Terence Tao on the suspension of UCLA grants
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The US House of Representatives has 219 GOPers that voted to pass certain legislation. The US Senate has 50 GOPers that voted to pass certain legislation and voted to confirm many appointments.
A large swath of the US public voted to put those 219+50 people into Congress and voted to put a convicted felon [1] and rapist [2] in the White House.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/trump-trial-deliberations-jury-te...
[2] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/12/30/appeals-court-upho...
To my worried eyes this looks too much like Russia circa 2000 for comfort. Or Turkey early in Erdogan’s reign. Whatever happens, it will be painful and damaging.
You can’t put this on a few. It’s the genuine desire of the American voter.
They also think they are not always correct, not always unbiased, and possibly not always honest; and the bias tends to be towards either things that benefit the urban elite, or "luxury beliefs" that have disproportionate costs on other people.
Wouldn't economics and sociology PhDs have both more room for bias in their work, and tend to have power over the economy and society?
"Experts" have a lot of sway over the public sector and legal system.
The public sector has increased to take up a huge percentage of GDP, and the legal sector has also arguably expanded a lot in power.
The perception is that a huge amount of public spending is controlled by the public service, and they tend to defer to academics if the executive keeps them in line.
The post you responded to asked about a specific aspect, namely political power, of math PhDs.
Your response was to state that surely other PhDs have bias in their work.
Are you not realizing that that's quite obviously a bad faith argument? Somebody claims that A has B and your respond that C had D, insinuating GP made connections between A and D or C and B. They didn't.
It's quite common to argue like that, but you did throw around the "bad faith" term. You need to measure your own behavior by that standard when accusing others.
Maybe because this thread is about a math PhD (Terrence Tao)?
I’m also surprised you believe academic economists have much power. These days, most politicians from both parties in the US proudly reject more or less all of mainstream economics. Sometimes, the work of academic economists can have some small influence on decisions at the Fed, so I guess that is something.
Sociologists don’t even have that. They’re more or less just talking to themselves.
The government is a large organisation and its middle management is both vast and powerful.
And this huge middle management is obliged (arguably) to listen to academia unless otherwise instructed by politicians (who are too few in number and mostly not talented in steering large organisations so much as they are used to just going with the flow and taking the credit).
If we take specifically the field of economics for a moment (since I know a bit about this one), what are examples of "middle managers" sticking to the recommendations of economists?
Because it's not hard to make a list of ideas that economists generally love and pretty much everyone else hates: paying organ donors, carbon taxes, land value taxes, charging for public parking, getting rid of minimum parking requirements, allowing surge pricing of various kinds, unilateral free trade, cash transfers instead of in-kind benefits, and abolishing the mortgage interest deduction. Honorable mention to congestion pricing, which economists of course love, but is interesting because support for it actually went up in NYC after implementation; support was pretty low before implementation.
The lump of gdp fallacy in which an urban Cafe is equal to a factory is maybe something I think is an issue?
Trump supporters disagree with economists on Carbon taxes, low tarriffs, and immigration.
And even economists to some extent pick and choose the issues they push from the less biased body of work they produce.
Expertise in this case isn’t cheaply earned. It’s the top of a pyramid of intellectual effort.
Spite politics is the ultimate form of post industrial vanity. People are so well off and have so little to worry about that their biggest ask from their leaders is to bully those who they don't like.
Though I don't agree with it, I think many conservatives feel the same way about e.g. trans rights - that it's a form of post industrial vanity.
Some don't like anti-immigrant, anti-gay, anti-climate rethoric. Others don't like trans-rights, anti-hate-speech, anti-christianity rethoric. For either side, those are not real problems which their opponents are concerned about.
That's an underappreciated aspect of current public discourse.
And the basis for that power is that they are supposedly right about things.
Group X does action A_x due to belief B_x. That B_x isn't logical or whatever doesn't matter. Members of group X generally don't know that group X is wrong, and instead think their own biases are common sense etc.
People are not perfectly rational spheres in a vacuum.
That you can substitute in a lot of different values for X, doesn't change any of this.
Don't marginalize the responsibility of the people in the democratic process. It's too easy to just blame those in power. It's the people who gave them that power.
Edit: come on people, read things in context. I was responding to someone who was implying that a majority of American voters support this. To support that assertion about any President's policies at a minimum you need that President to have received a majority of the popular vote.
When third parties get enough votes that a President gets a plurality but not a majority you can't really infer anything about what a majority of voters want.
Even if all the third parties were on the same side of the left/right spectrum as the President's party you can't infer much because if those voters agreed with most or all of the President's policies they would have voted for the President.
Voted for Trump: 77.3M
Voted for Harris: 75M
Voted for other candidates: 2.6M
Harris + others = 77.6M, which is greater than Trump's 77.3M
I think there's also a lot to unpack in "support for this". What is 'this' precisely? Many of Trump's policies and actions get poor results in polls.
The die hard ride or die for Trump types that are fully on board with everything are definitely not half the country.
Haha true! Though if the pedantry gets in the way of the big picture then it's counter productive, one may argue.
> I think there's also a lot to unpack in "support for this". What is 'this' precisely? Many of Trump's policies and actions get poor results in polls.
Fair point. It's the person that got the votes and it could be argued that people should have known what they voted for, even if many votes surely were cast more in the spirit of voting against the other side, and it's a common effect that once a side is chosen then the mind downplays the drawbacks of the "own" side in an effort to justify the choice.
I saw a poll the other day with a question like, "since 1990, has violent crime increased or decreased?" with the usual significant / somewhat options in each direction plus a neutral option.
There's clear data that shows a substantial reduction in violent crime in the US since the 90s. Despite that, slightly over half the respondents answered that violent crime had significantly or somewhat increased.
Only 9% of respondents gave the "significantly decreased" answer that aligns to the data.
You mean there were protests against genocide? Oops did I do an antisemitism by calling it a genocide?
- https://www.rbb24.de/politik/beitrag/2025/04/berlin-humboldt... (April 2025)
- https://astafu.de/node/589 (February 2024)
(Both links are German language - that should not be a problem anymore these days I hope)
I don't see why you refuse to even consider that there is more than 1 and 0 absolutes.
The majority of protests does not create such headlines. We have had smaller and larger protests in many cities(here in Germany). People meet, walk, speak, and that is fine and nobody complains. But especially in 2024 that was not all that happened.
I read similar students about threatened Jewish students at US universities.
It is, as so often, caused by a violent and vocal minority. But if a hundred protesters are peaceful and only one hits you on the head you still have a very bad day as the victim.
- https://www.nbcnews.com/news/investigations/five-jewish-coll... (Oct 2024)
- https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/06/04/antise... (June 2025)
Maybe it is getting better, this report says that in 2025 things have improved for both Muslim and Jewish students: "The biggest takeaways from Harvard’s task force reports on campus antisemitism and anti-Muslim bias" -- https://edition.cnn.com/2025/04/29/us/harvard-reports-antise... (May 2025)
Something we have evidence of Israel actually doing:
1. https://mondoweiss.net/2012/05/operation-glass-houses-idf-ag...
2. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/4/10/mustaribeen-israels...
Israel is probably the “strongest” nation in figuring out propaganda and mass disinformation campaigns. It is extremely easy to say an entire protest is invalid because of the actions of a few either legitimate or illegitimate protestors.
This is why this tactic is so easily deployed across any protest that seriously threatens states. We saw the US use this tactic in BLM protests of 2020.
Anyway these protests are legitimate despite the events that you’re mentioning happening. “Fed posting” is a thing people are slowly learning to spot.
Are you accusing me? I waited patiently for years building a profile here, for this one moment, to derail this comment, yay!
> Anyway these protests are legitimate despite the events that you’re mentioning happening
And so is the violence I linked to. If you have ANY proof whatsoever that the lecture hall and the Jewish student were actually attacked by Jewish saboteurs - despite the identity of the people involved known - please post it.
Otherwise you are the one doing the shitposting here.
> Something we have evidence of Israel actually doing:
So now you can just tell everybody to ignore any and all events that don't fit your narrative? How convenient!
And by the way, those "protests" would gain a lot of credibility if they were also targeted against Hamas.
Then you are vastly underestimating what CIA and FSB are capable of.
Or Meta, but they don't count as a state actor (yet).
What do you mean? Over half the country voted for this.
However your punt stands.
I think a lot of those voted for the racism not the economic collapse.
Not voting was a vote for fascism. It's not up for debate at this point.
>I think a lot of those voted for the racism not the economic collapse.
Um, having grown up in the south I can assure you a lot of these people are full of spite and love to see other people hurt.
They definitely voted for the economic collapse, they're just too stupid to see that it will affect them too.
https://www.mpim-bonn.mpg.de/application
Usually you need 2 letters of recommendation, I’d strongly assume that in the case of Tao one is enough.
Generally please consider the new „ Max Planck Transatlantic Program“:
https://www.mpg.de/25034916/max-planck-transatlantic-program
I don't think anyone should get in just on the relation to Tao, likewise it is also important that they move to a program that they have an interest in.
I do hope those students find an appropriate course for themselves as this must be extremely challenging for them both regarding their career and also mentally and socially.
Germany has an even lower threshold for criticism of Israel and organized Judaism than the US.
Mainland Europe (excluding Germany) is generally way more pro-Palestinian than the US. However that doesn't extend to our institutions. Case in point: Dutch riot police brutally beating up University of Amsterdam students for setting up UCLA/Columbia-style tent blockades.
If you're an American academic or student you can come to Europe and continue both your work and pro-Palestinian activism within the Overton window of mainstream European consensus on the two-state solution. Anything that is more radical than that might get you in the same level of trouble or worse than the US.
Basically Europe is a non-solution for pro-Palestinian American academics and students.
The US is coupling student politics to academic research funding. Is that done in Germany or other parts of Europe or Australia?
If they predicted this, then their actions would make a lot of sense. It is notoriously difficult for scientists to change careers after years in research. For people cut off from US funding like this, a EU-guaranteed middle-class income will appear much more attractive than hoping for this newly unpredictable US situation to turn out well.
From an individual perspective, the funding situation is (used to be?) better in the US than in Europe. Mostly because there is less competition, as the salary gap between the academia and the industry is wider in the US. Americans are less likely to do a PhD and pursue a career in the academia than Europeans.
And I say this with no joy whatsoever, because all these developments are damaging great collaborations and personal relationships with friends and colleagues in the US.
Intelligent, smart, critical citizens are a nuisance for absocapitalism goals.
/s
So you're not just getting down votes, worth noting that you are incorrect to state this as an absolute, as a matter of both law and common sense. It is very well established (and again, makes sense) that there are many many areas of life where it's utterly uncontroversial that the government is in no way required to offer people services. However, IF the government chooses to offer people services, then it must do so in a fair way. For example, a local government need not offer any of its building space for public use. But if it lets one group make use of it, it can't then disallow other groups from doing so based on disliking their race/speech/etc. Any restrictions must be content-neutral (this has been litigated).
Or for a broader theoretical example, there's nothing in the US Constitution that requires government to fund any sort of medical care. While it might be political suicide, Congress could choose to just sweep away Medicaid and Medicare completely whenever it wished, and that wouldn't be unconstitutional. Now instead imagine that the government said "to save money we're going to deny Medicaid or Medicare to filthy negroes or dirty jews going forward!" I would hope that you'd recognize that the government "not funding something" there would absolutely be a form of persecution. Conditioning funding on something the government would not be able to make a direct law about is not a universal Get Out Of The Bill Of Rights Free card.
That's part of why Trump admin is on the warpath. They ended up funding educational schemes that discriminate openly against certain groups.
And are you claiming that academics are some sort of protected group, that the government can't exercise any agency inner which academics it gives money to? Because that's just not true, if so.
See North Korea or Russia. People have been claiming they're on the verge of collapse for decades but the reality is that they just keep going.
Is the reason we're in this situation.
For now, I live in the former most powerful country in the world prior to the rise of the US.
The fact that the Bank of England was historically a private business is awkward when it comes to explaining to some modern country why it's not OK that their central bank is giving the leader's nephew $100M in unsecured loans, and this sort of discomfort is part of why it was bought by the British government and gradually ceased operating as a private bank in my lifetime. When I was younger I knew people whose mortgage was issued by the country's central bank. Not like celebrities or politicians or anything, just bureaucrats who got a good deal, sort of "mates rates" but for a house loan.
To be fair, this has felt like the natural consequence of the "maximize capitalism without regarding the downsides" maxim the US seems to have been operated under for a long time. Corporations have been (indirectly) running the country for some decades at this point, it's just way more obvious and in the face now when a "businessman" sits as president.
I thought things would look up after the 2012 election, when people were looking for meaningful change. Unfortunately a charismatic demagogue entered the scene and has taken power. Since then, we’ve been on the worst possible timeline, and I don’t see an easy way out of this mess. It’s going to take a lot of work for Americans to trust each other again and for the rest of the world to trust us.
And it's easy to understand why they made that choice. I don't think they are dim-witted, ignorant of history, or unaware of how this gamble could turn out badly for them. Instead, it's because for all of the problems that they are having with the current administration, they still have their wealth, they still have some of their influence, and they also have the option to jump ship for greener pastures if worst came to worst.
You'll notice that nowhere in that equation is concern for the average working-class American.
The US drifted far from any form of pure open market laissez-faire capitalism or balanced regulated capitalism some time past.
The idea that if it was only somehow more pure in some ideological virtue, then it would have worked, you'll need really hard historical material empirical evidence to defend such a claim
Not that it wasn't white and pure enough but that if it was the shade whiter you advocate for, it would have somehow been a complete 180°, like some magical threshold
Kinda similar to the people who say of the SU "but it was not true communism".
Either way, we're talking here about small in groups treating a larger out group as sheep to be manipulated and harvested.
That, and the propensity of those who seek power to dangle whatever shiny utopia best suits their end of fooling the masses.
If it were me I'd be sacking people until they started getting a mean adjustment somewhere around 0. I doubt that is what Trump is doing, but the managers left themselves vulnerable to technical criticism.
[0] https://mishtalk.com/economics/in-honor-of-labor-day-lets-re...
Moreover, do note that all published numbers come with standard errors [2] and 90% confidence intervals, which did include the corrections of -133k and -120k that were made for May and June. The current interval for July is -63k to +209k [3]. Anybody who understood high school stats knows the meaning and implications of this.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cesnaicsrev.htm#Summary
And I'm not going to bother digging through the manuals to figure out how the BLS is calculating their standard errors, but there is a pretty decent chance they've been calculated assuming that the error mean is 0 when in fact it appears to be biased.
Could you explain a bit how you arrive at this conclusion?
In fairness though, Trump's decision is clearly political, these sort of technical factors aren't important enough to rate an official press release and there isn't a cut and dried case that there is anything wrong with the BLS's methods looking in from the sidelines. But for the last few years they have been too optimistic with their estimates and that does strengthen Trump's case.
Why sack them? It's not like they refused to mean adjust or failed to do so. The numbers came out, and before anybody has even had a chance to question them. Before any coherent criticism as had time to root, the person responsible is fired.
Firing people is not how you get more accurate numbers. It's how you get yes-men.
It is like they failed to do so - there is a timeseries of consistently negative adjustments. The BLS revising numbers down isn't an unexpected event, that is pretty standard for their jobs reports.
It is better to resolve things with a conversation rather than formal action. But if a conversation doesn't get immediate results it is fastest just to move people on at that level of seniority. The competition is fierce and it is more about finding the right person for the job than trying to micromanage performance.
More generally, this is incredibly dumb in many, many ways. Like, the BLS can't control survey response rates, and the fact that Covid has broken the seasonal models for basically every long-run time series is also outside their control.
One could argue that they should be using IRS tax data to figure this out, but that would be a massive change.
And finally, if the numbers looked good, there would have been no firing (regardless of the errors). It's gonna be an interesting Monday on Wall St.
And nobody at CBS has been arrested, but that doesn't mean corruption isn't happening.
That's an important point actually - so the hypothetical future correction (based on past corrections) to the "bad" figures would make Trump look even worse, right?
When reality and truth do not matter, why would they want accurate numbers? They do not need the country to flourish, they just need their personal wealth to grow and the rest of the population to remain compliant. From that point of view, shooting the messenger before the message gets out of control makes perfect sense. It is working well enough for many autocratic regimes around the world.
When the jobs market is currently being impacted by a leader throwing around unprecedented tariffs, and upending decades of economic practice by throwing away national deals that he himself negotiated, you are not going to be able to accurately predict things - because they are unprecedented.
And the commissioner was just sacked and the reason given was because she was incompetent. Goes to show the risks of being in a high performing environment and not having a trivially demonstrable track record of high performance. If a dude with no particular track record can clearly articulate why the numbers are biased then your employment might fall into question.
The reason given was she purposefully changed the numbers to make Trump look bad. There was of course no evidence given for that.
Which is certainly a political reason and easy to disagree with. But it is reasonable and factually defensible. Her Bureau has been publishing optimistic estimates.
[0] https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/08/bls-has-lengthy-...
Same with global warming, it causes migration, loads of immigrants is great for the right wing, scares people into voting for them, they have no incentive to fix the problem that's causing them to get more votes.
Edit:
This is a comment about the administration, not Tao.
"I thought I was safe in my hideout, but a kick to the groin proved me wrong." -Testicles
Or your broadcasting license.
Or your public assistance.
Or your citizenship.
If the government gifts you $1000 a month because they like you so much, that's a privilege. Privileges can be taken away.
If the government gives you $1000 a month because it's the law, then they can't take it away without breaking the law (or changing it first).
Public funding for specific universities is not the law, so the government can stop giving it to someone (yes, yes, there are contracts and laws involved and what not, but the general point stands).
The government cannot imprison you for saying you like pineapple on pizza, but they can stop funding your pizza experiments.
Usually it's brought up by people on the left and I think they're right: freedom of speech is not freedom of consequences. Freedom of speech protects you from the government as in the executive branch can't just imprison you, but it doesn't protect you from any and all consequences. It's just that they usually don't find themselves the targets suffering those consequences.
And opinions often depend on whether you're affected.
And not just academia if i look at zuckerberg's testimony over federal government censoring people arbitrarily on the platforms.
Don't get me wrong : i'm not defending what's happening here. It's absurd and a very bad sign for US democracy. What i'm saying is that people only wake up when they're the ones in the crosshairs.
By the way, do you have an example of the academics feeling threatened by making political statements?
https://nypost.com/2025/04/23/us-news/psychiatrist-who-criti...
And there are tons of other. Gender theory was a pretty big drive for censorship.
Taken together, it makes it clear that we need to formulate even more clearly than before, what kind of society and country we want to live in. Not just oneliners, of course, those are now hollowed-out (see "freedom").
This really has very Germany 1930s vibes even if the direction of the anti is flipped.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-05-09/are-you-...
All UCLA has to do is strike up a deal with the gov't that presumably entails eliminating affirmative action and preventing pro-Hamas factions from taking hold of the university.
Columbia made a deal and they have their funding back now.
- Australia
Linked article summary:
"UCLA agrees to $6.5m settlement with Jewish students over pro-Palestinian protests"
> The University of California, Los Angeles, will pay nearly $6.5m to settle a lawsuit by Jewish students and a professor who said the university allowed antisemitic discrimination to take place on campus during last year’s pro-Palestinian protests.
> The lawsuit alleged that with the “knowledge and acquiescence” of university officials, protesters prevented Jewish students from accessing parts of campus, and made antisemitic threats.
It’s researchers who are not at the top of their fields who will have a much harder time leaving America to find research positions, since academic positions and funding haven’t been easy to obtain in places like Canada, Europe, Australia, and Japan for at least two decades.
What will most likely be the case is that scientific careers will be halted temporarily or permanently from these funding cuts. Graduate admissions are harder than ever now, it’s harder to find a research position, and I can’t imagine how much more difficult tenure will be to obtain if professors can’t fundraise and publish. Industry isn’t always an option, either. A lot of researcher’s careers will face major setbacks, some unrecoverable, all due to the capriciousness of our rulers.
EDIT: For people wondering why I think it's worse in Europe, it's because in Europe the ruling class and the universities are on the same side. And when I say Europe, I mean UK, France and Germany.
For example the anti-swastika or anti-cult laws, which I am not against, it's just a different approach to something like this happening
Oh, so I can freely go up against the German government's policies and have my career in academia unaffected and keep my government funding?
I lived in Germany and don't remember people or organisations ever being able to break government rules with no consequences (unless they had high friends in politics).
Something smells here.
I'm sure the German government will react with much more leniency than the US.
I lived in Germany and the moment you don't do what the government says you get the full shaft. Nobody let's you rebel against the government with no consequences, not in US, not in Germany, not in UK, nowhere.
People painting Germany like a bastion of free speech are coping hard. Only if you consider free speech doing and saying only what the government says.
Sounds like a feature, not a bug.
> And when I say Europe, I mean UK, France and Germany.
Europe is much larger and more diverse than those three countries. Scandinavia for example consistently top the list in most well-being statistics.
In fairness, it can be either, and which it is depends if in the specific case it's more accurate to phrase it as "the ruling classes are on the side of the universities" (good) or as "the universities are on the side of the ruling class" (bad).
It's never been any different, all the way back to when Germans or Irish or whoever were the 'demonized immigrants'. This is what made America great. Anytime we want it, those conditions can return. It was no illusion.
On the front of funding research? Considering that one is constantly adding more funds for research, while the other one is removing funds, I'm not sure how accurate that is.
If you truly believe that the whole world is "just as bad" as this, then you are unimaginably far to the right.
If you're fully aligned, there's no telling what would happen if you weren't, and you can't use "nothing happens" as evidence that nothing would happen - you're always allowed to share the opinions of whoever funds you.
If Germany got a right-wing government on the federal level, I expect to see either funding being slashed or universities adjusting their positions.
It's silly to say that EU is better jut because people don't see the government interfere with universities in the EU, when EU universities would never go against the central government to begin with, because that's where all their money comes from. Why would you bite the hand that feeds you?
Meanwhile universities like Harvard have so much private money they can publicly tell Trump to shove it. EU universities don't have this privilege so they exercise a degree of self censorship based on how the government tells them to dance.
Would you please expand on this?
Or Dutch professors openly criticizing the plans by the right-wing government (which just fell) as being damaging, unproductive amd sometimes unconstitutional?
The only examples I see are the opposite of what you say. Can you name any examples in Germany, Sweden, Norway or Holland? (Those are the countries that I'm confident talking about at least)
On par for this administration.
NSF has suspended Terry Tao's grant - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44755429 - Aug 2025 (332 comments)
China is producing 77K STEM PhDs in 2025 and that number is quickly growing year over year, US - 42K/year. (and just ponder for a moment that those 77K are the smartest out of 1.5B population of a country where STEM is all the rage - those 77K are really top line smart and driven ones with all the support from the state)
Is Trump using antisemitism as an excuse to crack down on liberal universities? Because this will make people only more critical of Israel.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2025/05/14/nx-s1-5387299/trump-white-hou...
US universities do a lot of research on Palestine and Israel's occupation and apartheid there. In addition, universities are naturally liberal and are targets of the right wing anti-education movement.
The feds are forcing the universities to either protect the freedom of speech by banning peaceful protests against the genocide, or to have the universities research funding cut.
Given that so far we (U.S) have been unmatched in science and tech research, this is probably the biggest case of "self own" in recent memory.
The faculty should take this opportunity to make the Universities drastically reduce the dead weight of administrators who have grown much more than faculty and produce no value.
for university administrative departments , thoughtful corresponding things that capture what they do all day in understandable and defensible ways.
That’s not at all clear. Regardless, there is no proportionality in the actions that this administration is taking against UCLA and other eminent universities. The tools for righting civil rights issues in education should be through consent decrees that permit the DOJ to set criteria and monitor for compliance. The destruction of a large part of the research enterprise for these claims, particularly when the claims are widely regarded as nonsense, is heavy-handed and gives the distinct impression of another agenda.
Also, Tao points out maybe the most important criticism of the Trump administration, which is how is cutting off all federal research funding improving the ability of faculty to do their work, given that the reason for an antidiscrimination claim in that setting is that discrimination prevents faculty from doing their work?
stop rearranging chairs on the deck of a sinking ship and move on terence
But you are right. That's why I said: can change quickly.
How does Chinese immigration work for STEM?
What does residency look like for someone making $500+ k in America?
What are the Y Combinators? (No CCP Tans.)
We’re allies. Barring a massive geopolitical realignment, D.C. will take Europe down with it.
You would have to be insane to consider founding or investing in a Chinese startup when you could do so in Silicon Valley or even NYC or Austin.
With all due respect, you´re not thinking long-term, or dare I say even medium-term.
Your suggestion is saying that research should be privatised, and shows very little thought about how research works and who benefits from it.
Yes, there are coordination problems for projects at some scale, for which government involvement makes it possible, however these are far fewer than we are made to believe.
The actions of the administration serve to force all academics not behaving as you describe research to start doing so, though. The criticism you have, is manufactured.
you say that like it's a lot of money? I mean sure, in comparison to the amount of money I make yes, but in comparison to value derived from research, amounts of money collected from California, amount of money given to California, and amount of money federal government spends on other things - is it a lot of money? I have a feeling it's not.
>I feel like government financing should be made available to those that actually need the money.
yeah, if they actually needed the money they would shut down the programs using the money when they stopped getting the money.
An uber driver who gets rich by other means will stop driving for uber, not drive for uber for free.
If the policy was no government funding if you have an endowment the net result would be that endowments would be spent down, and then not only would they need government funding for the things the government now funds, they would also need government funding for the things that are currently funded from the endowment's earnings.
Also, money in endowments is often legally restricted. Donors put conditions on their donations which limit what they can be used for. For example a donor might donate several million dollars to create and pay the salary of a named professorship in a specific department. That money goes into the endowment, but it and its earnings can only be spent on paying whoever currently holds that professorship.
A typical endowments includes hundreds or thousands of such restricted donations.
Agreed on restrictions and would be good to know how large the unrestricted part is.
The bigger problem is the recipients of these cuts seem to think it is about an "issue", and are incapable of accepting they are having sand kicked in their face.
UCLA does some pretty amazing work though. They recently published a study on the Los Angeles "mansion tax" that basically called it a failure. They did that for free, with no grants or funding. That is the kind of actual policy work and studies you would expect to see from a university, and it includes a master class on how modern urban property development works in mature urban areas such as Los Angeles.
Unfortunately work like that is overshadowed by the protesters that hijack other protests and bring in outsiders who cause property damage and violence.
https://www.lewis.ucla.edu/2025/05/14/los-angeless-mansion-t...
https://www.lewis.ucla.edu/research/the-unintended-consequen...
But I think it's very justified for the federal to do something (not necessarily this thing) against institutions that show racist behaviors. e.g. Little Rock Nine.
Edit: Incidentally, Trump absolutely gutted the Department of Education, including the Office of Civil Rights, appointing loyalists who explicitly don’t believe it should exist. Are these the actions of a president concerned with civil rights?
Also, indulge us in a wild guess as to what Trump would’ve done to the Little Rock 9. Consider that he signed a full-page newspaper ad calling for the death of the Central Park 5, a wrongfully convicted group of Black and Latino teenagers.
Invoking our civil rights legacy here is perverse.
Their goal isn't to build legal cases against actual offenses, their goal is extortion.
So are you in support of the current defunding?
> The lawsuit, filed more than a year ago, alleged that by not immediately ordering the encampment to be taken down, UCLA provided support to pro-Palestinian activists who “enforced” what it termed a “Jew Exclusion Zone,” prohibiting Jewish students and staff from passing through the camp’s makeshift barricades.
Personally I think this is a textbook racist behavior. Replace "Jewish" with "black" and "Palestinian' with "white" and see if you agree. I personally firmly believe if white activists try to enforce a "Non Black Zone" in the campus, the college administration has a responsibility to take it down and discipline said activists.
I'm not sure if this defunding is justified though, as it seems that UCLA has settled this case and the defunding sounds retrospective.
A lot of the college protesters are in fact Jewish. This is a fact the pro-Israel propaganda would rather you not know about. Otherwise, how could they claim "antisemitism" whenever you criticize the actions of the foreign country.
And, for the record, I think it's willfully ignorant to pretend that Jews and non-jews are given equal amounts of leeway by all Palestine protesters. While the majority may be doing so in good faith, I've seen far too many people being viewed with suspicion for wearing Jewish traditional headware by supposedly unbiased activists to believe that anti-Semites aren't using the movement to get a free ride.
Secondly, protests are escalatory by definition. If no one is listening to a protest, and absolutely no one is impacted, it will escalate until people listen.
You can denounce this form of protest - which I would argue is the only form of protest - from a high perch, but when push comes to shove, if it were your cause, you would do the exact same thing.
Look back at history, and you’ll see the same pattern in all high stakes college protests, from anti-war protests to anti-apartheid protests. The fact that you are either unaware or indifferent to this truth means the machine is working as intended.
https://epicenter.wcfia.harvard.edu/blog/student-protests-an...
I also want to add my own observation, which might be biased: There was a clear, sizeable fraction of the protests that was beyond "pro-Palestine / anti-Israel's Palestine policy". There was celebration of Hamas and of the attack, especially in the first days.
for me it looks like not just a civil case with UCLA. To me it looks like a straight criminal case of violation of federal civil rights law that FBI is supposed to prosecute. I.e. instead of collective punishment for the whole UCLA, i'd go with criminal prosecution against the specific individuals who perpetrated (i.e. those protesters who perpetrated the discrimination of Jews) as well as who materially supported (i.e. the administrators for example) those crimes.
i wish institutions would do the work to publish their sources in a way that is clear complete and verifiable.
i would love to understand what others on hn do day-to-day other than takes cues from media they “trust”.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/02/gaza-famine-st...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/aug/02/the-us...
idk what you want, there’s mountains of evidence.