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Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

I read about this elsewhere and the sentiment was "this is a very hot take" because overall Harvard remains committed to recognising, documenting and taking account of its slavery ties, it's not in denial.

All projects come to an end. Maybe funding ran out, maybe it's cowardice in the context of the Anti DEI move, but this isn't the same as what the headline implies.

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> this isn't the same as what the headline implies.

Correct, you need to read the actual article to find justification for the headline, not limit yourself to a generic "everything ends"

For example, re funding running out

> Even though Cellini was eventually given a budget for 2025, albeit a fraction of what he had asked for, the university would soon halt his work entirely.

Where was it that you read about this?

The story is from The Guardian, they have a certain point of view. I like it most of the time, but in this story it’s simpler to assume that spending money on slavery reparations and DEI activity suddenly became a political liability this January, rather than any very theoretical monetary liability in reparations.

Unfortunately, appeasement didn’t work this time, either.

> it’s simpler to assume

So, you didn't read anything to support your assertion at all? You just made it up, whole-cloth, from your political assumptions?

Believe it or not, people who read newspapers get a lot of background information on lots of topics. One such topic was that US corporations, en masse, started dropping DEI policies around the beginning of Trump’s term in acts of anticipatory compliance. It was suddenly very unfashionable to be looking to the slavery reparations business. Now, we could ascribe Harvard’s actions to being in line with the larger trends. Or, we could take the researcher’s idea that the end of the study was about how good and productive the researcher was and how bad and unrepentant Harvard is. They would never be forced to pay reparations to these people, but the costs of being on Trumps bad side has already cost Harvard hundreds of millions. I think it’s simpler to assume the former is true. My own politics are kind of irrelevant here.

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