Any university that depends on $2B (or $9B) for its sustenance is no longer a private university. Instead it's a wholly-owned subsidiary of the federal government, and Trump has as much right to order them around as he does any other federal agency. If Harvard wants to run its own affairs and live by its own customs and courtesies, then it needs to give us our $2B back.
I'm pretty much in total agreement. I really don't like the President personally micromanaging the affairs of a university. Especially Donald Trump, who, in my view, is often largely motivated by a desire to punish his enemies or those he feels threaten him.
On the flip side, even most "private" universities are recipients of direct grants and contracts from the Federal government and they receive indirect support from things like tax exempt status and FAFSA loans.
Universities should not simply be given a pass and allowed a completely free hand to operate as they choose but in general it seems like they are. There should be some review and accountability. Many in the public still have a very romantic view of the university and assume everything they do must be golden. In reality, there is a lot of waste, excessive overhead, superfluous courses not teaching anything meaningful, distortive affirmative action, campus activism arguably promoted by staff, and even a lot of original research is useless. There are some studies that should not be conducted in the first place. This is all in the USA where accountability and approval is still relatively good by global standards. A lot of what colleges do is wasteful, produces negative externalities (extreme political views) and wouldn't pass a simple cost benefit analysis test.
I don't think it's up to the President to personally try and manage how a university operates, what courses it offers, and what studies it conducts even if I happen to agree with the current President that some campus activism espouses immoral or incorrect views. I don't necessarily want a progressive POTUS taking action against universities for failure to address campus evangelism or religious activites. I'd rather have more thorough reviews by people "closer" to the institution and with more insider knowledge who can help optimize the size and scope of the university system.
1. As with everything Trump seems to do, it's a negotiation. By throwing out a couple of crazy things, he seems like he's getting several non-crazy things pushed forward without any real complaint. Because critics are too focused on the couple of crazy things that were thrown in to antagonize them.
2. More generally, I don't think it's possible to have a "civilized", "orderly" approach to taking away billions of dollars from people. Especially a bunch of smart, entitled feeling people. It's always going to be "personal". Only someone who's really ticked off at academia and sees them as an enemy would be motivated to seriously try and tackle them. And anyone who seriously tried would quickly become their enemies and it would be personal to the universities. Ergo, complaining that Trump is just "going after his enemies"always seems odd to me.
3. Likewise, the "rule of law" considerations seem oddly one sided. If we're honest about it, the whole process of funding universities through all of these administrative grants and bureaucracy has a very tenuous connection to the "rule of law". The rule of law is something different than "we jumped through a lot of bureaucratic hoops we created for ourselves". It's, well, are you actually following the the word and intent of the laws, from the constitution on down. And on that front, most the administrative state is of dubious legality.
I'm an academic and agree with this post. This administration is too heavy-handed and what it does can be reversed or twisted by the next. But Harvard and many universities have turned away from their primary mission of teaching and seeking knowledge to pushing ideological agendas. Their bloated bureaucracies don't serve the needs of students. These universities should not be so dependent on government funds.,
Why do you think that Harvard's primary mission is teaching and seeking knowledge? Has this ever been the case? If so, has it been the case in the last 100 years?
I believe that Harvard worked to become a national institution in order to become the primary dispenser of prestige. It was the finishing school for the children of New England's privileged social elite. In the 1930s, it restricted Jewish enrollment because it didn't want too many ambitious strivers to ruin the ambiance. It continues to recruit primarily from children of elite families.
I saw a quote, which I wish I could reference, that Harvard doesn't seek to enroll the next generation's best scholars, but the next generation's leaders. Their current website says "Academic accomplishment in high school is important, [not even "most important"] but the Admissions Committee also considers many other criteria, such as community involvement, leadership and distinction in extracurricular activities, and personal qualities and character."
There may have been a time in the 1960s when Harvard and the other elite universities admitted primarily based on academic achievement and potential, but those days are over.
You point out many flaws and problems both past and present. I agree with most or all but I don't see how any are more than minor deviations from teaching and seeking knowledge.
The impact of some of the social justice activities, especially dissuading some research ideas, on teaching and research is much more concerning but still not close to what I would label failure.
I'll acknowledge that teaching has long been the primary activity of Harvard. But the real "seeking knowledge", it seems to me, was mostly done at the state universities, to the extent it was done in universities at all.
Lately, the state universities, at least in many states, have tried to become more like Harvard, to the detriment of seeking knowledge.
I think you are wrong that teaching is the primary activity of Harvard. The primary activity is research. Faculty are hired on the basis of how likely they are to do high quality research. Later, teaching ability hardly matters to tenure decisions; it is important only as a tie-breaker between two evenly matched in research productivity. Much of the actual teaching is done by teaching fellows, graduate students who do much of the actual work in a course.
The majority of money that goes through the university is research money. The medical school is so much about research and clinical care that the teaching is put in a program of its own, the Program in Medical Education. Most HMS professors aren't involved in the PME.
Fair enough - I was thinking primarily of Harvard College, which I'm sure is a small part of the federal funding, total faculty, and total students.
By the way, when I said "primary activity", I didn't mean to imply "primary purpose". Even for Harvard College undergraduate education, teaching is behind fundraising and prestige for priorities.
Perhaps ... But I'm pretty sure Harvard College doesn't have any professors of their own. Most courses are given by professors in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, who have been chosen for their research, and who spend most of their time on research. So it depends how you define things.
I don't know if that is true or not, even if I'm inclined to doubt it on admittedly thin evidence. It's worth noting that Harvard, ivies, and a few other private peers seem to have far more than their share of Nobel laureates and high profile seekers.
I don't know exactly how it relates but I'm on CD 18 of 18 of Isaacson's Einstein biography. His last decades were at Princeton and he spent more time on social activism than earlier in his academic career. One way that relates is a lot of top academics migrate to ivies and peers later in their career.
First Amendment principles are at stake here though. That's not just a matter of heavy handedness, if they get away with it that's a precedent that undermines expressive freedoms for all of us.
FIRE is on Harvard's side here, for pretty much the first time. I think that tells us most of what we need to know about who to root for.
This is especially true because at the very beginning of the administration they were attacking the actual bad things about universities in the right way, using civil rights law. This is an own goal as well as an illiberal travesty.
Those are some of the demands they've made to Harvard, but not most of them. The other demands are:
--Change their governance structure to increase the institutional power of tenured faculty; reduce the power of students and untenured faculty, especially faculty who are interested in political activism
--Change admissions policy to prevent admitting international students "hostile to American values and institutions" and "anti-Semitic" students
--Hire more politically conservative faculty
--Ensure that every department at the university includes conservative faculty members
--Eliminate all "ideological litmus tests" for hiring (note that this is logically contradictory with the requirement that conservative faculty be hired)
--Audit the following programs for "anti-Semitism": Divinity, Education, Public Health, Med school, plus a bunch of smaller ones
--Enforce disciplinary rules against students more harshly and quickly
--Forbid the existence of student clubs that endorse criminal activity (this is one of the worst 1st Amendment violations in the list)
--Ban masks, with minimum penalty being suspension
I think ideological diversity is virtuous, and matters much more than racial diversity. But making federal funding contingent on ideological diversity is a clear violation of the First Amendment.
For the record, I don’t like diversity mandates of any kind, but I don’t think you’re correct. The first amendment protects freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly, and the right to petition the government. I don’t think mandating universities hire a few token conservatives in the philosophy department, dumb as that may be, violates any of those.
But please show me where in the First Amendment it states that government cannot tie strings to funding? It has been done for decades now. Including the kinds of things you claim would violate the First Amendment.
Thanks. Some of them seemly vaguely defensible under anti-discrimination laws, but as you point out, two are in conflict, and some (tenure? political inclination of foreign students? discipline students more and faster? masks) seem like none of the government's business.
"(note that this is logically contradictory with the requirement that conservative faculty be hired)"
As far as I'm concerned then, they cancel each other out. The idea of it being affirmative action for conservatives doesn't work (ideological diversity is too open-ended and in any case not as toxic as race/gender mandates), *except* I suspect the anti-Semitism thing wild assume criticism of Israel is bigotry. So that sorta counts, though its conservative credentials are much newer than other conservative gripes.
Why does the first amendment apply to organizations seeking federal money?
If they don’t take any federal money, they are not subject to any restrictions that the government might impose for taking that money.
I’m not saying I endorse all the things the Trump letter sought to impose, but I do in fact support a lot of them.
Of course, personally I’d cut a deal that allowed them to continue doing most of the crap they are doing but still get funding for medical and hard sciences research (even if few on either side would accept that bargain…), taking away all the rest of the money, and the student loan guarantees.
You've got it backwards. The 1A doesn't apply to the recipients of federal money, it applies to the giver, ie, the government. The government can't give money to violators of the 1A.
You claim the government cannot attach strings to dollars?
Surely you are not claiming that the feds can’t give money to people who deny free speech rights to others somehow! (They SHOULDN’T, but that’s a very different point.)
So Title IX is in its entirety unconstitutional? SCOTUS seems not to agree.
And this is apart from Biden Admin trying to change it from sex to “gender identity”.
Is the Civil Rights Act entirely unconstitutional (or mostly so)? Rand Paul might think so, but most do not.
By your logic, was SCOTUS wrong in ruling against Harvard in the recent Asian-American admissions lawsuit? If no, then please explain what exactly is the difference here.
You have to be a lot more explicit on what you mean.
They cannot explicitly be the ones censoring. They cannot get someone to censor - like they did with Twitter. But they *can* certainly have a contract with Google despite the fact that Google regularly censors YouTube.
Because Google’s YouTube censorship is allowed by the constitution. And worse, Google is protected from slander lawsuits for the stuff they don’t censor thanks to Section 230.
I wholly agree with ending the public funding of Harvard (and all the rest of higher ed). Given how much of public education is signaling, much of this funding is basically a deadweight loss or worse.
But, this is the worst way to go about it. Doing it in this political climate is intertwining this cause with the policies and politics of Donald Trump. End result is: Instead of making this a bipartisan issue it's going to be demonized as a "MAGA" policy.
And we all strongly suspect that Trump/MAGA is not long for this world, so this is akin to hoisting the cause to a sinking ship.
Due respect, taking away money from academia is NEVER going to be a bipartisan issue. Academia is one of the major interest groups in the Dem coalition.
You may indeed get some fraction of Dem voters to agree with ending the funding, but you aren't gonna get many - I doubt you will get ANY - Dem elected pols to go along with this. They know on which side their bread is buttered.
We can discuss, agree, or disagree about a variety of changes but I don't see how gutting our university education and research system would be an improvement.
Generally removing a big chunk of one’s colon isn’t an improvement, either, but when it has gone cancerous and is redirecting resources to ends fundamentally poisonous and at odds with the body, it definitely is an improvement. Even more so if a new version can grow in its place.
I disagree strongly. “Gutting” the system as you are describing it here, would be 8 steps forward, 1 step back.
Wouldn’t be too hard to get that 1 step (research in hard sciences, plus, the fractions of research in things like economics and psychology that are good) back.
The rest the federal government shouldn’t be subsidizing.
If you’re in favor of government funding for higher education then amend the Constitution to make education an enumerated right, otherwise it should be gutted.
Trump has the Constitutional authority gut the whole thing.
I have no clue why you think it has to be in specifically stated in the constitution.
As for Trump having authority to gut it, that is only true to the extent courts and especially Congress allows him. Congress has the ultimate power here if they chose to exercise it.
I've never thought Jan 6th was a threat to our system of government but Trump's open defiance of court rulings has me a little more concerned. I say that realizing Biden effectively ignored a court ruling that he couldn't cancel student loans.
It seems unlikely we'll have 67 Democrat Senators after the mid-term so is there any real threat of Congress impeaching and convicting? And what if he ignores a conviction by the Senate? Would his appointees and their underlings do as Congress demands or take commands from Trump? Still seems a bit far fetched but not nearly as absurd as three months ago.
Are you familiar with the Tenth Amendment? The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
While I agree that the feds *should* stay out of education, the Constitution does not in fact prevent the feds from giving money to states for education (or to universities for that matter), and attaching some strings to said funding.
The Constitution would (by the interpretation of a right of center justice, anyway) preclude the Feds from making laws regulating what education orgs can do, unless they tie those regs to funding, and the sole recourse of the government is to take back that funding.
He’s not wrong that the Feds can’t just regulate education left and right.
I am 100% with you that the way they gotta do it is with funding, and withholding that funding if the education organizations in question don’t adhere to the strings attached.
Which, of course, is the essence of what the Administration is doing with Columbia and Harvard now (note I say the essence; they may well be attempting stuff that is beyond the essence, just as left Administrations have done with cities over civil rights and policing, e.g.)
Good for the goose is good for the sauce. Harvard is getting exactly what it's asked for (which is all kinds of aggressive intervention in the private affairs of institutions). Defending the country from 'higher ed' is one of Trump's best initiatives, and we need more--and Harvard's total lack of contrition just demonstrates how bad the problem has become. There is simply no reason why the public fisc should be underwriting a hyperpartisan, far left temple of anti-Western worship. These institutions are proudly anti-american. That's their prerogative, but it's suicidal for America to pay for it.
Other than changing that opening to "Bad for the goose is bad for the sauce" and then changing "sauce" to "gander", I'm with you. First time I've heard the sauce version.
The correct expressions, originating, I think, in the 16th century, are either "What's good for the goose is good for the gander," or, "What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander."
A gander is a male goose. A female goose could be called a "goose hen", but as with ducks, nobody says that. What is good sauce to eat with a cooked goose hen is equally tasty to complement cooked gander.
The idea is to insist on the principle of equal reciprocity and that even major differences (such as sex) are irrelevant in the particular context, and a single standard ought to apply, and calls for different treatment would be to implement a hypocritical double standard.
Much of the progressive ideological, narrative-spinning, and legal efforts over the past half century have been to erect a giant structure of socially-acceptable excuses for why "It's different - and thus ok - when we want to violate individual rights and liberal principles, but not when they want to do it." We are entitled to full Academic Freedom and also full Federal Funding, but of course we can are also allowed to go to make our own Academics unfree and require "Diversity Statement" religious-test-equivalents and ideological loyalty oaths, because, "But That's Different!" and "But It's OK When We Do It!"
I hope you or your loved ones are not in a cancer trial that gets defunded by this pettiness and overreach. How can you not be a champion of the unparalleled research and scientific advances coming out of these large research institutions, which truly make American great? And if you think the Administration's motive with these universities is combatting anti-semitism, there is a European political movement of the 20th century you might want to revisit.
Why is it always cancer trials that people point to when trying to defend these folks? first, can you identify, with specificity, any successful research coming out of a university with respect to cancer? And can you make any claim that similar research isn’t being conducted by private industry, or that universities have somehow more success at developing cancer treatments than privately funded institutions and companies? And if you can make such a case, how much was spent on the research at the university, and what percentage of the funding was that research relative to the total amount received by the university?
I’d suspect all of these questions are going to be difficult to answer, because you don’t see the affected universities making this case at all.
Harvard has a 53.2 billion dollar endowment. It can easily continue the funding of any worthwhile project. If Harvard lets a cancer trial stop because the federal money stops, they are saying it isn't as important as not dipping into their capital.
Everyone quotes the first half they all forget the second half:
""
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.
In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been over shadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.""
Maybe we'll get lucky and in the long run it'll be good for both parties if Harvard gets cut off from the government teat. Something's clearly wrong when mediocrities and frauds like Claudine Gay are able to rise to leadership positions in an important institution; maybe being faced with having to raise more money from private sources will nudge the organization back toward being effective at...something. And if not, at least they're being retarded with someone else's money.
At some point you gotta make a choice. A or B. No use complaining that some perfect C isn't available.
"The Process" is owned by EHC so you aren't going to get a fair process.
Too often academic libertarians have sided with "EHC" on issues they clearly should not be siding with them.
Everyone hates Affirmative Action until it means doing to Harvard what was done to some southern town that refused integration, send in the troops/cut off the funding.
What the hell is EHC? I realize the fact that I have to ask means I probably don't have any right to comment and you are obviously superior, but can you stoop a little and enlighten me?
It’s kind of an open question as like a lot of words it means different things to different people. “Elite human capital”. But it doesn’t include every rich or powerful person. And it includes lots of umc professionals.
Something like “the (largely progressive) professional class and their funding sources”.
Right. A good precedent is Bob Jones U v US (1983), when IRS revoked tax exemption for racially discriminatory policies, per the 1970 change in the controlling and formerly permissive regulations. That's really all Trump has to do - and which the executive can clearly lawfully do without new congressional action (cf Solomon Amendment, Rumsfeld v FAIR) - and perhaps all he should do, and perhaps the new Nash Equilibrium point where he intends the post start-by-aggressively-demanding-the-moon-and-stars-and-swinging-for-the-fences default negotiating style to settle.
Getting paid by the public to produce purportedly otherwise-underproduced public goods worthy of tax exemption means public control and public rules. Paying taxes is the minimum price of freedom from that regulation.
My own view is that Deep Harvard is looking for a way out of the DEI singularity, but they need the cover story to their die-hard constituents of fighting it tooth and nail to the bitter end but after the last reasonable efforts at resistance being "forced" by the MAGA zombie hordes into giving up on DEI - "World War D."
They did everything necessary in terms of what rules they set down. Then they just needed to actually enforce the rules. The current action against Harvard is not just a matter of saying "obey civil rights law as detailed in EO 14173 or lose funding."
Nope, Roberts inserted a giant loophole in those rules - "... nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise. [citation] But, despite the dissent’s assertion to the contrary, universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today."
Translation, "Lie this way and we'll let you get away with it."
The second sentence you're quoting there falsifies the spin you're trying to put on the passage. But additionally, the Trump administration already closed any such loophole with its Feb 14 dear colleague letter, which says:
"Although some programs may appear neutral on their face, a closer look reveals that they are, in fact, motivated by racial considerations.8 And race-based decision-making, no matter the form, remains impermissible. For example, a school may not use students’ personal essays, writing samples, participation in extracurriculars, or other cues as a means of determining or predicting a student’s race and favoring or disfavoring such students."
So why don't they just enforce the rules they already set down, instead of adding in all this garbage about "anti-Semitism" and what political views the new hires are supposed to have?
Well put. I could imagine a world where I’d sympathize with Harvard and other schools in their position, where they are bastions of opportunity, training grounds for the next generation of leaders and thinkers, and the engine of innovation. But we don’t live in that world.
Their production of high-quality output is so lacking, in fact, that they do not even attempt to make any concrete or specific defense of their activities, and instead resort to hand-waiving.
While we're watching, I'd like it if someone could explain why an entity with an endowment of >$50 Billion needs a couple extra billion. Admittedly, I don't understand any of this stuff.
Thanks. Prudent. I guess I have to then wonder, ala Jake Gittes in Chinatown, how much is enough? >$50 Billion seems like maybe dropping a couple billion here and there would seem reasonable. But, like I said, I don't understand any of this stuff.
I am not entirely sure about Harvard, but at Washington University most of the government "funding" consists of grants for research, overwhelmingly to Barnes Hospital Medical School. If this is true at Harvard, then this represents another assault on our health care system, which Trump is inexplicably determined to destroy. Also, while the WOKE left is despicable, it is small potatoes. Irrational obsession with woke ideology is what got Trump elected. I'd take a WOKE Kamela any day over a psychotic sadist like Trump. Any one who voted for him are getting exactly what they voted for.
Ah, but you wouldn't get just Kamala, you'd get the same puppet masters who pulled Biden's strings for four years. The only unpredictable part of Trump is his tariffs, and considering that Biden doubled down on Trump 45's tariffs, and that candidate Kamala copied two of candidate Trump's ideas (don't tax tips and something else), thinking you know what Kamala would do is a fool's game.
Trump's tariffs were not at all unpredictable. Nor is his contempt for the Constitution and the rule of law. Nor is his appalling (and illegal) cruelty to legal immigrants. Trump does not care what the impact of these actions are or on the country, including his supporters. All he cares about is ruining the lives of those who oppose him, or for that matter, anyone who takes the spotlight away from him; no one is too unimportant. I promise you, he WILL call out the military in an attempt to stave off the mid term elections. Then, what will the military do? He is a madman, in case that isn't obvious.
How much money did you make off stock market turmoil? None? If the tariffs were as predictable as you claim, so were the results, and you could have made a fortune had you believed your own claim.
Offhand, I'd say you didn't predict either his tariffs or the results.
Go to my substack and read "short Junk." It took a bit longer than expected, but actually I'm doing quite well in the current market. By the way, the bear market hasn't even begun. Feel free to read my upcoming post.
I wonder if the incessant lawfare and cooperation between Democratic administrations and the media to push stories hostile to Trump and suppress stories favorable to Trump hasn't turned him mad. "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you."
Seriously, I think a certain amount of what Trump and his people are doing is, "you fucked with us, now see how it feels when we fuck with you."
Your comment completely validates my comment. I try and I try but I simply cannot understand how it is that clearly intelligent people like yourself and Chartertopia find Trump to be such an admirable figure and his policies to be consistent with American values.
Did I say Trump was an admirable figure? Please don't assume. I think Trump is the World Wrestling Federation of politicians. The WWF took the hype and phoniness of professional sports and turned it up to 11. Trump does that with politics.
I was thinking about what you said and it occurs to me than for many people Trump is like the Civil War. It was a terrible thing, so much killing and maiming, so much destruction. But attempts to abolish slavery just weren't happening, and it didn't look like they would happen. In four years of awfulness, the War did abolish it. Perhaps the War was, all considered, a good thing.
Yes, but why do you think we need a civil war? What today could possibly be comparable to slavery? Yes, Biden was too old, but he was a good man and we had four years of good economic growth and a good stock market. Inflation was a problem but that's been tamed and in any event was mainly Trump's fault (see below.). The deficit (fiscal, not trade) is maybe an existential problem but again, the deficit grew far more under Trump. Nothing was broke, and we didn't need Trump to fix it. https://charles72f.substack.com/p/why-kamela-lost-in-nine-simple-charts
Yes, there is an easy solution. Eliminate all federal funding of secondary education. Then we need not worry about whether such funding depends on the whims of a president.
Any university that depends on $2B (or $9B) for its sustenance is no longer a private university. Instead it's a wholly-owned subsidiary of the federal government, and Trump has as much right to order them around as he does any other federal agency. If Harvard wants to run its own affairs and live by its own customs and courtesies, then it needs to give us our $2B back.
Daniel: I could not agree with you more. Yours is the first comment I read after reading Prof Kling's excellent opinion. Thank you.
I'm pretty much in total agreement. I really don't like the President personally micromanaging the affairs of a university. Especially Donald Trump, who, in my view, is often largely motivated by a desire to punish his enemies or those he feels threaten him.
On the flip side, even most "private" universities are recipients of direct grants and contracts from the Federal government and they receive indirect support from things like tax exempt status and FAFSA loans.
Universities should not simply be given a pass and allowed a completely free hand to operate as they choose but in general it seems like they are. There should be some review and accountability. Many in the public still have a very romantic view of the university and assume everything they do must be golden. In reality, there is a lot of waste, excessive overhead, superfluous courses not teaching anything meaningful, distortive affirmative action, campus activism arguably promoted by staff, and even a lot of original research is useless. There are some studies that should not be conducted in the first place. This is all in the USA where accountability and approval is still relatively good by global standards. A lot of what colleges do is wasteful, produces negative externalities (extreme political views) and wouldn't pass a simple cost benefit analysis test.
I don't think it's up to the President to personally try and manage how a university operates, what courses it offers, and what studies it conducts even if I happen to agree with the current President that some campus activism espouses immoral or incorrect views. I don't necessarily want a progressive POTUS taking action against universities for failure to address campus evangelism or religious activites. I'd rather have more thorough reviews by people "closer" to the institution and with more insider knowledge who can help optimize the size and scope of the university system.
I get the complaints but think:
1. As with everything Trump seems to do, it's a negotiation. By throwing out a couple of crazy things, he seems like he's getting several non-crazy things pushed forward without any real complaint. Because critics are too focused on the couple of crazy things that were thrown in to antagonize them.
2. More generally, I don't think it's possible to have a "civilized", "orderly" approach to taking away billions of dollars from people. Especially a bunch of smart, entitled feeling people. It's always going to be "personal". Only someone who's really ticked off at academia and sees them as an enemy would be motivated to seriously try and tackle them. And anyone who seriously tried would quickly become their enemies and it would be personal to the universities. Ergo, complaining that Trump is just "going after his enemies"always seems odd to me.
3. Likewise, the "rule of law" considerations seem oddly one sided. If we're honest about it, the whole process of funding universities through all of these administrative grants and bureaucracy has a very tenuous connection to the "rule of law". The rule of law is something different than "we jumped through a lot of bureaucratic hoops we created for ourselves". It's, well, are you actually following the the word and intent of the laws, from the constitution on down. And on that front, most the administrative state is of dubious legality.
I'm an academic and agree with this post. This administration is too heavy-handed and what it does can be reversed or twisted by the next. But Harvard and many universities have turned away from their primary mission of teaching and seeking knowledge to pushing ideological agendas. Their bloated bureaucracies don't serve the needs of students. These universities should not be so dependent on government funds.,
Why do you think that Harvard's primary mission is teaching and seeking knowledge? Has this ever been the case? If so, has it been the case in the last 100 years?
I believe that Harvard worked to become a national institution in order to become the primary dispenser of prestige. It was the finishing school for the children of New England's privileged social elite. In the 1930s, it restricted Jewish enrollment because it didn't want too many ambitious strivers to ruin the ambiance. It continues to recruit primarily from children of elite families.
I saw a quote, which I wish I could reference, that Harvard doesn't seek to enroll the next generation's best scholars, but the next generation's leaders. Their current website says "Academic accomplishment in high school is important, [not even "most important"] but the Admissions Committee also considers many other criteria, such as community involvement, leadership and distinction in extracurricular activities, and personal qualities and character."
There may have been a time in the 1960s when Harvard and the other elite universities admitted primarily based on academic achievement and potential, but those days are over.
You point out many flaws and problems both past and present. I agree with most or all but I don't see how any are more than minor deviations from teaching and seeking knowledge.
The impact of some of the social justice activities, especially dissuading some research ideas, on teaching and research is much more concerning but still not close to what I would label failure.
I'll acknowledge that teaching has long been the primary activity of Harvard. But the real "seeking knowledge", it seems to me, was mostly done at the state universities, to the extent it was done in universities at all.
Lately, the state universities, at least in many states, have tried to become more like Harvard, to the detriment of seeking knowledge.
I think you are wrong that teaching is the primary activity of Harvard. The primary activity is research. Faculty are hired on the basis of how likely they are to do high quality research. Later, teaching ability hardly matters to tenure decisions; it is important only as a tie-breaker between two evenly matched in research productivity. Much of the actual teaching is done by teaching fellows, graduate students who do much of the actual work in a course.
The majority of money that goes through the university is research money. The medical school is so much about research and clinical care that the teaching is put in a program of its own, the Program in Medical Education. Most HMS professors aren't involved in the PME.
Fair enough - I was thinking primarily of Harvard College, which I'm sure is a small part of the federal funding, total faculty, and total students.
By the way, when I said "primary activity", I didn't mean to imply "primary purpose". Even for Harvard College undergraduate education, teaching is behind fundraising and prestige for priorities.
Perhaps ... But I'm pretty sure Harvard College doesn't have any professors of their own. Most courses are given by professors in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, who have been chosen for their research, and who spend most of their time on research. So it depends how you define things.
I don't know if that is true or not, even if I'm inclined to doubt it on admittedly thin evidence. It's worth noting that Harvard, ivies, and a few other private peers seem to have far more than their share of Nobel laureates and high profile seekers.
I don't know exactly how it relates but I'm on CD 18 of 18 of Isaacson's Einstein biography. His last decades were at Princeton and he spent more time on social activism than earlier in his academic career. One way that relates is a lot of top academics migrate to ivies and peers later in their career.
First Amendment principles are at stake here though. That's not just a matter of heavy handedness, if they get away with it that's a precedent that undermines expressive freedoms for all of us.
FIRE is on Harvard's side here, for pretty much the first time. I think that tells us most of what we need to know about who to root for.
This is especially true because at the very beginning of the administration they were attacking the actual bad things about universities in the right way, using civil rights law. This is an own goal as well as an illiberal travesty.
Harvard:FIRE::Bootleggers:Baptists
It is my understanding that this $2B defunding is still over DEI and other illegal racism. Is that wrong?
Those are some of the demands they've made to Harvard, but not most of them. The other demands are:
--Change their governance structure to increase the institutional power of tenured faculty; reduce the power of students and untenured faculty, especially faculty who are interested in political activism
--Change admissions policy to prevent admitting international students "hostile to American values and institutions" and "anti-Semitic" students
--Hire more politically conservative faculty
--Ensure that every department at the university includes conservative faculty members
--Eliminate all "ideological litmus tests" for hiring (note that this is logically contradictory with the requirement that conservative faculty be hired)
--Audit the following programs for "anti-Semitism": Divinity, Education, Public Health, Med school, plus a bunch of smaller ones
--Enforce disciplinary rules against students more harshly and quickly
--Forbid the existence of student clubs that endorse criminal activity (this is one of the worst 1st Amendment violations in the list)
--Ban masks, with minimum penalty being suspension
See: https://x.com/NicoPerrino/status/1911867961885041049
Racial diversity is virtuous, ideological diversity is an imposition.
I think ideological diversity is virtuous, and matters much more than racial diversity. But making federal funding contingent on ideological diversity is a clear violation of the First Amendment.
For the record, I don’t like diversity mandates of any kind, but I don’t think you’re correct. The first amendment protects freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly, and the right to petition the government. I don’t think mandating universities hire a few token conservatives in the philosophy department, dumb as that may be, violates any of those.
Really?!?
It might be ridiculously hard to enforce.
It might be unwise.
But please show me where in the First Amendment it states that government cannot tie strings to funding? It has been done for decades now. Including the kinds of things you claim would violate the First Amendment.
Thanks. Some of them seemly vaguely defensible under anti-discrimination laws, but as you point out, two are in conflict, and some (tenure? political inclination of foreign students? discipline students more and faster? masks) seem like none of the government's business.
"(note that this is logically contradictory with the requirement that conservative faculty be hired)"
As far as I'm concerned then, they cancel each other out. The idea of it being affirmative action for conservatives doesn't work (ideological diversity is too open-ended and in any case not as toxic as race/gender mandates), *except* I suspect the anti-Semitism thing wild assume criticism of Israel is bigotry. So that sorta counts, though its conservative credentials are much newer than other conservative gripes.
I agree that some of these are bad.
But some are clearly goodness.
While others are borderline fine enough asks to be negotiated away. Which of course is the Trump way.
Why does the first amendment apply to organizations seeking federal money?
If they don’t take any federal money, they are not subject to any restrictions that the government might impose for taking that money.
I’m not saying I endorse all the things the Trump letter sought to impose, but I do in fact support a lot of them.
Of course, personally I’d cut a deal that allowed them to continue doing most of the crap they are doing but still get funding for medical and hard sciences research (even if few on either side would accept that bargain…), taking away all the rest of the money, and the student loan guarantees.
You've got it backwards. The 1A doesn't apply to the recipients of federal money, it applies to the giver, ie, the government. The government can't give money to violators of the 1A.
Can’t? Or shouldn’t?!?
You claim the government cannot attach strings to dollars?
Surely you are not claiming that the feds can’t give money to people who deny free speech rights to others somehow! (They SHOULDN’T, but that’s a very different point.)
So Title IX is in its entirety unconstitutional? SCOTUS seems not to agree.
And this is apart from Biden Admin trying to change it from sex to “gender identity”.
Is the Civil Rights Act entirely unconstitutional (or mostly so)? Rand Paul might think so, but most do not.
By your logic, was SCOTUS wrong in ruling against Harvard in the recent Asian-American admissions lawsuit? If no, then please explain what exactly is the difference here.
Come on, man! The US government cannot legally support violations of the Constitution.
You have to be a lot more explicit on what you mean.
They cannot explicitly be the ones censoring. They cannot get someone to censor - like they did with Twitter. But they *can* certainly have a contract with Google despite the fact that Google regularly censors YouTube.
Because Google’s YouTube censorship is allowed by the constitution. And worse, Google is protected from slander lawsuits for the stuff they don’t censor thanks to Section 230.
I wholly agree with ending the public funding of Harvard (and all the rest of higher ed). Given how much of public education is signaling, much of this funding is basically a deadweight loss or worse.
But, this is the worst way to go about it. Doing it in this political climate is intertwining this cause with the policies and politics of Donald Trump. End result is: Instead of making this a bipartisan issue it's going to be demonized as a "MAGA" policy.
And we all strongly suspect that Trump/MAGA is not long for this world, so this is akin to hoisting the cause to a sinking ship.
"Instead of making this a bipartisan issue "
Due respect, taking away money from academia is NEVER going to be a bipartisan issue. Academia is one of the major interest groups in the Dem coalition.
You may indeed get some fraction of Dem voters to agree with ending the funding, but you aren't gonna get many - I doubt you will get ANY - Dem elected pols to go along with this. They know on which side their bread is buttered.
"Taking away money from academia is NEVER going to be a bipartisan issue. Academia is one of the major interest groups in the Dem coalition."
Absolutely.
Higher education is not an enumerated right. Cut the funding and let colleges fail.
https://www.independent.org/store/book/let-colleges-fail/
We can discuss, agree, or disagree about a variety of changes but I don't see how gutting our university education and research system would be an improvement.
Generally removing a big chunk of one’s colon isn’t an improvement, either, but when it has gone cancerous and is redirecting resources to ends fundamentally poisonous and at odds with the body, it definitely is an improvement. Even more so if a new version can grow in its place.
But that leaves the question of how much colon needs to be removed with the cancer. It seems we lean differently on that question.
Quite a bit, yes.
I disagree strongly. “Gutting” the system as you are describing it here, would be 8 steps forward, 1 step back.
Wouldn’t be too hard to get that 1 step (research in hard sciences, plus, the fractions of research in things like economics and psychology that are good) back.
The rest the federal government shouldn’t be subsidizing.
If you’re in favor of government funding for higher education then amend the Constitution to make education an enumerated right, otherwise it should be gutted.
Trump has the Constitutional authority gut the whole thing.
I have no clue why you think it has to be in specifically stated in the constitution.
As for Trump having authority to gut it, that is only true to the extent courts and especially Congress allows him. Congress has the ultimate power here if they chose to exercise it.
I've never thought Jan 6th was a threat to our system of government but Trump's open defiance of court rulings has me a little more concerned. I say that realizing Biden effectively ignored a court ruling that he couldn't cancel student loans.
It seems unlikely we'll have 67 Democrat Senators after the mid-term so is there any real threat of Congress impeaching and convicting? And what if he ignores a conviction by the Senate? Would his appointees and their underlings do as Congress demands or take commands from Trump? Still seems a bit far fetched but not nearly as absurd as three months ago.
Are you familiar with the Tenth Amendment? The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
While I agree that the feds *should* stay out of education, the Constitution does not in fact prevent the feds from giving money to states for education (or to universities for that matter), and attaching some strings to said funding.
The Constitution would (by the interpretation of a right of center justice, anyway) preclude the Feds from making laws regulating what education orgs can do, unless they tie those regs to funding, and the sole recourse of the government is to take back that funding.
Which is what has happened.
According to your reading of the Constitution; others will disagree with you, including me.
https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/articles/article-i/clauses/756#:~:text=The%20Constitution%20places%20the%20power,the%20contours%20of%20federal%20power.
He’s not wrong that the Feds can’t just regulate education left and right.
I am 100% with you that the way they gotta do it is with funding, and withholding that funding if the education organizations in question don’t adhere to the strings attached.
Which, of course, is the essence of what the Administration is doing with Columbia and Harvard now (note I say the essence; they may well be attempting stuff that is beyond the essence, just as left Administrations have done with cities over civil rights and policing, e.g.)
Good for the goose is good for the sauce. Harvard is getting exactly what it's asked for (which is all kinds of aggressive intervention in the private affairs of institutions). Defending the country from 'higher ed' is one of Trump's best initiatives, and we need more--and Harvard's total lack of contrition just demonstrates how bad the problem has become. There is simply no reason why the public fisc should be underwriting a hyperpartisan, far left temple of anti-Western worship. These institutions are proudly anti-american. That's their prerogative, but it's suicidal for America to pay for it.
Other than changing that opening to "Bad for the goose is bad for the sauce" and then changing "sauce" to "gander", I'm with you. First time I've heard the sauce version.
I used to say gander, but someone said "it's sauce" and I guess that makes more sense...since you know goose and sauce are the same mix, etc etc
The correct expressions, originating, I think, in the 16th century, are either "What's good for the goose is good for the gander," or, "What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander."
A gander is a male goose. A female goose could be called a "goose hen", but as with ducks, nobody says that. What is good sauce to eat with a cooked goose hen is equally tasty to complement cooked gander.
The idea is to insist on the principle of equal reciprocity and that even major differences (such as sex) are irrelevant in the particular context, and a single standard ought to apply, and calls for different treatment would be to implement a hypocritical double standard.
Much of the progressive ideological, narrative-spinning, and legal efforts over the past half century have been to erect a giant structure of socially-acceptable excuses for why "It's different - and thus ok - when we want to violate individual rights and liberal principles, but not when they want to do it." We are entitled to full Academic Freedom and also full Federal Funding, but of course we can are also allowed to go to make our own Academics unfree and require "Diversity Statement" religious-test-equivalents and ideological loyalty oaths, because, "But That's Different!" and "But It's OK When We Do It!"
I hope you or your loved ones are not in a cancer trial that gets defunded by this pettiness and overreach. How can you not be a champion of the unparalleled research and scientific advances coming out of these large research institutions, which truly make American great? And if you think the Administration's motive with these universities is combatting anti-semitism, there is a European political movement of the 20th century you might want to revisit.
I was waiting for the part where you reveal this was satire, but apparently reality was just indistinguishable from it. Well done, you.
Why is it always cancer trials that people point to when trying to defend these folks? first, can you identify, with specificity, any successful research coming out of a university with respect to cancer? And can you make any claim that similar research isn’t being conducted by private industry, or that universities have somehow more success at developing cancer treatments than privately funded institutions and companies? And if you can make such a case, how much was spent on the research at the university, and what percentage of the funding was that research relative to the total amount received by the university?
I’d suspect all of these questions are going to be difficult to answer, because you don’t see the affected universities making this case at all.
Actually, in a sane world the cancer research and other hard sciences research dollars wouldn’t be subjected to most of the Administration’s claims.
BUT. EVERY. OTHER. DOLLAR. OF. FUNDING (including student loan guarantees). WOULD. BE.
Last report I saw was that 75% of medical research could not be replicated. I hope the cancer treatment that you get is from the correct 25%.
Harvard has a 53.2 billion dollar endowment. It can easily continue the funding of any worthwhile project. If Harvard lets a cancer trial stop because the federal money stops, they are saying it isn't as important as not dipping into their capital.
I
Everyone quotes the first half they all forget the second half:
""
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.
In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been over shadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.""
Maybe we'll get lucky and in the long run it'll be good for both parties if Harvard gets cut off from the government teat. Something's clearly wrong when mediocrities and frauds like Claudine Gay are able to rise to leadership positions in an important institution; maybe being faced with having to raise more money from private sources will nudge the organization back toward being effective at...something. And if not, at least they're being retarded with someone else's money.
At some point you gotta make a choice. A or B. No use complaining that some perfect C isn't available.
"The Process" is owned by EHC so you aren't going to get a fair process.
Too often academic libertarians have sided with "EHC" on issues they clearly should not be siding with them.
Everyone hates Affirmative Action until it means doing to Harvard what was done to some southern town that refused integration, send in the troops/cut off the funding.
What the hell is EHC? I realize the fact that I have to ask means I probably don't have any right to comment and you are obviously superior, but can you stoop a little and enlighten me?
It’s kind of an open question as like a lot of words it means different things to different people. “Elite human capital”. But it doesn’t include every rich or powerful person. And it includes lots of umc professionals.
Something like “the (largely progressive) professional class and their funding sources”.
Thanks. Sorry to be so intemperate.
Right. A good precedent is Bob Jones U v US (1983), when IRS revoked tax exemption for racially discriminatory policies, per the 1970 change in the controlling and formerly permissive regulations. That's really all Trump has to do - and which the executive can clearly lawfully do without new congressional action (cf Solomon Amendment, Rumsfeld v FAIR) - and perhaps all he should do, and perhaps the new Nash Equilibrium point where he intends the post start-by-aggressively-demanding-the-moon-and-stars-and-swinging-for-the-fences default negotiating style to settle.
Getting paid by the public to produce purportedly otherwise-underproduced public goods worthy of tax exemption means public control and public rules. Paying taxes is the minimum price of freedom from that regulation.
My own view is that Deep Harvard is looking for a way out of the DEI singularity, but they need the cover story to their die-hard constituents of fighting it tooth and nail to the bitter end but after the last reasonable efforts at resistance being "forced" by the MAGA zombie hordes into giving up on DEI - "World War D."
Ahem: https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/16/politics/irs-harvard-tax-exempt-status/index.html
They already did what was necessary to stop affirmative action months before. This is about turning Harvard into New College Florida.
The preferences didn't stop, so what "they" did necessarily fell short of necessary.
They did everything necessary in terms of what rules they set down. Then they just needed to actually enforce the rules. The current action against Harvard is not just a matter of saying "obey civil rights law as detailed in EO 14173 or lose funding."
Nope, Roberts inserted a giant loophole in those rules - "... nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise. [citation] But, despite the dissent’s assertion to the contrary, universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today."
Translation, "Lie this way and we'll let you get away with it."
The second sentence you're quoting there falsifies the spin you're trying to put on the passage. But additionally, the Trump administration already closed any such loophole with its Feb 14 dear colleague letter, which says:
"Although some programs may appear neutral on their face, a closer look reveals that they are, in fact, motivated by racial considerations.8 And race-based decision-making, no matter the form, remains impermissible. For example, a school may not use students’ personal essays, writing samples, participation in extracurriculars, or other cues as a means of determining or predicting a student’s race and favoring or disfavoring such students."
https://www.ed.gov/media/document/dear-colleague-letter-sffa-v-harvard-109506.pdf
Harvard’s has not released its admitting data for the most recent year. Last year it was 14% black when meritocratic admissions would be 1% black.
So why don't they just enforce the rules they already set down, instead of adding in all this garbage about "anti-Semitism" and what political views the new hires are supposed to have?
Well put. I could imagine a world where I’d sympathize with Harvard and other schools in their position, where they are bastions of opportunity, training grounds for the next generation of leaders and thinkers, and the engine of innovation. But we don’t live in that world.
Their production of high-quality output is so lacking, in fact, that they do not even attempt to make any concrete or specific defense of their activities, and instead resort to hand-waiving.
Pass the popcorn, please.
While we're watching, I'd like it if someone could explain why an entity with an endowment of >$50 Billion needs a couple extra billion. Admittedly, I don't understand any of this stuff.
Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?
The endowment is not capital to spend, but to collect interest from. Spending your capital should be for emergencies only.
Thanks. Prudent. I guess I have to then wonder, ala Jake Gittes in Chinatown, how much is enough? >$50 Billion seems like maybe dropping a couple billion here and there would seem reasonable. But, like I said, I don't understand any of this stuff.
I am not entirely sure about Harvard, but at Washington University most of the government "funding" consists of grants for research, overwhelmingly to Barnes Hospital Medical School. If this is true at Harvard, then this represents another assault on our health care system, which Trump is inexplicably determined to destroy. Also, while the WOKE left is despicable, it is small potatoes. Irrational obsession with woke ideology is what got Trump elected. I'd take a WOKE Kamela any day over a psychotic sadist like Trump. Any one who voted for him are getting exactly what they voted for.
Ah, but you wouldn't get just Kamala, you'd get the same puppet masters who pulled Biden's strings for four years. The only unpredictable part of Trump is his tariffs, and considering that Biden doubled down on Trump 45's tariffs, and that candidate Kamala copied two of candidate Trump's ideas (don't tax tips and something else), thinking you know what Kamala would do is a fool's game.
Trump's tariffs were not at all unpredictable. Nor is his contempt for the Constitution and the rule of law. Nor is his appalling (and illegal) cruelty to legal immigrants. Trump does not care what the impact of these actions are or on the country, including his supporters. All he cares about is ruining the lives of those who oppose him, or for that matter, anyone who takes the spotlight away from him; no one is too unimportant. I promise you, he WILL call out the military in an attempt to stave off the mid term elections. Then, what will the military do? He is a madman, in case that isn't obvious.
How much money did you make off stock market turmoil? None? If the tariffs were as predictable as you claim, so were the results, and you could have made a fortune had you believed your own claim.
Offhand, I'd say you didn't predict either his tariffs or the results.
Go to my substack and read "short Junk." It took a bit longer than expected, but actually I'm doing quite well in the current market. By the way, the bear market hasn't even begun. Feel free to read my upcoming post.
I wonder if the incessant lawfare and cooperation between Democratic administrations and the media to push stories hostile to Trump and suppress stories favorable to Trump hasn't turned him mad. "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you."
Seriously, I think a certain amount of what Trump and his people are doing is, "you fucked with us, now see how it feels when we fuck with you."
Your comment completely validates my comment. I try and I try but I simply cannot understand how it is that clearly intelligent people like yourself and Chartertopia find Trump to be such an admirable figure and his policies to be consistent with American values.
Did I say Trump was an admirable figure? Please don't assume. I think Trump is the World Wrestling Federation of politicians. The WWF took the hype and phoniness of professional sports and turned it up to 11. Trump does that with politics.
I was thinking about what you said and it occurs to me than for many people Trump is like the Civil War. It was a terrible thing, so much killing and maiming, so much destruction. But attempts to abolish slavery just weren't happening, and it didn't look like they would happen. In four years of awfulness, the War did abolish it. Perhaps the War was, all considered, a good thing.
Yes, but why do you think we need a civil war? What today could possibly be comparable to slavery? Yes, Biden was too old, but he was a good man and we had four years of good economic growth and a good stock market. Inflation was a problem but that's been tamed and in any event was mainly Trump's fault (see below.). The deficit (fiscal, not trade) is maybe an existential problem but again, the deficit grew far more under Trump. Nothing was broke, and we didn't need Trump to fix it. https://charles72f.substack.com/p/why-kamela-lost-in-nine-simple-charts
Buddy, show me where I said Trump was admirable. Your flattery about my clear intelligence carries no weight with such a backhanded compliment.
OK. I take it back.
And a welcome side-benefit of eliminating all such funding is that costs would likely go down for students, not up.
Yes, there is an easy solution. Eliminate all federal funding of secondary education. Then we need not worry about whether such funding depends on the whims of a president.
Are you alluding to “The Dictator’s Handbook”- “to secure private benefits, not to provide public goods.”