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Comment by gred | Hacker News Reader

> It’s part of a global trend: universities cast as enemies and institutions in need of reform.

They are in need of reform.

> As scholars who study nationalism, emotion and higher education, we explore the emotional politics behind these attacks.

I don't think I trust you to diagnose your own condition.

Some of the Trump administration's actions in this area are misguided, but I am enjoying watching them challenge some of the left's sacred cows.

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So you'd accept losing billions of dollars of cancer research a year so you can own the libs. Lovely.

I'd love to have efficient, relevant, balanced, trustworthy academic institutions. I think we all want that. But IMO we're far from that ideal, and given where we are relative to where we'd like to be, one of the steps along the way is going to look a lot like "owning the libs".

Actually what's happening now isn't owning the libs. The tenured leftwing social science professors are mostly fine. They weren't getting a lot of federal grant money anyway. But the labs that study, say, brain cancer, are dependent on federal grant money. Now they're dealing with huge, often arbitrary budget cuts.

So you get to feel like you're owning the libs, but really you're just hurting everyone.

I don't know enough to judge one way or the other, but I wouldn't be surprised if this were true (unfortunately).

On the other hand, some changes have been pretty focused, as far as I can tell (e.g. DEI rollbacks, protecting women's sports, restarting student loan repayments).

> Some of the Trump administration's actions in this area are misguided, but I am enjoying watching them challenge some of the left's sacred cows.

That's a weird way to phrase "using governmental power to coerce speech from universities". What happened to freedom of speech?

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