpayers [...] allocating this money to organizations" such as Harvard? Because this organization is a world leading researcher that does top notch research. Because they are perhaps the top institute in the whole world across numerous realms of science.
That's why they have for example 350 medical research grants. Because they are awesome, a national treasure, along with countless other research institutes. Both for the direct science they do, and for the offshoot enterprises, hands on training, and economic development these incredible unparalleled instituions create, that nothing else that we know of can reproduce.
There's no real question that Harvard deserves these grants, that they are very good at this, that they have some of the best research. That their 243 years of doing this have created a worthwhile institution that does amazing work.
But some people can just cast doubt and say these people don't serve the public interest - like you do, incessantly, with endless messages day in and day out Rayiner - because it's inconvenient for the administration that some of these people actually speak their mind. Most of them just do their research, but there's a couple things here & there the administration with it's pathetic streak of authoritianism cannot suffer to allow exist, and so the whole lot of the institution has be to directly assaulted at it's very core. Made to do exactly what Dear Leader insists or else.
You cite a paper vehemently arguing in favor of bullying, so long as it's not based on race or sex. Fine, ok, maybe people have rights to be awful. What I really don't get is what's the offense here? Where's the beef? Why is CEI and you so offended that Obama would write a letter to some universities that were allowing or promoting homophobia or bullying. It seems beyond compare to look at a sole letter, and compare it to cutting off all federal funding: an absurd victimhood complex, mountains of out of molehills. Did anyone feel any need to seek legal guidance or to go to court over this letter, was any damage done at all?
You cite Title VI of presumably the Civil Rights act, prohibiting discrimination based on race, color, or national origin. You cite Title IX, prohibiting sex-based discrimination. It's worth noting that these are negative liberties to citizens, protect their right to be meddled with for who they are, keep government money from being used in ways that constrain or exclude them. So yes, Congress has passed acts that constrain how federal funds are allocated with regards to what speech is acceptable. In Trumplandia there are two notable differences: first, there's no law here, no acts of Congress: Trump is using countless executive orders and hot air to bully & cause as much pain as he possible can, in whatever manner possible. There's sometimes a flimsy excuse that this is entirely over Harvard being anti-Semitic, but it's impossible to take that seriously, and there's nothing but the typical insane bluster of a self-serving authoritarian sniffing his own insane farts without bothering to explain or make a case for how this massive institution is actually doing any real harm or injury. How banning foreign students is going to help or hinder that cause is further unclear: like everything else, there's no moral or just cause, no attempt to improve, only a desire to inflict massive endless & total damage, not to actually find remedy.
So I’m willing to do a lot to ensure my adopted homeland doesn’t suffer the same fate. Because in my estimation, the difference between India/Pakistan and the U.S. isn’t smart people, but the political and civic culture of ordinary people. What makes America great is the participatory democracy and deference to the wisdom of the common man that Alexis de Tocqueville admired. Not the modern trend of democracy as masses of mobilized demographic groups providing nudges to the Harvard-educated civil servants that actually run the country.
And viewing Harvard and its impact on the country as a negative is hardly some Trump invention. The quip that you’d rather be governed by the first 2,000 people listed in the Boston phone directory than the entire Harvard faculty is more than half a century old. The only difference is that the new right is willing to actually try and implement their vision of what would be good for the country. They’re willing to use the same legal and political tools—including control over discretionary federal funds—that liberals have long used to reshape society, culture, and civic institutions.
Liberals have tried helping everyone, endlessly. Giving chance and opportunity to all. That doesn't seem so unreasonable. They've lead not with restraint and threat (except to say you have to allow other people to be people). Conservatives are broadly against art and culture and science, perceiving them as liberal in mature and actively working to gut these institutions, with no replacement to be found. "The professors are the enemy" and so are the artist, the scientist, anyone who will not publicly supplicate themselves fully before this administration & it's madcap regex powered book burning scorched earth.
There's nothing like this intolerance, like this assault on not just a couple perceived Harvard elites, but on the tools America has used to bolsters the welfare and development of its people. This assault on speech and free thinking. This purposeful agenda to destroy a culture, to regress the Civil Rights of citizens, to undo a New Deal that finally saw to the common welfare of suffering people and built a nation that believed in its own greatness, to regress what chance reconstruction offered. This is a filthy mad quest to insure only a certain elite favoritism prevails and rules with absolute power, unchecked, with courts entirely stocked by radical extremeists that represent only the tiniest most wealthy and largely white nationalist oriented segment of society. That seems to controls speech and thoughts absolutely. Whatever the qualms with the Harvard elite, I just cannot see how much obvious imperious rulership, with nothing to offer other than destruction, is good. Control of discretionary funds should boost the welfare and liberty of this nation, broadly, not reduce us down and be used to allow meanness and grievance to flourish. I can't imagine at all how you can equate such control for such political and biased vicious ends, such narrowing and winnowing of the mind, with the boring and carrot-first center-left attempts to expand and enrich the world & human potential.
I think Harvard is great. Society needs elite scientists, etc. But they need to stay in their lane.
Title IX moreover is codified law passed by the legislative branch, not an executive order, and pertains to gender/sex nondiscrimination. It's not an executive order about how students are expressing their opinions about international policy pertaining to a foreign entity (note that no US citizens are being prosecuted currently for any of the things the administration is seeking leverage about with noncitizens, which suggests the viewpoints are protected speech).
It is well established that the government is allowed to make value judgments in deciding what activities to support with discretionary grants: https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/government-funding-a... (“The absence of an affirmative right for individuals to receive government aid has been central to this doctrine and these cases.”).
Title IX is an example of this. As interpreted today, it covers not only sex discrimination, but also speech, including speech by students, relating to sex and gender that would be protected by the first amendment outside the federal funding context: https://www.kgw.com/article/news/education/university-of-por....
What is unique about the government funding as opposed to private-sector funding is that government funding comes from money coercively seized from people, and private sector funding doesn't.
I categorically reject that characterization of how government works, but you do you.
One need not express an opinion on whether there should be more or less taxation to acknowledge this truth. As you said previously, let's be honest.
But couldn’t this be said about any source of funding? All funders, public or private, make decisions about the projects and people they choose to fund. This selection process is not an infringement on academic freedom. In fact, restricting who and how patrons choose to fund research is itself an infringement on their freedom to fund what they want. If I want to fund cancer research, how is this an infringement on physicists and mathematicians?
The real problem in academia regarding academic freedom isn’t federal research grants, but the dependence on external funding from any source to help maintain operations, and how this affects tenure decisions. Tenure-track professors should be able to do whatever research they want, but this freedom is tempered by two pressures: (1) publish-or-perish culture, and (2) the pressure to raise money for the university. In practice, this means having to do research that is more likely to get funded and published. Modern research universities are effectively think-tanks with researchers working on what could get published and funded. It’s still possible to do curiosity-driven work under such a setting, but one must still “play the game” to get tenure.
Getting rid of federal research grants won’t solve those problems. In fact, it may make things worse. I’m not confident about industry’s willingness to fund research, given the demise of legendary research labs such as Bell Labs and Xerox PARC and the overwhelming culture these days of only supporting research that has a high chance of getting productized immediately.
The consequence of getting rid of federal research funding is that a lot of universities will end up reverting to the pre-WWII model where there was very little funding to do research at all. This is the norm at many teaching-oriented universities, but research universities today rely heavily on research grants, particularly those from the federal government. Relying entirely on grants from private individuals and organizations won’t solve academic freedom issues if professors there are required to do publishable and fundable work in order to earn tenure, and with less money for research, this may make things worse.
The authors of the article are not claiming that this infringes on academic freedom, but intellectual freedom. They explain here:
"Intellectual freedom is the principle that all individuals have the right to think for themselves, to express their convictions on any subject, and to give their support, financial or otherwise, only to the ideas they choose. When government coercively seizes your money and uses it to subsidize some research program or viewpoint for any reason, it is violating your intellectual freedom. This is the injustice inherent in all government research grants. It is this that private universities like Harvard should now name and challenge.
Instead, they fight for “academic freedom,” which is actually the opposite of intellectual freedom. It asserts the right of universities and professors to teach, write and research whatever they see fit — and to do it at the taxpayer’s expense."
Taken to its logical conclusion, it would mean that the government should not fund anything, ever, for any purpose, because someone might disagree with it? Isn't disagreement actually a sign of intellectual freedom?
Agreed. I never claimed that of course, and neither did the authors. What they claimed is that government funding ALWAYS comes with strings attached, therefore the only way to have true intellectual freedom is to reject all funding. Moreover, the difference between government strings and private funding strings are that only government strings come under the threat of force.
I think it's a stretch for the article to say that because federal funding will have strings attached it should be rejected to attain "intellectual freedom". But private funding also comes with strings attached. So I guess you could be free to be unfunded if you don't want any strings.
The last part of the article reveals more about the political thinking behind it, when it says:
"When government coercively seizes your money and uses it to subsidize some research program or viewpoint for any reason, it is violating your intellectual freedom."
Whose money is being coercively seized here and whose intellectual freedom is being violated? It's not talking about the universities here.
It very much looks like a typical libertarian "all tax is theft" and "government shouldn't take my money to do things I don't like" argument. Not sure they are really concerned with freedom here, other than freedom from government.
And the fact that taxes are collected coercively is just that: a fact.
Collected coercively by a government != stolen. Taxes aren't theft.
Harvard may prevail on some of its challenges to the administration. But the gaping hole in its defense is that Title VI, by design, uses the threat of revoking federal money to regulate behavior in ways that would otherwise raise first amendment concerns. The Supreme Court is never going to rule that universities can invoke the first amendment as a shield against Title VI allegations, because that would gut the civil rights laws. If universities could, for example, engage in race conscious practices to increase diversity while still retaining federal funding, they could also engage in race conscious practices to decrease diversity while retaining federal funding.
The government, as a grant maker, obviously doesn’t have to provide federal funds to say neo-nazis. And if that’s true, it follows that the government can withhold federal funds based on any ideological disagreement. These organizations are of course free to say whatever they want, but the government doesn’t have to fund it!
---
How about at the Library of Congress or National Archives? Just create a `nih-GR12345-2025-05-31.torrent` for all the data which would offer lots of benefits:
- small network traffic for LOC/NA to seed - American-skin-in-the-game to share the publicly funded data - more eyes on the prize, the "FOSS" case for data
I think public data would also help all of us, collectively, to lead us out of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
Colleges' problem is that they weren't taking enough federal funding. If they had achieved TBTF status then Trump wouldn't be harassing them now.
No. We don't need this, and we also don't need a return to the status quo. What we need is a more equitable system where everyone's freedom is guaranteed and everyone accept that, such that actions like what we see Trump taking here are treated like an old crank on a street corner screaming about the apocalypse: we put him into a padded cell and move on with our lives.
Can you explain what you mean? I don't see how this follows from the arguments in the article.
Rereading the article, it does seem to have a bit more generic right-wing-flavored "government shouldn't do stuff" than stuck with me on the first read, which may be why my logic was a bit unclear. Basically my point is that the government cannot use funding to control universities unless some individuals have discretion over how and whether to award that funding. I'm saying what should be reduced is not funding but discretion.
(I'm open to rethinking the system to make it less discretion-dependent; the article does have some ideas that could be relevant there that I wouldn't dismiss out of hand. But that an issue of how schools get funded, not whether.)
Trump could easily move towards a work visa style, where the universities would need to prove they can’t get Americans to fill their admissions spots and quickly eliminate virtually all foreign students from highly selective US universities while still allowing your local non-selective university to fill their roles with high paying foreign students.
This would totally align with his ideology and could easily and quickly happen.