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Comment by kjksf | Hacker News Reader

> an independent university

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.

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> MIT is taking (lots of) money from federal government.

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.

I wish this was better understood more broadly. Grants aren't no-strings-attached gifts—far from it; they are contracts.

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.

So there's some department in the US government, which plans all the important research such as children looking at Facebook food ads or whether lonely rats crave cocaine more than happy rats [1] and the scientists compete for these? And it's not the scientists writing these up themselves and then asking government to finance the proposed research?

1. https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/FESTIVUS-REP...

It’s a mixture of both top down priorities from government and bottom up opportunities from scientists. I suspect you know this and are being sarcastic because that’s cool. But I’ll describe it anyway.

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.

For example, let's take cocaine rats, which is a real research paid by my tax dollars. Is it some kind of big government vision that created this? Can you locate a Call for Proposal that spawned this? How does it benefit me as a citizen and a taxpayer?

You can’t see any way that an improved understanding of happiness and/or drug use could help people? You don’t see any way that the government, on behalf of the People, would want to understand wellbeing and/or drug abuse better?

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.

>You can’t see any way that an improved understanding of happiness and/or drug use could help people?

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.

I am revising my belief.

>I simply don’t believe people are that dumb.

Sometimes a spades a spade, some people are just fucking stupid, magas for example.

> 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.

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.

Government grants are competitive, not gifts. MIT competes (along with private companies and individuals) for grants and if the grant is won, a very lengthy and detailed contract is signed that outlines the terms of the grant. This isn’t free money that’s being handed out willy nilly. If MIT (or anyone else) violates the terms of a contract, the government should seek to nullify that specific contract. That would be the normal (and legal) thing to do.

I mean, you're obviously right about this all. Which is why it's an easy decision. MIT chooses independence and so cannot agree to these terms.

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.

> 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.

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.

The thing about that legislation is that since it is the law of the land, it applies whether or not an institution receives a grant.

Not at all. It applies only to institutions that are funded by the government. Receiving grants has been characterized as accepting government funding, which is strange on the fundamentals - those grants notionally represent the government paying for work it wants done.

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.

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