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Colleges must give up federal funding to achieve true intellectual freedom
- duxup 1y agoThe memo to Harvard directing them to hire someone approved by the feds and survey staff AND STUDENTS and then implement "Viewpoint Diversity" as it relates to admissions and hiring as directed by the feds was straight up thought police type stuff.
- ecb_penguin 1y ago[flagged]
- sumeno 1y agoDon't recall the federal government doing that at all
- ecb_penguin 1y ago[flagged]
- sumeno 1y agoThere's a big difference between private citizens saying things and the federal government punishing speech. Of course, you already know this, you're doing a false equivalency as a transphobic dogwhistle (or whichever bigoted opinion you're upset about having consequences for), which is why you were flagged
- ecb_penguin 1y ago> There's a big difference between private citizens saying things and the federal government punishing speech Nobody said there wasn't a difference. Why do you keep making arguments that nobody is saying?? These things do not exist in a vacuum. The federal response is to limit federal funds. Not receiving billions in taxpayer money is not a punishment when you fail to uphold the basic principles for which that money was awarded. > as a transphobic dogwhistle (or whichever bigoted opinion you're upset about having consequences for), There it is! Took you two comments. Thought terminating cliches are exactly why Harvard needs to lose these funds. It's wild how easy it is for you to absolutely lose your mind. This lack of maturity has no place in education or tech.
- lurk2 1y agoI vouched for your parent comment earlier but have unvouched as this isn’t the standard of discourse that people expect to find here. Consider reviewing the site guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- atrus 1y agoWhen did the feds send that memo?
- ecb_penguin 1y agoWhen did I say the feds sent a memo previously? Is it easier to argue points that nobody makes? An organization that receives federal funds is being told they can no longer restrict viewpoints after having done so. What part is confusing you?
- lurk2 1y agoDecember 1st, 2014. https://www.ed.gov/sites/ed/files/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/faqs-title-ix-single-sex-201412.pdf https://www.ed.gov/sites/ed/files/about/offices/list/ocr/doc...
- AStonesThrow 1y agoPope St. John Paul II responded to the minority report in 1990: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_corde_Ecclesiae https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_corde_Ecclesiae https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/apost_constitutions/documents/hf_jp-ii_apc_15081990_ex-corde-ecclesiae.html https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/apost_constit...
- rayiner 1y agoIt’s not “thought police stuff” to condition receipt of taxpayer money on those things. Harvard can think or say whatever it wants, but that doesn’t mean the federal government must fund it!
- duxup 1y agoThey’re demanding Harvard hire someone to police staff and students viewpoints, and then adjust admissions and hiring to achieve the government’s desired ratio of viewpoints. That’s exactly thought policing.
- derbOac 1y agoConditioning government support based on "viewpoint" is about as close as you can get to government constraining freedom of speech.
- rayiner 1y agoIt’s not “constraining freedom of speech.” It’s declining to subsidize speech with grants. Recall that these are grants issued to specific universities for specific reasons, not generally available services it funds provided to everyone. Why are taxpayers required to allocate his money to organizations that (in the view of elected officials) don’t serve the public interest? On top of that, it’s well accepted that the government can use the threat of revoking federal funds force universities to regulate speech: https://cei.org/blog/obama-administration-undermines-free-speech-and-due-process-in-crusade-against-harassment-and-bullying https://cei.org/blog/obama-administration-undermines-free-sp.... Under Title VI and Title IX, the government can force schools to regulate speech in ways that the government couldn’t regulate directly among private citizens.
- duxup 1y agoMonitoring staff and students viewpoints and directing the school to hire, potentially fire, admit the governments prescribed people based on viewpoints has nothing to do with “declining to subsidize speech”. If you’re a student or even random staff, you’re not likely even asking for a grant, but you are subject to having your viewpoint assessed under the system demanded by the current administration, for no reason other than the federal government demands it. Presumably based on the letter prospective students would have to have their viewpoints assessed to make sure they have the correct viewpoints.
- crises-luff-6b 1y ago[flagged]
- duxup 1y agoI don’t understand this kind of “yeah well they’re bad” argument that props up. I don’t buy into your theory but even if I did my objection to the feds actions is just the same. Are you ok with the government policing people’s views and adjusting employment and admissions as long as you don’t like the school? Are you going to be ok with it if another party or politician does? It’s unfortunate but it appears people have no real ideals now, just recriminations that can justify anything.
- BrenBarn 1y agoThis is like saying if Trump says you have to pay for air, then you have to stop breathing to have true freedom. No. We don't need this, and we also don't need a return to the status quo. What we need is a more equitable system where everyone's freedom is guaranteed and everyone accept that, such that actions like what we see Trump taking here are treated like an old crank on a street corner screaming about the apocalypse: we put him into a padded cell and move on with our lives.
- garrettgarcia 1y ago> This is like saying if Trump says you have to pay for air, then you have to stop breathing to have true freedom. Can you explain what you mean? I don't see how this follows from the arguments in the article.
- BrenBarn 1y agoThe article is saying that Trump's actions have illustrated how dependency on federal funds makes colleges vulnerable. The proposed solution is to eliminate that funding. But what I'm saying is that what is better is to remove the loopholes in our system that allow Trump to threaten it. Rereading the article, it does seem to have a bit more generic right-wing-flavored "government shouldn't do stuff" than stuck with me on the first read, which may be why my logic was a bit unclear. Basically my point is that the government cannot use funding to control universities unless some individuals have discretion over how and whether to award that funding. I'm saying what should be reduced is not funding but discretion. (I'm open to rethinking the system to make it less discretion-dependent; the article does have some ideas that could be relevant there that I wouldn't dismiss out of hand. But that an issue of how schools get funded, not whether.)
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- cratermoon 1y agoLet's be honest: private sector funding is going to come with as many if not more strings attached that will limit or warp 'true intellectual freedom'. The only way a college could avoid those pressures would be to be completely self-funded and put their endowment money in investments not subject to political whims.
- garrettgarcia 1y agoThe article addresses this: "Intellectual freedom is the principle that all individuals have the right to think for themselves, to express their convictions on any subject, and to give their support, financial or otherwise, only to the ideas they choose. When government coercively seizes your money and uses it to subsidize some research program or viewpoint for any reason, it is violating your intellectual freedom." What is unique about the government funding as opposed to private-sector funding is that government funding comes from money coercively seized from people, and private sector funding doesn't.
- cratermoon 1y ago> coercively seized I categorically reject that characterization of how government works, but you do you.
- garrettgarcia 1y agoDeny reality all you want, it doesn't change the truth. The fact is that taxes are collected under threat of force. One need not express an opinion on whether there should be more or less taxation to acknowledge this truth. As you said previously, let's be honest.
- rayiner 1y agoIt would be easier for universities like Harvard to just stop violating the civil rights laws: https://manhattan.institute/article/harvards-civil-rights-violations-run-deep https://manhattan.institute/article/harvards-civil-rights-vi... Harvard may prevail on some of its challenges to the administration. But the gaping hole in its defense is that Title VI, by design, uses the threat of revoking federal money to regulate behavior in ways that would otherwise raise first amendment concerns. The Supreme Court is never going to rule that universities can invoke the first amendment as a shield against Title VI allegations, because that would gut the civil rights laws. If universities could, for example, engage in race conscious practices to increase diversity while still retaining federal funding, they could also engage in race conscious practices to decrease diversity while retaining federal funding. The government, as a grant maker, obviously doesn’t have to provide federal funds to say neo-nazis. And if that’s true, it follows that the government can withhold federal funds based on any ideological disagreement. These organizations are of course free to say whatever they want, but the government doesn’t have to fund it!
- smitty1e 1y agoOh, like https://www.hillsdale.edu https://www.hillsdale.edu ?
- gibbitz 1y agoAll the more reason to go abroad for school and try to immigrate to the country where you study. Soon there will be no reason to stay here except to lose weight on the poverty diet.
- daft_pink 1y agoAt the end of the day, the executive branch still has widely delegated authority to regulate foreigh student visas. Trump could easily move towards a work visa style, where the universities would need to prove they can’t get Americans to fill their admissions spots and quickly eliminate virtually all foreign students from highly selective US universities while still allowing your local non-selective university to fill their roles with high paying foreign students. This would totally align with his ideology and could easily and quickly happen.
- linguae 1y agoFrom the article: “But universities cannot get around the fact that federal grants, by their nature, selectively fund certain ideas at the expense of others. The government picks intellectual winners and losers among private citizens, which is the exact opposite of intellectual freedom.” But couldn’t this be said about any source of funding? All funders, public or private, make decisions about the projects and people they choose to fund. This selection process is not an infringement on academic freedom. In fact, restricting who and how patrons choose to fund research is itself an infringement on their freedom to fund what they want. If I want to fund cancer research, how is this an infringement on physicists and mathematicians? The real problem in academia regarding academic freedom isn’t federal research grants, but the dependence on external funding from any source to help maintain operations, and how this affects tenure decisions. Tenure-track professors should be able to do whatever research they want, but this freedom is tempered by two pressures: (1) publish-or-perish culture, and (2) the pressure to raise money for the university. In practice, this means having to do research that is more likely to get funded and published. Modern research universities are effectively think-tanks with researchers working on what could get published and funded. It’s still possible to do curiosity-driven work under such a setting, but one must still “play the game” to get tenure. Getting rid of federal research grants won’t solve those problems. In fact, it may make things worse. I’m not confident about industry’s willingness to fund research, given the demise of legendary research labs such as Bell Labs and Xerox PARC and the overwhelming culture these days of only supporting research that has a high chance of getting productized immediately. The consequence of getting rid of federal research funding is that a lot of universities will end up reverting to the pre-WWII model where there was very little funding to do research at all. This is the norm at many teaching-oriented universities, but research universities today rely heavily on research grants, particularly those from the federal government. Relying entirely on grants from private individuals and organizations won’t solve academic freedom issues if professors there are required to do publishable and fundable work in order to earn tenure, and with less money for research, this may make things worse.
- garrettgarcia 1y ago> But couldn’t this be said about any source of funding? All funders, public or private, make decisions about the projects and people they choose to fund. This selection process is not an infringement on academic freedom. The authors of the article are not claiming that this infringes on academic freedom, but intellectual freedom. They explain here: "Intellectual freedom is the principle that all individuals have the right to think for themselves, to express their convictions on any subject, and to give their support, financial or otherwise, only to the ideas they choose. When government coercively seizes your money and uses it to subsidize some research program or viewpoint for any reason, it is violating your intellectual freedom. This is the injustice inherent in all government research grants. It is this that private universities like Harvard should now name and challenge. Instead, they fight for “academic freedom,” which is actually the opposite of intellectual freedom. It asserts the right of universities and professors to teach, write and research whatever they see fit — and to do it at the taxpayer’s expense."
- throwworhtthrow 1y agoFor most of the essay, the author pretends to care about Harvard's loss of funding. But at the end they awkwardly transition into their real argument, which is that every tax dollar spent on something they potentially don't 100% agree with is morally wrong. Colleges' problem is that they weren't taking enough federal funding. If they had achieved TBTF status then Trump wouldn't be harassing them now.
- crises-luff-6b 1y agoWhy do these researchers get to benefit from patents and other intellectual property generated using the public money? The IP generated here should immediately enter the public domain.
- bytematic 1y agosame for companies that take federal money
- garrettgarcia 1y agoYet another reason to not take federal money
- crises-luff-6b 1y agoWhy are these researchers allowed to keep their data private for their future benefit? The data generated here should be part of the public domain. --- How about at the Library of Congress or National Archives? Just create a `nih-GR12345-2025-05-31.torrent` for all the data which would offer lots of benefits: - small network traffic for LOC/NA to seed - American-skin-in-the-game to share the publicly funded data - more eyes on the prize, the "FOSS" case for data I think public data would also help all of us, collectively, to lead us out of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
- wellsm8 1y agoQuite right. We need to keep in mind that: He who pays the piper calls the tune. And that is especially true of government, who has a monopoly on the use of force and the power to make laws and enforce those laws at the point of a gun.