Is there any precedent in US history for what the administration is asking of the nations top universities? Incredible they have to deal with this.
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
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.