Regarding the Compact
president.mit.edu
president.mit.edu
> In our view, America’s leadership in science and innovation depends on independent thinking and open competition for excellence. In that free marketplace of ideas, the people of MIT gladly compete with the very best, without preferences. Therefore, with respect, we cannot support the proposed approach to addressing the issues facing higher education.
I liked the “These values and other MIT practices meet or exceed many standards outlined in the document you sent” line.
Obviously, an independent university cannot agree to government-mandated pricing or censorship of faculty members. Similarly, government intrusion into grading practices and proactively threatening to use "lawful force" against minors are immediately off the table.
That's all aside from the practicality of ongoing assessment, which would likely require something akin to commissars to monitor speech and discussions around grading.
The universities are fortunate the administration is not more subtle.
What's the context here?
> Signatories commit to using lawful force if necessary to prevent these violations and to swift, serious, and consistent sanctions for those who commit them.
Many students enter college as minors, so this is asking colleges to commit to using force against minors while only talking about hypothetical events.
1. Many people have an aversion to harming children. This aversion is not universally shared, but it is a very common stance nonetheless. Children, especially, tend to have an aversion to being harmed.
2. Universities need to recruit children to leave their families and be governed by them (e.g. housing, food, etc.).
3. Parents of children are required to get approval for those children to go to the universities, so that the universities can function.
4. It is harder to recruit children to a university that has agreed that in vague circumstances it is ready to harm them. Note here that everyone already knows that there are sanctions for breaking the law, and that the university is advertising that it is willing to go above and beyond normal law enforcement procedures in hurting children.
Does that clarify?
> Signatories acknowledge that the freedom to debate requires conditions of civility. Civility includes protections against institutional punishment or individual harassment for one’s views. Universities shall neither support nor permit a heckler’s veto through, for example, disruptions, violence, intimidation, or vandalism. Universities shall be responsible for ensuring that they do not knowingly: (1) permit actions by the university, university employees, university students, or individuals external to the university community to delay or disrupt class instruction or disrupt libraries or other traditional study locations; (2) allow demonstrators to heckle or accost individual students or groups of students; or (3) allow obstruction of access to parts of campus based on students’ race, ethnicity, nationality, or religion.
Misbehaving children need to dealt with too, within the bounds of what is allowed by law. Otherwise, what, you want a loophole for them to get away with all of the above?
> to delay or disrupt class instruction or disrupt libraries or other traditional study locations
No, I do not think that it is reasonable for a child to be beaten or shot because someone delayed a class somewhere on campus (note that this does not even indicate that the harmed student must have been part of the demonstration).
> allow demonstrators to heckle or accost individual students
I do not think this is generally enforceable outside of a police state. And no, I do not consider it reasonable for a child to be beaten or shot because a person was "heckled" somewhere on campus.
I am using "beaten or shot" because that's always a likely event when "lawful force" is exercised in America.
> you want a loophole for them to get away with all of the above
No, I want to fall back on our existing laws, which have the benefit of decades/centuries of precedent, and which are enforced in more transparent fora.
Heckling is not against the law last I checked.
https://nefac.org/is-heckling-a-speaker-a-crime/
https://www.aclumich.org/en/cases/hecklers-veto
https://stanfordmag.org/contents/the-first-amendment-does-no....
MIT is taking (lots of) money from federal government. That makes them dependent on the government and government is within its right to attach strings to the money.
MIT is free to not do what the government wants but then government is free to stop giving them (our) money.
Furthermore, MIT, like any other organization, must obey state and federal laws.
For example, there's a law that you cannot discriminate in hiring based on sex or religion. If IBM, MIT or a barber shop discriminates it's the role of the government to enforce the law and make them stop. The easy way is sending them a letter and asking. The hard way is to sue them in federal court.
Separately, there is the question of whether it is in the best interest of the US to part ways with organizations such as MIT.
> MIT is taking (lots of) money from federal government
Surely nobody is naive enough to think the federal government is giving money to institutions like MIT with no expectation of reciprocal benefit?
MIT is (was?) full of DoD asset tags to indicate which equipment was paid for by DoD grants. So another way of stating your point is the federal government is investing in programs at MIT to shape which basic research gets done so that it aligns with the best interest of the United States.
(A prior iteration of conservativism would have recognized outsourcing to MIT as a capital-light way of accomplishing a set of policy goals. The alternative being to spin up the whole apparatus in-house without cost sharing. Left to their own devices, engineering students are not likely to discover and research problems that are immediately germane to DoD.)
It is possible to be independent while also accepting grants from the USG. There's no contradiction there. The point of independence is that the Institute gets to determine how it runs its affairs. This Compact is an attempt to move that decision-making process to the White House. Maintaining independence in this environment therefore means abandoning federal research funding.
That hasn't been true for many decades. Accepting grants means being subject to a host of legal requirements tied to various different pieces of civil rights legislation.
Also characterized as accepting government funding is admitting students who get student loans from the government. This goes well beyond "strange on the fundamentals" - that money is notionally given to the student, not to the school.
Governments do not have rights (except in a metaphorical sense in relations with other governments, which doesn't apply here), so it is impossible for a government to be “within its rights” when interacting with an entity to subject to its governance.
It may be within legal exercise of its powers, but that is a very a very different thing than rights, and in any case there is a very good argument that the compact is not only unlawful as an exercise of government power, but that accepting and complying with it would require universities to act in conflict with existing federal civil rights laws which provide for private causes of actions against perpetrators.
The People of the United States are getting some of their research business done by MIT, yes. MIT competes for that business. It is not a gift, subsidy or favor to MIT.
Of course grants and contracts have terms. I hope the government can come to terms with MIT because I want the best researchers doing our work.
When a researcher at a university gets a grant, that's the federal government hiring that researcher and their team to complete a specific research project. The research team has a particular research question that the federal government has deemed important enough that U.S. tax payers would benefit from getting an answer.
1. https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/FESTIVUS-REP...
The NSF, DARPA, DOE, NASA, etc etc have research program offices that set priorities. For example let’s have a DARPA program that pushes new stealth materials, or an NSF program on quantum computing (possibly partly motivated by another three-letter agency). The program managers understand the state of the art AND what the government (as the agent of the People) could really use Real Soon Now, or down the road for big bets. They write a Call for Proposals that describes what they’d like to see.
Researchers watch out for CFPs they might be able to contribute to, and propose a project where their work could help. Sometimes the fit is easy, and sometimes the researcher will modulate their work to fit better, because they want support from somewhere.
The proposals compete for a share of the targeted pot of money.
This is how the government influences basic research, while still giving researchers the opportunity to propose novel stuff the government hasn’t thought of.
It’s the system that built the Internet and CRISPR, RNA vaccines and the laser, microelectronics and IVF.
It’s not about the fucking rats. You KNOW this. Everyone knows this. The ‘cocaine rats durrrr’ type argument is not in good faith. I simply don’t believe people are that dumb.
I can't see how is this research helping anyone other than the researchers themselves. Also I can't see the Call for Proposal for that, I figure there was not any, as I expected.
Sometimes a spades a spade, some people are just fucking stupid, magas for example.
If you have morals but lack the conviction to stand by them, do you really have morals?
As much as I despise these institutions and their undergrads this does nothing to punish them and everything to increase the power of this current corrupt executive.
I can't claim 100% aren't assholes, but the vast majority realize the luck and arbitrary nature of it. Are you going to be stuck in decision day sadness mode for the rest of your life? Life is too short
I’m not sure why you think anyone is targeting you specifically. The vast majority of students at elite schools, in my experience, know that we got lucky in addition to all the other things that we did well to get admitted.
A couple people in this thread now have told you that they don’t match your description of “every” and “all” graduates of elite schools, and the nice thing about using such strong descriptors is that a single counterexample disproves them.
They're doing so by choice to do PhDs or go into public service. They (as in, the ones in quantitative majors and many even outside of it) _also_ had the choice to make several multiples of what I made by working at Jane Street or HRT or Citadel or now OpenAI and Anthropic.
I didn't have the choice. Nobody is selecting me for anything, I don't have the optionality of doing just anything. I took the best offer I got at a company that most elite school students would consider to be beneath them (Amazon).
Anyways, I'd also bet you make multiples of what I make now too as someone with a higher level if you're an SWE or adjacent.
Of course, MechE's frequently also work at these companies or in finance too...
Maybe that's true. I'm sympathetic to the fact that these people aren't even interesting enough to be around. But then I see articles like this [0] sympathizing (?) with elite students that don't end up going into public service while still canonizing them and then I fall back into depression
[0] https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/09/elite-ivy-leagu...
And why wouldn't they? Why wouldn't they think people like me are lazy and genetically predisposed to be stupid? I didn't make $500k out of undergrad. HRT or OpenAI isn't going to recruit me anytime soon. My net worth isn't $12m at 29, it's a tenth that.
Whenever I ask what the difference between them and their infinite success and potential is and people like me they never have an answer. They're always so confused.
This honestly reads like you are just bragging about how successful you are. I think you know this, but if you made $150k at 22 and have a net worth of $1M at 29, you are far more monetarily successful than the vast, vast majority of the country. I’m pretty sure you are rage baiting, which doesn’t belong on HN, but if not you are seriously out of touch and not grateful enough for your luck or proud enough of the work you have put in to get there.
Sure, but that's a very high level of abstraction.
At a lower level, it is far less common (if precedented at all) for the federal executive to attempt to unilaterally impose conditions that violate the Federal Constitution and would require those subject to the conditions to violate federal civil rights law.
Which led me to this very interesting article from 1965: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1965/6/17/the-university-...
In it, the author described the attacks on specific personnels and public villainification of Harvard. More tellingly though, the author wrote the article for students in the 60s, who, growing up a mere decade after, most likely considered the events "an aberration which could not have lasted", and that, "the whole [McCarthy] period has an air of unreality".
Those who did not know history are bound to repeat it. Unfortunately, no amount of textbooks and historical resources seems to be sufficient to impart lessons to subsequent generations, and we are bound to repeat it after a few cycles.
We in the US have been very arrogant in assuming we’ve found the solution to all this when all it took was a few decades — a flash-in-the-pan, really — of consistent, strategic bad faith by the political rulers to undermine the whole thing.
This view presupposes there are not moral facts.
https://speechfirst.org/case/title-ix/
One example of many: it would have been a punishable offense to refuse to use someone's preferred pronouns.
You may not see the harm in this particular instance, but establishing "we'll just force them to say it and punish them if they don't" as a tool in any government's toolbox is a very, very bad idea.
Forcing me to say things I don't want to say under threat of punishment violates first amendment. It's been litigated and so concluded.
The fact that it's the 1st amendment indicates that founding fathers thought that it is indeed the greatest injury us government can inflict on us citizens.
By that argument the greatest injury that they were addressing was a weak central government that couldn’t provide for the security and financing of the state. It’s literally called the first amendment because the Bill of Rights was an addendum to the constitution.
> students can be reported for merely expressing their opinions about controversial political and social issues of the day or even if they prefer not to express support for American political allies and wars they may not support
Operating Revenue: $5.07B, out of which - Federal funding (sponsored support): $2.30B
Operating Costs: $4.78B, out of which - Sponsored research expenditure: $2.10B
Additionally, they seem to have $24.57B worth of endowed funds and get gifts and pledges of net ~$0.6B every year.
Looks like they can wane off their dependence on federal funding if only they tried. They don't have to deal with idiot politicians.
Suddenly loosing 45% of revenues would be devastating.
And yes, MIT is a company. They have a CEO (under a different name), a board of directors, thousands of employees and they provide a service for a fee.
No one that works for MIT wants to loose that money. Not CEO, not board of directors, not employees.
Maybe they'll put ideology first and $2B second but I doubt it.
Personally I would love to see the richest people in the nation contribute a lot more to universities in the form of unrestricted funds, to give these universities some options when it comes to being dependent on federal funding. But I guess you don't get rich by giving unrestricted funds to universities.
I hope the other universities involved also resist. We'll see.
I think you may have meant "refuse and resist" (or something similar) in your comment, based on the first half.
Vanderbilt University
Dartmouth College
the University of Pennsylvania
the University of Southern California
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
the University of Texas at Austin
the University of Arizona
Brown University
the University of Virginia
I think a lot of the neural connections to the word motley come from the expression “motley crew” which has fairly negative connotations. But the truth of the matter is, this is just a very varied group of schools; some great schools on the list. I won’t say any of the schools are not great, because of course some alum will come along and say “actually we had a great department for some niche computational thing” and I’ll be embarrassed to not have known that.
The list includes public & private institutions across a variety of states and size ranges. It singles out particular institutions in state university systems (e.g. University of Texas at Austin but not Texas A&M or University of Texas at El Paso). Half the list is in the northeast, while the midwest and Pacific Northwest are not represented. It's 9 institutions, not 10.
It's just an odd list.
It looks an awful lot like a sampling designed to identify who the "enemies" are.
UC and Stanford manage national laboratories for the US government. Someone might have realized the crisis that could come from that particular confrontation, and decided to steer clear for the moment.
[1] https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-white-house-sent-its-c...
My claim of "leftists control academia" is based on data on political affiliation / donations by staff at major universities which is 80-90% democrats.
As for the document itself, it's a bit of a mixed bag, with a lot of subtle gatchas to make it sound enticing on the surface, but more sinister the closer you look. I honestly like some of the proposed tuition changes, but there's some language regarding enrollment that I find problematic. However, since the whole thing is being given to them with the threat of a knife hanging over their head, you're going to see a lot of universities be opposed to this.
"We want only the best and brightest to be let in, unless they are foreign or female."
MIT is clearly rejecting it diplomatically
I agree with many of the principles in the document, but I'm good at reading between the lines and determining the true intent of the authors.
After a quick skim, I don't see an issue. Is the opposition to this based upon any rational argument, or is it just "Resist Trump"?
> Signatories commit themselves to revising governance structures as necessary to create such an environment, including but not limited to transforming or abolishing institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas.
> Institutions commit to defining and otherwise interpreting “male,” “female,” “woman,” and “man” according to reproductive function and biological processes.
I didn’t read the compact itself, but I did read the wikipedia article about it, and it seems to be a very positive set of criteria (safeguarding individuality and merit, protecting against the formation of ideological monoculture, protecting against hostile nation-state actors, etc)
It’s bizarre actually, because these institutions should be doing all of these things already. I don’t know what to make of the fact that they aren’t.
This is why a couple of conservative schools don't accept any sort of federal money. Liberal schools might be considering doing the same.
Otherwise, yes, an independent school can do what they want. If you want to be truly independent, you have to be willing to walk away from the money. Anybody that gives money can attach conditions to it, including the government.
What you seem to imply that there should be no strings. Which is a position you can have but it has never been the case.
To wit, one of the things this compact wants is an enforcement of civil rights act and Biden admin did the same thing:
> The most important stipulation during the Biden administration attached to federal funding for universities was compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This law prohibits discrimination based on race, color, or national origin in any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance, including discrimination against Jewish students through antisemitic harassment or hostility on campus. Universities that fail to adequately address such issues risk federal investigations by the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) and potential loss of funding.
> Following the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and subsequent campus protests, the administration opened over 100 Title VI investigations into universities for alleged antisemitic discrimination—more than in the entire previous four years combined. This included guidance like a May 2024 "Dear Colleague" letter to colleges outlining examples of prohibited conduct, such as denying Jewish students equal access to education or tolerating harassment.
The Civil Rights Act was legislation put into place by Congress, signed by LBJ, and upheld by the Supreme Court. This compact was a letter sent by the White House telling universities to fall in line with their demands or be refused funding. I find those to be two completely different things.
I think the negative reaction to it is mostly a function of who is pushing it.
If you mean "not worried", then yeah, I bet you're right that there are a bunch of things that could be entailed by the language that aren't obvious. Good point.
A bit like “cleave” in that way.
But yes, you read me correctly.
> Signatories commit themselves to revising governance structures as necessary to create such an environment, including but not limited to transforming or abolishing institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas.
Only conservative ideas receive protected status under this compact. Why? It is objectively false that only conservative ideas are punished, belittled, and met with threats of violence on the relevant college campuses.
> Such policies also shall recognize that academic freedom is not absolute, and universities shall adopt policies that prevent discriminatory, threatening, harassing, or other behaviors that abridge the rights of other members of the university community.
Read strictly, this clause implies no protests or demonstrations of any kind of a college campus, including e.g., the annual pro-life demonstrations at my alma mater (which occasionally became violent, by the way). It is naive to imagine this clause will be enforced equitably.
> Signatories commit to rigorous, good faith, empirical assessment of a broad spectrum of viewpoints among faculty, students, and staff at all levels and to sharing the results of such assessments with the public; and to seek such a broad spectrum of viewpoints not just in the university as a whole, but within every field, department, school, and teaching unit.
Every biology department must hire creationist professors. Every astronomy department must hire flat-earthers. Every geology department must hire young-earthers. Every medical school must hire germ-theory-skeptical epidemiologists.
And across departments, too: we need mathematicians who believe in Fomenko’s new chronology and ultrafinitist historians.
I assume you’ll argue these are hyperbole, but I’ve encountered such people during my time in academia.
> Signatories acknowledge that the freedom to debate requires conditions of civility. Civility includes protections against institutional punishment or individual harassment for one’s views.
So, logically, a professor of classical philosophy must entertain homophobic assertions about Plato and Aristotle, and cannot sanction in any way the student interrupting class in this fashion.
I also see that a Christian student could occupy a Hillel building (a Jewish student organization) and could not be legally removed or administratively sanctioned for doing so under this section of the policy.
You might argue that these fall under the ban on “heckler’s veto” defined later in this paragraph, but strictly speaking they don’t. The “heckler’s veto” ban applies to the hypothetical Jewish students attempting to convince the Christian student to leave.
> Signatories shall adopt policies prohibiting incitement to violence, including calls for murder or genocide or support for entities designated by the U.S. government as terrorist organizations.
Recall how NSPM-7 recently expanded the definition of “terrorist organization” to include groups that display some of the following “common threads”: “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”
How any Islamic student group, no matter how explicitly pro-Israel and pro-Christianity, survives this definition is an real question.
EDIT: To those who believe this example is unjustified, please see https://www.christianity.com/newsletters/breakpoint/understa... for a typical American Evangelical opinion on the status of Islam.
> The university shall impartially and vigorously enforce all rights and restrictions it adopts with respect to free speech and expression.
As we have seen, this concluding sentence is contradicted by the whole of the policy that appears before it.
How is that for a breakdown? I didn’t say “fascist“ once, may I collect my five pounds?
This is a disingenuous example, Islamic student groups are not anti-capitalist, anti-American, or anti-Christian, and giving an example like this only creates FUD.
I don't think looking at Trump's history of actions toward individual Muslims subject to the authority of the United States government (as distinct from, e.g., foreign states that give him multimillion dollar bribes) really helps your case here, though.
I agree, if only because the thing you just said is entirely incorrect. Qatar is not building an airbase on US soil, they are building facilities on a US-owned airbase. This happens every year from the NATO partners like Turkey who have been doing this for decades.
Please do your own research, don't just cite Twitter/X on this crap.
In other words, trans people can't use the bathrooms matching their gender identity.
> Calls for ideological diversity, not just at the campus level, "but within every field, department, school, and teaching unit."
In other words, every academic department is susceptible to ideological litmus tests defined by the state. If Trump's white house feels like your Computer Science department has too many Democrats in it, you fix that problem or you lose your funding.
> Restricts student visas to foreign students who ... "are ... supportive of, American and Western values."
In other words, another ideological litmus test, only in this case the consequence is that foreign students can be thrown out at will.
> Requires that "university employees, in their capacity as university representatives" as well as all colleges, faculties, departments, and other academic units "abstain from actions or speech relating to societal and political events"
In other words, tenured faculty lose their right to free speech.
I think trans people who "pass" can do whatever they want, and in practice it won't be an issue. I do support actual sex segregation in any area of life women will have no chance without it (like sports). The bathrooms thing is stupid, I agree.
> In other words, every academic department is susceptible to ideological litmus tests defined by the state. If Trump's white house feels like your Computer Science department has too many Democrats in it, you fix that problem or you lose your funding.
Every academic department already has really strong ideological litmus tests. It got way less intense with Trump's election, but it's still there. It's not subtle. You can be really good at what you do, but if you're religious or conservative you have no hope of getting a job in tons of fields. Sociology, for instance. It has nothing to do with how good you are at what you do, it's overt political testing. It was (in the case of many University of California schools, like Berkeley) actually the first line in hiring decisions.
> In other words, another ideological litmus test, only in this case the consequence is that foreign students can be thrown out at will.
I think this is reasonable if there's an objective standard. "Doesn't support listed terrorist organizations" is a reasonable standard. The standard should be written in.
> In other words, tenured faculty lose their right to free speech. "...in their capacity as university representatives...". So no, nobody loses his or her right to free speech. It's just that when you're acting as the mouthpiece of the University, you shouldn't be political if you want federal $. And I wholeheartedly support this. University presidents being political was a fucking disaster (see Reif at MIT).
There's too much pussyfooting around it these days. Trump is a fascist, as are the upper echelons of his administration.
If people had been willing to say this in 2016, maybe he wouldn't have been elected twice, to all of our detriment.
Yes, every new administration can attempt to impose their will on institutions of higher learning (so long as the administration has some sort of leverage, like funding or legal threats). The wise administrations limit their imposition, preferring to allow academia to enjoy high levels of freedom, autonomy, and funding to achieve their mission.
- Specifically calling out protecting "conservative ideas" in their section on creating an "intellectually open campus environment". This is a dog whistle that makes it patently clear which viewpoints will be protected, and which won't. See what happened to Mahmoud Khalil for a recent example of how this will work in practice.
- Preventing admissions of foreign students based on "hostility to America or our allies", which is obviously an attempt to silence dissent. Who is responsible for defining what "hostility" means? If a foreign student supports boycotting Israel due to their ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people, would they be barred from admission to an American university?
I would contend that threatening to annex Canada and Greenland constitutes "hostility to American allies", but since those talking points are being espoused by the sitting president, it stands to reason that this administration's justice department wouldn't intervene to prevent a potential student with similar views from from admitted to an American school.
- Forcing institutions to define bathroom usage criteria based on biological sex. Putting aside for a moment the fact that this is a blatant attempt to humiliate trans people -- how does this work in practice? Do you hire someone to stand at every bathroom door and prevent people from entering if they don't fit your notion of what that gender is "supposed" to look like? Do you demand identity documents before letting someone use the toilet?
There are plenty of videos online of cisgender people being accosted in the bathroom that aligns with their biological sex simply because other people _assume_ based on their appearance that they are trans.
So you don't know what "hostile to US" means.
Do you know what "Unwelcome verbal, nonverbal, or physical conduct based on protected characteristics" means? This is one of the many vague prescriptions in MIT code of conduct.
If I make a sour face at a gay person, is it "unwelcome nonverbal conduct"? Should I be punished for that? But not punished for shouting "from the river to the sea" i.e. demanding annihilation of Israel?
Is your argument that we should just scrap all code of conducts because it is by nature open to interpretation?
Or you just object to those that tickle your politics?
Instead of asking "does this agreement sound nice?", ask what power it gives, to whom, and what might they want to do with it.
Some prompts to spark a cogent reasoning process:
> Signatories commit themselves to [...] transforming or abolishing institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas
What "institutional units" might this mean? How are they identified? Who identifies them? What is the threshold for belittling conservative ideas that might trigger the "transforming or abolishing" remedy?
> Universities shall be responsible for ensuring that they do not knowingly: (1) permit actions by the university, university employees, university students, or individuals external to the university community to delay or disrupt class instruction or disrupt libraries or other traditional study locations [...] signatories commit to using lawful force if necessary to prevent these violations
What do "actions by" "university students" to "delay or disrupt class instruction" refer to? What kinds of disruptive action might the people writing this document be so concerned about that they would ask universities to "commit to using lawful force" to prevent? What sort of scenario is being envisaged here?
> Institutions commit to defining and otherwise interpreting "male," "female," "woman," and "man" according to reproductive function and biological processes.
Doesn't it seem oddly specific to assert a definition like this? Why can't a university decide for itself? How does this assertion square with "maintaining a vibrant marketplace of ideas" and the "empirical assessment of a broad spectrum of viewpoints"? Why only this definition and no others?
I could go on, but hopefully you get the picture. It's an important skill to practice critically reading a document the same way you might critically audit code. Don't ask what it seems like it does, ask what it might allow someone to do.
"protestors" took over libraries, disrupted lectures, vandalized university property, used the power of the mob to intimidate students who disagreed.
The universities have rules against all of that but failed to stop it, leading to weeks long disruptions on campus.
There are videos of all that on the internet.
And you're playing dumb asking what actions do they mean. Those actions: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=university+prot...
Actions like setting fire to university, which apparently happened yesterday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voqhFZZ9zyA
Actions like smashing windows by masked hooligans: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/CH2kUU3h9j4
Actins like breaking cop's nose: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyMssP-A09A
As to defining a "woman" as anything else than a woman: it's modern day flat earthism, not something a serious person should entertain.
Further, your "setting fire to university" video is in South Africa; it hardly seems relevant here. Access to global news will always provide extremes. To me, it's important that actions we take serve the everyday reality rather than the rare occurrences that happen in a few places but are amplified by human attraction to violence and drama.
The questions I offered were prompts to engage critically with why this compact exists. Perhaps watching that video might help you find answers beyond "playing dumb".
The overarching problem is it moves management decisions from the colleges to the White House. But here are a couple of really problematic points:
- mandates government price setting
- requires institutions to promise to use force against minors when faced with unknown hypotheticals
- requires universities to monitor & censor staff and faculty
- requires government oversight of classroom grading, in the total absence of government standards
- bathroom fetish likely in conflict with state laws
- White House oversight of which academic programs are allowed, and the budgets attached to each. White House does not specify whether programs currently in flight will be allowed to continue through the school year, or whether students in those programs will need to leave immediately.
- White House decides what criteria can be used for admission
- White House decides which "institutional units" are allowed to function
- To enforce a parts of the Compact would effectively require the White House to install commissars at the institution to e.g. monitor speech and communications to ensure they are acceptable. This alone should be disqualifying.
- Many discretionary decisions like the above are made at the White House without any binding written guidance
Basically, an independent university would only agree to this if it would have to close otherwise.
The Compact is not conservative because it centralizes decisions best made lower down; it aims to radically reshape higher education; it mandates prices; it promulgates ideology, and more. Conservatives should also reject this Compact.
1 - https://www.washingtonpost.com/documents/22e45e59-75ac-4a81-...
The Compact itself can be found here: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/1... It's short, I ask that you read it before commenting.
It's too bad MIT has taken this stance. I think the Compact is overall an obviously reasonable, good-faith effort to improve universities in the United States. The one area I'd change a bit is the specific mention of "conservative" ideas:
"...purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas."
It's entirely fair because these universities do purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas. But it's not what I'd want in such a document because next time around it could be "liberal" ideas, or "communist" ideas, or...
Everything else seems on the nose. I would hasten to remind you that the threat is not "we'll force you to do this stuff", it is "if you want federal funding, you'll do this stuff". Which seems fine to me. Much of the document is merely trying to actually enforce the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
I really find HN to be a truly surreal place at this time.
A university that can’t “belittle” obviously false ideas like “the earth is flat” or “evolution isn’t real” or “the climate isn’t changing” just because they’re popular with whoever’s calling themselves “conservatives” at the time is not capable of functioning.
You’re picking out the quote that reveals the entire document for what it really is, and choosing to ignore it.
Conservative: I have been censored for my conservative views
Me: Holy shit! You were censored for wanting lower taxes?
Con: LOL no...no not those views
Me: So....deregulation?
Con: Haha no not those views either
Me: Which views, exactly?
Con: Oh, you know the ones
This Compact aims to radically reshape the management of higher education. In that, it is anything but conservative. Conservatives should reject it for that reason alone.
> "if you want federal funding, you'll do this stuff"
There's another piece that keeps getting lost. That is: the US government has a set of policy goals it is trying to accomplish. Outsourcing to third parties some parts of the work of getting there is a cash-light approach. As an American, I think this is better than e.g. the DoD building duplicate capacity (and competing for researchers) at multiples of the cost.
In one sense, MIT gets federal funding in the same way that Raytheon gets federal funding (and there are DoD asset tags at MIT to prove it).
This isn't just MIT getting funding, it's also the US buying some capacity from MIT. It's a mutually beneficial transaction.
The most important part is the end: if the university violates the agreement, they not only lose funding, they also have to give back what they received the previous year. Such a clawback would be devastating, much worse than merely denying funding going forward. And who determines whether there's a violation? The Department of Justice apparently has sole power to make that determination. There's no mention of any appeals process or oversight.
That means that if the President has a compliant Attorney General, they can demand pretty much anything of the university under threat of finding them in violation, regardless of whether they've actually done anything wrong.
It could be a reasonable, good-faith effort if it were put forth by reasonable, good-faith people. But it very much was not.
Trump is an attempt by the voters (most of whom do not share the ideology) to undo the power grab.
As an example, for a long time, spiritual and scientific enlightement was the calling card of the Warszaw pact countries: they just couldn't figure out how to earn money off it (free university education and intensive scentific curiculums in primary and high schools were common).
For China today, they are thoroughly convinced they are doing the same by restricting access to "bad information" (like "Western nations" are now starting to do with eg. porn, and did similar stuff with "fake news" during the pandemic) — the difference being that they did figure out how to earn money while doing that.
In the Middle East, people die and kill in the name of their version of "enlightenment".
Now, not saying there never was any enlightenment in the Western world, but it was built on slavery, exploitation and being first to many an industrial improvement (like using coal or oil to drive progress, that the whole world now suffers for).
Yes, I'd rather live in a "Western" country than any of the "adversaries", but they are only a risk to our way of life if we do not believe it is the right, enlightened way.
Because if it is, we are willing to pay for it. Are we?
It’s important to reflect on why you say this because when push comes to shove, the moral relativism rings a hollow tone. The preceding parts of your post are just part of the education instilled in you from having been exposed to enlightenment-influenced frameworks.
I did not add that statement accidentally to "off myself": I did that to acknowledge that this is hard to overcome, and that none of us has a moral upper hand, really (me included).
On top of that, sociopolitical self-preserving interests can muddle the discourse on what is moral or not, which is what you’re saying, more or less. The point being that ultimately the truth of an immoral act is unchanged by whatever abstractions we layer upon it. So, we make exceptions to ethics for selfish reasons, not moral ones.
What matters then are the outcomes for all the reasons we make exceptions, just as you think there’s some justified reason for moral relativism. It’s okay, people can do what they want, they just have to be honest about the trades they make when they do this.
From a geopolitical perspective, moral relativism is a nice diplomatic tool, it just has the troubling effect of producing unnecessary contrarianism in populations that would benefit from understanding the implications of that moral relativism.
Even if we restrict ourselves to recorded human history, there are plenty of examples where killing in particular and imposing one's will by force more generally was glorified.
This is really a very modern development (last hundred years?). Just look at how women have been treated 50 years ago as the "weaker sex" (and to an extent, still are today).
But going back to morality of the Western world, how does that compute in terms of recent excursions in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria... All exceptions needed in the last 20 years?
My point is that I subscribe to the notion that "morality" has been developed as a human, reasoned construct to help with self-preservation when cohabiting in large social groups (aka civilization) — I am outright disagreeing with you. Compare with the "morality" of humans brought up outside society (kids lost in woods and similar). Too many counter-examples throughout history to consider it innate, IMO.
Bacteria might not be able to communicate that they don’t like being killed, but I don’t think their view of it changes despite that lack of ability to communicate. More complex and conscious organisms, like monkeys, take offense to lies and deception. Or dominant animals with higher-level cognition might punish members of their groups who display jealous traits. Who taught these animals human social mores? No one, they’re going purely off instinct.
There are primal instincts which drive some of these behaviors which have absolutely nothing to do with human culture or society. To paraphrase what I’ve already said, morality doesn’t change, but only how you think of it does. Humans are the only animals who elegantly communicate their selfishness about moral behaviors, and get away with it.
And I don’t get the point of the rest of your post about the Middle East, but I am going to leave it at that.
You seem to be using a definition of morality that's a lot narrower than what we generally call moral and morality: https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/englis...
I don't think your examples show morality at work, but I already realised we disagree on this topic, and I am sure you'll interpret the dictionary definitions differently too.
Thanks for the discourse and enjoy the day.