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Universities will not be safe from government meddling until they comprehensively stop taking money from the government first. Until such a point, they run the

Universities will not be safe from government meddling until they comprehensively stop taking money from the government first. Until such a point, they run the real risk of censorship and becoming the agents of the very thing that they are warning about.

IshKebab 1y ago
I don't know why you think financial independence would free them from government meddling. That happens to be an easy tool that Trump has used, but it isn't the only one available. Ultimately the government can simply pass laws to make Universities do whatever they want.
1oooqooq 1y ago
you're historically wrong. monasteries were financialy independent. when the "government changed" and the new rulers had no use for the church, all of them were raided and plundered. it's very dangerous to have resources and not be politically positioned. you become a target more than a fortress. it's the one thing preppers don't get. universities are facing the same problem as monasteries faced. they are huge bags of money already. excluding the UCs they are already rich and take government money more for the associations than the actual money.
- throwawaymaths 1y ago
  nobody claimed absolute immunity from everything that the government does anywhere. enjoy beating up your strawman.
JeremyNT 1y ago
What a strange assertion. It's not the case that the government is necessarily run by authoritarians cracking down on speech they disapprove of at colleges by threatening to withhold other funding. This is a novel development. We can surely go back to funding schools without such strings attached.
- throwawaymaths 1y ago
  "live by the sword, die by the sword". even if it was a novel development it was entirely foreseeable.
robwwilliams 1y ago
Worth drawing a distinction between governmental support for science and for the humanities. The first does a lot of relative low mark-up contract work requested by governmental agencies. Governments and all of us would like to see cancer and Alzheimer disease cured. The request for “bids” (aka grant applications) from NIH, DoD (now DoW) and NSF is what has greatly expanded research-focused universities and msde the USA the greatest source if cutting-edge science since WW2 (now relative success is shifting rapidly to China). The recipients of these small but numerous contract to big medical schools usually are totally agnostic about politics—at least at work. Turns out even autocratic-leaning politicians and the public are almost universally interested in learning how to live a long healthy life. In contrast, the humanities are not a bread winners for universities. These faculty are ultimately paid by tuition or red or blue state support. These much more socially saavy and interested faculty mainly teach, and if they are lucky, have some modest time to think, read, and write. They are not beholding to government funds. They can speak truth to power. So if a university like Columbia is brought to heel by the administration it is mainly due to the addiction of university administrators for the relative modest overhead they receive for NIH compared to that any corporation would accept for the same work. And the ultimate source and cause of that addiction of administrators now willing to bend the knee to retain their federal funding overheads is the hard and intense work of their research scientists.
- skybrian 1y ago
  It’s my understanding that the humanities doesn’t get much in government grants to begin with, but when the sciences have a finance problem, they cut the humanities for some reason.
  - epistasis 1y ago
    I'm not aware of humanities getting get to fund the sciences, at least in the UC system. But in many places with highly complicated accounting, the sciences can sometimes indirectly fund humanities through the overhead rate that universities charge. These are highly negotiated rates between the government and the universities, so there has to be a bit of confusion on what money keeps which buildings going.
GuB-42 1y ago
This kind of reasoning works for private companies, not for the government. It is true that if you are accepting money from Coca Cola, it will limit your ability to do work that goes against the interests of Coca Cola. To be independent, just stop accepting money from them. But it only works because Coca Cola can't do much against an independent group. Of course, you need to be careful, which typically means hiring a good lawyer, but you should be fine. And the reason you should be fine is because the government is there to protect you, at least to some extent. But you can't be independent from your government, unlike Coca Cola, they can raid your house and put your in jail if you do things they don't want you to do, and they have no one to answer to but themselves. Government censorship doesn't depend on whether you are getting paid or not.
- throwawaymaths 1y ago
  by that argument coca cola can certainly hire goons to come get you. how far do you want to take your strawman?
  - GuB-42 1y ago
    But they won't, because the government won't let them. Even Coca Cola is not above the law. But government hired goons (aka the police) are the law. In free countries, their role is limited to things like making sure that you won't be bothered by Coca Cola goons, but in less free countries, they are going to hit you for saying things the government doesn't want you to say.

IshKebab 1y ago

I don't know why you think financial independence would free them from government meddling. That happens to be an easy tool that Trump has used, but it isn't the only one available. Ultimately the government can simply pass laws to make Universities do whatever they want.

1oooqooq 1y ago

you're historically wrong. monasteries were financialy independent. when the "government changed" and the new rulers had no use for the church, all of them were raided and plundered. it's very dangerous to have resources and not be politically positioned. you become a target more than a fortress. it's the one thing preppers don't get. universities are facing the same problem as monasteries faced. they are huge bags of money already. excluding the UCs they are already rich and take government money more for the associations than the actual money.

throwawaymaths 1y ago
nobody claimed absolute immunity from everything that the government does anywhere. enjoy beating up your strawman.

JeremyNT 1y ago

What a strange assertion. It's not the case that the government is necessarily run by authoritarians cracking down on speech they disapprove of at colleges by threatening to withhold other funding. This is a novel development. We can surely go back to funding schools without such strings attached.

throwawaymaths 1y ago
"live by the sword, die by the sword". even if it was a novel development it was entirely foreseeable.

robwwilliams 1y ago

Worth drawing a distinction between governmental support for science and for the humanities. The first does a lot of relative low mark-up contract work requested by governmental agencies. Governments and all of us would like to see cancer and Alzheimer disease cured. The request for “bids” (aka grant applications) from NIH, DoD (now DoW) and NSF is what has greatly expanded research-focused universities and msde the USA the greatest source if cutting-edge science since WW2 (now relative success is shifting rapidly to China). The recipients of these small but numerous contract to big medical schools usually are totally agnostic about politics—at least at work. Turns out even autocratic-leaning politicians and the public are almost universally interested in learning how to live a long healthy life. In contrast, the humanities are not a bread winners for universities. These faculty are ultimately paid by tuition or red or blue state support. These much more socially saavy and interested faculty mainly teach, and if they are lucky, have some modest time to think, read, and write. They are not beholding to government funds. They can speak truth to power. So if a university like Columbia is brought to heel by the administration it is mainly due to the addiction of university administrators for the relative modest overhead they receive for NIH compared to that any corporation would accept for the same work. And the ultimate source and cause of that addiction of administrators now willing to bend the knee to retain their federal funding overheads is the hard and intense work of their research scientists.

skybrian 1y ago
It’s my understanding that the humanities doesn’t get much in government grants to begin with, but when the sciences have a finance problem, they cut the humanities for some reason.
- epistasis 1y ago
  I'm not aware of humanities getting get to fund the sciences, at least in the UC system. But in many places with highly complicated accounting, the sciences can sometimes indirectly fund humanities through the overhead rate that universities charge. These are highly negotiated rates between the government and the universities, so there has to be a bit of confusion on what money keeps which buildings going.

GuB-42 1y ago

This kind of reasoning works for private companies, not for the government. It is true that if you are accepting money from Coca Cola, it will limit your ability to do work that goes against the interests of Coca Cola. To be independent, just stop accepting money from them. But it only works because Coca Cola can't do much against an independent group. Of course, you need to be careful, which typically means hiring a good lawyer, but you should be fine. And the reason you should be fine is because the government is there to protect you, at least to some extent. But you can't be independent from your government, unlike Coca Cola, they can raid your house and put your in jail if you do things they don't want you to do, and they have no one to answer to but themselves. Government censorship doesn't depend on whether you are getting paid or not.

throwawaymaths 1y ago
by that argument coca cola can certainly hire goons to come get you. how far do you want to take your strawman?
- GuB-42 1y ago
  But they won't, because the government won't let them. Even Coca Cola is not above the law. But government hired goons (aka the police) are the law. In free countries, their role is limited to things like making sure that you won't be bothered by Coca Cola goons, but in less free countries, they are going to hit you for saying things the government doesn't want you to say.