Much of that federal funding is for research, the same as any other R1 university. We all benefit from research findings. Endowments are used for other purposes.
There are a few colleges that take no federal funding in order to maintain total independence (mostly for religious reasons). But their research output is virtually zero.
> I'd guess bad-to-good ratio is at least 10 to 1. Should we fix that?
Should we fix... what? Your unsubstantiated claim? You didn't even bother to do napkin math about it, you just asked a bunch of leading questions and then claimed inaction by the masses.
The federal funds are for doing research that the government wants to fund, not keeping the university’s lights on. This is about terminating a productive partnership, not ending a subsidy handout to schools.
It actually isn’t. Grants, as well as much of endowment funds are restricted. They legally must be accounted for separately and can only be used as specified. If you have a billion dollars in restricted endowment or grants towards scholarships and resources, you cannot use them to keep the lights on.
Research projects require grant funding because the schools do not have a business model to justify doing the research.
Yup, people really need to learn their history. The modern federally-funded research university system came about as a direct result of the US getting caught with their pants down after Sputnik. The government decided it's in its best strategic interests to maintain long-term investments in basic and applied research. Those aren't things you can just spin up on short notice, though it's easy to kill it.
Also, isn't a ton of the IP from federally funded research just handed over to US corporations for free or pennies on the dollar?
Something tells me this is more of the current administration threatening to completely wreck US prosperity if they don't get wins on their bigoted social war agenda.
Absolutely. Everything in tech is hugely funded by tax payer money.
Modern semiconductor manufacturing is nearly all researched in partnership with federal funding. It's viewed as a national security issue.
The best theory I've heard so far is that Trump has this wild idea that if he can tank the US economy into a recession/depression then he can renegotiate our debt. He thinks this will save the US trillions of dollars. Except it'll cost the US trillions of dollars as well. I don't know if he's smart enough to think this up but it does kinda seem like what he's doing.
Just consider the tax-exempt status as an indirect subsidy for research and education. I think its ROI is much higher than from any other way the government could use the uncollected amount.
Sure, that's the narrative to manufacture consent from the naive, but I don't buy it at all. Perhaps for very small fledgling universities that makes partial sense; even then I am skeptical. For Harvard, definitely not.
At very least, if your endowment is growing on an inflation-adjusted basis, it does not appear to me that you need further subsidies; your primary business is to be an hedge fund and the treasury of an empire, not education for the masses. Gains should be taxed like a hedge fund at that point.
If you want to subsidize education as a society, there are much better ways: fund research directly and cut through the indirect cost crap (which was popular among academics up until the moment the current administration started advocating for it).
I think this is the common-sense response. The push back I've heard is that endowments are apportioned to specific things. That is, it's not an open piggy bank. Nevertheless, $50B is a _lot_ even if the smallest allocation is 1% of the largest that is likely on the order of tens of millions.
Do you have money in the bank? Do you have income? If so, you don't really need any help from the government. If you value your personal independence so much, then cut the cord.
As a university professor, I agree with you. I think universities must cut the cord and be independent. The university faculty gave up the control to administrators and administrators, in turn, gave up the control to politicians.
> Harvard has a 50 billion endowment, what do they need federal funds for. If they value their intellectual independence so much, then cut the cord.
I agree. Gulf monarchies will probably come in a give even more billions to these institutions anyway to make up for the losses. No strings attached of course...
Harvard probably already secured some more funding from Qatar and what not.
It'd be an interesting strategy if you could split the organization based on departments that depend heavily on federal funds (i.e. perhaps STEM fields such as medicine and physics/hard sciences, etc.) and those that are not (and perhaps simultaneously requiring more freedom of thought).
Perhaps resurrect the Radcliffe College to support the more intellectual, free thought based departments. [1]
It’ll be nice if an institution finally decides to oppose some of the recent government overreach.
It’s really shocking to see an institution in our country take action that is not in its immediate financial best interest (assuming this letter translates to an action)
and they've been painting political enemies as criminals. It's pretty much the same situation as Russia/Putin but at an earlier stage of its development, and people want to avoid being the tallest grass that gets mowed.
It's good that some institutions are standing up but I don't expect it to go well for them.
He also said Chris Krebs and Miles Taylor may have committed treason for criticizing him as president after signing an executive order to investigate them.
It's bad rhetoric. Using stronger, more direct language would have been much more effective at making their point and having their point reach a broader audience. We need leaders who refuse to comply with an authoritarian government and do so with proud defiance. This message was meandering and weak.
Harvard has "fuck you money". They should go ahead and make it clear that they know they have this power and are expressing it (not necessarily with the vulgarity, yet)
I guess that Harvard probably does not need the Feds as much as the Feds need Harvard but I'm glad they are standing up to the Fascists. I'm going to have to see what NYU is doing now.
Its not clear what the effect no Harvard would be on those metrics. And all of those are necessarily in Harvards best interest to maintain too.
This is compared to a direct payment to sustain operations which the government is saying they may not be in favor of. But its not like Harvard would say ”it may not be in our interest to produce successful people anymore.”
Harvard isn't the first to be targeted, nor will they be the last.
The American university system is undeniably impactful on American success over the last century. It would be tough to put any sort of exact number on it, but we can absolutely say "a shitload".
> What kind of DEI programs did Harvard have 100 years ago?
Amongst others, legacy admissions and discrimination against Jews, Catholics and non-whites. Let’s not pretend that Harvard’s admissions process, or American society more generally, was some kind of perfect meritocracy in 1925.
Don't confuse the credential factory with the skills and quality of the underlying students. Harvard is little more than a toll booth for students who were already smart and over-achieving. It's not like the teaching is extraordinary.
A university research lab is controlled by usually one professor or a very small number of professors. They can decide to move to another university and take the lab with them.
Most if not all of his cabinet (surprisingly) have an Ivy League background. Not sure if that's an endorsement on them, or an indictment on Ivy League schools
Until recently, the US brand was where exceptional people wanted to go study and work. If you want to send the world's best and brightest to other countries that's fine, but it will have negative long term impacts on the US.
The GOP / Trump administration shows no real focus on employing experts, Trump shows no curiosity about anything. They're slashing research and science across the board department by department. They employ anti science people as heads of departments that require science.
I don't think the GOP & Trump thinks they need anything from Harvard other than agreeing to impose first amendment violations on others on behalf of the GOP and Trump.
The thing to remember is that these grants are their research budget. The endowment is largely earmarked for educational projects. Your average university professor is there because they want to do research, not because they want to teach - so the research budget is critical for educating as well.
I assume Harvard has a plan for dealing with this dynamic. They have some extremely smart people there, so I don't doubt they've found a way.
Genuinely curious: what part of the federal government's letter to Harvard seems fascist to you?
Is the government asking a university to shift their bias away from skin color diversity to viewpoint diversity fascist?
Is there a historical parallel?
Or is it just the fact that the government is asking for reform, and any reform request would be considered fascist? If so, do you also consider the DEI reform requests fascist?
Let's set aside specific terms like "fascist" for now. Below is one of the demands from the government:
> the University shall commission an external party, which shall satisfy the federal government as to its competence and good faith, to audit the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for
viewpoint diversity, such that each department, field, or teaching unit must be individually
viewpoint diverse.
Do you feel this is ok for the government to demand of an educational institution? This isn't about specific political ideologies. If the Biden administration had threatened to withhold funding from a university because, for example, their hiring policies weren't left-leaning enough or something, it would be equally outrageous.
Let me start by saying that I am not American and I am not your enemy. Also, I am genuinely trying to understand the truth about these matters, with an open mind to the possibility that it's messy and complicated and I might not be capable of understanding it. I hope that provides context for what follows.
Honestly, I am not sure if it's okay. It reminds me of the anti-racist movement, in that the action almost feels like it's anti-fascist. It's using a fascist action (use of state power to enforce conformity), to undo a fascist policy (suppression of political opposition and dissent). This reminds me of anti-racism, which uses one type of racism to compensate for a different type of past-racism.
What I find interesting is the very last statement in your post. I am not aware of anything Biden did, but it does seem like Obama did something very similar with the DEI policies forced on universities which came with funding implications for non-compliance. It was a different time, everyone was upset about the great financial crisis of 2008, and on their surface I am sure these policies sounded like a good thing. In the end though these policies were very much a form of facism in that it was a state sponsored effort to suppress political opposition. This probably sounds like I am defending the political views of racists, but really I am defending the political views of people who believe leadership roles should be filled based on the merit of the individual and their ability to take care of those in their charge, and not based on the color of their skin, their gender or sexual preferences.
As I have tried to unpack all this, the perspective that is growing for me is that for the last 20 or so years both administrations have been taking steps towards fascism while hiding their fascist actions behind intentions that sound anti-fascist. If this perspective is even partially correct, it would explain why so much of this has been so confusing for me.
The section on "Student Discipline Reform and Accountability" is explicitly fascist. Harvard police must prevent/crush serious protests that cause disruption. Student groups must be vetted so that they don't violate orthodoxy. Masking (even for valid medical reasons) is banned. (This lets you know that this has nothing to do with facts or diversity of viewpoints and everything to do with the supremacy of theirs.) The "Whistleblower Reporting and Protections" section is basically a demand for a hotline, direct to the government, to inform on anyone not toeing the line. The "Transparency and Monitoring" section makes it clear the government intends to monitor foreign students at Harvard closely.
This isn't quite 1930's Germany yet, but it's getting there. The next step to watch for would be any laws passed that regulate who can serve as faculty in universities or attempts to impose different leadership on universities that don't comply with demands.
You made several good points. While I am struggling to validate "Student groups must be vetted so that they don't violate orthodoxy", it may be because I am unfamiliar with the actions of the student bodies listed at the end of the section, or maybe subtleties in the wording that I am missing that could be exploited later.
Also I find the mask-ban strange and alarming. That example alone was probably enough of a red flag for me to more carefully scrutinize the good-faith of the rest of the letter.
Thank you for taking the time to actually engage with me constructively. Unfortunately many others decided to just downvote my questions.
I find it so disappointing that on a forum like Hacker News I am being downvoted for asking a question in good faith in an attempt to better understand a complex and nuanced topic.
When I ask ChatGPT to explain Facism to me, two aspects it pointed out were:
- Suppression of political opposition, dissent, and individual freedoms.
- Use of state power to enforce conformity.
I can see how the letter from the government to Harvard would be considered use of state power to enforce conformity. As someone who is open minded trying to understand the truth, the letter on first pass reads like they are using state power to unwind enforced ideological conformity. This is confusing, because on its surface it seems anti-fascist, so when people label it fascist (with charged emotions), it's hard for me to take them at their word without further explanation.
When the people who are concerned about the current actions of the government attack me for asking questions in an effort to actually understand their concerns rather than just accepting them, it makes me more suspicious of their viewpoints, not less.
Also, ChatGPT's thorough explanation of Fascism indicated to me that both administrations have been showing signs of increasing fascism, almost complimenting each other in their policies as they rock the cultural and institutional trunk of the united states back and forth with ever increasing momentum until it tips over into catastrophe. If such is the case, then maybe the only hope is for people to engage in these thorny issues with curiosity and nuance, to carefully sift out the bad from the good instead of assuming that everything the other side is doing is evil.
I have no control over what other people do, all I have control over is my own actions. I don't see a good way out of this mess that doesn't involve curiosity, empathy, understanding and reconciliation. So I will continue engage in the conversation with these intentions, and if people attack me for that then I suppose to will just have to accept what's inevitable.
Universities and colleges are hotbeds of political protest. Take young people with poor impulse control, expose them to education and political literature, and let them freely associate (e.g. form student groups). They're going to question authority and government policy, often in an unruly manner. That's just how it goes. The thing is, when students are right, protests often spread to the rest of the population. That's why the letter makes explicit a concern about non-students being invited onto campus. The last thing any administration wants is for student groups to spark a big protest that sticks around for a bit and pulls in protesters from off-campus. That stuff will make the news every time!
Most governments recognize that large protests can influence public opinion against them. If you let such a protest occur and do nothing to satisfy the demands of the protesters, then things can get ugly quick. Freedom of speech and association are powerful things! There's not much an open, democratic government can do except respond to protests by addressing the underlying issues or crush the protest and hope that the public decides the protesters were wrong. What the Trump administration is trying to do here is reduce their risk by infringing on freedom of speech and association. It's fascist or totalitarian. Take your pick.
As for their claims that they're trying to "unwind enforced ideological conformity"... You can't do that by enforcing conformity to a different ideology, as they are attempting here. This is a case where you should pay less attention to words and more to actions.
Maybe? Or maybe they realize that they will lose all future credibility with students, government and NGO's if they bow to the conservative & Christian right?
There are two outcomes for the the current American government situation - a slide in to authoritarianism (it's right there in Project 2025), or these wackjobs get voted out because they are destroying global financial stability.
If it's the former, Harvard eventually has to cave because literal Nazi's.
If it's the latter, Harvard is screwed if they capitulate.
Yes, I doubt they're cool with the ideas in the letter like the federal government auditing everyone's "viewpoint diversity" and mandating staffing changes to fit what the federal government wants.
The thing is there's really no choice. The version of Harvard we get if they cave is the same as burning it all down. It would be dead as an educational institution and would only serve to foster the same kind of insane doublethink that leads people to ask for "diversity in viewpoints" at the same time they ask for the removal of the viewpoints they disagree with.
I don't know, is it moral to give legitimacy and a platform to someone like J. Mark Ramseyer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Mark_Ramseyer)? Less clear example would be keeping around Roland Fryer.
I find that very few people and even fewer institutions are consistently always on the right side of things morally, even in very clear-cut cases (never mind that what exactly the "moral thing" is, is a whole discussion in itself). It's probably better to look at the overall pattern rather than a incidents (either good or bad).
I have no opinion on Harvard myself by the way; I don't know enough about it. I'm just saying this is not an especially good criticism.
> Harvard just earned some reputation with me. It was already a place with great research. But now, it is also in institution with actual moral fiber.
I'm not so sure. The Harvard endowment is huge. I might not be so much "moral fiber" as having enough fuck you money that risks don't matter as much as they do to others.
More of that! When a mountain of old money is suddenly put at risk, it can easily be mistaken as moral fiber. We will see if Harvard suddenly decides to defend others, or just fend for itself.
No. This fight will be much bigger than money. It’s true they have money, but this will be a literal fight of academic freedom against authoritarianism.
While I agree with this, if you read the letter of demands from the administration I don't think Harvard had any choice. I think the letter was much more egregious than what the Columbia demands were (at least from what I read about the Colombia demands). I think if Harvard had acquiesed it wouldn't have much reason to exist anymore, and I say this as a Harvard alum who took plenty of issue with the direction of the university in recent years.
In contrast, most of the demands I read for Columbia, except for the one about putting the Middle Eastern studies department under some sort of "conservatorship", seemed relatively reasonable to me if they hadn't come from the barrel of a gun and from an administration who has clearly defined any criticism of Israel and any support for Palestinians as anti-Semitism.
> Although some of the demands outlined by the government are aimed at combating antisemitism, the majority represent direct governmental regulation of the “intellectual conditions” at Harvard.
So alongside antisemitism, The other demand is for changes in intellect. For some reason this reeks of Christian evangelical movement to purge wokism and anti-Zionism, both of which have run counter to evangelical dogma.
Except homeland has been Egypt before it was Palestine. And Jews lived in both places peacefully after the Arabs established peace.
Antisemitism is not what you want to make it out to be. It is as much a hatred against Arabs as it is against Jews, as Zionist Christians want to fill the land with Jews just so the end of the world is near, without any consideration for what happens to the Arab natives of the region.
Arabs never ‘established peace’ - historians largely agree that Islam was spread through conquest. Under Arab colonisation Jewish people either lived as Dhimmis, which are second class citizens, or were subject to outright violence (you can find many incidences of this before 1948), or both.
Yes, peace happens after conquest. Colonization never occurred. And if you want to know what happened to the Jews after Arabs conquered, listen to this historian speak: https://youtu.be/9bBlv0hfj5c?si=JVi7tMYTPwBI97gT
No, it doesn’t. This is discussed in the comment you responded to.
To deny the Arab colonisation of the middle east is simultaneously hilarious and disgusting, the one does see this occasionally amongst arab nationalists that have recently infiltrated the American left and caused the issues at Harvard and elsewhere.
You can’t block anyone on here. And you can’t be here to argue if you don’t make an argument. And you can’t attack anyone just because they don’t agree with you. Roy is a historian unlike yourself.
I could knock anything from Ray from Austin Community College out of the park. His video on the creation of Israel is full of falsehoods that are easily proven wrong, that's where I recognised him from. If he's an historian, I am too.
Which reminds me I need to click the block button.
Extensions don't block anyone. your argument was addressed. I have not seen his video on the creation of Israel. And he is a PhD historian. which you are not. (I am surprised to the lengths which you went to try to discredit him.)
The focus on the conquest of Jerusalem and bringing back Jews to the city is also reiterated by Sam Aranow, an Israeli like yourself.
The current administration have interrupted the pipeline of students to research - current research funded or partially funded by federal government is stopping or will be curtailed and future students will question whether is a rational decision to go into any sort of path that leads to research because it would only be stable for maybe two to three years, assuming a sane, science respecting House, Senate and President were in office and used the regular norms to pass bills and implement programs. I do not see a recovery path from this unless American public gets a similar thrashing like the Great Depression and decides to not elect nut jobs for 50 years. I keep seeing interviews with those who vote for Trump and are hurt by his tariffs or immigration changes and insisting they still support Trump. Those (mostly older) people are going to have to die of natural causes and be replaced by demographic shifts before things change, but the last election showing young men shifting to Trump and this administration trying to suppress the vote of women does not point to this.
I was struck by how many of the people whose ages are named in that article were in their late thirties through fifties. Both as alleged perpetrators of violence, and victims.
Yeah. Sometimes college students are older, but that article isn't really evidence that student groups are hitting the streets bashing people based on ethnicity.
I am sure you can read, but apart for the very numerous mentions of violent attacks against Jewish students, we have this quote:
Kates, the head of Samidoun, and leaders of other hard-line pro-Hamas groups, say they don’t randomly attack Jewish people at demonstrations. Rather, they said, protests turn violent due to clashes with the police and run-ins with Jewish counterprotesters who carry Israeli flags and become targets.
“If you were to carry other flags of countries and nations that have committed genocide, one might expect them to be taken away,” Kates told NBC News. “That’s really a very low-level of confrontation for actively going out and supporting the genocide of the Palestinian people.”
That's a pretty straight up claim admission of violence during demonstrations by a student group. This group that was part of the "student's" demonstrations in the universities was later on designated by both USA and Canada as affiliated with the PFLP terror group [1][2]
I am lost for words, what kind of evidence will you deem sufficient?
Surely the two students attacked at the start of the article due to wearing yarmulkes in public by a man wearing a keffiyeh is not related to subscribing to a specific ideology
I know that Jewish people are attacked by antisemites. No one is questioning that Jews face race-based hatred, just like Muslims do. Especially after 9/11, Muslims face a lot of antimuslim sentiment here.
I am questioning the notion that leftist groups on universities are doing antimuslim or antijewish activities.
The article you linked writes this about the perpetrator of the attack you're referencing here: "The man, whom police later identified as Jarrett Buba, a 52-year-old white man from Pittsburgh"
That doesn't really sound like a leftist student protestor to me. I was told that leftist student protestors are attacking people based solely on their ethnicity, so I'd like some evidence of this.
Reading this without a side, all they're asking you is to prove what you said, which is that leftist student groups are being racist/violent/antisemitic in an organized way.
You haven't shown any evidence to support your notion that "both sides the same" in regards to left/liberals banding together to promote their hateful ways.
There is, however, widespread and constant organization on the right to enact hateful/racist/antisemitic rhetoric. One can just go to foxnews for that.
Your argument is weird and I think the majority of people wouldn't buy it.
I don't think it really matters if it was organized based on hate for a specific ethnicity, I think for one that the western tradition of antisemitism is so embedded in the culture it is still pretty rampant, but racism is hard to prove today when everyone is disingenuous about it.
What actually matters is that some of the same groups that organized these protests celebrated the massacres in october right afterwards (google SJP october 7). When a student organization supports a massacre that kills a thousand civilians with the added atrocities or further calls for genocide of that group (but only in Israel!), obviously members of that ethnicity will feel threatened
Is that worth restricting free speech for? that's a different question, but the protests could have been done in a less restrictive way for other students and when you compare it to some of the more extreme cases of Title IX investigations, and university administrators saying that calls for genocide of jews is not violations of Harvard policies, you have to ask yourself is free speech really the issue
The claim was "Organized groups of Lefists and Muslims in the US became increasingly violent and started to attack a group of people based on their ethnicity."
I asked for evidence. It has devolved into the message you just wrote, which still does not supply evidence that "Organized groups of Lefists and Muslims in the US became increasingly violent and started to attack a group of people based on their ethnicity."
The keffiyeh bit reads as really suspect (not saying the student was lying—mistakes are common in these situations) given all the other details of that incident I can find in other sources covering this. That claim appears to be the only connection to the pro-Palestine movement of the attack by a 52 year old white townie whose mugshot reads "homeless"—all of which paints a very different picture.
Maybe, I actually believe that the many instances of obvious non college participants does not cast these protestors in a good light
In any case, another example, A US court ruled an organized attack by a leftist group on Jews by physically blocking them from entering the campus if they refused to declare they agree with the "leftist" group
I believe there's ample evidence that campus life in many american universities was hostile to many jews, and it is enough to watch Claudine Gay congressional hearing to understand they were reluctant to do anything about it
> Those who complied with the protesters’ view were issued wristbands to allow them to pass through, the complaint says, which effectively barred Jewish students who supported Israel
So, just to be clear, it was because they were pro-Israel, and not because they were Jewish.
If it was because they were Jewish, Jewish students that oppose Israeli occupation wouldn’t be allowed through.
Conflating the Jewish identity with support for Israel is a subtle ideological trick, one that Jewish antizionists consider to be antisemitic.
Why is it any more necessary to fight "leftists and muslims" than it is to fight righties and MAGAs?
That's the question that the Trump people never seem to acknowledge that the rest of America is asking itself?
What's the difference between muslims bombing whatever and MAGAs shooting up or torching a black church? The rest of us are finding it hard to see the distinction.
In fact, recent events have served to crystalize the dangers posed to the republic by ill considered MAGA policies. And to concentrate minds on the problem of how to extricate ourselves from the crises they have gotten us into in as efficient a manner as possible.
If efficiency is even possible at this point? Maybe "in as minimally painful a manner as possible" is a better way to say it?
No mention of anti-Asian discrimination? It made big rounds in all the American media circles a few years back, and if memory serves, MAGA boarded that train too.
These "values" are not sincerely held, but tactical. Once they got the SCOTUS win and affirmative action was toast, they quickly moved on from fighting anti-Asian hate to a new fig-leaf/tool to useful for fighting the next ideological battle, which was prominent protests against government policy, which happened to be pro-Palestine, so this is the best tool for the job.
The messaging is very similar too, conflating pro-diversity with anti-whiteness, or anti-asian when needed, and now redefining being pro-Palestine as anti-Semitic or pro-Hamas. It's dumb, lacks nuance, but effective when the Fifth estate is pliant, co-opted or otherwise ineffective.
Good points. But they did open themselves up to this by blatantly discriminating against Asian students. I mean, "you have an ulterior motive in arguing against our hugely racist policies" is not a great defense.
Asians are not a uniform block. They forget, often, just like every other ethnicity. Or they convince themselves that the values are actually still being held.
MAGA loves to say how universities screw over poor hard-working Asian students, and then they turn around and defund universities and fire researchers. Their pity on Asians is not sincere, because they detest higher education in the first place.
And I'm saying this as an Asian father whose kid is going to a US college this year.
Harvard was one of the universities "screw[ing] over poor, hard-working Asian students", so I'm not sure the criticism holds, especially when the government's letter is asking for merit based admissions reform.
Are there other universities that weren't discriminating against Asians that the government has or has moved to defund?
> Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, 600 U.S. 181 (2023), is a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court ruling that race-based affirmative action programs in most college admissions violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
What came out of the documents in that court case was used as research by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and was published[2], so we can see very well how they were screwing over poor, hard-working Asian students.
> Data on admissions—particularly at elite universities—is tightly guarded, making it challenging to identify both the students who benefit from racial preferences and the importance of race in admissions decisions… The data made public in the SFFA v. Harvard and SFFA v. UNC lawsuits are important because they make it possible to look behind the admissions veil to see how racial preferences operate.
It wasn't just Harvard, the University of North Carolina was included. The poor part is handled right there in the abstract:
> Both universities provide larger racial preferences to URMs [under-represented minorities] from higher socioeconomic backgrounds.
Echoed later on:
> Those who benefit the most from racial preferences (at least in terms of advantages in admissions) are those who come from higher socioeconomic status homes.
Asians weren't and probably still aren't benefitting from this, as:
> Looking first at the applicant columns, African Americans are most likely to be labeled disadvantaged followed by Hispanics, Asian Americans, and whites.
So not only do these "diversity" policies hurt Asians, they don't even help black Americans from lower socioeconomic classes, which seems to me to make all of it racist, including against black Americans - the ones most purported to be helped by this - and even against disadvantaged whites, who lose a whopping 25% of their chance to be admitted:
> a white, male, disadvantaged applicant with a 5% chance of admissions would only see his admissions probability rise to 32.1% if he were instead treated as an African American applicant
But the easiest misdeed to see is that done against Asians, hence the lawsuit.
If you've read history, this rhymes with certain acts that have happened before under certain regimes. Under a non-authoritarian Government, this type of showboating can be dismissed, but when habeas corpus and the right to due process is suspended — such actions take on a very different cast indeed.
It's good that Harvard is fighting this. The more people accede, the more they will accelerate down a path where there is no coming back from.
The point of no return is Trump getting a third term. The parallels are strong there.
I was just thinking this morning that we very much needed the USA's help fighting Nazi Germany, but who will we turn to when we're fighting fascists coming from the East _and_ West? (Russia and the USA)
Edit to explain my point, because I'm getting downvoted (which I don't care about, but I _do_ care if people don't understand my point): fascism was a specific ideology/movement in the 20th century that, other than being right-wing and authoritarian, doesn't bear much resemblance to right-wing authoritarianism today: they have different goals, different motives, promote different policies, etc.
It seems people just use "fascism" as a synonym for "destructive right-wing populism" or even just "bad". And I agree that things like the MAGA movement, or AfD in Germany, ARE bad, and one could even argue that they are just as bad as historical fascism.
But I don't think we should use "fascism" in this way, because it gives ammo to your opponents: the supporters of these right-wing movements can point out that indeed, they are not the same as historical fascism and make you look silly.
Fascism (/ˈfæʃɪzəm/ FASH-iz-əm) is a far-right [checks box], authoritarian [ignoring courts decisions, sending people to prisons without any due process; check], and ultranationalist [MAGA, american exceptionalism, etc; check] political ideology and movement, characterized by a dictatorial leader [do I really need to explain; check], centralized autocracy [feckless GOP congress, EOs left and right; check], militarism, forcible suppression of opposition [J6, anyone? also see Maine and TFA and the law firms being blacklisted and more; check], belief in a natural social hierarchy [pro-life, shrouded in "traditional family values", anti-gay, anti-trans, etc; check], subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation or race [tariffs, massive deportations without due process, etc; check], and strong regimentation of society and the economy [bathroom bills, tariff policies with exceptions for those who bribe him with million dollar dinner purchases, etc; check].
I mean.. Mussolini's Italy or 30s Austria weren't exactly Nazi Germany. So while there still might be some way to go the comparison is not that extreme.
Equating Trump with Hitler is of course a stretch. Mussolini however? Well..
I get what you mean, and I understand the frustration. We should be more careful with words for exactly the reason you say at the end.
Having said that, the reason I chose to use it here was because I felt it was time, i.e. it has finally become earned. I could defend the usage with anyone who brought that up (and someone's done a thorough job in one of the replies).
The good things (and the promises of more) are what make them compelling for a while. Fascism is appealing because top-down directives from an absolute leader can work… for a bit.
Eventually you run out of the low hanging fruit that can be messed with by executive fiat, and then you have to find enemies to blame.
Apologies. Did by no means try to mean it as a compliment to the Nazis - I just intended it as a comparison to help explain the justification at the time.
Nope, it didn't. The Nazis started a war economy almost immediately and yes, they hiked employment, but the Nazi economy was boom or bust. They couldn't sustain it long term without the war.
The nazis just robbed minorities and used slave Labour to prop up their economy and rich certain people/ethnicities
Which, again, is a parallel to Trump. If the peoll,e he deports to El Salavdor start to have their assets taken by the state/their neighbours/the people that dobbed them in, good luck.
The point of no return is Trump getting a third term
That's a little alarmist. It's not going to happen.
Things are close to going off the rails and people are understandably troubled with the direction in which the US government is headed. I am as well. But we all need to start turning down the temperature a bit.
I have had to listen to people like you for almost 10 years talk about things Trump said that were never going to happen. At what point do you just accept the evidence of your eyes and ears?
People keep saying this about everything the admin does before they do it. Pretending it won't happen won't stop it happening.
The real question is, who is left to stop it? The man is saying he's not joking about it. It's in line with his previous actions. They have actively refused to comply with court orders. They actively tried to reject the results of an election.
Why is it alarmist to say they may do the thing they want to do, and can do?
Steve Bannon went on Bill Maher recently saying they are working on finding a way to make it happen. He was not joking. When challenged, Bannon's response was that Trump was already flooding the courts with cases.
If there was no track record of Trump doing things off the rails, we could turn down the temps. However, he very much does not, and quite the opposite. Him admitting they are "looking into it" on how to achieve a third term is quite unsettling. Especially with congress acquiescing to any whim he has as well as SCOTUS giving him permission to do whatevs. None of this instills confidence that there will be any push back.
The same people that came up with Project 2025 are the very people that would come up with plans for giving a third term. Those plans might seem ridiculous to some, but so did the alternate electors and the other things Trump has already tried before. The fact that no negative outcome came from any of those previous attempts just emboldens even further attempts.
It will definitely happen if everyone is as complacent as that. At this point this attitude is extremely hard to take serious: you're either not paying attention or you're not engaging in good faith.
This is where I was at, but am believing less and less as the parallels stack up.
I used to tell people to look at Russia if they wanted to see the Nazi script play out, and that this could never happen in the USA. Now I'm reminded of others that weren't taken seriously early enough.
I was speaking in probabilities, not making a judgment myself (I wouldn't be qualified to do so anyway). Numerous mental health professionals have made the assertion that he is, and he has a family history of it, so at the very least it can't reasonably be claimed with 100% certainty that he's not in the early-to-mid stages of dementia.
Furthermore, my statement was very clearly presented as a massive stretch in the first place; noting that it might slightly increase the chance that he'll be unable to make an attempt at a third term (even if by 0.01%). Sometimes squinting hard enough that the resulting bokeh resemble a silver lining is all you can do to muster hope.
Once Americans pardoned an attempt by the sitting president to overthrow US democracy the game's over.
America desperately needs a huge revision to the powers conceded to individuals and should instead mature to a slower, maybe less effective at times, but stronger democracy that nurtures parliamentary debate and discourse.
> Once Americans pardoned an attempt by the sitting president to overthrow US democracy it's over already
By this logic it was “over already” at the end of the Civil War. Suspending habeus corpus, ignoring the courts and then meeting with public indifference will be the point of no return. Trump’s third term would just be the canary passing out.
I think people frequently forget that the North didn't actually have the firepower to stamp out the ideology.
Like any ideology, you can't actually destroy it with force any other way than burning books and, eventually, men.
And whether or not that would have been wise: the war was extremely costly for the North and there was a non-zero chance that if they started dropping every third Southerner from the gallows the federal government would lose legitimacy in the eyes of the survivors on both sides of the Mason-Dixon and that'd be it.
It would have been water under the bridge if him and his cronies all got perpetuity starting jan 7th and we never heard of them ever again. Instead the dems chose a demonstration of weakness, and showed that an attempt on our democracy would be punished by a strong worded reprimand, at best.
Plenty of blame to go around including for the Democrats.
Responsibility for Merrick Garland's failure to adequately pursue Trump lies at Joe Biden's feet and will likely be the thing he is remembered for most in the history books* despite the fact that he had some decent domestic policy (and some horrific foreign policy).
* (assuming we work our way out of the current mess, if we don't he will be remembered for far worse things given that he's Trump's reflexive whipping boy despite the fact that it makes Trump look weak to keep droning on about Biden)
$9 billion dollars from the federal government to Harvard equates to nearly $30 per American, that is an ignorant amount of money for a single academic institution, surely the world isn't so black and white that we can have a conversation about how much money is leaking out of our tax dollars without it always coming back to "fascism"?
given my comment got railroaded instantly, this is clearly what everyone thinks, but let's at least have that conversation rather than blindly pumping money into academia while local schools can't even afford books
this is identity politics, rather than discussing ideas we discuss whose ideas they are and whether we like that person, I don't like that kind of discourse and don't find it valuable, bad people can have good ideas and vice versa
edit: that being said, I agree what's happening to harvard is in bad faith and has nothing to do with making the government more efficient, so my argument isn't good
When the guy lifting your TV starts quoting Marx at you, it's not actually an invitation to engage in philosophical discourse, and no amount of sound economic reasoning is getting your TV back.
The Trump administration is not, has not, and will not be arguing in good faith. Stop pretending we're working collaboratively towards a shared future - they're either stealing your television or stealing your neighbor's television, and attempts to interrogate the merits of their television relocation policy aren't shedding any actual light to the situation.
@TimorousBestie (I can't reply inline due to comment depth)
I didn't say fund harvard xor fund local schools, I said it's crazy how much money harvard gets. The comment I'm replying to is who implies I must support harvard funding xor I must support trump, "the people who want to hurt harvard", I don't think that's true. I'm allowed to think federal funds for academia are too high and also think Trump is bad for the country
A place that has all the facilities, faculty and pedigree to pull some of the best researchers from all over the world. It's in fact crazy that Harvard, or any R1 university, wouldn't get a large amount of research dollars from the federal government.
Sure, but you can understand the perspective of someone growing up with zero access to those resources and lives in a rural part of the country hearing your argument and then voting for someone like trump, I would argue that sentiment is one of the forces driving regular people away from democrats and lost them the election in 2024, it is an "ivory tower" perspective and regular americans don't buy it (even if it's true that harvard is a great investment for public money)
I agree the democrats have terrible messaging, but what would really help 'regular' Americans is universal healthcare, free education, and maybe even UBI. As departments get DOGE'd a lot of 'regular' Americans are starting to find out where a lot of federal money goes, to those rural parts of the country.
And let's be honest. The force 'driving people away from the democrats' is the propaganda network known as Fox News.
We can have a discussion on if the money we spend is worth it sure. That's not what's happening now, Trumps not asking if this is the best way to fund research, he's demanding Harvard ban masks and punish students for engaging in political behavior he doesn't like. You're bringing up an entirely separate issue.
No need for that. There is more than enough money being funnelled into defense to fund Harvard + everything else you can think of and still have the largest defense spending in the world.
Arguing that Harvard gets too much while ignoring 99% of the budget is not a reasonable stance.
Is there any evidence that we've been "blindly" pumping money into academia? Funding agencies are part of the federal budget and don't just get everything they ask for. Then those agencies have all sorts of review procedures for choosing grant awardees.
There isn't just some big slush fund labeled "dumb science ideas" that everybody grabs from.
> that we can have a conversation about how much money is leaking out of our tax dollars
Of course. It's clear you didn't read the letter because Harvard addresses this specifically. The Trump admin is literally refusing to have a conversation. This is 100% politically motivated and it's obvious to anyone who is not in the Trump cult. This is particularly disgusting because their doing it under the guise of 'antisemitism', while Trump keeps friends with known white supremacists.
nope, just a random stranger trying to add some random noise into these often one sided conversations, I of course support public academic investment and Trump is bad for the country, but I worry we've fully mapped one to one trump and nazis, and it just doesn't resonate with me as much as it seems it does everyone else.
I'm from small town America, I know that the federal government doesn't care about my hometown, so when I hear things like Harvard gets billions while already having tens of billions in endowment, it's hard for me to not think that's crazy and why can't that money go to average americans, meanwhile here I am typing words into a screen connected to the internet so I fully acknowledge I've benefited from the institution
Small towns overwhelmingly get more federal dollars than they put in. Big cities subsidize small towns.
>it's hard for me to not think that's crazy and why can't that money go to average americans
Because Americans in small towns overwhelmingly vote for people who lower taxes for rich people and promise not reduce the scope of government. Instead of blaming Harvard, why don't you ask your neighbors why they like to vote for people who refuse to help them?
> it's hard for me to not think that's crazy and why can't that money go to average americans
Are there world-class research facilities in your small town? Why would it be hard for you to see it makes sense for billions to be spent on research at world-class facilities with world-class scientists?
FWIW, chances are whatever local state university nearby also receives quite a bit from federal grants as well. But it probably scales based on the research facilities and staff actually there. Do you think it would be better management of federal resources to instead spend the same amount at facilities that don't do nearly as impactful or nearly as much research?
These are grants for specific research. Researchers put together proposals to study things, the federal government decides that's something worth looking into, and funding gets cut (simplified). Harvard has a lot of people doing pretty fancy research, so it makes sense they'd have a lot of grant proposals requiring fancy and expensive things. Complain to your state legislature for not focusing on making your local university a research university if you feel your area should be getting more of these grants. But let me guess, you probably voted for people who argued for lower taxes. Gee, I wonder what they found to cut...
And FWIW the federal government spends a bunch on a lot of small-town America. FEMA grants for emergency preparedness comes to mind. A higher percentage of populations of small-town America live off federal aid programs. Small-town America also sees more of its school funding from federal sources and grants.
> it's hard for me to not think that's crazy and why can't that money go to average americans
The democrats have been trying to pass universal healthcare and free higher education it feels like forever. UBI has even come up a few times. Nothing that Trump is doing is for anyone but himself and his rich friends.
Let's have a conversation about leaking tax dollars. How do you feel about our tax dollars directly enriching the sitting president? How do you feel about our tax dollars leaking into a military parade to celebrate the president's birthday? If you don't address those leaks, how can we be expected to take people like you seriously when you defend authoritarian policy as fiscally responsible?
that's 10 cents per american (still crazy!), but not $30, and $30 is only for Harvard much less how much federal funds go to other schools
Obviously I'd rather that 10 cents go to something productive, but on the national stage trump golfing feels like just a distraction from much more important topics
Yeah, his reasoning is suspect to a lot of folks, but I’m not sure why everyone is so comfortable with the consolidation of wealth at these elite institutions.
There's definitely a conversation we can have about the cost and accessibility of higher education in this country. I don't think that conversation should include an administration that is unilaterally and arbitrarily canceling international student visas, threatening to withhold research funding that was already allocated by congress, and turning back foreign scientists at the border for things they said in private conversation that the government only knows about after a warrantless search.
If the entire budget was income taxes and everyone paid the same including babies then sure $30 dollars or it's 1/4 of the money the government gave to Musk over the last 20 years.
I would absolutely love to see my federal tax dollars doled out to schools and institutions where they would more directly benefit a wider set of people. If that was what was under discussion it would be great. The administration isn't proposing to redirect that money, simply rescind it, and they are very, extremely clearly attempting to use this to coerce institutions and punish people for their speech and associations.
The dispute between Harvard and the Trump has nothing to do with fiscal responsibility. You can read the government letter and see for yourself, none of it is about Harvard spending research money irresponsibly. It is an attempt to assert deep government control over the institution's policies and ideologies. So your comment reads as an attempt to distract from the real issues at hand, which I (and I think many others here) consider existential for the survival of the rule of law in the U.S.
Maybe. Not sure. More explicitly the letter demands that tenured professors be given more decision making power than non academic activists.
The outright dismissal of the letter suggests that at least maybe non academic activists are calling the shots, and if that is true Harvard is destined to wither and die.
> More explicitly the letter demands that tenured professors be given more decision making power than non academic activists.
1) Granting that giving more power to tenured professors would be a good thing, in what way is it legal, wise, or good for the executive branch to achieve this in the absence of any law by strong arming individual private institutions that it has decided to target on ad hoc basis?
2) You are reading selectively, it says "fostering clear lines of authority and accountability; empowering tenured professors and senior leadership, and, from among the tenured professoriate and senior leadership, exclusively those most devoted to the scholarly mission of the University and committed to the changes indicated in this letter" [emphasis mine]. So in other words, it is a requirement that the university give power to those ideologically-aligned with the Trump administration. This is a very clear and alarming violation of the first amendment.
In toto, the letter is an attempt to impose ideological reform in a private institution, and is part of a wider attempt by the current administration to browbeat or subvert every institution that might act to curtail (or even speak out against) its actions.
I read "the changes indicated in this letter" to mean "removing power from non academic activists"
While I kinda agree that can also be taken to mean "those ideologically-aligned with the Trump administration", it still means those calling the shots are the non academic activists not aligned with an ideology of promoting academic merit....
That sentence (from the letter) makes no sense. An activist isn't someone with power to do something. If they had that power, they wouldn't be advocating it, they would do it.
What that insisting the University do is shut down people talking and protesting with viewpoints they disagree with. They list those viewpoints in their letter: "..., Students for Justice in Palestine, and the National Lawyers Guild". The pro Israeli protests that happened aren't mentioned. If they get away with this, I'm sure a lot more viewpoints will follow.
This isn't about powers. It's about controlling what people can and can not say on a University campus.
>An activist isn't someone with power to do something
Without doubt in this context "activist" refers to those pushing the LGBTQ, race and gender baiting agenda with no regard for education of actual real world value.
> Without doubt in this context "activist" refers to those pushing the LGBTQ, race and gender baiting agenda with no regard for education of actual real world value.
Nope. They literally spell out the activity they want banned in their letter. Have you read it? LGBTQ and gender aren't mentioned.
Yes, discontinuation of DEI is one thing they are asking for. But they aren't (yet) the calling for banning "hispanic homosexuals" or any other DEI group on campus. They aren't asking for discussions about them to be banned. That would be a little awkward, as I'm sure they warn to encourage discussions disparaging them. Nowhere in the section on dismantling DEI do they use the term activists.
Kicking out activists is another thing they are asking for, in a different section. They list the sorts of activists they want kicked out. Right now it's a short list that boils down to protesting what Israel is doing in Gaza. DEI is not mentioned anywhere in the section, nor are any of the groups DEI typically encompasses. I have no doubt that if Harvard did acquiesce the list will be expanded to everything the administration disagrees with - for example protesting about abolishing DEI. But that's for the future.
It's clear from the letter of demand "activists" and DEI are separate issues they want dealt with in different ways. One is a policy they want dropped, the other is a group they want shut down. What is not so clear is why you are so keen to conflate the two issues. Are you keen to get "hispanic homosexuals", and any other sub-group you don't like banned from campuses?
Just for clarity, do I have this right: You think people who protest Israel’s handing of Gaza are mostly people favoured by DEI, you think "hispanic homosexuals" are favoured by DEI at Harvard, and you think someone who is a "hispanic homosexual" and others that fall under DEI invariably have zero academic credibility?
I think the people who blocked jewish students attending class are mostly the same racist dumbasses that think being black or hispanic or sexually deviant automatically qualifies you for additional tax payer funds.
And being that dumb to believe in either means you have zero acedemic credibility.
> I think the people who blocked jewish students attending class
Again for clarity: blocking those students have been ruled illegal: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/aug/14/ucla... so no invention from the Whitehouse was needed. Unlike the Whitehouse, the university involved feels compelled to follow the law, so that's the end of the matter. It also wasn't necessary at Harvard as it didn't happen at Harvard, so that can't be the reason it was included in their letter of demand.
The government is giving them money, the letter is informing them they will stop funding them if those committing crimes (racism is the crime here) are not removed from offices of power within the institution.
So Harvards response is to vigorously defend their right to hire racist criminals. They of course have that right.
But the US Government is also well within their rights to no longer fund them anymore in that situation. Which I'm pretty sure will be the only hard outcome from Harvards response.
They absolutely have the right to not cooperate, the US govt has no obligation to fund racist crayon munching idiots.
I agree, each UK citizen is infused with the original sin of being a colonizer and their opinion should be discarded until they purge this sin from their bodies through appropriate cleansing rituals.
Perhaps some form of self-flagelation or bloodletting?
Goodness gracious. Invoking religious self-harm imagery in response to mild criticism feels wildly out of pocket. Do you genuinely think anti-colonial activism demands this or anything even resembling this of post-colonial states?
It feels like a really silly way to deflect from the concept that maybe average UK citizens do benefit in some way from their colonial past.
Do you not find it out of pocket that you made a judgement about the validity of someone's opinion based on their (not even birth) nationality? Is there anything they could say or do to make their opinion worth listening to?
> Is there anything they could say or do to make their opinion worth listening to?
That’s the thing, I didn’t say their opinion isn’t worth listening to or consideration in general. Acknowledging bias isn’t the same as discarding opinion.
It's not though. It's either being obtuse or outright silly. How exactly does "decolonisation" figure in any of the things they said?
> average UK citizens do benefit in some way from their colonial past.
Even if they do, which is debatable (i.e. it's not clear they benefit more from it than people living in other European countries which didn't have extensive colonial empires) what does this have to with nonsensical subjects being taught in universities?
I'm not sure. They did supposedly organized "Decolonization in Mathematics" conference. I have no particular interest in figuring out what that means exactly on a non superficial level because it would be a waste of time.
I googled the term you put in quotes and found a lovely article in Nature that seems to indicate that it's mostly about correcting common lies in Mathematics history.
""
Fibonacci's sequence (i.e. 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, ...) was discovered in Africa long before the Italian wrote it down, in the form of Ghanaian textile cloth and Egyptian temple design. (1)
""
or:
""
It is long believed calculus was discovered by Leibniz and Newton, however there is evidence of Indians having discovered the subject 300 years earlier in the Kerala School. (2)
""
Fun trivia I guess. Also inconsequential if Fibonacci, Leibniz, Newton made their discoveries independently since further developments were based on their work.
It's like saying that Ancient Greeks and not Newcomen or Watt "invented" the steam engine... Again, interesting piece of historical trivia but hardly has much to do with physics as a science.
I agree - trying to show that other people may have discovered things that we believe we did exclusively is abhorrent and those people deserve all the sanctions that we can impose on them.
It's significant because we already have patterns of thought where we credit civilization and such to white people and it causes problems.
You might not realize it, but thousands of these tiny things over a lifetime creates a subconscious bias. And then that manifests in real ways. Like, for example, disregarding or discrediting an area of study you know nothing about based purely on the type of people who created the study.
If you really believe that then I don't know what to tell you. You've been successfully brainwashed. I hope one day you're able to hold a 5 minutes conversation with an actual student and clear that bullshit out of your head.
Well you do have a point. It would be absurd. Just like the opposite. Both decolonizing and "further" colonizing maths makes no sense and is a waste of time at best...
The arabs of the Abbasid Caliphate braided a rope by unifying Greek, Babylonian, and Indian mathematical and scientific works after translating original works into Arabic and extending them.
Since my example was apparently poorly chosen due to my own ignorance, and you're finding it worthwhile to have this discussion, I'll conclude that studying mathematical history ("decolonizing mathematics") is useful.
You should really read those articles that you linked instead of ignorantly pointing at them in outrage, against something you clearly never engaged with other than through conservative media. At least read the Nature one, damn. It's directly addressed to people like you, who might think they have issues with this stuff, for reasons.
No one is out to cancel theorems or whatever other bullshit. Also those concerns over the freedom of science are rich coming from the party that's actually defunding labs, arresting researchers on ideological grounds and burning books.
It's dangerous because of post colonialism and earlier post structuralism is in its basis.
That philosophical school sees truth as being a fantasy and subservient to power.
Therefore it is common for an adherent of post-colonialism to believe a statement is true if it was made by a person arbitrarily considered oppressed, while the same logic might be false if made by an 'oppressor'.
As this approach makes all science to be political effort before a discovery effort, it was highly successful in the highly political environment of the academics, as it also has highly favorable economical results for its followers. (New departments, ability to religiously outcast the old, new postions)
The problem as it reaches the hard sciences, for example the religious sacrifice each ML paper needs to make to the gods of ethics, is that it assaults the very notion of truth by its very essence. It is easy to see why this is highly problematic for mathematics
What? Have you really read the Nature article? You're talking absolute nonsense here. No one is out to redefine mathematics, fuck!
You want real politicization of science? Check out the GOP's pomicies. They're the one cutting funding to organization that won't bow to their ideological lines. They're the ones barring access to foreign scientists for having criticized the dear leader online. They're the ones appointing political commissars to overview what's fine or not to work on in labs.
75% of scientists that ever published in Nature are now considering leaving the US [1] from fear of the administration. Is that not a concern to you?
Talk to any academic, ask them wether they fear more from blue haired teens or the looming fascist threat that is Trump and his cabinet. You may be surprised by the answer.
Fair enough, I am simply baffled that some people can still believe the threat to science comes from the left in the face of an overwhelming and unprecendented anti-science crusade from the right. Now I wonder what the current administration would need to do for you to change your mind. Behead scientists? They're already detaining them, so that's the next logical step.
> *At least read the Nature one, damn.* ~ @thrance
> *I read the article. It's dangerous nonsense.* ~ @ConspiracyFact
> *Where's the danger? Where's the nonsense in acknowledging the origins of algebra?* ~ @myself
Do you have _ any _ meaningful critique of the contents of, say, maths historian George Joseph’s book The Crest of the Peacock: Non-European Roots of Mathematics (1991) ?
This appears to be old established material that I read in the ANU library back in the early 1980s.
I read the Nature article, and I read the seminal work on the subject Orientalism by Said. The context of the article is post-colonialism, a very established philosophical movement. This is shown when they mention whether mathematics is socially constructed and in the actual title "decolonization". I then proceeded to criticize that movement and explain why it is a problem for mathematics.
You and the other poster responded with anger, I do not agree I am the one who is not meaningfully contributing
I could give your own post as an example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43685383 , where you judged a statement as false due to the presumed location of the author in the power/knowledge spectrum.
But sorry, it's hard to discuss when you quote a single sentence from the few paragraphs i've written and say it's wrong, with nothing added. When adding to it your replies in previous discussions we had such as this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43705166
I feel you are overly emotionally attached to the subject and this is approaching troll/flame territory. It's not that I don't want to discuss with you, but I feel in our engagements a lot of aggression and very little actual passing of information except for short sentences, so let's end it right here
You're beyond saving then, if basic historical research is "dangerous nonsense". What's the risk there? Discovering a theorem was known at an earlier point in history? Big whoop.
Seriously, what's the danger? Be clear. It feels like you peolple are unable to articulate anything more than "thouhtcrime!!".
Also, what do you think of the actual threats Trump made to academics? Is it dangerous too or not?
> Although the president was caught on mic musing about deporting American citizens
The canaries in our coal mine are permanent residents. Anything that can legally be done to a permanent resident can basically be done to a "bad" citizen. Trump is trying to run roughshod over permanent residents' habeus corpus rights. Courts are currently pushing back; I expect he will defy them. That, for me, will be the line at which I'll start helping with civil disruption.
The rubicon has already been crossed. If you asked some of the framers of the US constitution - beyond all other factors, unelected powers etc - what was the one defining trait of the government structure they wished to avoid; they'd have replied with arbitrary imprisonment and the suspension of due process.
Please don't take my word for it, hear it from the Prosecutor's Prosecutor. The SCOTUS justice, former AG and former USSG who led the American prosecution against the Nazis at Nuremberg, Robert H. Jackson,
No society is free where government makes one person's liberty depend upon the arbitrary will of another. Dictatorships have done this since time immemorial. They do now. Russian laws of 1934 authorized the People's Commissariat to imprison, banish and exile Russian citizens as well as "foreign subjects who are socially dangerous."' Hitler's secret police were given like powers. German courts were forbidden to make any inquiry whatever as to the information on which the police acted. Our Bill of Rights was written to prevent such oppressive practices. Under it this Nation has fostered and protected individual freedom.
The Founders abhorred arbitrary one-man imprisonments. Their belief was--our constitutional principles are-that no person of any faith, rich or poor, high or low, native or foreigner, white or colored, can have his life, liberty or property taken "without due process of law." This means to me that neither the federal police nor federal prosecutors nor any other governmental official, whatever his title, can put or keep people in prison without accountability to courts of justice. It means that individual liberty is too highly prized in this country to allow executive officials to imprison and hold people on the basis of information kept secret from courts. It means that Mezei should not be deprived of his liberty indefinitely except as the result of a fair open court hearing in which evidence is appraised by the court, not by the prosecutor
There is a reason why citizenship was not a requirement for receiving due process under the law. Citizenships are bestowed by the government. They can be taken away by the government. The framers held certain rights to be unalienable from human beings - something that no government can take away, and that was the right to not be unjustly detained for your beliefs, your behavior, your dress, your religion or composure.
Suspending due process for anyone is fundamentally un-American. But we have crossed that threshold. What comes next is fairly inevitable - if the process isn't stopped now.
The more fundamental corollary is that the US government does not grant any rights. We have them by default and cede limited power for the benefit of an orderly society. Within such a framework, it should be impossible to disenfranchise people by denying them due process.
Precisely. If only the people who worship the Declaration of Independence and recite it like parrots singing a psalm, actually understood what the document was saying.
I've posted here before that this idea that we just have rights is actually problematic, not the least reason for which is that whether we have such rights or not, their mere existence has never and will never actually defend anyone from any violation of them.
Rights are just the concessions that the less powerful have extracted from the powerful by virtue and utilization of power. This perspective has the double benefit not relying on the imaginary and making it clear that if you don't fight for your rights you will not get to keep them. Rights may be God given, but God isn't going to come down and rescue you from a concentration camp if you get put there by an autocrat who doesn't like your "free speech."
All that matters is whether we will personally tolerate abuses against human beings and what we are willing to do to prevent them. If I had my way, talk of rights qua rights would be swept into the dustbin of history with other imaginary stuff like religion in favor of concrete, ideally evidence based, free human discussion about what human beings want from the universe and what we are willing to endure to get it.
How do you exercise due process on the 10 million people imported into the country over the last 4-5 years?
The court system simply isn't built for it, nor the detainment facilities to house them while the courts take months to process each person. The housing market is already under too much stress and low cost housing and free housing has gone to them instead of citizens who were already here and in need.
...?
The same way you exercise it for 320 million other people. The same way it has been exercised for every person who immigrated to American soil. Including your ancestors.
Let's be clear about what you're actually saying and you're advocating for, you are advocating for the suspension of due process and fundamental rights to an entire class of human beings you see as the other.
If history has taught us anything, the definition of who and what is other changes over time. One day, you too shall be the other. And that day you will beg for the due process and fundamental rights you wish to deprive these people.
When the Benjamin Franklin said, "... if you can keep it." This type of thought process is precisely what he meant.
> because Wall Street wanted cheap exploitable labor
totally a ton of illegal immigrants running across the trading room floor yelling put orders and putting the real, American stock brokers out of jobs they deserve!
Bernie Sanders put it best: "open borders is a Koch Bros scheme"
You saturate the labor market with workers, it depresses wages, plain and simple. It's in the interests of shareholders to saturate the labor market to increase profits.
Companies exploiting labor to maximize profit is as old as this country itself. Slave labor, child labor, god awful minimum wages, union busting. What's your point? Why is this an issue now when it has always existed?
The point is we have laws in place to prevent it, unless you're being trafficked and forced to pay off gangs that transported you over the border, and no rights to ability to deal with an abusive situation.
The fact that you are okay with the defacto slavery/trafficking because "its always happened" says a lot, and why I generally dismiss these arguments, because at the end of the day, you just want to pay less for things, while you live in the nice part of town.
> The point is we have laws in place to prevent it
And the current administration is flagrantly violating and ignoring the laws and the courts of our country. What is the point of laws if they're not followed? What is the point of your argument saying we have laws in place if laws no longer matter?
I didn't say I was ok with anything, don't put words in my mouth. I was asking why the thing that has always existed is a big issue now. For this administration specifically, the thing that has always existed wasn't an issue that demanded these actions the last time they were in office, just 4 short years ago. See what I'm pointing out? There are other reasons that things are being done.
>For this administration specifically, the thing that has always existed wasn't an issue that demanded these actions the last time they were in office, just 4 short years ago
Immigration and border security were maybe the #1 policy front for Trump in 2016 -- am I missing something here?
As soon as you carve out exceptions for who should and shouldn't have their basic rights, you've lost the plot. Someone with a little bit of authority only needs to claim that you are a part of that group that shouldn't have their rights, and then you get to experience a flight to El Salvador wondering where it all went wrong.
Just to be clear, you are suggesting that it is fine to kidnap and send American citizens, ANY AMERICAN CITIZEN, to foreign prisons. They could come take you or any family member for any reason, and all they have to say is they thought you are a dangerous gang member. They don't even have to say anything! Once you are on that plane, it is a black hole, and they are grinning about the fact that you can't do a thing about it. That is why we have due process. This isn't about immigrants or cheap labor or anything. This is about disappearing political enemies for any reason. Flick off a Tesla driver? Gulag. Post on facebook that maybe we should be nice to gay people? Gulag. Trying to enter the USA on vacation with too much melanin? Guess what, gulag.
You realize that the 'First They Came' poem was literally targeted towards people like you, specifically? By the time it happens to you, it'll be too late.
Question for you - if you don't exercise due process, how do you know if any individual is one of those 10 million you speak of, or someone who is here legally, or for that matter, a citizen?
If you want to reverse exploitation of cheap labor I suggest you turn to strategies which do not treat human beings like cattle or some kind of infestation to be shipped en mass elsewhere.
An economically viable solution to this problem would be simply force companies to pay all laborers, foreign or domestic, legal or illegal, a living wage, eliminating the benefits of bringing in illegal labor and maintaining a humane society. Furthermore, we should probably only trade with countries which have equal labor protections as our own, so as to ensure that jobs aren't offshored to save money, at least at the expense of human rights.
I'm sorry, I just can't buy that "treat a bunch of people like animals" is the humanist, labor friendly, perspective.
>An economically viable solution to this problem would be simply force companies to pay all laborers, foreign or domestic, legal or illegal, a living wage
Do you think that the law has a cut-out to allow for paying illegal immigrants less than minimum wage? This is like solving the murder rate by making murder illegal -- it's already illegal to employ these people and pay them below minimum wage.
Yeah, but maybe we should deploy the national guard to make sure its happening. Even that would be a better use of our resources than rounding up a bunch of desperate people in a dragnet that might catch the innocent.
Like these people are victims of a system which is exploiting them. Treating them even more like shit isn't going to make the world a better place. Target the exploiters.
So when would you consider the US crossed this threshold? Guantanamo Bay? The internment of ethnic Japanese in WW2? The Trail of Tears? Or is there something about the excesses of this particular administration that makes this an unprecedented and irreversible step, if I understand your metaphor correctly?
Respect for rule of law and democratic norms. “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
the judge you are quoting literally worked in FDR's admin when they were deporting millions of Mexicans, regardless of whether they were born in the US. They didn't get due process
Perhaps but "the framers of the US constitution" are almost always over idealized. It was the very early stages of democracy (even if you can call it that). When elected to office they regularly used they official powers to supress political opponents, partisan enmity was endemic and the levels of corruption were pretty extreme (of course there was only so much money to go around due to very low taxes). Trump is unhinged of course but some of the founders or early US politicians weren't too far off...
The constitution was more of an aspirational ideal than a binding document back then since there were very limited ways too enforce it (e.g. the only way to repeal the Alien and Sedition Acts was by electing a new president/congress). The First Amendment was also interpreted and viewed extremely different that it is now before the 1900s...
So you acknowledge that it’s a race for the government to get permanent residents on flights as fast as they can to El Salvador before a petition is able to be filed?
Just say "oops, sorry, that was a mistake but we can't get that person back" every time you want to disappear someone, and somehow you'll have people claiming that habeas corpus is still alive and well while people get disappeared.
It's clear that the administration does not consider collateral damage a bug, but a feature; it confirms that as long as they insist that they will not do anything, then nothing will be done.
Well one thing is for sure: it's not a coincidence that after they determined that it was impossible to get him back, they've changed the narrative to "no mistake was made" (and begun throwing around the magic word "terrorist" which justifies all sorts of things).
> after they determined that it was impossible to get him back
This phrasing buys into the Trump admin's narrative.
They did not determine that it was impossible to get him back. They have chosen to not pursue it. They refuse to define the agreement between the US and El Salvador sufficiently for anyone to know what is or is not possible through that path. They also seem to refuse to use political or financial influence to go beyond whatever that agreement may define.
If they can decide someone is a migrant and deport them without due process and no recourse, they can decide anyone is a migrant and deport them without due process.
If a class of people don't have habeas corpus, no one does.
the timeline of the first plane clearly shows that that is not the case (plane departed after the judge's stay). it would be helpful if people didn't cavalierly pronounce these kinds of things.
> How? Which major law firm is standing up like Harvard is?
Perkins Coie, Covington & Burling LLP, and Elias Law Group are fighting Trump's executive order. Those are 3 of the biggest law firms in the US. As far as I know only two major firms have made deals with Trump while many are sitting quiet but not everyone is cowering.
And University of Washington and University of California on the west coast, although he's not directly threatening them. Rather, his HHS appointment has just quietly pulled all of the funding for their medical and biological research programs.
I did; it explicitly demanding an audit of employees and students political views, the forced hiring of more professors who are sympathetic to the current administration's politics.
That doesn't sound authoritarian to you? Can you imagine if Obama had demanded that any university do an ideological purge of its conservative staff and students?
In this intra-elite competition, the previous winners might deserve to lose. The current regime and its allies absolutely cannot be allowed to be winners.
Yes it does sound authoritarian. Thank you for answering my question in good faith.
I am noticing a pattern; whenever I ask clarifying questions on hacker news threads regarding politically charged topics, most people assume least-respectful interpretation of my questions and heavily downvote them. As someone who is curious and genuinely trying to understand what's going on (I am here instead of other social media because I am looking for nuance, analysis, details, etc), it's really frustrating and disappointing when I am attacked for asking questions.
So thank you, again, for engaging in my question constructively.
Thank you, never heard of that concept before. I don't think I was doing that but I can see how it could appear that way. I can't figure out how to get back to the parent comment to see what I was responding to, but I think I asked that because I was trying to understand if the commenter was reacting only to the Harvard letter and preconceptions about the administration, or the administration's letter itself. I could have been more thoughtful about the question.
I have very little experience engaging in political discourse on the internet. So I asked the question like I would to a friend.
I'm realizing now that the best way for me to engage is simply to take these threads and paste them into an LLM and have it explain the nuance and context to me. I just wish there was a forum for conversing about this stuff with real people with diverse viewpoints and who kept to most respectful interpretations.
The notion of "Sealioning" is a perfect example of substituting mockery for criticism. See also: "What about the menz?!", "Akshully...", "tips fedora", etc., etc.
The problem with your questions (if the one above is an example) is that you're asking what can be seen as an insulting question that doesn't really add any nuance or analysis itself.
You could have asked the question while highlighting points in the governments letter that you thought were valid policy goals that you wanted more discussion about. You could have asked if they'd read the government letter and pointed out that the government telling the university that it both had to consider who it hired with regard to political and ethnic and to make personnel changes to demonstrate they didn't consider political and ethnic considerations going forward was particularly ridiculous.
You may still get downvoted for emotional(which you shouldn't) or other reasons but it would be less likely to be the case as it showed you made some effort (which can indicate good faith) and more importantly you're comment might inform someone reading the comments more about the topic as well.
Thank you for explaining this. I don't have much experience discussing politics on the internet and so I have some catching up to do in my understanding of the etiquette. I can now see how my question came off as disrespectful, but it's not how I meant it. I asked it in the way I would ask one of my friends in good faith.
I have learned my lesson and I will try and be more thoughtful in my questioning moving forward.
Again, thank you, if you (and a couple others) hadn't responded by explaining my mistake I would have gone on assuming that I was being downvoted for the wrong reasons.
Yes, I understand my mistake now. Thankfully a couple other people explained it with a bit more nuance than you have here, but regardless I appreciate you taking a moment to offer me feedback instead of just downvoting me. I had never heard of the sea lion concept before. I am not new to this world, but I am new to discussing politics on the internet and am still learning how to do it constructively.
these types of moves wouldn't be possible in the first place if these institutions hadn't spent decades burning their own credibility. They even mention Alzheimer's research in this post, something that has literally wasted billions of taxpayer dollars due to an academic cartel shutting down anybody trying to expose the fact that they were completely wrong about amyloid plaques
> if these institutions hadn't spent decades burning their own credibility
They burned their credibility among those with whom they never needed it in the first place. Harvard as a taxpayer-funded institution is oxymoronic. Return it to an elite institution that the President can commend in private and mock at a rally in rural Kentucky or whatnot.
>They burned their credibility among those with whom they never needed it in the first place.
I think universities should probably be concerned with their credibility among democratically elected political representatives if they are going to be accepting public funds. If the university wants to forgo federal grants, then yes, they don't require any credibility with anyone but academia and their donors, and more power to them.
> universities should probably be concerned with their credibility among democratically elected political representatives if they are going to be accepting public funds
Agree. I don’t think they should accept federal funds to the extent that they do. Maybe it’s time for elite institutions to get past the 70s camp era and start behaving (and wielding the power of) being elite.
It’s current year. They might hobble along for a few years without federal funding but they need federal funding to keep their academic reputation and be elite institutions.
> they need federal funding to keep their academic reputation and be elite institutions
Why? The funding chased their reputations during the world wars. There are plenty of ways of collaborating on expensive research facilities with the federal government while keeping a boundary between church and state within the elite halls.
no, but there would be much more push back against this type of action if Harvard and other universities didn't alienate a large chunk of the population. Why should the taxpayers fund places that openly admit to decades of racial discrimination in admissions
the institutions have already failed their intended purpose, as shown by the research fraud. Propping them up with tax dollars because of nostalgia over the name brand is pointless
> there would be much more push back against this type of action if Harvard and other universities didn't alienate a large chunk of the population
Not in any meaningful way. And not in a way that would have mattered.
The elite universities got into this hole by trying to court pedestrian approval. Trump is at war with the professional managerial class, not the elites. Harvard’s brand remains unimpeached among the latter. Return to serving that group and ignore the broader population.
So you're fine with them arresting dissenters as long as you disagree with the dissenters? That's fairly antithetical to the ideas expressed in the US constitution.
I'm fine with stopping the flow of federal money to people who hate me in particular and who take a salary to convince others to do so too. Those who defend the conduct of universities need to pause and consider that the public has noticed the radicalization of academia, despises it, and will support state action to reverse it.
Who hates you in particular? What do you mean by that? Also, that's fine to have a conversation about funding, but it's fairly different from arrests, deportations, and shipping individuals to foreign prisons. Rather motte and bailey to earlier suggest that the government was going to go "Henry VII" on universities, and then say that you just want to change funding. These are very different positions.
Well you claimed they are violating "the fourteenth amendment" which hardly makes sense. How could they be doing that? Is Harvard a Government agency? A state unto itself?
Can you please elaborate on the “radicalization” of academia? What “radical” actions have they been taking, exactly? And are these actions pervasive or situational?
Yes we all know what good defenders of truth and knowledge the Trump administration is. Surely the same people who seem to have made a habit of causing constitutional crises and have directly challenged the 1st, 5th and 14th amendment have our best interest at heart.
We as a species have come back from it, yes. But generally after millions of victims are killed, and what is left over is very different than what existed prior.
There are many points in history where a dictator made their country permanently worse. Argentina was once among the wealthiest democracies in the world, until a dictator seized power in 1930 - it took 53 years to restore democratic governance and their economy still isn't back on track.
According to Wikipedia, “in 1929, Argentina was wealthy by world standards, but the prosperity ended after 1929 with the worldwide Great Depression.” It was presumably the collapsing economy which caused the military coup, not the other way around.
>3. Testimony before Congress that equated opposition to war crimes to antisemitism [4].
Can you link to a specific line of testimony that supports this allegation? "war crimes" isn't even mentioned in the article. Far too often claims like this devolve into a game of strawman/motte-and-bailey, where each side tries to paint their position as maximally charitable, and accuse the other side of rejecting the maximally charitable position.
It seems like the government has a soft Monopsony. There are many universities willing to sell research, but the government is the biggest buyer and controls the research grant market
This isn't close to a monopsony but it's more directionally correct than it is wrong. Keep in mind research institutes can be funded by private foundations, state and local governments, industry (e.g. pharma), venture, or even foreign governments. The federal government is undoubtedly the largest buyer though. I do think there are other motivations to rely primarily on federal grants beyond number of dollars. In particular, funding sources other than federal grant money is often looked down on from an academic prestige perspective. Until now federal money came with very few strings attached compared to the perceived loss of objectivity that could occur when receiving money from other sources. The current situation may alter or relax the prevailing view on which sources of research money are perceived of as potentially compromising.
Universities don't sell or do research. They provide facilities, equipment, services, and sometimes funding for research. The actual research is done by individuals, who are nominally employed by the university but largely independent from it. If a researcher doesn't like a particular university, they can usually take their funding and projects to another university.
When grants are revoked for political reasons, it affects individuals who happen to be affiliated with the university more than the university itself. And it particularly affects people doing STEM research, because humanities and social sciences receive much less external funding. If the decline in public funding is permanent, it makes humanities and social sciences relatively stronger within the university. They are more viable without public subsidies than the more expensive STEM fields.
Research is often (usually?) the property of the host university, though. Yeah labs are independently managed but the university is in at least one sense, and imo many more, still the institution both doing and selling the work
By default, research belongs to the researchers. That's an essential part of academic freedom. The main exceptions are research funded by grants and contracts that specify otherwise, and when you start looking for patents and other commercialization opportunities.
In other words, the university may have some property rights to your work if you deal too closely with for-profit businesses or national security interests. But if you are just doing normal research with normal grants, you'll probably never see those exceptions in your career.
Anyone whose research is profitable is free to work for a private entity. The government is a "monopsony" in "buying" unprofitable research the same way it's a "monopsony" subsidizing any industry that would otherwise fail in a free market. That is not typically how the concept of monopsony is meant.
It's not a very good analogy because federally-funded research is a public investment, a public good like roads. The research is supported by the public (the government) and becomes available for anyone to use, learn from, and build off of. And in fact most successful U.S. business are built on the backs of technological innovation that was originally funded by the government, or at the very least, innovation from PhD's whose educations were largely federally funded. (Disclaimer: federally funded researcher)
You couldn't replace that with a private company "buying" research and expect the same societal benefits.
With their endowment above $50 billion, combined with Federal plus Non-Federal sponsored revenue at 16% of operating budget, it makes sense to me they just forgo Federal funds and operate independently.
If all 16% is canceled, then they'd need to draw an additional $1 billion per year from endowment at current budget levels.
That would put them above 7% draw so potentially unsustainable for perpetuity, historically they've averaged 11% returns though, so if past performance is a predictor of future, they can cover 100% of Federal gap and still grow the endowment annually with no new donations.
This article lists out why it's not good of an idea as you think.
>Universities’ endowments are not as much help as their billion-dollar valuations would suggest. For a start, much of the money is reserved for a particular purpose, funding a specific professorship or research centre, say. Legal covenants often prevent it from being diverted for other purposes. In any case, the income from an endowment is typically used to fund a big share of a university’s operating costs. Eat into the principal and you eat into that revenue stream.
>What is more, eating into the principal is difficult. Many endowments, in search of higher income, have invested heavily in illiquid assets, such as private equity, property and venture capital. That is a reasonable strategy for institutions that plan to be around for centuries, but makes it far harder to sell assets to cover a sudden budgetary shortfall. And with markets in turmoil, prices of liquid assets such as stocks and government bonds have gyrated in recent days. Endowments that “decapitalise” now would risk crystallising big losses.
More worrying is the fact that the federal government can inflict even more harm aside from cutting off federal funding:
>the Trump administration has many other ways to inflict financial pain on universities apart from withholding research funding. It could make it harder for students to tap the government’s financial-aid programmes. It could issue fewer visas to foreign students, who tend to pay full tuition. With Congress’s help, it could amend tax laws in ways that would hurt universities.
I've seen arguments of this general shape and form many times about this, and yes, this is true. In general, Harvard should not spend down it's endowment when it has other sources of revenue.
I think the issue here is that this _is_ an emergency. Harvard should consider that Federal money gone for the near future and spend and plan to spend as if they will not have it. There is no point in them continuing to exist as an institution if they accede to these absurd demands.
>You can certainly do it, in a true emergency. But you certainly don't want to make a habit of it.
Harvard's endowment returned 9.6% last year, growing the total by $2.5 billion. In the previous year, the endowment returned 2.9%, though the total endowment decreased as the gain was offset by contributions to operating expenses. [0]
In other words, Harvard already operates somewhat from their endowment, and can realize net endowment gains in spite of that.
>In other words, Harvard already operates somewhat from their endowment, and can realize net endowment gains in spite of that.
The argument isn't that Harvard should never draw from its endowment, like it's saving for retirement or something. The argument is that they shouldn't raid endowments by doing additional withdraws to fund the current shortfall.
> the many billions it was meant to provide, in interest
THATS WHAT WHAT THE FIFTY BILLION IS
It’s a war chest that has been carefully cultivated over decades. The fifty billion is the result of a hundred years of investment and management.
If it can’t be spent now then when the fuck exactly can it be spent? In 200 years you’d still be saying “this is the seed corn for tomorrow!!”
I’m not saying burn it down to zero. But the whole fucking point of an endowment is to provide stability during trying times. If you can’t use the interest that has been accumulated now then when the fuck can you??
Their principal is not intended to be spent, ever. The point of an endowment is not to "provide stability during trying times".
The point is to spend the interest that it generates, in normal times, in perpetuity. Which Harvard already does and has always done. Interest from their endowment is already a large part of their revenue. That's what the endowment is for.
Returns fluctuate wildly, while expenses are roughly constant. So obviously expenses are drawn conservatively. And if investment works well, you can grow the endowment too. Obviously it is up to the university to strike the right balance.
The more it grows, the less risk there is in the future. But if you start spending it more than the levels of its average returns, that's high risk. And the point is it's supposed to last forever.
You also need to grow it simply to account for inflation and other rising costs.
Paraphrasing J. P. Morgan, the man, in the midst of the Panic of 1907 reassuring a banker concerned about dipping into reserves to pay out depositors: "what are reserves for if not times like these."
Eat the seed corn. Fight. Then raise unencumbered donations from the billionaires whose balls haven't fallen off. If Harvard plays this correctly, they could become one of the flag bearers of the legal and financial resistance to Trump.
How much is “enough” money to hoard in an endowment though? We hear lots of arguments about how the concept of a billionaire is itself obscene, why can’t we apply to same logic to institutions? E.g. much like people say “billionaires shouldn’t exist”, perhaps endowments over some similarly arbitrary value shouldn’t exist either.
Well, it's proportional to their spending to some degree. It takes a world-class endowment to fund a world-class university. And it's all from private donations.
Harvard doesn't make a profit. It educates students and does research. It sounds like you're arguing Harvard should be broken up or something? But based on what? Is it abusing its power or something?
Not to mention all those legal covenants have another party to them - they're not written in stone. I'm sure a good number of them would be willing to considering loosening legal restrictions if it would really help.
Endowments have come from people over the entire history of the institution. The vast majority of the endowers are likely deceased and won't be able to agree to change the terms of their endowment.
And yet some trust, estate, or descendant somewhere ultimately has the authority to change those agreements. These things are not immutable facts of the universe, they can be changed.
As for the minority where that is not the case, it also means nobody will have standing to sue if the school decides to stop letting someone who died 200 years ago decide exactly how Harvard's money will be spent.
To some degree it already has been. After the economic genius Larry Summers paid for the Allston campus expansion with some dodgy loans that blew up in their faces during the 2008-9 financial crisis, there was some attempt to reform the endowment, back off some risky investments, and build up more of a free-cash emergency fund. This actually paid off during the Covid lockdowns, which the university was able to weather without too much disruption.
The other oddity of Harvard's endowment is that each school at the university basically has it's own fund--so that for instance, the Business school and the Law school don't have to worry about money the same way that FAS (the main undergraduate school) does.
They made a big fuss a few years ago about what I read imo as over investing in foreign farm land, esp south America and Africa. Which seems to have completely flopped, if not yet realized.
At this point, you really do have to question whether each university hire was merit based or not, including the fund managers.
I don't know that making a bad investment makes them terrible fund managers, just as making a good one would not make them brilliant. Don't you need a string of data points?
If you are going to claim that they were not hired on merit, and that they are bad investment managers, you'll need to provide a lot more evidence on both points, rather than a "just asking questions" post on HN. Otherwise, it's just snark and not in keeping with HN's ethos.
>...much of the money is reserved for a particular purpose
I would assume that a tax on an endowment would be like a capital gains tax, i.e., taxed on the investment growth. Is the growth 'reserved for a particular purpose'?
It's reserved because the donation was earmarked for a specific purpose (eg. a business program or whatever), not because they reserved 30% on tax owing.
>Is the growth 'reserved for a particular purpose'?
It's probably safe to assume donors are competent enough that such glaring loopholes don't exist. After all, the concept of endowments being used as long term savings, rather than spent immediately, isn't exactly a new concept. Failing to take this into account would mean any earmarks are void after a few decades.
It’s never a guarantee when it comes to government funding. It can come and go at any time. Take the politics out of it, Harvard has been operating at risk with this funding source for some time.
He still controls the congress, the white house and the supreme court. So he could potentially pull a completely illegal fast one and freeze their accounts. Since rule of law seems on fairly shaky ground right now in any case.
This is true, and they have likely been accelerating the arrangements they already had for a while now. At the same time however, getting 50 billion in assets into various European jurisdictions is not at all easy. I'd estimate Trump could cut off 70-90 percent of what Harvard has to work with.
Alumni will need to come through for continuing operations if the worst does happen. And I'm certain Harvard has put some thought into that contingency as well.
Trump can make that illegal in no time. „No foreign funds” is a well known method of fighting opposition, tried and tested in many soft regimes (looking for a recent example, Hungary comes to mind).
There really isn't such a thing if you want to do business in America. If you're in the US and doing business with a bank, the courts can order that bank to do things or face isolation from the entire financial system.
Yeah I'm no expert in financial systems but since the money ultimately needs to be spent in the U.S. it doesn't seem that important whether the funds are frozen in the U.S. or locked away overseas and can't be transferred in for the next ~4 years.
It's much more than that, foreign banks will comply with US court orders, it's not just a blockade.
US courts shut down a series of Swiss banks that were trying to hide American's assets behind the swiss banking secrecy laws while also doing business on American soil (just having bank employees in the country did it).
> since the money ultimately needs to be spent in the U.S. it doesn't seem that important whether the funds are frozen in the U.S.
Of course it does. The hypothetical we're considering is the administration illegally freezing bank accounts. You don't need something legally impenetrable. Just complicated enough that it slows down the goons while you fight them in court.
> There really isn't such a thing if you want to do business in America
There are to varying extents. You want a country that isn't aligned with or dependent on America, but also isn't its adversary. (And which has a good banking system.) That list was classically Turkey, the UAE and Switzerland. Today I'd add India, Qatar, Canada and Brazil and remove Switzerland.
He may issue an EO against them similar to the ones he's successfully used to bring major law firms he doesn't like to heel: ban consideration of former Harvard employees (... maybe also graduates?) for Federal jobs, revoke clearances held by anyone employed by Harvard, and ban them from Federal property. Maybe with some other creative terms thrown in to mess with universities in particular.
That has essentially never been a risk for a non-appointed government employee in the United States of America, at least for the past century or so. We Don't Politicize the Bureaucracy. And that was at least in part the secret sauce to our generational success, that we could immunize the workings of the government from the pique and emotion of its leadership.
Well this was advice my father (an academic and lifelong straight ticket Democrat) gave me decades ago. So it was nothing specific to the current administration.
The difference is that the people affected by whim were, by design, only supposed to be the political appointees, not the civil service rank and file. Those jobs existed for as long as Congress decided that they produced useful results for the American people. Positions could be eliminated by virtue of Congress deciding that a shift in policy was needed, eg fewer Kremlinologists after 1989, but that is not a whim, that is a result of debate.
The current administration is making all positions political, and in doing so, performing an end run around the legislative branch.
> You want to argue that Joe Biden didn't weaponize every branch of the bureaucracy against Republicans?
He didn't. I don't know why you guys think he did. A lot of those agencies, like the Justice Department, act independently.
It's not like any Republicans were jailed. This is starting to seem less like a legitimate take, and more like a strange fetish for persecution.
For the record, if people like President Trump want to no longer be under the eye of Justice, they should stop doing illegal things. It seems every other American citizen has figured that out. It is shameful our own president has not.
Joe Biden did nothing remotely comparable to what Trump is doing now.
And unlike Trump, Biden faced constant criticism from within his party. He would have faced outrage if he tried to, for example, cancel all federal grants containing the word "conservative" in them.
Meanwhile we're heading towards a future where Trump can deport anyone he doesn't like to an El Salvadorian prison without so much as a trial, regardless of whether they broke any laws. Why doesn't this terrify people on the right?
The people I've talked to just don't believe it can happen to them. They're going through the normal immigration channels, only getting abortions when medically necessary, and limiting their anti-Trump speech to the few quibbles they have here and there. They don't realize that the deportations aren't just the "bad" immigrants, even medically necessary abortions are being stymied by the current administration (with predictable deaths), and that any anti-Trump rhetoric is dangerous.
No, this is not the case. This is a recent and never before seen phenomenon. Please, do not try to downplay it. And, if you do, do not do it dishonestly.
Cannot edit my original comment, because I wrote it 16 hours ago, but I am somewhat surprised by the fluctuating up/downvote count, going from 0 to 6 and back.
It seems that the very idea that some employees in academia might be superfluous is very disagreeable for some HNers.
Why? Institutional bloat is a well known problem, it happens in private sector, public sector, churches, military, wherever you can think of. It probably already happened in Ur and Nineveh. Why should academia be somehow immune from this problem?
And if it is not immune, shouldn't it try to do something with it?
There was a massive increase in tuition in the last generation or so. How much of that extra money goes to the core mission of the universities, and how much is spent on "nice to have extras", starting with opulent campuses and ending with "Standing Committees on Visual Culture and Signage"?
Everyone has to trim the fat down a bit from time to time. Even Google and Meta. Why not Harvard.
People are reflexive. In a different context, driven by someone else, many of the people currently defending Harvard would instead be pointing out that Harvard and the other elite institutions are part of "the problem". In general this year, it's been interesting to me to see Republicans become protectionists and Democrats become neoliberal free traders, both parties flipping their talking points to either align or disagree with Trump.
People in HN have been complaining about university admin bloat for many years. In this thread, the problem is it’s political and people struggle with the cognitive dissonance about that stuff.
This is about lots more than money. Sure, Harvard can go without federal funds. Then comes federal tax breaks. Then Harvard's ability to recruit foreign students (no visas, no foreign students/professors). After that comes the really draconian stuff like the fed revoking clearances or not hiring/doing business with Harvard grads. Such things were once thought illegal but are now very much on the table. That is why Harvard needs to win the money fight no matter the numbers.
Right, money is just the first and most obvious cudgel. Does Harvard have any biomedical labs that require federal approval to handle hazardous materials? That could be delayed or revoked. Do they file taxes? They could face an audit. There's no shortage of painpoints an organization that large has exposed to an unethical government.
I think the 9 billion is very misleading. More than half goes to hospitals affiliated with Harvard. I am not sure but I don't think they get anything from the endowment. The impact of loosing this money would be very uneven across different parts of the university and hospitals affiliated with it.
The faculty of arts and science would be fine. Yes, some cuts, a hiring freeze etc. The med school and public health school would feel a big impact. They employ so many people on "soft money" through grants including many faculty members.
The hospitals are a different story and I am not sure why they are even lumped together.
Yeah this isn't purely a question of Harvard's P&L being dependent on subsidies. The money in question is grants attached to specific practices or research. The money isn't just gratuity for Harvard being so great, it's awarded for specific objectives that Harvard was deemed capable of delivering. Cutting off the money isn't going to hurt Harvard, it's going to stop all the programs the grants were funding.
Harvard is probably thinking they just need to draw the $1 billion extra for another 4 years. Unless, Trump runs for a 3rd time which he has floated. If that happens then I think everyone's just screwed.
With an overbearingly powerful executive like the federal US executive you can come up with so many ways to fuck with companies or institutions like this one beyond not giving them money.
I'm sure he's got plans to issue an executive order declaring all of the votes against him null and void because they weren't cast and counted within 4 hours of each other on election day.
It's very dangerous to assume "oh, this will only last four years". The rights currently being eroded (free speech, habeas corpus and voting rights themselves) are required for free and fair elections. Even if the term of the current Shitstain In Chief ends when it's supposed to, his replacement will be from the same cloth.
College endowments are typically tax-exempt, but a 2017 law imposed a 1.4% tax on investment income for a small group of wealthy private universities. A new proposal seeks to increase the endowment tax rate to 14%
Other article:
proposing an 8.6 percent tax hike
When hacking the government rules is used against you.
LoL - why it makes any sense to do this for universities and not billionaires is beyond me, but I'm sure half the country can explain it to me like I'm 5.
Doesn't this tax only apply to "net investment income"/realized gains? Billionaires technically already have to pay it at a higher rate. And well they generally do? I mean when they personally actually sell stock and or receive dividends and interest.
Agreed. For the revenue tax activists want from billionaires, it would necessitate a wealth tax, which I believe is unconstitutional. The non-profit tax exemption fight is about "income taxes" which billionaires already have to pay (but avoid). So it is an apples-to-oranges comparison.
"Double taxation" is absolutely constitutional. Tons of things are double, triple, quadruple and more taxed.
I make a W2 salary. I pay federal income taxes on it. I pay FICA taxes on it. My employer pays payroll taxes on it. I might pay state income taxes on it. One event, tons of taxes. I take that quadruple taxed money and buy a dinner with a beer. Sales taxes on the overall sale, additional taxes on the alcohol, additional sales tax riders because I bought it in the touristy night life area. Triple taxes on my quadruple taxes, good lord! Unconstitutional!
Worthless phrase, "double taxation".
> That does not prohibit the Federal Gov from taxing once, and your residential state from taxing you a second time.
Once again, the several different taxes applied to my salary income. Then on that I go buy a gallon of gasoline, uh oh, federal gas taxes on that. Or I buy a plane ticket and that gets Federal Excise Tax (7.5% of the base fare), the Federal Segment Fee (currently $5.20 per segment), the TSA Security Fee ($5.60 per passenger), and more. Oof, "double taxation"! Even at the federal level!
"No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or Enumeration herein before directed to be taken"
A wealth tax is generally considered to be a direct tax. If you wanted to enact one at the federal level, my understanding is that it would have to be done in proportion to the census. So, given that Mississippi is around 1% of the total US population, Mississippi would have to pay 1% of the wealth tax. Mississippi is the poorest US state, so that would be a very regressive tax.
An income tax is also considered to be a direct tax, that's why it took an amendment to the Constitution to enact one.
The Constitution applies to taxes at the federal level, not state. States could enact a wealth tax the same way they enact property taxes now (depending on their state Constitutions). The problem for them is that wealth is a bit more mobile than property.
And yes there are arguments about what a direct tax really meant in the language at the time the Constitution was written, there are arguments that the income tax should have been legal without an amendment. But that's not how it went down.
I'm not a lawyer but I do not consider a property tax to be the same thing as a wealth tax.
If I own a house or condominium in San Francisco, at a fundamental level I do not own the land or space the residence is sitting on. "Ownership" is basically a lease of the parcel from the city. The house structure is an improvement on leased land; this ties the property tax calculation to the value of the structure. The property tax is the rent on the land/space. I believe this is the constitutional justification for property taxes (no opposition from me).
> If I own a house or condominium in San Francisco, at a fundamental level I do not own the land or space the residence is sitting on. "Ownership" is basically a lease of the parcel from the city.
It's interesting to me that medieval European peasants "renting" the land they farmed had much stronger ownership rights than Americans who "own" land do today.
> I believe this is the constitutional justification for property taxes
It isn't. The constitutional justification for property taxes is that they're assessed by the states, not by the federal government.
> An 1861 federal tax on real property illustrates how the rule of apportionment operates. Congress enacted a direct tax of $20 million. After apportioning the direct tax among the states, territories, and the District of Columbia, the State of New York was liable for the largest portion of the tax [...]
What this meant was that the federal government delegated tax quotas to the states and the states were responsible for collecting them as they saw fit.
Recommend James C. Scott's "Seeing like a State" to learn more about the evolution of property valuation and rights. The systems of land rights in up to the 1500s-1800s were quite complex. The modern state imposed a uniform system of free-hold tenure which shifted the complexity to the downstream consequences.
The concept of freehold tenure is pretty central to the book. Not sure you could get any more on-point for the general reader looking for a book recommendation.
But since you ask: the peasant's rights to land were exquisitely bespoke. No tax collector could figure out how much one family owed versus another in another county. The rules in one prefecture of one county may have been completely unresolvable with the rules of a county a hundred miles north. Everything was negotiated family to family over generations, with rights in one place having no corollary whatsoever with the rights in another area, making the tax man's duty a fool's errand.
So, I don't your first statement "European peasants "renting" the land they farmed had much stronger ownership rights than Americans who "own" land do today." is really meaningful. Because no generalization can be made about the rights of a European peasant. That problem is the whole reason for the systems of freehold tenure that prevail today: making the territory "seeable" by the state.
You're talking about something entirely different. The typical case for the renting medieval peasant is that the rent on a given plot of land is set by custom, the nominal amount has been the same for centuries, and it can never be changed for any reason. No administrative task could ever be simpler than collecting the rent.
Landowners responded to that by adjusting the size of the units in which land rents were due, which is why a major demand of peasant movements was for standardized units.
The fact that rents were absolutely nonnegotiable led to other developments, such as the lord being so indifferent as to exactly who was renting from him that the renter was free to leave his status to whoever he chose in his will.
Again, you're generalizing. To say that doesn't work in medieval Europe is probably itself a generalization. But if you read the book, I don't think this would be a point you'd be arguing.
> amount has been the same for centuries, and it can never be changed for any reason
That's only true in a narrow and a relatively obtuse way. For starters that varied to a huge degree between regions and types of contracts.
e.g. in England freeholds were indeterminate and or more or less worked the way you are saying.
However most peasants didn't have those, before the plague the overwhelming majority of peasants were villeins (i.e. serfs), inheritance was customary and lords were not legally obliged to pass it to the serf's descendants (also there were all kinds of fees, fines and stuff besides the fact that they weren't legally free and there was no legal system to protect your rights).
Leaseholds and copyholds became much more common due to labour shortages after the plague. leaseholds were not inherited and market price based. Copyholds were inherited and rents customary fixes (but again lords could and would impose all kinds of arbitrary fees to get their cut).
Then you had the enclosures starting the 1400s (a lot of the land peasants relied on was common)
The Supreme Court explicitly allowed property taxes in Pollock decision. They haven’t for wealth taxes (they still might allow it but they also might not).
Most of the wealth being in stock is really tricky. You can't really tax stock ownership, but at the same time stock can be leveraged against business deals (Musk for example bought Twitter with largely stock, without having to sell it first and therefore being subject to tax), and you can take out loans with stock as collateral.
If I get something of worth, non-related to the stock/ownership, for the current value on my stock/ownership, I should pay taxes on that amount. I am using the stocks value to gain something. If I take out a loan for businesses needs, that is in the interest of the thing I own. If I take out a loan to buy a separate thing, I have leveraged the current value and have therefor realized the current value and should pay accordingly.
When I bought my home I had to sell $XXX,XXX of stock to make the down payment. If Jeff Bezos wants to buy the same house, he would use a line of credit from the bank, collateralized by his Amazon shares (or whatever source of wealth) and pay with that. I paid 15% in long-term capital gains, he pays 0%. Under my plan, he would pay 15% LTCG for collateralizing his stock,. If I had to pay it, then it's entirely fair and reasonable that we expect him to pay his fair share too.
You could have done the same thing with a margin-enabled brokerage account, e.g. Interactive Brokers or Fidelity.
It's not particularly hard. Just have enough collateral to not get margin called. And, like the margin interest rate better than the tax hit. Shop around for rates. Notice, you don't have to pay the entire down payment this way.
If you have amassed 6 figures of stock and are buying a house, you're qualified to educate yourself on these topics. It's usually worth reading up anytime you incur that sizable a taxable event.
I am not saying this is a great idea, BTW. Just, it's an idea within many people's reach.
If it's a bad idea, it's a bad faith argument - why would you suggest it? The tax laws shouldn't favor the gross accumulation of wealth, nor the starvation of the treasury, so the laws need to change to force the rich to pay their fair share.
I believe the GP is just cautioning rando HN readers that they should not rush out and make their down payment in the manner described, as opposed to liquidating some of their stock options for "real cash" like the GGP had to do.
They are just explaining a reasonable method that the (above) average HN reader could use to be in the same situation as Bezos of having a 0% tax on their down payment.
In the US, there's a pretty massive exemption (well, deferral) for capital gains tax on the sale of a primary residence, so once you have one home to work with, the down payment is (kind of?) tax-free anyway.
They definitely shouldn't. It's absurd to suggest that because a middle-class homebuyer can get a margin loan through iBroker means that we should let the richest people in history dodge taxes in this way. If no one would actually do that, then it really doesn't matter that they technically can. The obvious solution is to take away the privilege from the wealthy and make them abide the same rules as the rest of us.
Another very rational reason for such a margin loan for a home down payment is if the stock you wanted to sell hadn't been held for a year and therefore its sale would not yet qualify for long-term capital gains rates.
You might choose to pay margin interest for up to a year so that the stock sales become taxed at the much lower long-term capital gains rates instead of like income.
That might make sense for someone in the 24% federal bracket which ends at just under $200K of annual income, depending upon how much longer one needs to hold the position to achieve the more favorable taxation. Certainly far below the yacht-owning bracket.
Bezos gets a much better margin rate than you or I would ever get on IBKR. And IBKR doesn't margin call, they straight up auto liquidate. Bezos's lender would never do that to him.
And withdrawals from margin accounts should cause taxable events too. Honestly it is up to the industry to justify and propose a workable tax scheme that makes margin accounts feasible. Withdrawals triggering taxable events seems fair to me, though.
Sure, if you exclude primary residence. We aren't trying to fuck with the middle class, just the uberwealthy. I'd be fine with only taxing collateralized stock on people with over $20M in net worth too. We just don't need to provide tax breaks to the rich to make them more rich.
It's such an odd argument - the wealthy always seem to know what their net worth is. We could just make them declare it. If they lie, straight to jail.
How do we know whether they lie without a solid definition of net worth?
I'm not defending billionaires and I believe they should be heavily taxed, and huge inheritances should be outlawed, but what's Elon Musk's net worth, for example? He surely doesn't have $369 billion in cash. Can we tax him based on his Tesla shares? What happens if Tesla stock goes down by 99% next year? It's tricky.
> How do we know whether they lie without a solid definition of net worth?
They get to tell us what they are worth. Generally speaking, if you want to lie about your net worth you are choosing between tax fraud and insurance fraud. There are some areas that are tricky, like pre-market startups, but we have things like 409A valuations that help with that. Penalties should have no statute of limitations - if you lie about it, you get to look over your shoulder forever. It's not perfect, but as you have clearly recognized, there is no perfect system that allows for a reasonable degree of freedom.
> Can we tax him based on his Tesla shares? What happens if Tesla stock goes down by 99% next year?
Not really tricky! He gets taxed on the value of his shares in year 1 and he gets taxed on the value of the shares in year 2. If the value goes down 99%, you pay way less tax (or none if he's no longer wealthy enough to qualify). He can sell his shares to pay it, and I honestly do not care if he is not liquid enough to do that - that's a situation he put himself into. No he doesn't get a tax break on the loss - the rich have a sense of entitlement that their wealth belongs to them free of charge, and I think they should have to pay maintenance. Without public utilities (roads, electricity, air and sea traffic control, etc) and social stability, most of these billionaires would lose their wealth to warlords very quickly.
> He gets taxed on the value of his shares in year 1 and he gets taxed on the value of the shares in year 2.
That doesn't make any sense. If I have $8B worth of shares and I have $2B in cash, and if the wealth tax is 20% I will have to pay all my cash this year. If my shares goes down to zero next year I'm broke. I couldn't just sell $2B worth of shares in the first year either because that would have affected the value of the shares. This is not how taxes should work.
Everyone agrees on income tax or capital gains tax because they are both cash, and the tax is also in the same currency. If we can find a way to tax wealth in the same "currency" (for example 20% of your share portfolio, plus 20% of your cash) then it might work. Obviously the state may not always be able to use shares to fund infrastructure, and cashing out those shares would diminish the value. Also it's still hard to do that for, say, real estate investments.
What doesn't make sense? He'd owe $1.6B the first year, and then he'd be shit out of luck because he drove the stock to 0. Not my problem. And you should stop putting yourself in his shoes - you will never be a billionaire, and you probably won't be a mega-millionaire either. Start worrying about your own situation.
In any case, the whole thread about "net worth" is really besides my original point, which is that collateralizing stock for loans should be a taxable event. The only reason we got into net worth was because I said I'd only apply it to high net worth individuals, since they have almost exclusively benefitted from the economy over the last 10-20 years. This is also super achievable because to get the bank to loan you money, you have to declare the value of the assets and the bank has to agree with the valuation - super easy to determine tax on that number.
I don't feel that strongly about it if he is just sitting on the assets, but if he's leveraging them to buy Twitter, OpenAI or to donate money toward overthrowing the Democratic order, then yes, he should absolutely pay taxes for the privilege.
I'm not worrying about billionaires. I'm discussing about hypothetical ways we can tax them. They own the government, and obviously your idea of potentially making them homeless will be immediately rejected and we will be in this status quo forever.
> collateralizing stock for loans should be a taxable event
> They own the government, and obviously your idea of potentially making them homeless will be immediately rejected and we will be in this status quo forever.
Disagree. We've been negotiating from the middle. We got the New Deal because the alternative for the wealthy was facing a socialist revolution.
I'm all for threatining them with a socialist revolution if possible. However, I'm afraid they are better prepared this time. In today's world a (metaphorical) guerilla war that targets one small win at a time might be more prudent. The wealthy is not necessarily smart. Not all will see it coming.
Do they? I think exactly the opposite is true - if you ask any sufficiently wealthy person, they’d need a team of people working for a bit to arrive at a very hazy net worth number. Private stock is extremely illiquid and doesn’t usually have a good mark to market, ditto most artwork. My impression is that even most public stock doesn’t generally have the depth of liquidity to absorb a founder selling any significant fraction in a short timeframe without cratering in value.
Why does it matter? It eventually gets taxed through estate tax and at a higher rate than income. This obsession with taxing them _now_ only makes sense if the point is to punish the the rich.
>> College endowments are typically tax-exempt, but a 2017 law imposed a 1.4% tax on investment income for a small group of wealthy private universities.
> LoL - why it makes any sense to do this for universities and not billionaires is beyond me, but I'm sure half the country can explain it to me like I'm 5.
Because they already do it for billionaires: unlike university endowments, billionaire investment income is not tax-exempt by default, it's already subject to income tax [1].
[1] At least theoretically, ignoring the loopholes and tax-dodges billionaires can take advantage of with literal armies of accountants.
They don't pay anywhere close to that, there are tons of tricks to avoid paying that % on gains and the more money you have the more leeway for loopholes.
Very relevant in startup ecosystem as well (look up exchange funds, opportunity zones etc.)
Edit: it's an honest question. Maybe the top 1% paying 40% of all income taxes is too much tax. Maybe it's not enough. Without knowing how much of all the income they make it's a meaningless number.
According to the Tax Foundation[1], for tax year 2021, the top 1% of U.S. earners—those with an adjusted gross income (AGI) of $682,577 or more—accounted for 26.3% of total AGI and paid 45.8% of all federal income taxes.
My personal opinion is that income tax should be more progressive, but I know that plenty of smart people disagree on that.
Your source leans right-center, so probably good reason to suspect their reported top 1% AGI is low and their reported federal income tax estimate is high.
1. Does not follow. Just because you don't like someone's politics doesn't mean they're dishonest.
2. Your own link contradicts you. It says explicitly that that site hasn't failed any of their fact checks and doesn't use loaded words that they say are typical of that category. It says the categorization is because the site promotes libertarian policies.
There are a lot more taxes than the federal income tax. It happens to be one of the most progressive taxes. Anyone focusing on that and ignoring all the others is trying to scam you.
This is true for ultra high net worth individuals. They can do schemes like borrowing against equities and using the tax-free cash for expenses or purchasing other assets.
It is also true for many “normal” one percenters. For example there is a service for incorporated anesthesiologists where you tell them where you plan to go on vacation and what dates, and they create a bullshit anesthesiology conference, including the brochure and other artifacts, that meet the letter of the law IRS definitions for a valid business expense. None of this stuff ever hits AGI.
If the asset appreciates faster than the interest rate there's never a need to sell. If the interest rate is lower than the capital gains tax rate, paying the interest is cheaper than paying taxes.
UHNW individuals can borrow until they die. Their assets pass to their heirs with a stepped up cost basis. The heirs can liquidate whatever's needed to pay off the loan and incur no tax.
Normal people can't do this. If I die owing money, my creditors will take it out of my estate before it passes to my heirs. UHNW estates can be structured differently and creditors can accommodate different payment terms (get paid second) because they know the money's there, and it saves taxes.
I assumed you asked a question to learn something. If you're not interested in learning, please continue believing that everyone gets the same tax system. Otherwise keep reading.
> the stepped up basis gets hit with the inheritance tax.
There's no federal inheritance tax. Only some states have it. You're thinking of the estate tax.
it has a fairly detailed explanation of how it's a completely different ballgame above a net worth of $300m. Grantor trusts allow sidestepping estate tax and...
> The loan and the interest payments
"The loan" otherwise known as "income" because that's what it really was. Income that would normally have been derived by selling assets. Obviously it has to be paid back. No one said it's free money. Only that it's (largely) tax-free money.
The interest payments are lower than the income tax would've been on the same amount of income.
> and dont forget the inheritance tax.
You mean estate tax. Explained above.
> Yes, they can borrow money, die, the inheritors pay off the loan with the stocks, and then pay estate tax.
Not in the same way, and not nearly as effectively.
> There's no federal inheritance tax. Only some states have it. You're thinking of the estate tax.
They're the same as far as this discussion is concerned, as the amount that the beneficiary gets is (roughly) the same.
> "The loan" otherwise known as "income" because that's what it really was
Borrowed money is not "income" in any sense of the word. When I was on summer vacation, I decided to take a class in accounting. One of the most productive uses of my time. I recommend it. P.S. if your business tries to classify borrowed money as "income", that's called fraud.
> If you read the link I posted
I rely on my CPA for tax advice, not the internet, nor do I care much for misusing accounting terms. I've read too many articles that confuse income with revenue, wealth with income, and so on.
> They're the same as far as this discussion is concerned, as the amount that the beneficiary gets is (roughly) the same.
The estate's value is reduced by what it owes.
> if your business tries to classify borrowed money as "income"
sigh C'mon man, engage in good faith here. Stop saying things I didn't say.
If you can borrow cash against assets, don't have to pay principle until you die, and only pay low interest payments then it's functionally the same as selling those assets at a low tax rate. That's the principle.
And if you can use trusts to avoid estate taxes then there are no (or very low) taxes due ever.
> I rely on my CPA for tax advice
Ok ask your CPA what they know about using trusts to avoid estate taxes. Maybe it's BS but maybe it's true. Without some curiosity, how will you ever know?
> not the internet
More reputable sources than Reddit indicate it may be possible to use trusts to greatly reduce or eliminate estate tax:
A simpler example: social security taxes hit a cap at a bit under $200,000/year. Somebody working fast food at minimum wage is paying 6.2% on every dollar they earn, while with my fancy tech job I’m paying a substantially lower percentage.
The social security "tax" should really be conceptualized as an investment, not a tax. The typical fast food worker has probably not passed the first bend point in the Social Security PIA formula, meaning that social security is giving them 90 cents on the dollar*. You, with your fancy tech job, are likely well past the second bend point: social security is only giving you 15 cents on the dollar* (and nothing, obviously, for earnings beyond the payroll tax ceiling).
It's a progressive system overall - but it wasn't designed for the purpose of wealth redistribution, hence the payroll tax ceiling.
* More precisely, their monthly benefit at full retirement age increases by 90 cents for each additional dollar of pre-retirement average monthly earnings, whereas yours only increases by 15 cents.
The top 1% of people make 20.7% of the country's income. Given progressive tax rates, they should be paying a lot more than 40% of Federal income tax revenue, but rates don't scale enough, and aren't lax enough on other classes.
Can you explain your reasoning behind "they should be paying a lot more"? I kept hearing that they didn't pay their "fair share" when in fact it appears they pay double. It just seems like whatever they actually pay, measured in dollars or as a percentage, will always be widely regarded as not enough.
There are a couple of key phrases in politics that get used because there is no actual justification. "Fair" is one of them. It is impossible to achieve fairness in the tax system under any circumstances, it is always taking from someone who - from the fact that it isn't voluntary - we can assume quite likely disagrees with how the money is about to be used. Taxes are fundamentally arbitrary.
So in practice, if "fair" is used in politics the appropriate reading is often as a euphemism for "I think we have the numbers to push this interpretation of the world on people; it'll be good for us".
Could you help me understand why an individual with one billion, needs two? At what point would you accept that someone has more money than they'd reasonably need? And if you just thought of a maximum amount, then, wouldn't the acceptable tax rate over that amount, be 100%?
Assume you think the government is in a better position to spend that billion than the billionaire is to figure out what to buy or invest their money in?
I know he's out of favor with a lot of people, but would Elon have created SpaceX or The Boring Co or Neuralink, or helped start OpenAI if he hadn't had the spare billions to do so?
I'd much rather have multi-billionaires investing in the economy, and in the future, than giving additional money to the government.
As for making lives better, Starlink was provided free to disaster victims in N Carolina and the LA fires. Something the government failed at. Enabled by cheap reusable SpaceX rockets, another thing the government failed at. Starlink is very popular, so it must be making peoples' lives better.
Money was funnelled to Elon, he has a knack for getting government contracts. My memory is Tesla was powered by many grants for whoever was willing to work on electrification of society. The issue with that is that people want to put more money under the control of the government, despite it being the entity that funnelled money to Elon. I don't really understand that perspective, it seems a bit crazy - it'll end up with Elon getting more and more power and wealth. If we assume de-powering and de-wealthing Elon is a good, why push more money into the system that is wealthing and powering him? One theme in Elon's companies is they are positioned to hoover up money the US government is wasting and make sure it ends up in Elon's pockets.
Less government spending is more likely to hurt Elon than help him.
Government contracts where they buy something is not "funneling" money any more than you "funnel" money to Safeway when you buy tomatoes there. And if Musk had failed to deliver working rockets, NASA wouldn't have paid a dime. Musk bet his entire fortune on it.
Musk also sold those rockets to NASA for 10% of what NASA would otherwise have to pay.
> One theme in Elon's companies is they are positioned to hoover up money the US government is wasting and make sure it ends up in Elon's pockets.
Tell us how that works.
> Less government spending is more likely to hurt Elon than help him.
Are you suggesting that Musk is doing what's right for the country rather than what's right for his fortune?
So every enterprise becomes state owned? Ilya Sutkever's new company is already worth 32B so 31/32 of it should be owned by the government in your world? Who makes the decisions for it?
I am going to abstract from the hard 1 million number which is obviously low in 2025, and just base my arguments on maybe a few million as a reasonable limit. Make it ten or twenty if that fits your mental model better. You have no way of knowing that those companies would never have existed. They could very well have existed, just no billionaire would have been the majority owner. The money is not removed from their investments, but they are required to divest them to other owners. Funding mechanisms for the companies now self-funded by billionaires would be quite different if the ultra-wealthy were never allowed to exist. It would require more cooperation, but it would not therefore be impossible.
If somebody cares about progress and is highly motivated, they should remain highly motivated to create incredible products and services, whether that buys them unchecked power or not. If some people would be less motivated and do less than they do now, it would be a lesser evil that creating oligarchs thirsty to dominate whenever they get the chance. As long as people can live a good and comfortable life, they do not have rights to more than that.
People who argue against progressive taxes tend to ignore the fact that modern capitalism is basically a game, one where the rules greatly favor the richest, who have virtually unlimited leverage compared to the average person. They make money exponentially more easily than others. It is absolutely right to correct this game through appropriate progressive taxes. Every once in a while an adult needs to step in to keep the game fun for everybody, and not just let the best player dominate others and make everybody else miserable. Maybe if we did this, the price gouging and constant turning of the screws would give way to a society where fair trade was the default cultural and economic norm.
Certainly hoarding more wealth than Smaug is a crime of grave injustice against humanity. For the mind completely sold to capitalism, this is impossible to understand. But people come before wealth and power.
> If somebody cares about progress and is highly motivated, they should remain highly motivated to create incredible products and services, whether that buys them unchecked power or not
If you tax their money away, they have that much less capital to invest.
> It is absolutely right to correct this game through appropriate progressive taxes.
Only if you don't like electric cars, cheap space rockets, cheap global communications, and enabling people with spinal injuries to need a lot less help.
> Certainly hoarding more wealth than Smaug is a crime of grave injustice against humanity. For the mind completely sold to capitalism, this is impossible to understand. But people come before wealth and power.
Nobody hoards wealth. They invest it. Nobody has a Smaug hoard. There are no Scrooge McDuck cash vaults.
I suggest you check out what happened under communism in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, Cuba, etc., under communism where people came before wealth and power. Your ideas sound good in a textbook and in the classroom, but they just don't work in the real world.
How come the system rewards someone like Musk with so much but doesn't do the same for people like Norman Borlaug (green revolution), Frederick Banting (insulin), Karl Landsteiner (ABO blood groups) or Katalin Karikó (mRNA vaccines)?
What sort of things can our society do to ensure that the people who dedicate their lives to eliminating the suffering of so many are compensated for what I'm sure we can agree are absolutely amazing accomplishments?
> Nobody hoards wealth. They invest it. Nobody has a Smaug hoard. There are no Scrooge McDuck cash vaults.
There are, unfortunately. [0] Though Putin's gold palace did have to be stripped for fungal problems, later.
Musk does go around with a large amount of debt, such as the 13bil he currently owes. So he's less likely to have a prepper vault. That does not mean that human greed doesn't turn to cartoons for inspiration, at times.
Musk's companies are hype stocks. Today's many successful tech companies run because of the commodification of x86 hardware, allowing them to build massive data centers, run cheap ad platforms, provide things like YouTube, etc, for free. All of this was because of Linux, which Linus Torvalds created. Before Linux and commodity x86 made it reliable and useful, every company had to pay Sun/IBM exorbitant amounts. In no conceivable universe has Musk created more value than Linus. Yet, Linus is not a billionaire.
Most businesses are funded by taxpayers, either directly or indirectly. Elon Musk is a billionaire because of DOE funding, or there would have been no Tesla today.
By January 2009, Tesla had raised $187 million and delivered 147 cars. Musk had contributed $70 million of his money to the company.
In June 2009, Tesla was approved to receive $465 million in interest-bearing loans from the United States Department of Energy.
Do you think they weren't? What about that logic doesn't apply to millionaires?
Or to put it another way, if I make the same claim about millionaires; how do you expect to argue that they will be greatly affected by being taxed more? A 1% tax increase on someone's gross income is never going to "greatly" affect them unless, but if it happens 100 times they will be pennyless.
If you take money away from someone, they will have less money and do less because they have less resources.
I'm not sure what the disagreement is? None of the stuff you said is wrong, but I don't see how it is a response to my comment. Nor do I see how it is particularly relevant in a conversation where I assume the idea is a different progressive taxation rate.
There isn't a disagreement, it is a question (technically, several questions). The hint is in the "?". Your 1 sentence comment isn't long enough to respond to directly without more information, even if I wanted to.
It's important to distinguish between wealth and income. Like, I would say that a lot of HN readers are in the top decile of income in whatever country they live in, but far, far fewer are in the top decile of wealth.
Personally, I think that we should tax wealth more in general, and probably make the income tax a bit more progressive (I currently pay 52% which sucks, but if I had to pay a few pp more to get rid of homelessness and poverty in my country then I'd be ok with it).
You've mis-read the comment. This logic is not strictly related but it might help you understand what he was saying:
There are ~300 million people in the US who are not billionaires. If they earn, on average, $4 each that balances out a billionaire by income [0]. Since there are <1,000 US billionaires, the average american income would need to drop back to something around the $4,000 range for billionaires to be out-earning them.
This is why taxes tend to land heavily on the middle class, the billionaires don't control most of the money. If politicians want access to money, the biggest pot isn't the billionaires.
[0] And billionaires don't generally make billions in income because it is a wealth measure.
Whatever it takes to restore 1960s level of inequity.
By whatever measure works, eg old school gini coefficient or something more modern.
You're right though: food fights over decimal points and gaming the rules nicely obfuscates any constructive debate about what kind of society we want.
Your answer begs the question - why is the 1960’s the right target?
And if the Gini coefficient is calculated pre-tax and pre-benefit distribution, it’s not going to change with high taxes and high redistribution (and yes you mentioned it may not be the right measure).
And if the Gini coefficient is calculated based on income data from the US, do we know if the better Gini from 1960’s wasn’t just due to income not being reported to the IRS?
Realpolitik. Proper Nordic levels of (lesser) inequity is not likely in the USA. But selling the nostalgia of our '60s era prosperity might fly.
> if the Gini coefficient is calculated pre-tax
Firstly, then pick a different different metric. Gini coefficient is merely the most familiar.
Secondly, you asked about proper income tax rate. In my pithy reply, I implied outcomes are more important than implementation details, but slap fights (like this one) about those details are used to distract. (I think the kids today call that "bike shedding".)
Also, I did not explicitly state that measures of wealth distribution is the central issue. I regret the omission.
--
While I have your attention: How do you think our tax regime should be structured?
Feel free to link to any prior explanations (posts) I may have missed, so you don't have to repeat yourself.
For perspective: UK tax rate bands are 40% between £50k-£125k, 45% above that. So 50% tax for the 1% isn't wild at all in absolute (although it's a big departure from the american approach to taxes, of course)
Imagine how much federal revenue would increase if that 1% paid the same effective rate as say a typical plumber, rather than the <10% they currently pay. That might actually put a dent in the trillions of dollars this congress is about to add to the national debt.
I hear that sentiment a lot, but it doesn't seem right to me. My salary is pretty close to the median plumber's income, and my family's effective tax rate last year came in at... 1.6%. And that's with all retirement account contributions going toward Roth accounts. If we'd chosen to contribute to traditional IRA/401k accounts instead, the EITC and child tax credit would easily turn our tax bill negative.
A quick search tells me the median plumber salary is ~$60k. Your telling me your entire tax burden is ~1k? I find that hard to believe, and if true is pretty darn atypical. That's closer to what I was paying when I was making ~10/hr.
Yes. We had $50k of taxable W2 income ($63k including pre-tax insurance premiums and HSA contributions), $13k of taxable family leave benefits, $4k of interest/dividends (mostly qualified dividends, taxed at 0%), and $9k of long-term capital gains (taxed at 0%), making our pre-tax gross income about $89k. Only $66k of that is subject to taxes; the standard deduction brings that down to $37k, on which the tax is $4k. With a $2,000 child tax credit, $400 saver's credit, and $200 foreign tax credit, our tax liability is reduced to $1400, which is 1.6% of $89k.
"That might actually put a dent in the trillions of dollars this congress is about to add to the national debt."
It might also result in even more spending. I don't think that there is any "natural ceiling" when it comes to willingness of politicians to spend other people's money. The only ceiling is external - how much will the system bear.
If they don't wanna pay so much in taxes, they should stop having so much money. Taxes function to raise revenue and thus have to go where the money is.
There are no loopholes for investment gains. If you are talking about offsetting losses and delaying gains, those options would likely be available to endowment funds.
Financial policy is very specifically against people saving their money though - that's why a certain level of inflation is considered desirable to mainstream economists. Spending and borrowing is heavily encouraged at all levels, while investment opportunities are gated based on wealth and income to prevent the poor from being able to "work smarter".
> investment opportunities are gated based on wealth and income
Anyone can install robinhood on their phone and trade using their credit card.
> Financial policy is very specifically against people saving their money
No, it isn't. People who save money are terrified of risk. There's nothing stopping anyone from investing the money.
> that's why a certain level of inflation is considered desirable to mainstream economists
That's the excuse the government makes to inflate the money. You'll never see a politician point out the real reason for inflation. It's so they can spend it without raising taxes, but it does cause inflation, and inflation has to be blamed on something else. Anything but the truth.
> Anyone can install robinhood on their phone and trade using their credit card.
Buying a few stocks on an app is not anywhere near the same thing as being an accredited investor. Access to the most lucrative investment opportunities are not available to the average person, and that's almost entirely due to rules intentionally created to block anyone but the already wealthy.
Please, this thread is about the average wage-grade worker (money earned via the "sweat of one's brow"), not an "accredited investor". In this example, almost anyone in the US can open up a Robin Hood, Vanguard, Schwab, Fidelity, etc account with probably $25. You don't need access to the most lucrative investment opportunities to make money; simply buy a standard S&P 500 ETF and call it a day. Over time, the chances of you making money with your investments are high, and the tax burden is lower, meaning you get to make and keep more money in your pocket. That is a win for everyone - not just the magical "billionaire".
The average worker in the US needs these sorts of opportunities to be self reliant. You don't need to be a billionaire to make money on the market, you just need a few dollars, some time, and the will to take a little risk. Stop hating on the average worker...
The methods that institutional investors have, like market making or delta one strategies, aren't available because of the rules, it's because individual investors literally don't have the scale, flow and networks to do it.
Second of all, at the end of the day it's other people money's they're using, and are entrusted to manage. You can't demand people to just lend money to anyone, any sort of free market of loans will quickly coalesce into a few capital allocators.
Sorry, nothing prevents the poor from working smarter. Just because you are poor does not mean you are uneducated. And, investment opportunities are NOT gated based on wealth and income. Literally anyone in the US can open an investment account and get started. The lack of desire is the real issue.
> And, investment opportunities are NOT gated based on wealth and income.
What? There is literally a class of people considered accredited or sophisticated investors.
To be considered an accredited investor by the SEC you must have a net worth of over $1M -not including- your primary residence, and you must have an annual household income of over $300K.
We have tax-advantaged retirement accounts to enable the middle class to save a reasonable amount in order to retire without being a burden on society. A typical saver doesn't have additional extra money leftover for a taxable brokerage account that exposes them to capital gains taxes.
Low capital gains taxes aren't meaningfully encouraging somebody making 75k and saving 10k annually to continue with their saving plan.
If they sell and incur capital gains. But they have so many better alternatives than you or me. And if they do incur capital gains they pay the same tax rate (or maybe 5 basis points higher, depending on your income) as you or me.
Borrowing against assets. Wealthy people get low, low rates, much lower than the hoi polloi would get on a HELOC or brokerage account margin loan. Banks like having them as clients.
You don't pay back the loan. You die, your assets pass to your heirs, and their cost basis is stepped up. The heirs sell some of the assets to pay the loan back. They don't have capital gains because of the stepped-up cost basis.
There are finer points I don't understand such as:
1. Is the stepped-up cost basis available to the estate or only to the heirs? If it's to the estate, it's easier for the bank to trust they'll be paid back.
2. If the heir gets the stepped up cost basis, what legal guarantees does the bank have that the heir will pay the loan back?
And probably a lot else. I assume there's expensive lawyering and accounting involved in setting it up, so it isn't cost-effective unless you have a certain amount to shield from taxes in the first place.
First of all, prime can be pretty good vs being taxed. Secondly, who knows what kind of sweetheart deal can be pulled for a small (in the big scheme of things) "loan" when banking of billions is at stake.
An ELOC for a HNWI can be significantly lower interest than a mortgage. They can often get "fed funds rate/LIBOR + 0.5%" or so. This is because they can accept a floating rate, while mortgage rates get locked in for 10-30 years.
> Nobody loans out money with a guaranteed prospect of below market returns
Not to you or me. Giving powerful people who can send more business the bank's way a freebie on their personal accounts might make sense as a loss leader.
Not only they get low rates, but if they have friends in the palace, they tend to be beneficiaries of large governmental contracts; during times of economic upset, they are the beneficiaries of large “monetary injections” that later cause inflation and prices to rise for all of us. During 2008, COVID, and the Mango recession the wealthy got much much wealthier, and all we got was expensive eggs and higher costs of living.
Only short term gains are taxed as income. Long term capital gains tax caps at 20%, wildly lower than the top income tax bracket of 37%. And it's always possible to defer short term gains (e.g. put your trading money in an IRA).
IRA contributions are drastically limited to a $7000 cap per year under 50. Whether they should be is another question, and one worth exploring.
Long-term investment is rightly seen as something to be encouraged hence the lower tax rates. You can make the argument that the rate should be more like 0% since the money invested and risked was already taxed most likely...20% is a reasonable value for the market regulating infrastructure provided by gov't entities.
There are loopholes to roll all sorts of nonsense into an IRA though. There was a whole news cycle in the 2012 election about Mitt Romney's $4M "IRA" or somesuch. And IRAs are hardly the only shelter from income tax, they're just the most obvious.
The simple truth is that wealth beyond the ~$10M level in the US pays essentially zero "income tax". It just doesn't happen, no one does it. Short term gains are only taxed for small investors who don't know any better.
"Entrepreneur Elon Musk announced on social networks that this year he will pay 11 billion dollars, thus becoming the largest taxpayer in the history of the USA."
That was on a sale of Tesla stock that he'd held for much longer than the long term rate threshold. He paid 20% on it, or plausibly less. I, personally pay a higher rate than that. Big numbers notwithstanding, Elon Musk shouldn't be paying less tax than I do, sorry.
You're dodging, and I know you're smart enough to know how this goes. I don't make money with long term stock, I make salary. I pay >>20% tax on that salary. Billionaries make, statistically, zero salary. All their income is on long term gains. All of it. So billionaires pay 20%, and that only if they're dumb enough not to find other shelters.
You're just saying "Well, that's the way the tax code works". I'm saying "The tax code sucks", and your point is non-responsive.
So how "over time" do I need to wait until I start paying the same tax rate as a billionaire? Seems like your solution to "the rich pay less tax" is "well, everyone should just be rich then"?
"Let them eat cake" makes for extremely poor federal revenue policy.
IRA caps are low, but loads of people earning enough that they'd reasonably save more than 7k annually have access to 401ks or similar accounts that raise the annual cap to >30k, vastly more than the typical person is saving.
The middle class isn't taking advantage of low capital gains rates to earn more from their taxable brokerage accounts because they haven't even filled up their tax-advantaged accounts.
No but their earnings are mainly in their companies, and those can hire fleets of tax attorneys and accountants to crush their tax burden.
Once the money is in stocks, it doesn't get taxed unless you draw on it, but the billionaires can use strategies like buy, borrow, die (which last I checked only really works if you're north of ~ $300M) to avoid personal taxes.
Billionaires benefit most from the largest tax exceptions. No tricky accounting needed it’s baked blatantly into the tax code. Long term capital gains are specifically lower than short term capital gains. Further gains are only taxed on sale allowing a lifetime of growth to pass to the next generation tax free.
They also operate at a scale where many tax breaks become viable. CEO owners aren’t paying themselves nominal salaries because they are actually working for free. Creating a shell company to own your 50k car isn’t useful but it’s damn well worth it if you’re buying a 50+m dollar yacht for personal use. Turning depreciation into a nominal loss offsetting capital gains etc.
Meanwhile people of lesser means get stuck with all kinds of crap like a 10% early withdrawal penalty on 401k plans.
The administration is saying “hire and promote faculty and admit students based on scholarly merit, not ideology and activism”. Universities are saying “no, we want to keep doing the ideology stuff”. That is anti-intellectual.
The administration defines what ideology is and given the current administration claims it’s based on merit and given the nonsense they do economically, scientifically and militarily they are the ideological activists.
Not to mention that they are clearly hired based on gender and skin color.
Applicants for faculty positions are required to submit "diversity statements" expressing their commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. This statement is evaluated before any of their other qualifications, like their standing in the field, number and quality of publications, teaching experience, you know, the intellectual quality of their work. If they are judged to be insufficiently committed to the DEI ideology, then their application is rejected without further review, regardless of how qualified they might otherwise be. That is anti-intellectual.
That is before we even get into the explicitly racist hiring and admissions policies.
> growing number of states and schools have also begun eliminating requirements that job applicants furnish “diversity statements” — written commitments to particular ideas about diversity and how to achieve it that, at some institutions, have functionally served as litmus tests in hiring.
> Chavous and her colleagues did not collect demographic information from applicants. Instead, they were asked to submit statements addressing how they would advance D.E.I. goals, whether through research into “race, gender, diversity, equity and inclusion,” “significant academic achievement in the face of barriers” or “commitment to allyhood through learning about structural inequities.” Departments were invited to nominate candidates from an application pool created by the diversity center, which then oversaw further vetting.
I don't agree with Ohio's diversity statements being used as part of the selection criteria. It's wrong.
What about every other university though? JD Vance's statement called universities the enemy. Most universities aren't connected to each other, they aren't a single organization and aren't responsible for what each does.
1. If only a few were using diversity statements as a part of the hiring process, which is wrong, what's the justification in calling all of them the enemy?
2. What about the professors? Most aren't responsible for setting hiring practices. Why are they the enemy?
> That is before we even get into the explicitly racist hiring and admissions policies. [ from your original comment ]
Same as the above for this. A University is a large insinuation of students, teachers, researchers, and various employees. Harvard employs 19k people and has 23k students.
#----------------
My opinion is that Vance is attacking universities not because he cares about merit based hiring or the quality of students but for selfish political reasons.
Why I think this:
1. As previously stated not all universities are doing what you claimed. Ohio for one, and the first link says "some" but there are thousands.
2. There are private schools that receive public money but discriminate against LGBQT [1] However nothing has been said or done about this by Trump in the past or now. These religious schools are more conservative and attacks would likely anger the base.
> 1. As previously stated not all universities are doing what you claimed. Ohio for one, and the first link says "some" but there are thousands.
Not all, but most. It may have decreased as some universities have started to abandon it now that it is falling out of fashion, but it was a large percentage, I'd estimate 90% offhand, but it's not like there's a lot of sources on this. It is a movement led by an aggressive and militant minority who silences and drives out anyone who disagrees. Most professors, who just want to do their research on 19th century French poetry or the mating habits of dung beetles or whatever they care about just shut up and try to keep their heads down so they don't get denied tenure or have students protesting at their office because they said the wrong pronoun. If you know people in academia and they trust you they will tell you off the record that it is nearly universal and so, so much worse than what is publicly reported. Sorry, I can't provide sources for this. You can trust me or not, but I know what I've seen and what people have told me.
> There are private schools that receive public money but discriminate against LGBQT [1] However nothing has been said or done about this by Trump in the past or now. These religious schools are more conservative and attacks would likely anger the base.
There is a religious freedom issue, because religion is also a protected class. I don't know, religious schools are not that many and they are not a big factor in academia. If you really care about that religion, then you go there, if not there are lots of other places. I don't know why an LGBQT person would want to force their way into going to a school where everyone thinks they're sinful and destined for hell. Seems like masochism to me.
> My opinion is that Vance is attacking universities not because he cares about merit based hiring or the quality of students but for selfish political reasons.
Well, neither of us can read his mind, but he benefited from a system that espoused meritocracy and used it to improve his life from growing up very poor to becoming vice president of the United States. I think it's reasonable that he would want to preserve that so other people could also have that opportunity and not get denied because they were the wrong race.
No, that's a lie and you know it's a lie. The administration specifically demanded that Harvard must submit to viewpoint diversity audits, hiring faculty and admitting students as necessary to make sure that every department has a balance of viewpoints the government finds acceptable.
No, that wasn't sufficient. The government specifically demanded that Harvard must commission a government-approved external party to audit viewpoint diversity, and must promise in advance to follow its recommendations, for each of the next three years.
No, it's not a lie that the administration said universities should hire and admit students based on merit. The administration's letter is linked from the university's statement. You can go read it. It's the very first two points.
It's true they also said they want viewpoint diversity quotas and audits. I agree that goes too far. I think they would probably give that up if the university pushed back. This is what Trump does every time - make outlandish demands so you have something to give up in negotiation. He even wrote an entire book telling you exactly that's what he does, yet somehow the "intellectual elite" cannot wrap their heads around a very simple negotiating tactic. Every plumber, electrician, and carpenter that ever worked with Trump figured this out decades ago.
>This is what Trump does every time - make outlandish demands so you have something to give up in negotiation
Harvard rejected the demands and Trump pulled funding. What negotiation happened?
Also, if everyone knows you're just demanding more than you'd accept what's the value of the negotiation tactic? Everyone would just reject demands initially knowing this
Yes, you reject the first offer and make a counter offer. That is how negotiating works. You ask for more than you expect to get to find out what the limit is that the other party will go up to. How else would you find the limit? You don't know what the other party is thinking or what all of their priorities are. You can't just magically intuit it a priori.
If that's how negotiating works, and Trump cancelled the funding instead of delivering a counteroffer, shouldn't we conclude that Trump is not in fact negotiating? It seems like your vision of negotiation is that Trump does whatever he wants and everyone else politely begs him to be gracious in victory.
Trump made the initial offer. It was up to the university to make a counteroffer and try to meet in the middle. Instead they flatly refused everything. When one party rejects an offer in a negotiation, the other party often walks away. That’s what Trump did. If you aren’t willing and able to walk away, you’re begging, not negotiating.
I find I'm willing and able to walk away from this discussion. I'll keep your strategic advice in mind the next time a Trump supporter tries to explain why I should not shun them or organize a boycott of their business.
No, they had issues with some of the demands and wanted to open a dialog.
Harvard's response says they changed policies to protect Jewish students, made other changes to related to the protests, etc.
It also states
"It is unfortunate, then, that your letter disregards Harvard’s efforts and instead presents demands that, in contravention of the First Amendment, invade university freedoms ..."
#-----------------------------
Finally they said:
"Harvard remains open to dialogue about what the university has done, and is planning to do, to improve the experience of every member of its community. But Harvard is not prepared to agree to demands that go beyond the lawful authority of this or any administration. "
What he explained in his book is that he's an evil, dishonest person, who routinely lies and harms people in negotiations in order to get his way. I agree that being evil and dishonest is often quite effective - if you came up to me with a knife and an outlandish demand that I should give you my wallet, I'd probably concede the negotiation. But I don't at all understand the idea that I have to respect this as some kind of clever negotiating strategy. The innocent researchers whose grants he's cancelled are real people suffering real harm, and they don't become transmuted to a mere negotiating tactic just because Donald Trump doesn't care about them.
> somehow the "intellectual elite" cannot wrap their heads around a very simple negotiating tactic
This is extremely disingenous. Throughout this thread you've been arguing on the basis that hiring people simply to fit a political viewoint is wrong, but when it's pointed out that that's exactly what your team wants as well you fall back to name-calling.
The administration wants to revoke visas for non-US citizens who come here under the pretense of education and then instead advocate for terrorist groups that are hostile to the interests of the US and its allies. No, that isn't the same. Why is the US government expected to fund people who want to destroy the US government? Should you be required to pay people who want to kill you?
>The administration wants to revoke visas for non-US citizens who come here under the pretense of education and instead advocate for terrorist groups.
1. You can get an education while advocating for causes
2. The letter doesn't only say advocating for a terrorist group.
From the gov demand letter:
"International Admissions Reform. By August 2025, the University must reform its recruitment, screening, and admissions of international students to prevent admitting students hostile to the American values and institutions inscribed in the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence, including students supportive of terrorism or anti-Semitism."
>Why is the US government expected to fund people who want to destroy the US government?
1. They aren't, Harvard does
2. Federal grants aren't targeted to specific students so revoking them isn't a targetted punishment
3. Harvard can still operate without these grants, including bringing in international students who the current admin might disagree with.
4. The US government gives money to people who want to destroy it all the time. Welfare, social security, etc is given to anti-gov US citizens with no restrictions based on those views.
5. Although only proposed Trump wanted to set up a fund for January 6th protestors who he pardoned. Some of whom attacked the US capital to disrupt a Democratic election process.
>Should you be required to pay people who want to kill you?
No. How is that related to this? You just overly generalized the entire situation in order to produce a question where I'd mostly likely to say "no" as a argument manipulation tactic.
> 2. Federal grants aren't targeted to specific students so revoking them isn't a targetted punishment
> 3. Harvard can still operate without these grants, including bringing in international students who the current admin might disagree with.
Harvard funds them with the money it gets from grants. If Harvard wants to fund activist students with their own money out of their endowment, nobody is stopping them from doing that.
No, they can't unilaterally import foreign students though, the government has to grant them a visa to come here, and it really doesn't seem prudent to grant visas to people who hate our country and everything it stands for. If they believe the US is so evil and awful, they should be quite relieved that they won't need to come here. Maybe Harvard can open a satellite campus in Gaza if they really feel that these are the best students who are most deserving of a Harvard education.
>Harvard funds them with the money it gets from grants.
The grants fund students regardless of views. Yes they can use their endowment (I think) it's quite massive but the point is the government attacking universities for what a small amount of students say which is wrong.
It's also quite hypocritical considering views on free speech and "big government"
"Shutting down free speech will destroy our civilization." - JD Vance
>it really doesn't seem prudent to grant visas to people who hate our country and everything it stands for.
Why? In the case of attacking Israel that's not even our country?
What if they hate the current government?
What is "our country" to you because most probably hate the government, a very common attitude for many inside the country.
If they hate our values of freedom then punishing them only says that those freedoms aren't that dear to us because we're willing to compromise.
The rest of your comment is Facebook level of like "If you don't like it leave". I do think your other comments are professional so I hope we can move back
>they should be quite relieved that they won't need to come here
> If they hate our values of freedom then punishing them only says that those freedoms aren't that dear to us because we're willing to compromise.
How is it a punishment to send someone away from a place they hate?
For all the people chanting “from the river to the sea” and then crying about their free speech when their visas are revoked, where is their passion for free speech when someone draws a cartoon of Mohammad?
These are not people who care about the ideals of freedom. They only want to use our indulgence as a wedge to promulgate their own, much less free ideology.
Or to put things in maybe more HN-friendly terms - suppose you have a public facing service that you intend to be very liberal and accepting of any inputs. Does that mean you need to allow SQL injection attacks? Cross-site scripting? Spam? Not all actors are acting in good faith. Some are deliberately trying to harm you.
They are the ones asking to live in a different country. The burden is on them to demonstrate why they should be allowed to live here, not on us to prove why they shouldn’t.
Let’s say I want to come live in your house. Do you need to prove to me why I shouldn’t be allowed to do that, or do I need to prove to you why I should? If I make speeches and write articles about how you’re an evil person and we should burn your house down, does that make you think it’s a good idea for me to live with you?
The people in the administration were not admitted to their universities based on merits, they paid to get in and they paid for their degree. This is especially true for POTUS who holds an entirely fake degree bought and paid for by his father.
>You are simply defining intellectual as “whatever universities do and say
Definition of anti-intellectual
"a person who scorns intellectuals and their views and methods" from oxford
Intellectual
"of or relating to the intellect or its use", "given to study, reflection, and speculation", and ": engaged in activity requiring the creative use of the intellect" from MW.
I didn't define anything. If I said the administration was anti-education would that be better?
> the University must adopt and implement merit-based hiring policies, and cease all preferences based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin throughout its hiring, promotion, compensation, and related practices among
faculty, staff, and leadership.
> the University must adopt and implement merit-based admissions policies and cease all preferences based on race, color, national origin, or proxies thereof, throughout its undergraduate program, each graduate program individually, each of its professional schools, and other programs.
In what way is hiring faculty and and admitting students based on merit instead of their identity anti-education? Is your position that you get a better education from a professor who was hired because of their race instead of the quality of their scholarly work?
>In what way is hiring faculty and and admitting students based on merit instead of their identity anti-education?
It's not. Calling universities and professors the enemy is. The government taking away funding because you want international students to adhere to an ideology is wrong.
>is your position that you get a better education from a professor who was hired because of their race instead of the quality of their scholarly work?
You ask other scholars in the field to read it and give their opinion on it. It’s this thing called “peer review” that is kind of the basis of all modern academic inquiry.
In the case of hiring, typically a committee of other professors in the department would evaluate candidates, not a bunch of DEI bureaucrats. They would read what the candidates have published and see if the arguments they make are sound, and look at things like # of citations that indicate how prominent the work is in the field.
I don’t know if you’ve ever met any academics, but I promise you they have no problems forming opinions about the quality of work of other people in their field.
Sure. Research by definition deals with areas that are not settled, so different people can have different theories, and they might disregard scholars who don't like their preferred theory. On the other hand, some academics welcome debate and differing viewpoints more than most people.
Like, if you were a physics professor and you were applying to a department where everyone was a string theorist, and your position was that string theory is a bunch of bullshit, you might not get that job. Or you might, if your work is otherwise solid, you never know.
But that's a disagreement about physics, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to evaluate a physics professor on. It's not about how enthusiastically they endorse some ideological dogma that has nothing to do with physics.
If people can be ranked differently as candidates by different universities and the people at them how can you ever be sure that a person who got the job because of DEI was the worse candidate?
There are objective measures like quantity of publications, quality of the journals published in, # of citations, awards won, books published, things like that. Every academic could tell you the top 5 journals in their field that are the most competitive to get published in and are the most respected, someone with a lot of publications in those journals would be objectively better than someone with no publications or with publications in crappy no-name journals that claim they are "peer-reviewed" but basically publish anything that gets submitted.
We're not talking about roughly equal candidates with similar qualifications and one getting the edge because of race. I'm telling you there are cases where PhD candidates with zero publications, people who have not even finished and defended their dissertation yet, are hired for tenure-track positions over other candidates who have had their degree for several years, published in top journals, won highly competitive fellowships, etc, because universities want someone of a particular race. It's not subtle.
You may not be able to say that one candidate is the unequivocal best when there are many qualified candidates, but you can definitely say that a particular candidate is unqualified or not even close to other candidates when, for example, they have not published at all.
>There are objective measures like quantity of publications, quality of the journals published in, # of citations, awards won, books published, things like that
None of these are objective measures of quality.
1. The more papers you write the more likely you'll be published more. This is connected to time and desire.
2. Judging yhe quality of a journal is subjective therefore can't be used as an objective measurement for something else
3. If you write a paper that more people have access to, is about a more popular subject, is the only paper for a subject, or is published in more popular journals it would increase your citations outside of the paper quality.
4. Awards are a subjective judgement
Of course all of these increase the probability of quality but it's not a guarantee.
> for example, they have not published at all.
I don't think anyone going for a position as a professor hasn't published since most PHds require it. This point probably adds more weight but I think it would be rare between candidates for job.
Sure, it’s not infallible, but having other experts in the field read and judge a candidate’s work is at least an honest attempt at assessing merit.
Whereas going by who can write the most enthusiastic essay about diversity, as judged by the blue-haired gender studies major in the diversity center, is a system that will only select for rabid ideologues and disingenuous bullshitters.
Pretend you are an investment banker. You've spent the last 10 years living and breathing investment banking. You've worked 100 hour weeks. You can point to a long list of successful deals you've done. You have glowing references from every client and colleague that has ever worked with you.
Now, you're applying for a job at a major investment bank, but before your resume is reviewed by any of the investment bankers, you have to write an essay about how much you love baseball. This essay will be reviewed by a panel of baseball superfans. They will judge it on how much you know about baseball and how much you love baseball. If they feel you know enough about baseball and you sufficiently express your love for it, they will then pass your resume on to be reviewed by the investment bankers.
Now, maybe you like baseball, maybe you don't. Maybe you have no particular strong feelings about it. Mostly, you didn't have time to think much about baseball because you have spent your time obsessed with investment banking.
Do you think this is a good system to hire investment bankers? If someone said "hey, we should hire investment bankers based on their track record in investment banking and not how much they love baseball or if they are baseball players", would you call them "anti-investment banking"?
Reading more carefully, you're just making nonsensical statements that have no connection to reality. Yes, many of these absolutely are objective.
> The more papers you write the more likely you'll be published more. This is connected to time and desire.
Yes, someone who writes more and spends more time doing research and has more desire to do research is objectively better at research than someone who produces less. There is a possibility that one person writes lots of low quality papers and another person writes a few high quality papers, but in asserting this you are admitting that there is some objective measure of the quality of a paper (which there is). Since the reviewers would be reading the papers, they could also objectively assess the quality of the papers too.
> 2. Judging yhe quality of a journal is subjective therefore can't be used as an objective measurement for something else
No, the quality of the journal is not subjective. If journal A publishes anything they are sent without review and journal B rigorously reviews everything by sending it to other experts in the field, then journal B is objectively higher quality than journal A.
> If you write a paper that more people have access to, is about a more popular subject, is the only paper for a subject, or is published in more popular journals it would increase your citations outside of the paper quality.
If you write the only published paper on a subject, then you are objectively the world's leading expert on that subject. If the university wants someone who knows that subject, the only person in the world who has published on it is objectively the best choice.
Part of a professor's job might be to communicate about their research and bring it to a wider audience, and convince e.g. grant committees that it is important and deserves funding. Someone savvy enough to get published in popular journal is objectively more qualified to do this than someone who hasn't been able to accomplish that.
> Awards are a subjective judgement
The awards can be subjective, but whether you have won an award or not is an objective fact. If the job involves doing the kinds of thing that impress the people who give the award, then someone who has achieved that is objectively better than someone who has not.
>I'm telling you there are cases where PhD candidates with zero publications, people who have not even finished and defended their dissertation yet, are hired for tenure-track positions over other candidates who have had their degree for several years, published in top journals, won highly competitive fellowships, etc, because universities want someone of a particular race. It's not subtle.
Give me examples then because how could you know this?
I've worked in academic publishing for a long while, and I can tell you from experience that:
- "quantity of publications" is a problem and directly leads to bad science, so is on aggregate a measure of anti-quality
- "quality of the journals published in" is all in the mind; prestigious journals with high impact factor have been repeatedly found not to have the best research. The rigour of the editing process is more important, but few researchers know that, and importantly they are heavily incentivised by funders to go for high impact factor, completely muddying the waters of who's a good researcher by that metric.
- number of citations would be a better measure, but unfortunately is directly linked to impact factor, in practice and in perception.
- awards won, books published - too niche and random to matter much.
- "every academic could tell you the top 5 journals in their field" haha, no, you'd be as surprised as I was when doing that research.
Academic publishers have been considering the measuring problem for decades, and no one has found a solution yet.
There is no good measure of the quality of a paper until many years after publication. It's easy to identify some true positives (high impact, no retraction), it's quasi-impossible by definition to identify false negatives (unfairly ignored papers), and most importantly this emphasis on prestige research is terribly harmful to Science. Science needs researchers who are happy to replicate studies, people who publish disappointing results, and people who study otherwise unglamorous topics, otherwise Science fails.
TLDR: measuring how 'good' a researcher is by their prestige is extremely destructive to Science. You can't do that.
I'm not saying it's only prestige, but to a first approximation, a researcher who has an article published in Nature is highly likely to be better than one who has only published in no-name garbage journal that publishes whatever they are sent. Of course, nothing is certain, but we're talking about probabilities here.
And, as I'm saying, prestige, or probable future prestige, isn't a good proxy for a researcher's value or future value, even if it could be fairly guessed, which it can't. Nature is exhibit A, B and C, as it's the most prestigious journal, but not the most rigorous in any field, and its very existence damages Science by overvaluing the research it publishes, reducing the impact of better journals and the research they publish, and wasting the time, quality of life, and quality of research of scientists who feel like they must do anything they have to to publish in it, or are pressured by funders and/or academic institutions to do so.
But you are talking certainty when you claim DEI hires means that it's possible the lesser person is hired. If you have no objective system to measure merit then it's possible to ever know this
How does anyone know anything? Why even vet candidates at all? Let’s just assign professorships completely randomly then. We’ll have high school dropouts who can’t explain the quadratic formula teach differential equations at Harvard.
I’m sure they would do just as good of a job. Because nobody could ever possibly objectively tell whether someone with a PhD in math is going to be better at teaching and researching math than a high school dropout, right?
It's JD Vance's keynote speech at the 2021 National Conservatism conference. The speech, which I've just skimread, is mostly well-worn US conservative complaints about US higher education. He also talks about red-pilling because he's down with the kids, and he adds Jesus sprinkles in case you forgot he's Christian.
The speech is dull but it's bookended with two spicy statements, both of which you mostly quoted. The latter statement is not his words but a quote from Nixon.
Opening statement: «So much of what we want to accomplish, so much of what we want to do in this movement in this country, I think are fundamentally dependent on going through a set of very hostile institutions - specifically the universities which control the knowledge in our society, which control what we call truth and what we call falsity, that provides research that gives credibility to some of the most ridiculous ideas that exist in our country and so I'm excited to close this conference with this particular set of remarks, because I think if any of us want to do the things that we want to do for our country, and for the people who live in it, we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.»
Closing statement: «I really want to end this on an inspirational note [...] and the person whose quote I ultimately had to land on was the great prophet and statesman Richard Milhous Nixon [...] there is a season for everything in this country and I think in this movement of National Conservatism, what we need more than inspiration is we need wisdom, and there is a wisdom in what Richard Nixon said approximately 40-50 years ago. He said, and I quote: "the professors are the enemy".»
EDIT: And for the context of the Nixon quote, it comes from a private conversation Nixon had with Henry Kissinger in the Oval Office on December 14, 1972, recordings of which were released in 2008: «Henry remember... we're gonna be around and outlive our enemies. And also, never forget, the press is the enemy. The press is the enemy. The press is the enemy. The establishment is the enemy. The professors are the enemy. The professors are the enemy. Write that on a blackboard 100 times and never forget it.». It's worth noting that Nixon was already keeping an "enemies list": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon%27s_Enemies_List
It doesn't matter what Nixon's context was Vance was quoting him literally by proclaiming it a piece of wisdom.
Posting the entire speech only bolsters my view. For example
"[To accomplish goals].. I think are fundamentally dependent on going through a set of very hostile institutions - specifically the universities..."
I'm confused about your argument. I don't consider it a smoking gun just a concise example of what Vance and MAGA Republicans belive. There's no context confusion, it's on video, and it being dull only shows how comfortable he is exposing insane views.
The spicy soundbites on their own are scary and do suggest the state wants to destroy intellectuals.
The speech they're from doesn't.
The speech defends and praises universities and their role in society. Vance even claims some academics prefer to ignore evidence that refutes their positions, and he's against that; that would be a valid pro-intellectual position if true (but it's completely nebulous and unsourced)
The thesis of his speech was he doesn't like the content of what academics profess and he thinks they ought to teach his political views (and his audience's political views) instead. That's not anti-intellectualism, i.e. "don't trust those book-learning types, look to the common man for answers". This guy still wants ivory towers provided his cronies are in them.
Also it's interesting to see where his quote came from. He clearly picked an on-theme Nixon quote just to appeal to his audience, and he seems to miss the context of the Nixon quote in that Nixon is a paranoid nutter saying it, not coming from a rational place like Vance thought he just did.
I’m not half the country, but I can explain it to you. Billionaires already pay tax on investment income. Universities are exempt but now the proposal is that they pay as well, just like individuals (including billionaires) and other profit-making groups.
Why do you expect a billionaire to steal from billionaires? a portion of non-essential stealing comes from respct, and of course these billionaires are all a part of the same club.
The other lens is simple as well: big fish don't go after the other big fish. That just ends in two hurt fish and no food. Trump thought he was going after a small fry and underestimated the response. just because Columbia folded doesn't mean all universities will.
In France, we ran an NGO whose music festival got a bit big… a million or two of beer sales. Tax office came in and put that part of the NGO under the business rules, ie we paid and received VAT, paid the corporate tax at the normal rate, etc. We ended up putting the entire charity under the business rule because it was more profitable (saving VAT on all providers, while our donations were exempt of VAT).
I’m surprised USA doesn’t have a rule that industrial/commercial sections of any org is liable to all corporate tax laws.
we "sorta" do. It's an all in or all out matter with 501c3's. You declare a non-profit and essentially all your money needs to be funneled back to the company. There's many other regulations to prevent the most obvious means of fraud.
>A new proposal seeks to increase the endowment tax rate to 14%
That would be great that Harvard pays %14 on investment income on its 50 billion fund, considering I pay a minimum of 20% on my 'way less than $50 billion' in
taxable investments, which was funded by my already taxed earnings, where as Harvard gets much of its endowment funds gifted to it.
But I don't understand why 14%? It should be the same as you, 20%.
Same goes for religious organizations, but it would be extremely hard to enforce, as they might say "government is interfering us practicing our religion", as practicing religions helps to not pay taxes and protected by the Constitution.
>But I don't understand why 14%? It should be the same as you, 20%.
Taxing donations is really thorny. If people realize that the government is taking money they want to give away... they stop giving away money. It's a self-terminating cliche in action. So you either leave it alone if you want to encourage people stimulating charities, or you make the tax very small.
>Same goes for religious organizations,
I don't fully know. Some attempt at separattion of church and state. The government tries to maintain that except when other boundaries are crossed.
It does sort of fall into the same umbrella though, when regarding tithes.
why do you disagree? Most people working a job do have taxes taken out. That's why you get a "return" when the IRS realizes they took too much or you provide other means to deduct your taxes.
The comment attempts to suggest that something is being taxed twice. It is not. The original income that funds some investment is taxed. After that, only further income is taxed. The existing principle is not.
People already paid their taxes on all of the principal before they donated it to fund education. You and I are not chartered as an educational endowment; things like Roth IRAs exist for us.
I think the point is that money for many was taxed before the paycheck ever came in. And you have no control over it. Part of your W-2 goes to fund social security, part of it to fund the federal, part of it to fund the state.
Taxing donations is just double dipping on your money. That's how you discourage donating.
No skin in the game, but curious to know why any Republican would want to raise taxes. Is this some sort of power play like the tariffs? Feels like they’re ghost riding the economy for the lulz.
They don't care about taxes - they are happy to implement regressive taxes that disproportionately burden the middle class and poor, such as sales taxes, Social Security, etc. They just don't want to pay taxes themselves.
> They don't care about taxes - they are happy to implement regressive taxes that disproportionately burden the middle class and poor, such as sales taxes, Social Security, etc. They just don't want to pay taxes themselves.
A very large portion of the country vote Republican, and I would be surprised if they are by and large the most well-off part of the American public.
The voters are not the party and the party is not the party leadership. The actual policies that end up being supported have little-to-nothing to do with the stuff that gets talked about while campaigning, and this only gets more true the further away from the actual voter the position is.
These voters were scammed. Many still don't realize or believe this, and they avoid real news for the purpose of keeping faith in the easter bunny they voted for.
And you are right... that's why "The Party" instead appeals to "the party" with various single issues (you know all the hot topics) and implement (or perhaps, pretend to implement) those while the real bills "The Party" want are passed under their nosess. "The Party" spends a dollar on "the party" while grabbing hundreds from the vault they all pitched into.
Worked for decades. Not so well when Trump so publicly tanked the economy and snatched one of the 3 untouchable things.
> Feels like they’re ghost riding the economy for the lulz
Yes. The abstract of "the economy" doesn't matter. The priorities are "owning the libs" on Twitter and other media, and their own personal bank accounts which can benefit from insider trading the tariffs, state-sponsored memecoins and so on.
Easy, Harvard is essentially a training center for their ideological enemies on top of providing an actual education. They're just putting the boot down and saying stick to teaching instead of implementing and advancing a specific ideology. If taxes are the tools, so be it.
Harvard is a private instutution. If they want to teach underwater basket weaving, there's not much you can do to stop that. Anymore than Trump can raid apple and tell them to start making Androids. I thought a billionaire businessman would understand that much; imagine if Clinton back in the day tried to seize Trump Towers.
And while we long forgotten: don't forget that all of this is illegal. to retract congressionally appropriated funds that were already budgeted. The time to yoink this stuff legally was a month ago.
Which is, of course, why the internet is a spectacular failure and SpaceX is our best chance to ever put a man on the moon, and polio is still ravaging the country. Great point.
those endowments, especially for the Ivy League schools, aren't liquid at all. They'd take a massive haircut if they had to start pulling funds from it
Presumably they could go to a large bank and make a deal so that they only have to take a relatively small haircut by getting a loan to be paid back from endowment interest.
This is absolutely par for the course for university endowments. They're not big pots of money, they're thousands of small pots of money with various restrictions on their investment, disbursement, etc.
For a quick institution specific overview, see “with donor restrictions” on page 20-21 (pdf page 21-22) of their most recent annual report[0].
I’d imagine “maintain and invest the original contribution in perpetuity” covers majority of the restricted funds, with use-specific restrictions in a distant but comfortable second. Since it’s Harvard, they probably also have more funky restrictions than the average bear (gifts of stock in kind with restrictions on timing of sale, voting, etc.).
If I give a school 20 million yearly to research a specific form of cancer, and I find out that they instead used that money to upgrade the plumbing in their dormitories and spent nothing on cancer research, I would not give them 20 million ever again.
Sure, due to funding cuts students will suffer with slowly degrading infrastructure and will need to do plumbing fixes at some point. But that doesn't mean people who give them money for one purpose are happy with it being used for another purpose.
This might be true for Harvard, but I don’t think free speech should only be for those who can afford it. I know my school couldn’t if the government came knocking.
Harvard is free to say whatever it wants and operate without government funds. A shocking idea may be for a school to actually use the tuition paid by students to educate them.
This is forced speech for all those of us who disagree with Harvard's politics and yet have our tax dollars sent to support it anyways.
"Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past"
> My first amendment right not to be forced to support causes I disagree with is being harmed.
Fascinating. Do I have a similar right to stop paying taxes, because I don’t support the things the President is saying, or the causes Mike Johnston is adding to the budget?
> My first amendment right not to be forced to support causes I disagree with is being harmed. I don't want my tax dollars going to support discrimination against Asians and others.
This is absolutely NOT what the 1st amendment is about, you are confusing tax and speech but they are treated separately in the Constitution.
The reason for that is simple, if every taxpayer could deny the funding of everything they didn't agree with, we'd have a very different Constitution. The ability to FULLY defund something YOU don't agree with requires the powers of a king... If you scale that ambition back a little and ask only for the power to decide where YOUR own money goes, you'd be speaking of something other than a tax because this isn't the way taxes work.
I'm not explaining this because I see much good coming out of Harvard, in fact I don't, but that's a different conversation. Both political parties, as well as certain private organizations have their hands deep in students' brains - it's the ultimate cookie jar after all. The real problem is the attempt to legitimize overt government meddling in the "cookie jar" instead of focusing on transparency and examination of the current forces involved in that process.
BTW can you elaborate on your assertion about "discrimination against Asians"? Neither the government letter nor Harvard's response mention Asians! Were you trying to comment on another post? Maybe something about the tariffs?
That's just how government works, buddy. I disagree with my tax dollars being spent to shoot wild horses and fund Lockheed-Martin, but here we are. It's not forced speech, because you have representatives who (in a working system) you could ask to fight against tax dollars being spent on something you dislike. You have a voice, you just don't get to have the only voice.
The majority of Americans elected Republicans specifically based on their platform of eliminating waste and corruption like these funds that go to Harvard and directly fund anti Asian discrimination. The President is simply following through on his mandate. Why do you oppose democracy?
Communicating to elected officials that you will not vote for them if they continue their current behaviour is not anti-democracy, it's the main feature of democracy. You are actively participating in the democratic process by doing so.
Could you explain how government research funding constitutes forced speech?
If an individual who receives a government tax credit (say EITC) speaks out contrary to your politics, is the government allowed to withhold that credit too?
My money is taken from me at gunpoint by government forces I cannot resist without facing life in prison. I don't want this money going to random causes I disagree with. The government should be far smaller or we cannot have rights as the government will intrude on us more and more.
Lots of government spending is supported by the vast majority of Americans. Police, courts, fire, ambulance, and military (though size is up for debate).
I posted this deep in another part of this discussion - but the majority of the money being discussed here isn’t really for Harvard or educating its students - the largest portion are for NIH grants funding to Boston area hospitals, most of which have affiliations with Harvard Medical School.
> The Crimson analyzed the proposed Trump administration funding cuts and estimated that the five hospitals’ multi-year commitment from the NIH is over $6.2 billion and the University’s multi-year federal research funding exceeds $2.7 billion.
I’m sure that you have legitimate issues with politics at Harvard, but penalizing a number of independent non-profits that serve the community because they associate with a University that the administration disagrees with also seems to be forcing speech.
Just watch what happens when they exercise their Constiutional right to "say whatever it wants."
Stephen Miller made it clear this morning:
"Under this country, under this administration, under President Trump, people who hate America, who threaten our citizens, who rape, who murder, and who support those who rape and murder are going to be ejected from this country."
If the government decides you "hate America" or your business supports some hypothetical rapist/murderer they imagined, you're going to end up ejected from this country without due process.
Basis: words of the president on various different occasions, for example Trump wants to send U.S. citizens with criminal records to be imprisoned in EL Salvador.
So you support impinging on free speech as long as the majority of voters is against something? That's exactly the kind of thing the Constitution is meant to prevent.
Or do you agree that it is not a violation of free speech to fund police when there are citizens who disagree with it? You can't have it both ways.
i disagree with you but i still think you should be allowed to drive on public roads and access publicly-funded health care that are funded by my tax dollars.
According to NYT, “ of the $9 billion in federal funding that Harvard receives, with $7 billion going to the university’s 11 affiliated hospitals in Boston and Cambridge, Mass., including Massachusetts General, Boston Children’s Hospital and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.”
People here have little idea about how Harvard works. Harvard is financially vulnerable. It is currently running on a deficiency considering the endowment. And Harvard can't freely use most endowment for personnels anyway. If the government takes away funding, Harvard will have a financial crisis. I guess the leadership made the decision in hope someone could stop the government before bad things happen but when bad things do happen, you will probably see mass layoffs of researchers in particular in life sciences and biomedical research.
I understand. I am saying they are correct that much of Harvard's endowment is not discretionary, even if they accidentally used a term that implies that it is.
That's not what discretionary means in this context. The funds having been originally earmarked at the discretion of the originator, means they are no longer available for any purpose at the discretion of the trustee, meaning they are no longer discretionary. You are confusing the funds having once been earmarked at someone's discretion for their being discretionary, which they haven't been since the point when they were earmarked at the originator's discretion.
I mean, we literally just saw what happened at JHU when their USAID funding vanished. Everybody on that soft money got laid off.
That’s what makes stands like this hard for admin: you’re risking massive layoffs in the programs that are often the least political to defend the academic freedom of the programs that are often the most political. Columbia made one decision. Harvard is making another. You could make Lord Farquaad jokes here, but if it alone loses its federal funding in these expensive research areas, it will lose its preeminence in those areas for a long time.
Harvard has sat on $53B tax free leveraged 40% into private equity and now might have to panic sell because their VIP status got clipped? Color me surprised.
This is the only correct response, but I don't think I'm being overly cynical in thinking they're being opportunistic either.
They're quite happy to turn a blind eye to unfashionable political views being silenced, so there's a pinch of hypocrisy in making such a show of standing for openness.
It's my understanding that the issue is not that they're "espousing the right views" but rather that they have the constitutional right as a private institution to espouse whatever views their students and faculty want under the first amendment.
right, freedom of speech is free as long as it agrees with the viewpoint of who's in power. similar to how history is written by victors but this part is conveniently ignored. it's just facts in the open marketplace of ideas yay!
I mean, while this is the only correct response, it could still cost Harvard around $9 billion, which isn't chump change, even for Harvard.
And while I agree and have been disgusted with Harvard's slow slide to demanding ideological conformity over the past decade plus (e.g. https://www.thefire.org/news/harvard-gets-worst-score-ever-f...), I believe they have made some belated changes in the right direction over the past year.
> The Federal government has always attached conditions in exchange for Federal funding and Federal contracts. This is not dictating.
It effectively is. Just look up the history of the drinking age - a classic example of the federal government using extortion tactics to override state rights.
I don't think most people would consider "You can't discriminate based on race", to be extortionary. Instead, its a well accepted principle in most of society.
I agree on the matter, but pressuring states with financial strings is not the way to go for it.
All other democracies on this rock just go and modify their constitution, that's the proper way. Y'all just are so completely gridlocked that this is all but impossible...
> Which was also a law passed by Congress. Congress passes laws.
Indeed, but this was a clear evasion of prior laws. I don't like such workarounds in principle - either Congress should have gone the proper way and go for a constitutional amendment, or it should have buried the fucking bill. This created the nasty precedent that the current admin is using to push through the SAVE Act.
Importantly, the Civil Rights Act is a (well-litigated) law, not an ad hoc decree from the executive branch. If the current administration wants to strong arm universities, they should go through Congress.
I agree. Congress has allocated funds to Harvard. It’s not up to the executive whether to disburse them, unless that was specifically stated in the law.
The federal government cannot attach conditions that limit free speech onto federal funding.
There is precedent for the federal government expanding into areas it has no direct constitutional authority over through conditions on funding. But e.g. 'regulating commerce within a state' is not something the constitution explicitly forbids. Whilst 'abridging the freedom of speech' is very much explicitly forbidden.
As the Harvard letter says, "I encourage you to read the letter to gain a fuller understanding of the unprecedented demands being made by the federal government..." This goes far beyond a demand to follow existing civil rights law. It's a demand for a full-on, government-monitored cultural revolution that will punish Trump's enemies and bring in his supporters. It's also hilarously self-contradictory. The government demands an END to all DEI programs, yet in the same breath, "Every department or field found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by hiring a critical mass of new faculty within that department or field who will provide viewpoint diversity..."
A demand letter that said only "Harvard may not use race, gender, or national origin as criteria for admissions and hiring" would be a lot more defensible, and much harder to oppose.
But the government's list of demands includes all kinds of stuff that would be mildly insane even if offered in good faith. And we have seen enough already that any independent organization would be very irresponsible to assume good faith.
I would go so far as to say that any institution trying to make decisions based solely on merit is required to resist this kind of pressure very forcefully. There are many examples of the administration using "DEI" as a buzzword when firing meritorious women and minorities, all the while promoting totally meritless white men.
If you think 'viewpoint diversity' is any level of sane with the current administration then you haven't been keeping up with their actions:
> By August 2025, the University shall commission an external party, which shall satisfy the federal government as to its competence and good faith, to audit the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity, such that each department, field, or teaching unit must be individually viewpoint diverse.
This sounds like the federal government is demanding that they adhere to a department of Policing Wrongthink.
> Every department or field found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by hiring a critical mass of new faculty within that department or field who will provide viewpoint diversity; every teaching unit found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by admitting a critical mass of students who will provide viewpoint diversity.
Insane
> Harvard must implement a comprehensive mask ban with serious and immediate penalties for violation, not less than suspension.
Insane
> reducing the power held by faculty (whether tenured or untenured) and administrators more committed to activism than scholarship
Is even insane if you think about it for two seconds; nobody wants the government deciding what counts as activism and what counts as "real" scholarship. A good heuristic: do any of the proponents want a Bernie Sanders or AOC wielding this authority?
This sounds very similar to all the DEI stuff which they didn't have an issue with before. Forcing them to not be aggressively hostile towards Republicans does not seem like an unreasonable ask.
I had to take critical race theory classes for my grad school program, I'm sure they can find a Christian to make a powerpoint on avoiding hate towards Christians.
This is all stuff which has been happening in reverse for decades. The real solution is for schools to find a funding route other than government, but until then these shinanigans have been happening for decades and this isn't suddenly "insane".
1. Universities aren't "incredibly hostile towards Republicans"
2. CRT: critical race theory is a real study. It's just understanding the historical context for the current socioeconomic landscape of America. Do you think black Americans were magically fixed after slavery ended? No? Congratulations, you support the fundamentals of CRT. It just became conservative spooky buzzword.
3. Avoiding hate towards Christians... who is out here hating Christians? This fetish for persecution is getting very strange. At absolute worst, people are asking Christians to avoid passing legislation using their religion. Which is happening at an alarming rate and should be concerning to every American who respects our Constitution!
4. "reverse"... yeah no, it's really not. Nobody has been silencing conservative voices, it's just difficult to hold a conservative voice while being in higher education. Because conservatism as an ideology is naturally opposed to higher education and new ways of thought. It's the same reason conservative pieces of media suck. Conservatism as an ideology is naturally opposed to artistic expression and radical creativity, so of course the media sucks. Nobody is doing it to them, it's just that the way they are is largely incompatible with that thing. There's other fun example of this, too. For instance, why does Christian Rock suck so bad? (Christianity and Rock as ideologies are antithetical).
I don’t care at all. For what it’s worth, yes, Harvard and other elite universities should be more welcoming to conservatives. But turning to the federal government to enforce “viewpoint diversity” is just an obviously bad idea.
I don’t want the government deciding what viewpoints need representation. And again, if you think about beyond the immediate case you may have a personal emotional investment in, I don’t think you do either.
I don’t want a future administration trying to enforce “viewpoint diversity” on oil and gas companies, investment banks, or rural family farms either, regardless of what federal contracts or subsidies they have. Exxon, Goldman Sachs, or an Iowa hog farm would be insane to submit to that.
Also, a mask ban enforced by suspension is just plain stupid. That’s not even viewpoint diversity, it’s just partisan chum, and it gives away the game on whether this exercise is in good faith.
I agree in that I'm not thrilled that federal government is enforcing viewpoints, however the original post was saying their requirements were insane and impossible to implement. The requirements laid out are very similar to prior requirements thrust upon them, the only difference is these requirements require right-wing viewpoint alignment instead of left-wing viewpoint alignment.
Even if Harvard wanted to comply with the government letter, it's full of so many non-sequiturs and self-conflictions that it reads more like a piece of satire:
> The University must immediately shutter all diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, offices, committees, positions, and initiatives, under whatever name, and stop all DEI-based policies, including DEI-based disciplinary or speech control policies, under whatever name
> Every department or field found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by hiring a critical mass of new faculty within that department or field who will provide viewpoint diversity
> In particular, Harvard must end support and recognition of those student groups or clubs that engaged in anti-Semitic activity since October 7th, 2023
> Discipline at Harvard must include immediate intervention and stoppage of disruptions or deplatforming, including by the Harvard police when necessary to stop a disruption or deplatforming
The letter is a complete joke. Giving it any sort of compliance would be giving validation to a set of rules that are literally impossible to follow by design. There is literally nothing Harvard could do to not be in trouble later.
Also buried in the letter is this gem:
> Harvard must implement a comprehensive mask ban with serious and immediate penalties for violation, not less than suspension.
Keep in mind Harvard also runs a medical school!
This is Maoist-style social reform through and through.
Ah yes I've heard of that, it's one of the "Programs with Egregious Records of Antisemitism or Other Bias" which most fuels antisemitic harassment and reflects ideological capture!
Good. I think Harvard has faltered a bit recently with academic integrity scandals, but they are still well-respected overall. Them standing up for students is an important signal to other less high-profile schools that they can do the same.
As information, the current administration is doing similar demands to foreign universities, trying to impose the point of view of the world in a president we didn't vote for.
Here is an article about the Trump administration demands to our universities.
General strike when >50% of those who voted wanted this? What world are you living in?
Edit: I stand corrected, 49.81%. It doesn't change the point much. Especially when that ~49% includes many "working class"[1] voters. Who's going to participate in this general strike? A bunch of office workers?
> Also, research tells us that it only takes 3.5% to overthrow a government.
You're describing a coup or revolution. Isn't that highly anti-democratic considering this president just won an election? Why should the 50% be under the thumb of the 3.5%?
If the 50% can't or won't promise me that they won't ship me to El Salvador in a few years, I don't much care about abstract political principles until their power is broken.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 256 ms ] threadThere are a few colleges that take no federal funding in order to maintain total independence (mostly for religious reasons). But their research output is virtually zero.
Should we fix... what? Your unsubstantiated claim? You didn't even bother to do napkin math about it, you just asked a bunch of leading questions and then claimed inaction by the masses.
Research projects require grant funding because the schools do not have a business model to justify doing the research.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sputnik_crisis#Response
Something tells me this is more of the current administration threatening to completely wreck US prosperity if they don't get wins on their bigoted social war agenda.
Modern semiconductor manufacturing is nearly all researched in partnership with federal funding. It's viewed as a national security issue.
The best theory I've heard so far is that Trump has this wild idea that if he can tank the US economy into a recession/depression then he can renegotiate our debt. He thinks this will save the US trillions of dollars. Except it'll cost the US trillions of dollars as well. I don't know if he's smart enough to think this up but it does kinda seem like what he's doing.
At very least, if your endowment is growing on an inflation-adjusted basis, it does not appear to me that you need further subsidies; your primary business is to be an hedge fund and the treasury of an empire, not education for the masses. Gains should be taxed like a hedge fund at that point.
If you want to subsidize education as a society, there are much better ways: fund research directly and cut through the indirect cost crap (which was popular among academics up until the moment the current administration started advocating for it).
I agree. Gulf monarchies will probably come in a give even more billions to these institutions anyway to make up for the losses. No strings attached of course...
Harvard probably already secured some more funding from Qatar and what not.
Perhaps resurrect the Radcliffe College to support the more intellectual, free thought based departments. [1]
[1] https://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/about-the-institute/histor...
It’s really shocking to see an institution in our country take action that is not in its immediate financial best interest (assuming this letter translates to an action)
and they've been painting political enemies as criminals. It's pretty much the same situation as Russia/Putin but at an earlier stage of its development, and people want to avoid being the tallest grass that gets mowed.
It's good that some institutions are standing up but I don't expect it to go well for them.
Harvard has "fuck you money". They should go ahead and make it clear that they know they have this power and are expressing it (not necessarily with the vulgarity, yet)
Lawyers? Doctors? Medical research? Thousands of highly educated graduates annually? 161 Nobel prize winners?
This is compared to a direct payment to sustain operations which the government is saying they may not be in favor of. But its not like Harvard would say ”it may not be in our interest to produce successful people anymore.”
The American university system is undeniably impactful on American success over the last century. It would be tough to put any sort of exact number on it, but we can absolutely say "a shitload".
Merit based reforms would only help. What kind of DEI programs did Harvard have 100 years ago?
I look forward to some.
This ain't it.
Amongst others, legacy admissions and discrimination against Jews, Catholics and non-whites. Let’s not pretend that Harvard’s admissions process, or American society more generally, was some kind of perfect meritocracy in 1925.
Medical research depends heavily on faculty and postgraduate folks.
Only some of their thousands of annual graduates are undergrads - about 1/3 of them, per Wiki.
Include postgraduate folks and they're still doing a lot more than just teaching and credentialing. Places like Harvard output research, too.
I don't think the GOP & Trump thinks they need anything from Harvard other than agreeing to impose first amendment violations on others on behalf of the GOP and Trump.
I assume Harvard has a plan for dealing with this dynamic. They have some extremely smart people there, so I don't doubt they've found a way.
Is the government asking a university to shift their bias away from skin color diversity to viewpoint diversity fascist?
Is there a historical parallel?
Or is it just the fact that the government is asking for reform, and any reform request would be considered fascist? If so, do you also consider the DEI reform requests fascist?
> the University shall commission an external party, which shall satisfy the federal government as to its competence and good faith, to audit the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity, such that each department, field, or teaching unit must be individually viewpoint diverse.
Do you feel this is ok for the government to demand of an educational institution? This isn't about specific political ideologies. If the Biden administration had threatened to withhold funding from a university because, for example, their hiring policies weren't left-leaning enough or something, it would be equally outrageous.
Let me start by saying that I am not American and I am not your enemy. Also, I am genuinely trying to understand the truth about these matters, with an open mind to the possibility that it's messy and complicated and I might not be capable of understanding it. I hope that provides context for what follows.
Honestly, I am not sure if it's okay. It reminds me of the anti-racist movement, in that the action almost feels like it's anti-fascist. It's using a fascist action (use of state power to enforce conformity), to undo a fascist policy (suppression of political opposition and dissent). This reminds me of anti-racism, which uses one type of racism to compensate for a different type of past-racism.
What I find interesting is the very last statement in your post. I am not aware of anything Biden did, but it does seem like Obama did something very similar with the DEI policies forced on universities which came with funding implications for non-compliance. It was a different time, everyone was upset about the great financial crisis of 2008, and on their surface I am sure these policies sounded like a good thing. In the end though these policies were very much a form of facism in that it was a state sponsored effort to suppress political opposition. This probably sounds like I am defending the political views of racists, but really I am defending the political views of people who believe leadership roles should be filled based on the merit of the individual and their ability to take care of those in their charge, and not based on the color of their skin, their gender or sexual preferences.
As I have tried to unpack all this, the perspective that is growing for me is that for the last 20 or so years both administrations have been taking steps towards fascism while hiding their fascist actions behind intentions that sound anti-fascist. If this perspective is even partially correct, it would explain why so much of this has been so confusing for me.
This isn't quite 1930's Germany yet, but it's getting there. The next step to watch for would be any laws passed that regulate who can serve as faculty in universities or attempts to impose different leadership on universities that don't comply with demands.
Also I find the mask-ban strange and alarming. That example alone was probably enough of a red flag for me to more carefully scrutinize the good-faith of the rest of the letter.
Thank you for taking the time to actually engage with me constructively. Unfortunately many others decided to just downvote my questions.
I find it so disappointing that on a forum like Hacker News I am being downvoted for asking a question in good faith in an attempt to better understand a complex and nuanced topic.
When I ask ChatGPT to explain Facism to me, two aspects it pointed out were: - Suppression of political opposition, dissent, and individual freedoms. - Use of state power to enforce conformity.
I can see how the letter from the government to Harvard would be considered use of state power to enforce conformity. As someone who is open minded trying to understand the truth, the letter on first pass reads like they are using state power to unwind enforced ideological conformity. This is confusing, because on its surface it seems anti-fascist, so when people label it fascist (with charged emotions), it's hard for me to take them at their word without further explanation.
When the people who are concerned about the current actions of the government attack me for asking questions in an effort to actually understand their concerns rather than just accepting them, it makes me more suspicious of their viewpoints, not less.
Also, ChatGPT's thorough explanation of Fascism indicated to me that both administrations have been showing signs of increasing fascism, almost complimenting each other in their policies as they rock the cultural and institutional trunk of the united states back and forth with ever increasing momentum until it tips over into catastrophe. If such is the case, then maybe the only hope is for people to engage in these thorny issues with curiosity and nuance, to carefully sift out the bad from the good instead of assuming that everything the other side is doing is evil.
I have no control over what other people do, all I have control over is my own actions. I don't see a good way out of this mess that doesn't involve curiosity, empathy, understanding and reconciliation. So I will continue engage in the conversation with these intentions, and if people attack me for that then I suppose to will just have to accept what's inevitable.
Most governments recognize that large protests can influence public opinion against them. If you let such a protest occur and do nothing to satisfy the demands of the protesters, then things can get ugly quick. Freedom of speech and association are powerful things! There's not much an open, democratic government can do except respond to protests by addressing the underlying issues or crush the protest and hope that the public decides the protesters were wrong. What the Trump administration is trying to do here is reduce their risk by infringing on freedom of speech and association. It's fascist or totalitarian. Take your pick.
As for their claims that they're trying to "unwind enforced ideological conformity"... You can't do that by enforcing conformity to a different ideology, as they are attempting here. This is a case where you should pay less attention to words and more to actions.
Today I learned that demanding an end to racial discrimination makes you a fascist. I swear this word becomes more meaningless by the day.
Maybe? Or maybe they realize that they will lose all future credibility with students, government and NGO's if they bow to the conservative & Christian right?
There are two outcomes for the the current American government situation - a slide in to authoritarianism (it's right there in Project 2025), or these wackjobs get voted out because they are destroying global financial stability.
If it's the former, Harvard eventually has to cave because literal Nazi's.
If it's the latter, Harvard is screwed if they capitulate.
Yes, I doubt they're cool with the ideas in the letter like the federal government auditing everyone's "viewpoint diversity" and mandating staffing changes to fit what the federal government wants.
I have no opinion on Harvard myself by the way; I don't know enough about it. I'm just saying this is not an especially good criticism.
I'm not so sure. The Harvard endowment is huge. I might not be so much "moral fiber" as having enough fuck you money that risks don't matter as much as they do to others.
In contrast, most of the demands I read for Columbia, except for the one about putting the Middle Eastern studies department under some sort of "conservatorship", seemed relatively reasonable to me if they hadn't come from the barrel of a gun and from an administration who has clearly defined any criticism of Israel and any support for Palestinians as anti-Semitism.
So alongside antisemitism, The other demand is for changes in intellect. For some reason this reeks of Christian evangelical movement to purge wokism and anti-Zionism, both of which have run counter to evangelical dogma.
Antisemitism is not what you want to make it out to be. It is as much a hatred against Arabs as it is against Jews, as Zionist Christians want to fill the land with Jews just so the end of the world is near, without any consideration for what happens to the Arab natives of the region.
No, it doesn’t. This is discussed in the comment you responded to.
To deny the Arab colonisation of the middle east is simultaneously hilarious and disgusting, the one does see this occasionally amongst arab nationalists that have recently infiltrated the American left and caused the issues at Harvard and elsewhere.
I’m going to block you now, Not, because you’re a very good at arguing, but because you’re very poor at it.
PS: the man speaking is Ray Casagranda. Many laypersons know know more about Middle Eastern history than he does.
> you don’t make an argument.
I have made an argument, here's a fourth reminder. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43690612 You haven't responded once.
I could knock anything from Ray from Austin Community College out of the park. His video on the creation of Israel is full of falsehoods that are easily proven wrong, that's where I recognised him from. If he's an historian, I am too.
Which reminds me I need to click the block button.
The focus on the conquest of Jerusalem and bringing back Jews to the city is also reiterated by Sam Aranow, an Israeli like yourself.
Ctrl F 'dhimmi' - nope. Nothing on arab attacks either.
> he is a PhD historian
That says a huge amount about higher education in the US.
As long as educators aren’t selling themselves short, I remain optimistic about the future.
https://www.nytimes.com/1932/10/18/archives/einstein-would-q...
It's true, though. It's a convenient tool. "What do you mean you don't want to cede control to us? Don't you want to fight antisemitism?!"
What is SJP? What student did they attack based on ethnicity? Can you send any links?
I couldn't find that part.
Kates, the head of Samidoun, and leaders of other hard-line pro-Hamas groups, say they don’t randomly attack Jewish people at demonstrations. Rather, they said, protests turn violent due to clashes with the police and run-ins with Jewish counterprotesters who carry Israeli flags and become targets.
“If you were to carry other flags of countries and nations that have committed genocide, one might expect them to be taken away,” Kates told NBC News. “That’s really a very low-level of confrontation for actively going out and supporting the genocide of the Palestinian people.”
That's a pretty straight up claim admission of violence during demonstrations by a student group. This group that was part of the "student's" demonstrations in the universities was later on designated by both USA and Canada as affiliated with the PFLP terror group [1][2]
[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/public-safety-canada/news/2024/10/g...
[2] https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy2646
Can you link me to evidence that a leftist group attacked a student because of their ethnicity?
Surely the two students attacked at the start of the article due to wearing yarmulkes in public by a man wearing a keffiyeh is not related to subscribing to a specific ideology
I am questioning the notion that leftist groups on universities are doing antimuslim or antijewish activities.
The article you linked writes this about the perpetrator of the attack you're referencing here: "The man, whom police later identified as Jarrett Buba, a 52-year-old white man from Pittsburgh"
That doesn't really sound like a leftist student protestor to me. I was told that leftist student protestors are attacking people based solely on their ethnicity, so I'd like some evidence of this.
>What organised group of leftists has attacked a group of people based on their ethnicity? Do you have a link you could share?
I am not being combative; I am requesting evidence of a claim that was made at me.
Can you quote the part that talks about this to me?
You haven't shown any evidence to support your notion that "both sides the same" in regards to left/liberals banding together to promote their hateful ways.
There is, however, widespread and constant organization on the right to enact hateful/racist/antisemitic rhetoric. One can just go to foxnews for that.
Your argument is weird and I think the majority of people wouldn't buy it.
What actually matters is that some of the same groups that organized these protests celebrated the massacres in october right afterwards (google SJP october 7). When a student organization supports a massacre that kills a thousand civilians with the added atrocities or further calls for genocide of that group (but only in Israel!), obviously members of that ethnicity will feel threatened
Is that worth restricting free speech for? that's a different question, but the protests could have been done in a less restrictive way for other students and when you compare it to some of the more extreme cases of Title IX investigations, and university administrators saying that calls for genocide of jews is not violations of Harvard policies, you have to ask yourself is free speech really the issue
I asked for evidence. It has devolved into the message you just wrote, which still does not supply evidence that "Organized groups of Lefists and Muslims in the US became increasingly violent and started to attack a group of people based on their ethnicity."
This is disappointing.
In any case, another example, A US court ruled an organized attack by a leftist group on Jews by physically blocking them from entering the campus if they refused to declare they agree with the "leftist" group
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/judge-rules-jewish-stud...
I believe there's ample evidence that campus life in many american universities was hostile to many jews, and it is enough to watch Claudine Gay congressional hearing to understand they were reluctant to do anything about it
So, just to be clear, it was because they were pro-Israel, and not because they were Jewish.
If it was because they were Jewish, Jewish students that oppose Israeli occupation wouldn’t be allowed through.
Conflating the Jewish identity with support for Israel is a subtle ideological trick, one that Jewish antizionists consider to be antisemitic.
https://www.courthousenews.com/jewish-students-harassed-duri...
I don’t want to be mean or anything but you aren’t succeeding in convincing me that leftist groups are plotting to attack Jews.
That's the question that the Trump people never seem to acknowledge that the rest of America is asking itself?
What's the difference between muslims bombing whatever and MAGAs shooting up or torching a black church? The rest of us are finding it hard to see the distinction.
In fact, recent events have served to crystalize the dangers posed to the republic by ill considered MAGA policies. And to concentrate minds on the problem of how to extricate ourselves from the crises they have gotten us into in as efficient a manner as possible.
If efficiency is even possible at this point? Maybe "in as minimally painful a manner as possible" is a better way to say it?
The messaging is very similar too, conflating pro-diversity with anti-whiteness, or anti-asian when needed, and now redefining being pro-Palestine as anti-Semitic or pro-Hamas. It's dumb, lacks nuance, but effective when the Fifth estate is pliant, co-opted or otherwise ineffective.
By MAGA, yes. Asians themselves haven't forgotten about it nor will they forgive anytime soon.
And I'm saying this as an Asian father whose kid is going to a US college this year.
Harvard was one of the universities "screw[ing] over poor, hard-working Asian students", so I'm not sure the criticism holds, especially when the government's letter is asking for merit based admissions reform.
Are there other universities that weren't discriminating against Asians that the government has or has moved to defund?
> Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, 600 U.S. 181 (2023), is a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court ruling that race-based affirmative action programs in most college admissions violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
What came out of the documents in that court case was used as research by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and was published[2], so we can see very well how they were screwing over poor, hard-working Asian students.
> Data on admissions—particularly at elite universities—is tightly guarded, making it challenging to identify both the students who benefit from racial preferences and the importance of race in admissions decisions… The data made public in the SFFA v. Harvard and SFFA v. UNC lawsuits are important because they make it possible to look behind the admissions veil to see how racial preferences operate.
It wasn't just Harvard, the University of North Carolina was included. The poor part is handled right there in the abstract:
> Both universities provide larger racial preferences to URMs [under-represented minorities] from higher socioeconomic backgrounds.
Echoed later on:
> Those who benefit the most from racial preferences (at least in terms of advantages in admissions) are those who come from higher socioeconomic status homes.
Asians weren't and probably still aren't benefitting from this, as:
> Looking first at the applicant columns, African Americans are most likely to be labeled disadvantaged followed by Hispanics, Asian Americans, and whites.
So not only do these "diversity" policies hurt Asians, they don't even help black Americans from lower socioeconomic classes, which seems to me to make all of it racist, including against black Americans - the ones most purported to be helped by this - and even against disadvantaged whites, who lose a whopping 25% of their chance to be admitted:
> a white, male, disadvantaged applicant with a 5% chance of admissions would only see his admissions probability rise to 32.1% if he were instead treated as an African American applicant
But the easiest misdeed to see is that done against Asians, hence the lawsuit.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v...
[2] http://www.nber.org/papers/w29964
“Bruh”
More like they found some useful idiots
It's good that Harvard is fighting this. The more people accede, the more they will accelerate down a path where there is no coming back from.
I was just thinking this morning that we very much needed the USA's help fighting Nazi Germany, but who will we turn to when we're fighting fascists coming from the East _and_ West? (Russia and the USA)
Edit to explain my point, because I'm getting downvoted (which I don't care about, but I _do_ care if people don't understand my point): fascism was a specific ideology/movement in the 20th century that, other than being right-wing and authoritarian, doesn't bear much resemblance to right-wing authoritarianism today: they have different goals, different motives, promote different policies, etc.
It seems people just use "fascism" as a synonym for "destructive right-wing populism" or even just "bad". And I agree that things like the MAGA movement, or AfD in Germany, ARE bad, and one could even argue that they are just as bad as historical fascism.
But I don't think we should use "fascism" in this way, because it gives ammo to your opponents: the supporters of these right-wing movements can point out that indeed, they are not the same as historical fascism and make you look silly.
Fascism (/ˈfæʃɪzəm/ FASH-iz-əm) is a far-right [checks box], authoritarian [ignoring courts decisions, sending people to prisons without any due process; check], and ultranationalist [MAGA, american exceptionalism, etc; check] political ideology and movement, characterized by a dictatorial leader [do I really need to explain; check], centralized autocracy [feckless GOP congress, EOs left and right; check], militarism, forcible suppression of opposition [J6, anyone? also see Maine and TFA and the law firms being blacklisted and more; check], belief in a natural social hierarchy [pro-life, shrouded in "traditional family values", anti-gay, anti-trans, etc; check], subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation or race [tariffs, massive deportations without due process, etc; check], and strong regimentation of society and the economy [bathroom bills, tariff policies with exceptions for those who bribe him with million dollar dinner purchases, etc; check].
Tell me how this doesn't fit?
If you want something more modern, someone made a tracker: https://www.realtimefascism.com/
The tracker uses "the 14 characteristics of fascism identified by Dr. Lawrence Britt" (which is slightly different): https://osbcontent.s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/PC-00466.pdf
I mean.. Mussolini's Italy or 30s Austria weren't exactly Nazi Germany. So while there still might be some way to go the comparison is not that extreme.
Equating Trump with Hitler is of course a stretch. Mussolini however? Well..
Having said that, the reason I chose to use it here was because I felt it was time, i.e. it has finally become earned. I could defend the usage with anyone who brought that up (and someone's done a thorough job in one of the replies).
Like a heart attack can be good for your health,perhaps this USA withdrawal will be good for Europe. (If Europe is what you mean)
Eventually you run out of the low hanging fruit that can be messed with by executive fiat, and then you have to find enemies to blame.
issuing correction on a previous post of mine, regarding the terror group ISIL. you do not, under any circumstances, 'gotta hand it to them.'
This is a myth. Wages of Destruction [1] details the Nazis’ autarkic economic incompetence.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wages_of_Destruction
Which, again, is a parallel to Trump. If the peoll,e he deports to El Salavdor start to have their assets taken by the state/their neighbours/the people that dobbed them in, good luck.
That's a little alarmist. It's not going to happen.
Things are close to going off the rails and people are understandably troubled with the direction in which the US government is headed. I am as well. But we all need to start turning down the temperature a bit.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/04/trump-t...
https://www.foxnews.com/media/trump-going-run-third-term-ste...
Legal residents are being kidnapped and disappeared into foreign gulags but let’s turn down the temperature, right?
The real question is, who is left to stop it? The man is saying he's not joking about it. It's in line with his previous actions. They have actively refused to comply with court orders. They actively tried to reject the results of an election.
Why is it alarmist to say they may do the thing they want to do, and can do?
The same people that came up with Project 2025 are the very people that would come up with plans for giving a third term. Those plans might seem ridiculous to some, but so did the alternate electors and the other things Trump has already tried before. The fact that no negative outcome came from any of those previous attempts just emboldens even further attempts.
Serious question, when someone tells you what they want, why don't want you believe them?
It's openly being discussed and you think it's alarmist? No, we need to turn the temperature up and start taking people at their word.
For context, this is exactly what was said of _literally everything_ that has happened in Trump's current term.
Is it alarmist, or is it just alarming? And, if it is alarming, shouldn't we be taking it seriously, instead of hand-waving it away?
I used to tell people to look at Russia if they wanted to see the Nazi script play out, and that this could never happen in the USA. Now I'm reminded of others that weren't taken seriously early enough.
I don't like him either, but that doesn't mean I will say unfair things about him.
Furthermore, my statement was very clearly presented as a massive stretch in the first place; noting that it might slightly increase the chance that he'll be unable to make an attempt at a third term (even if by 0.01%). Sometimes squinting hard enough that the resulting bokeh resemble a silver lining is all you can do to muster hope.
Once Americans pardoned an attempt by the sitting president to overthrow US democracy the game's over.
America desperately needs a huge revision to the powers conceded to individuals and should instead mature to a slower, maybe less effective at times, but stronger democracy that nurtures parliamentary debate and discourse.
By this logic it was “over already” at the end of the Civil War. Suspending habeus corpus, ignoring the courts and then meeting with public indifference will be the point of no return. Trump’s third term would just be the canary passing out.
That may be true. The North won the war, but let the ideology that caused it fester.
Like any ideology, you can't actually destroy it with force any other way than burning books and, eventually, men.
And whether or not that would have been wise: the war was extremely costly for the North and there was a non-zero chance that if they started dropping every third Southerner from the gallows the federal government would lose legitimacy in the eyes of the survivors on both sides of the Mason-Dixon and that'd be it.
Responsibility for Merrick Garland's failure to adequately pursue Trump lies at Joe Biden's feet and will likely be the thing he is remembered for most in the history books* despite the fact that he had some decent domestic policy (and some horrific foreign policy).
* (assuming we work our way out of the current mess, if we don't he will be remembered for far worse things given that he's Trump's reflexive whipping boy despite the fact that it makes Trump look weak to keep droning on about Biden)
Now do what it gets them.
edit: that being said, I agree what's happening to harvard is in bad faith and has nothing to do with making the government more efficient, so my argument isn't good
The Trump administration is not, has not, and will not be arguing in good faith. Stop pretending we're working collaboratively towards a shared future - they're either stealing your television or stealing your neighbor's television, and attempts to interrogate the merits of their television relocation policy aren't shedding any actual light to the situation.
I didn't say fund harvard xor fund local schools, I said it's crazy how much money harvard gets. The comment I'm replying to is who implies I must support harvard funding xor I must support trump, "the people who want to hurt harvard", I don't think that's true. I'm allowed to think federal funds for academia are too high and also think Trump is bad for the country
A place that has all the facilities, faculty and pedigree to pull some of the best researchers from all over the world. It's in fact crazy that Harvard, or any R1 university, wouldn't get a large amount of research dollars from the federal government.
And let's be honest. The force 'driving people away from the democrats' is the propaganda network known as Fox News.
Arguing that Harvard gets too much while ignoring 99% of the budget is not a reasonable stance.
let me cred fall. idgaDANG
There isn't just some big slush fund labeled "dumb science ideas" that everybody grabs from.
Second, I agree that local schools (I guess you mean K-12?) should get more money. DOGE is busy cutting that also.
Of course. It's clear you didn't read the letter because Harvard addresses this specifically. The Trump admin is literally refusing to have a conversation. This is 100% politically motivated and it's obvious to anyone who is not in the Trump cult. This is particularly disgusting because their doing it under the guise of 'antisemitism', while Trump keeps friends with known white supremacists.
I'm from small town America, I know that the federal government doesn't care about my hometown, so when I hear things like Harvard gets billions while already having tens of billions in endowment, it's hard for me to not think that's crazy and why can't that money go to average americans, meanwhile here I am typing words into a screen connected to the internet so I fully acknowledge I've benefited from the institution
>it's hard for me to not think that's crazy and why can't that money go to average americans
Because Americans in small towns overwhelmingly vote for people who lower taxes for rich people and promise not reduce the scope of government. Instead of blaming Harvard, why don't you ask your neighbors why they like to vote for people who refuse to help them?
Are there world-class research facilities in your small town? Why would it be hard for you to see it makes sense for billions to be spent on research at world-class facilities with world-class scientists?
FWIW, chances are whatever local state university nearby also receives quite a bit from federal grants as well. But it probably scales based on the research facilities and staff actually there. Do you think it would be better management of federal resources to instead spend the same amount at facilities that don't do nearly as impactful or nearly as much research?
These are grants for specific research. Researchers put together proposals to study things, the federal government decides that's something worth looking into, and funding gets cut (simplified). Harvard has a lot of people doing pretty fancy research, so it makes sense they'd have a lot of grant proposals requiring fancy and expensive things. Complain to your state legislature for not focusing on making your local university a research university if you feel your area should be getting more of these grants. But let me guess, you probably voted for people who argued for lower taxes. Gee, I wonder what they found to cut...
And FWIW the federal government spends a bunch on a lot of small-town America. FEMA grants for emergency preparedness comes to mind. A higher percentage of populations of small-town America live off federal aid programs. Small-town America also sees more of its school funding from federal sources and grants.
The democrats have been trying to pass universal healthcare and free higher education it feels like forever. UBI has even come up a few times. Nothing that Trump is doing is for anyone but himself and his rich friends.
https://didtrumpgolftoday.com/
"Est. cost to taxpayers for golf since returning to office: $32,200,000"
Obviously I'd rather that 10 cents go to something productive, but on the national stage trump golfing feels like just a distraction from much more important topics
The outright dismissal of the letter suggests that at least maybe non academic activists are calling the shots, and if that is true Harvard is destined to wither and die.
1) Granting that giving more power to tenured professors would be a good thing, in what way is it legal, wise, or good for the executive branch to achieve this in the absence of any law by strong arming individual private institutions that it has decided to target on ad hoc basis?
2) You are reading selectively, it says "fostering clear lines of authority and accountability; empowering tenured professors and senior leadership, and, from among the tenured professoriate and senior leadership, exclusively those most devoted to the scholarly mission of the University and committed to the changes indicated in this letter" [emphasis mine]. So in other words, it is a requirement that the university give power to those ideologically-aligned with the Trump administration. This is a very clear and alarming violation of the first amendment.
In toto, the letter is an attempt to impose ideological reform in a private institution, and is part of a wider attempt by the current administration to browbeat or subvert every institution that might act to curtail (or even speak out against) its actions.
While I kinda agree that can also be taken to mean "those ideologically-aligned with the Trump administration", it still means those calling the shots are the non academic activists not aligned with an ideology of promoting academic merit....
Maybe.
That sentence (from the letter) makes no sense. An activist isn't someone with power to do something. If they had that power, they wouldn't be advocating it, they would do it.
What that insisting the University do is shut down people talking and protesting with viewpoints they disagree with. They list those viewpoints in their letter: "..., Students for Justice in Palestine, and the National Lawyers Guild". The pro Israeli protests that happened aren't mentioned. If they get away with this, I'm sure a lot more viewpoints will follow.
This isn't about powers. It's about controlling what people can and can not say on a University campus.
Without doubt in this context "activist" refers to those pushing the LGBTQ, race and gender baiting agenda with no regard for education of actual real world value.
Nope. They literally spell out the activity they want banned in their letter. Have you read it? LGBTQ and gender aren't mentioned.
yes they are
"discontinuation of DEI"
aka not giving someone a position of power purely because they are e.g. a hispanic homosexual and a quota needs filling.
and kicking out the activists that push that policy over academic credentials.
Kicking out activists is another thing they are asking for, in a different section. They list the sorts of activists they want kicked out. Right now it's a short list that boils down to protesting what Israel is doing in Gaza. DEI is not mentioned anywhere in the section, nor are any of the groups DEI typically encompasses. I have no doubt that if Harvard did acquiesce the list will be expanded to everything the administration disagrees with - for example protesting about abolishing DEI. But that's for the future.
It's clear from the letter of demand "activists" and DEI are separate issues they want dealt with in different ways. One is a policy they want dropped, the other is a group they want shut down. What is not so clear is why you are so keen to conflate the two issues. Are you keen to get "hispanic homosexuals", and any other sub-group you don't like banned from campuses?
Separate issues. Mostly the same people.
All of whom have exactly zero acedemic credibility.
Certainly non of whom should be funded by tax collected from a single mother living in a trailer park.
Just for clarity, do I have this right: You think people who protest Israel’s handing of Gaza are mostly people favoured by DEI, you think "hispanic homosexuals" are favoured by DEI at Harvard, and you think someone who is a "hispanic homosexual" and others that fall under DEI invariably have zero academic credibility?
And being that dumb to believe in either means you have zero acedemic credibility.
Again for clarity: blocking those students have been ruled illegal: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/aug/14/ucla... so no invention from the Whitehouse was needed. Unlike the Whitehouse, the university involved feels compelled to follow the law, so that's the end of the matter. It also wasn't necessary at Harvard as it didn't happen at Harvard, so that can't be the reason it was included in their letter of demand.
So Harvards response is to vigorously defend their right to hire racist criminals. They of course have that right.
But the US Government is also well within their rights to no longer fund them anymore in that situation. Which I'm pretty sure will be the only hard outcome from Harvards response.
They absolutely have the right to not cooperate, the US govt has no obligation to fund racist crayon munching idiots.
The lion’s share of it appears to be NIH programs for area hospitals - all of which are associated with Harvard.
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/4/4/funding-review-h...
We all benefit from that research.
Perhaps some form of self-flagelation or bloodletting?
It feels like a really silly way to deflect from the concept that maybe average UK citizens do benefit in some way from their colonial past.
That’s the thing, I didn’t say their opinion isn’t worth listening to or consideration in general. Acknowledging bias isn’t the same as discarding opinion.
It's not though. It's either being obtuse or outright silly. How exactly does "decolonisation" figure in any of the things they said?
> average UK citizens do benefit in some way from their colonial past.
Even if they do, which is debatable (i.e. it's not clear they benefit more from it than people living in other European countries which didn't have extensive colonial empires) what does this have to with nonsensical subjects being taught in universities?
Since we’re bringing it back onto topic, has any university ever ran a “decolonised maths” program? What would that look like?
Seems relatively straightforward to me...
"" Fibonacci's sequence (i.e. 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, ...) was discovered in Africa long before the Italian wrote it down, in the form of Ghanaian textile cloth and Egyptian temple design. (1) "" or: "" It is long believed calculus was discovered by Leibniz and Newton, however there is evidence of Indians having discovered the subject 300 years earlier in the Kerala School. (2) ""
Fun trivia I guess. Also inconsequential if Fibonacci, Leibniz, Newton made their discoveries independently since further developments were based on their work.
It's like saying that Ancient Greeks and not Newcomen or Watt "invented" the steam engine... Again, interesting piece of historical trivia but hardly has much to do with physics as a science.
You might not realize it, but thousands of these tiny things over a lifetime creates a subconscious bias. And then that manifests in real ways. Like, for example, disregarding or discrediting an area of study you know nothing about based purely on the type of people who created the study.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00240-9
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/education/article/black-lives-ma...
https://www.maths.ox.ac.uk/node/70845
Algebra could be renamed Chestering, to credit the Englishman who did the real work of translating Al-Khwarizmi's text from Arabic into Latin.
Surely the arabs have been colonizing mathematics by translating the indigenous greek works
That argument is rather weird as mathematics was never about culture, but rather about logical truth
No one is out to cancel theorems or whatever other bullshit. Also those concerns over the freedom of science are rich coming from the party that's actually defunding labs, arresting researchers on ideological grounds and burning books.
That philosophical school sees truth as being a fantasy and subservient to power.
Therefore it is common for an adherent of post-colonialism to believe a statement is true if it was made by a person arbitrarily considered oppressed, while the same logic might be false if made by an 'oppressor'.
As this approach makes all science to be political effort before a discovery effort, it was highly successful in the highly political environment of the academics, as it also has highly favorable economical results for its followers. (New departments, ability to religiously outcast the old, new postions)
The problem as it reaches the hard sciences, for example the religious sacrifice each ML paper needs to make to the gods of ethics, is that it assaults the very notion of truth by its very essence. It is easy to see why this is highly problematic for mathematics
You want real politicization of science? Check out the GOP's pomicies. They're the one cutting funding to organization that won't bow to their ideological lines. They're the ones barring access to foreign scientists for having criticized the dear leader online. They're the ones appointing political commissars to overview what's fine or not to work on in labs.
75% of scientists that ever published in Nature are now considering leaving the US [1] from fear of the administration. Is that not a concern to you?
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00938-y
I currently worry more about the left though, as it is much more powerful in the academics, and actually creates political "science" today
Talk to any academic, ask them wether they fear more from blue haired teens or the looming fascist threat that is Trump and his cabinet. You may be surprised by the answer.
The context was:
Do you have _ any _ meaningful critique of the contents of, say, maths historian George Joseph’s book The Crest of the Peacock: Non-European Roots of Mathematics (1991) ?This appears to be old established material that I read in the ANU library back in the early 1980s.
You and the other poster responded with anger, I do not agree I am the one who is not meaningfully contributing
I don't mean to be rude, but do you think it's possible that your understanding of the situation is a bit out of date?
Which part of my critique of post-colonialism do you think had become obsolete?
This part. I'm not sure if it's because it's out of date or just plain wrong, though.
But sorry, it's hard to discuss when you quote a single sentence from the few paragraphs i've written and say it's wrong, with nothing added. When adding to it your replies in previous discussions we had such as this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43705166
I feel you are overly emotionally attached to the subject and this is approaching troll/flame territory. It's not that I don't want to discuss with you, but I feel in our engagements a lot of aggression and very little actual passing of information except for short sentences, so let's end it right here
You just sent links to me without acknowledging the conversation we were having at all.
Very, very strange.
Seriously, what's the danger? Be clear. It feels like you peolple are unable to articulate anything more than "thouhtcrime!!".
Also, what do you think of the actual threats Trump made to academics? Is it dangerous too or not?
The canaries in our coal mine are permanent residents. Anything that can legally be done to a permanent resident can basically be done to a "bad" citizen. Trump is trying to run roughshod over permanent residents' habeus corpus rights. Courts are currently pushing back; I expect he will defy them. That, for me, will be the line at which I'll start helping with civil disruption.
https://bsky.app/profile/pbump.com/post/3lmryeyuj6s2v
The rubicon has already been crossed. If you asked some of the framers of the US constitution - beyond all other factors, unelected powers etc - what was the one defining trait of the government structure they wished to avoid; they'd have replied with arbitrary imprisonment and the suspension of due process.
Please don't take my word for it, hear it from the Prosecutor's Prosecutor. The SCOTUS justice, former AG and former USSG who led the American prosecution against the Nazis at Nuremberg, Robert H. Jackson,
There is a reason why citizenship was not a requirement for receiving due process under the law. Citizenships are bestowed by the government. They can be taken away by the government. The framers held certain rights to be unalienable from human beings - something that no government can take away, and that was the right to not be unjustly detained for your beliefs, your behavior, your dress, your religion or composure.Suspending due process for anyone is fundamentally un-American. But we have crossed that threshold. What comes next is fairly inevitable - if the process isn't stopped now.
Yet, US was systematically disenfranchising people for centuries
Rights are just the concessions that the less powerful have extracted from the powerful by virtue and utilization of power. This perspective has the double benefit not relying on the imaginary and making it clear that if you don't fight for your rights you will not get to keep them. Rights may be God given, but God isn't going to come down and rescue you from a concentration camp if you get put there by an autocrat who doesn't like your "free speech."
All that matters is whether we will personally tolerate abuses against human beings and what we are willing to do to prevent them. If I had my way, talk of rights qua rights would be swept into the dustbin of history with other imaginary stuff like religion in favor of concrete, ideally evidence based, free human discussion about what human beings want from the universe and what we are willing to endure to get it.
The same way you exercise it for 320 million other people. The same way it has been exercised for every person who immigrated to American soil. Including your ancestors.
Let's be clear about what you're actually saying and you're advocating for, you are advocating for the suspension of due process and fundamental rights to an entire class of human beings you see as the other.
If history has taught us anything, the definition of who and what is other changes over time. One day, you too shall be the other. And that day you will beg for the due process and fundamental rights you wish to deprive these people.
When the Benjamin Franklin said, "... if you can keep it." This type of thought process is precisely what he meant.
totally a ton of illegal immigrants running across the trading room floor yelling put orders and putting the real, American stock brokers out of jobs they deserve!
Wtf you talking about bro? Cmon buddy.
You saturate the labor market with workers, it depresses wages, plain and simple. It's in the interests of shareholders to saturate the labor market to increase profits.
The fact that you are okay with the defacto slavery/trafficking because "its always happened" says a lot, and why I generally dismiss these arguments, because at the end of the day, you just want to pay less for things, while you live in the nice part of town.
And the current administration is flagrantly violating and ignoring the laws and the courts of our country. What is the point of laws if they're not followed? What is the point of your argument saying we have laws in place if laws no longer matter?
Immigration and border security were maybe the #1 policy front for Trump in 2016 -- am I missing something here?
Because it's a relatively new phenomenon that the ruling administration enables and advocates for the import of 10 million illegal immigrant laborers.
An economically viable solution to this problem would be simply force companies to pay all laborers, foreign or domestic, legal or illegal, a living wage, eliminating the benefits of bringing in illegal labor and maintaining a humane society. Furthermore, we should probably only trade with countries which have equal labor protections as our own, so as to ensure that jobs aren't offshored to save money, at least at the expense of human rights.
I'm sorry, I just can't buy that "treat a bunch of people like animals" is the humanist, labor friendly, perspective.
Do you think that the law has a cut-out to allow for paying illegal immigrants less than minimum wage? This is like solving the murder rate by making murder illegal -- it's already illegal to employ these people and pay them below minimum wage.
Like these people are victims of a system which is exploiting them. Treating them even more like shit isn't going to make the world a better place. Target the exploiters.
So when would you consider the US crossed this threshold? Guantanamo Bay? The internment of ethnic Japanese in WW2? The Trail of Tears? Or is there something about the excesses of this particular administration that makes this an unprecedented and irreversible step, if I understand your metaphor correctly?
The US came close to losing its democracy status with FDR, which is why after he died, the 22nd Amendment was quickly created - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-second_Amendment_to_the...
The constitution was more of an aspirational ideal than a binding document back then since there were very limited ways too enforce it (e.g. the only way to repeal the Alien and Sedition Acts was by electing a new president/congress). The First Amendment was also interpreted and viewed extremely different that it is now before the 1900s...
Unless, of course, the government considers you to be 2/3 of a person
I mean I don't know that it's their policy but it sure looks that way.
And, more recently, Bukele and Trump insisted that they would not return a "terrorist" to the United States: https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3lmrwrrkbnf2e
It's clear that the administration does not consider collateral damage a bug, but a feature; it confirms that as long as they insist that they will not do anything, then nothing will be done.
This phrasing buys into the Trump admin's narrative.
They did not determine that it was impossible to get him back. They have chosen to not pursue it. They refuse to define the agreement between the US and El Salvador sufficiently for anyone to know what is or is not possible through that path. They also seem to refuse to use political or financial influence to go beyond whatever that agreement may define.
If a class of people don't have habeas corpus, no one does.
Totalitarian? not yet, but....
How? Which major law firm is standing up like Harvard is?
> I meant what other universities other than Columbia?
Trump has only really gone after Columbia and Harvard. (Institution is a broader word than university.)
WilerHale and Jenner & BLock are two: https://www.npr.org/2025/03/28/g-s1-56890/law-firms-sue-trum...
Perkins Coie, Covington & Burling LLP, and Elias Law Group are fighting Trump's executive order. Those are 3 of the biggest law firms in the US. As far as I know only two major firms have made deals with Trump while many are sitting quiet but not everyone is cowering.
There's a lot going on and it's really hard to keep abreast of it all
https://www.reuters.com/legal/trump-says-law-firms-agree-pro...
That doesn't sound authoritarian to you? Can you imagine if Obama had demanded that any university do an ideological purge of its conservative staff and students?
You're supposed to say that it will help the children too.
Obama didn't need to demand it, the Universities went ahead and did it on their own.
https://unsafescience.substack.com/p/the-last-four-years-wer...
In this intra-elite competition, the previous winners might deserve to lose. The current regime and its allies absolutely cannot be allowed to be winners.
I am noticing a pattern; whenever I ask clarifying questions on hacker news threads regarding politically charged topics, most people assume least-respectful interpretation of my questions and heavily downvote them. As someone who is curious and genuinely trying to understand what's going on (I am here instead of other social media because I am looking for nuance, analysis, details, etc), it's really frustrating and disappointing when I am attacked for asking questions.
So thank you, again, for engaging in my question constructively.
I have very little experience engaging in political discourse on the internet. So I asked the question like I would to a friend.
I'm realizing now that the best way for me to engage is simply to take these threads and paste them into an LLM and have it explain the nuance and context to me. I just wish there was a forum for conversing about this stuff with real people with diverse viewpoints and who kept to most respectful interpretations.
You could have asked the question while highlighting points in the governments letter that you thought were valid policy goals that you wanted more discussion about. You could have asked if they'd read the government letter and pointed out that the government telling the university that it both had to consider who it hired with regard to political and ethnic and to make personnel changes to demonstrate they didn't consider political and ethnic considerations going forward was particularly ridiculous.
You may still get downvoted for emotional(which you shouldn't) or other reasons but it would be less likely to be the case as it showed you made some effort (which can indicate good faith) and more importantly you're comment might inform someone reading the comments more about the topic as well.
I have learned my lesson and I will try and be more thoughtful in my questioning moving forward.
Again, thank you, if you (and a couple others) hadn't responded by explaining my mistake I would have gone on assuming that I was being downvoted for the wrong reasons.
They burned their credibility among those with whom they never needed it in the first place. Harvard as a taxpayer-funded institution is oxymoronic. Return it to an elite institution that the President can commend in private and mock at a rally in rural Kentucky or whatnot.
I think universities should probably be concerned with their credibility among democratically elected political representatives if they are going to be accepting public funds. If the university wants to forgo federal grants, then yes, they don't require any credibility with anyone but academia and their donors, and more power to them.
Agree. I don’t think they should accept federal funds to the extent that they do. Maybe it’s time for elite institutions to get past the 70s camp era and start behaving (and wielding the power of) being elite.
Why? The funding chased their reputations during the world wars. There are plenty of ways of collaborating on expensive research facilities with the federal government while keeping a boundary between church and state within the elite halls.
Sorry... you think that Trump is doing this because of suppression of dissent about amyloid plaques?
the institutions have already failed their intended purpose, as shown by the research fraud. Propping them up with tax dollars because of nostalgia over the name brand is pointless
Not in any meaningful way. And not in a way that would have mattered.
The elite universities got into this hole by trying to court pedestrian approval. Trump is at war with the professional managerial class, not the elites. Harvard’s brand remains unimpeached among the latter. Return to serving that group and ignore the broader population.
Why do you say this? At practically every point in history where a government or dictator goes too far, we've come back from it.
I assume parent is talking about the functional end of this iteration of the United States as a political entity.
We as a species have come back from it, yes. But generally after millions of victims are killed, and what is left over is very different than what existed prior.
Heck, just in the last few years we've seen several countries regress by a decade or more because of military coups or similar.
Really, if you look at many countries that haven't been a world power, this has happened once or twice in recent memory.
Do you have a better example? Or is that it?
Not everyone.
Can you link to a specific line of testimony that supports this allegation? "war crimes" isn't even mentioned in the article. Far too often claims like this devolve into a game of strawman/motte-and-bailey, where each side tries to paint their position as maximally charitable, and accuse the other side of rejecting the maximally charitable position.
When grants are revoked for political reasons, it affects individuals who happen to be affiliated with the university more than the university itself. And it particularly affects people doing STEM research, because humanities and social sciences receive much less external funding. If the decline in public funding is permanent, it makes humanities and social sciences relatively stronger within the university. They are more viable without public subsidies than the more expensive STEM fields.
In other words, the university may have some property rights to your work if you deal too closely with for-profit businesses or national security interests. But if you are just doing normal research with normal grants, you'll probably never see those exceptions in your career.
You couldn't replace that with a private company "buying" research and expect the same societal benefits.
If all 16% is canceled, then they'd need to draw an additional $1 billion per year from endowment at current budget levels.
That would put them above 7% draw so potentially unsustainable for perpetuity, historically they've averaged 11% returns though, so if past performance is a predictor of future, they can cover 100% of Federal gap and still grow the endowment annually with no new donations.
>Universities’ endowments are not as much help as their billion-dollar valuations would suggest. For a start, much of the money is reserved for a particular purpose, funding a specific professorship or research centre, say. Legal covenants often prevent it from being diverted for other purposes. In any case, the income from an endowment is typically used to fund a big share of a university’s operating costs. Eat into the principal and you eat into that revenue stream.
>What is more, eating into the principal is difficult. Many endowments, in search of higher income, have invested heavily in illiquid assets, such as private equity, property and venture capital. That is a reasonable strategy for institutions that plan to be around for centuries, but makes it far harder to sell assets to cover a sudden budgetary shortfall. And with markets in turmoil, prices of liquid assets such as stocks and government bonds have gyrated in recent days. Endowments that “decapitalise” now would risk crystallising big losses.
More worrying is the fact that the federal government can inflict even more harm aside from cutting off federal funding:
>the Trump administration has many other ways to inflict financial pain on universities apart from withholding research funding. It could make it harder for students to tap the government’s financial-aid programmes. It could issue fewer visas to foreign students, who tend to pay full tuition. With Congress’s help, it could amend tax laws in ways that would hurt universities.
https://archive.is/siUqm
You can not possibly convince me that Harvard’s endowment doesn’t trivially have one year of liquidity in it.
I’m sure it’s not structured to handle a 7% annual draw down for the next 30 years. But it’s got plenty of time to restructure if needed.
Spending a billion of it is not just spending a billion. It's spending the many billions it was meant to provide, in interest, over the next decades.
It's extraordinarily expensive to spend it directly, as opposed to spending the income it generates.
You can certainly do it, in a true emergency. But you certainly don't want to make a habit of it.
This seems to qualify for many people though. Less pain than complying in many minds I am sure.
I've seen arguments of this general shape and form many times about this, and yes, this is true. In general, Harvard should not spend down it's endowment when it has other sources of revenue.
I think the issue here is that this _is_ an emergency. Harvard should consider that Federal money gone for the near future and spend and plan to spend as if they will not have it. There is no point in them continuing to exist as an institution if they accede to these absurd demands.
Harvard's endowment returned 9.6% last year, growing the total by $2.5 billion. In the previous year, the endowment returned 2.9%, though the total endowment decreased as the gain was offset by contributions to operating expenses. [0]
In other words, Harvard already operates somewhat from their endowment, and can realize net endowment gains in spite of that.
[0] https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2024/10/financial-report-fis...
The argument isn't that Harvard should never draw from its endowment, like it's saving for retirement or something. The argument is that they shouldn't raid endowments by doing additional withdraws to fund the current shortfall.
The argument I was replying to was actually of exactly this form.
That argument also implied that any endowment spending to cover shortfalls would necessarily be of the principal, but that is also incorrect.
In fact, the White House just responded with a $2.2B funding freeze—an amount that would have been covered by last year's endowment return.
THATS WHAT WHAT THE FIFTY BILLION IS
It’s a war chest that has been carefully cultivated over decades. The fifty billion is the result of a hundred years of investment and management.
If it can’t be spent now then when the fuck exactly can it be spent? In 200 years you’d still be saying “this is the seed corn for tomorrow!!”
I’m not saying burn it down to zero. But the whole fucking point of an endowment is to provide stability during trying times. If you can’t use the interest that has been accumulated now then when the fuck can you??
Their principal is not intended to be spent, ever. The point of an endowment is not to "provide stability during trying times".
The point is to spend the interest that it generates, in normal times, in perpetuity. Which Harvard already does and has always done. Interest from their endowment is already a large part of their revenue. That's what the endowment is for.
Yes, but these are not normal times.
The more it grows, the less risk there is in the future. But if you start spending it more than the levels of its average returns, that's high risk. And the point is it's supposed to last forever.
You also need to grow it simply to account for inflation and other rising costs.
They’d probably want to reduce spending and hit up donors if they felt they need to power through a four year stretch.
Paraphrasing J. P. Morgan, the man, in the midst of the Panic of 1907 reassuring a banker concerned about dipping into reserves to pay out depositors: "what are reserves for if not times like these."
Eat the seed corn. Fight. Then raise unencumbered donations from the billionaires whose balls haven't fallen off. If Harvard plays this correctly, they could become one of the flag bearers of the legal and financial resistance to Trump.
How much is “enough” money to hoard in an endowment though? We hear lots of arguments about how the concept of a billionaire is itself obscene, why can’t we apply to same logic to institutions? E.g. much like people say “billionaires shouldn’t exist”, perhaps endowments over some similarly arbitrary value shouldn’t exist either.
Harvard doesn't make a profit. It educates students and does research. It sounds like you're arguing Harvard should be broken up or something? But based on what? Is it abusing its power or something?
As for the minority where that is not the case, it also means nobody will have standing to sue if the school decides to stop letting someone who died 200 years ago decide exactly how Harvard's money will be spent.
The other oddity of Harvard's endowment is that each school at the university basically has it's own fund--so that for instance, the Business school and the Law school don't have to worry about money the same way that FAS (the main undergraduate school) does.
At this point, you really do have to question whether each university hire was merit based or not, including the fund managers.
If you are going to claim that they were not hired on merit, and that they are bad investment managers, you'll need to provide a lot more evidence on both points, rather than a "just asking questions" post on HN. Otherwise, it's just snark and not in keeping with HN's ethos.
I would assume that a tax on an endowment would be like a capital gains tax, i.e., taxed on the investment growth. Is the growth 'reserved for a particular purpose'?
>Is the growth 'reserved for a particular purpose'?
It's probably safe to assume donors are competent enough that such glaring loopholes don't exist. After all, the concept of endowments being used as long term savings, rather than spent immediately, isn't exactly a new concept. Failing to take this into account would mean any earmarks are void after a few decades.
Harvard (and most institutions and powerful individuals) would be smart to maintain liquid assets and a bank account outside America’s control.
I like the way you think!
Alumni will need to come through for continuing operations if the worst does happen. And I'm certain Harvard has put some thought into that contingency as well.
There really isn't such a thing if you want to do business in America. If you're in the US and doing business with a bank, the courts can order that bank to do things or face isolation from the entire financial system.
US courts shut down a series of Swiss banks that were trying to hide American's assets behind the swiss banking secrecy laws while also doing business on American soil (just having bank employees in the country did it).
Of course it does. The hypothetical we're considering is the administration illegally freezing bank accounts. You don't need something legally impenetrable. Just complicated enough that it slows down the goons while you fight them in court.
There are to varying extents. You want a country that isn't aligned with or dependent on America, but also isn't its adversary. (And which has a good banking system.) That list was classically Turkey, the UAE and Switzerland. Today I'd add India, Qatar, Canada and Brazil and remove Switzerland.
Perhaps in theory, but not in practice as a historical norm. And, certainly not for "standard" non-appointed, bureaucratic roles.
It's important that we don't normalize what we're seeing here, in terms of quality or degree.
Or we didn't. Now we do. Kinda sucks.
The current administration is making all positions political, and in doing so, performing an end run around the legislative branch.
Submitted some historical breadcrumbs here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43686221
He didn't. I don't know why you guys think he did. A lot of those agencies, like the Justice Department, act independently.
It's not like any Republicans were jailed. This is starting to seem less like a legitimate take, and more like a strange fetish for persecution.
For the record, if people like President Trump want to no longer be under the eye of Justice, they should stop doing illegal things. It seems every other American citizen has figured that out. It is shameful our own president has not.
And unlike Trump, Biden faced constant criticism from within his party. He would have faced outrage if he tried to, for example, cancel all federal grants containing the word "conservative" in them.
Meanwhile we're heading towards a future where Trump can deport anyone he doesn't like to an El Salvadorian prison without so much as a trial, regardless of whether they broke any laws. Why doesn't this terrify people on the right?
Oh, those federal jobs he’s been DOGEing for the past weeks in an attempt to demotivate folks out of them?
This administration’s incoherence comes back to bite it in the ass again.
Just a few years ago, Harvard Crimson carried an op-ed complaining about the bloat:
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2022/11/29/anderson-burea...
It seems that the very idea that some employees in academia might be superfluous is very disagreeable for some HNers.
Why? Institutional bloat is a well known problem, it happens in private sector, public sector, churches, military, wherever you can think of. It probably already happened in Ur and Nineveh. Why should academia be somehow immune from this problem?
And if it is not immune, shouldn't it try to do something with it?
There was a massive increase in tuition in the last generation or so. How much of that extra money goes to the core mission of the universities, and how much is spent on "nice to have extras", starting with opulent campuses and ending with "Standing Committees on Visual Culture and Signage"?
Everyone has to trim the fat down a bit from time to time. Even Google and Meta. Why not Harvard.
The faculty of arts and science would be fine. Yes, some cuts, a hiring freeze etc. The med school and public health school would feel a big impact. They employ so many people on "soft money" through grants including many faculty members.
The hospitals are a different story and I am not sure why they are even lumped together.
Proposed College Endowment Tax Hike: What to Know : https://thecollegeinvestor.com/52851/proposed-college-endowm...
Other article: When hacking the government rules is used against you.- as far as I know, double taxation by any given entity (Federal Gov) is unconstitutional
- a given dollar is taxed once as income. A federal wealth tax on the remainder of that dollar would be double taxation.
That does not prohibit the Federal Gov from taxing once, and your residential state from taxing you a second time.
There are other arguments about "direct taxation" I don't fully understand.
I make a W2 salary. I pay federal income taxes on it. I pay FICA taxes on it. My employer pays payroll taxes on it. I might pay state income taxes on it. One event, tons of taxes. I take that quadruple taxed money and buy a dinner with a beer. Sales taxes on the overall sale, additional taxes on the alcohol, additional sales tax riders because I bought it in the touristy night life area. Triple taxes on my quadruple taxes, good lord! Unconstitutional!
Worthless phrase, "double taxation".
> That does not prohibit the Federal Gov from taxing once, and your residential state from taxing you a second time.
Once again, the several different taxes applied to my salary income. Then on that I go buy a gallon of gasoline, uh oh, federal gas taxes on that. Or I buy a plane ticket and that gets Federal Excise Tax (7.5% of the base fare), the Federal Segment Fee (currently $5.20 per segment), the TSA Security Fee ($5.60 per passenger), and more. Oof, "double taxation"! Even at the federal level!
Article I, Section 9, Clause 4:
"No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or Enumeration herein before directed to be taken"
A wealth tax is generally considered to be a direct tax. If you wanted to enact one at the federal level, my understanding is that it would have to be done in proportion to the census. So, given that Mississippi is around 1% of the total US population, Mississippi would have to pay 1% of the wealth tax. Mississippi is the poorest US state, so that would be a very regressive tax.
An income tax is also considered to be a direct tax, that's why it took an amendment to the Constitution to enact one.
The Constitution applies to taxes at the federal level, not state. States could enact a wealth tax the same way they enact property taxes now (depending on their state Constitutions). The problem for them is that wealth is a bit more mobile than property.
And yes there are arguments about what a direct tax really meant in the language at the time the Constitution was written, there are arguments that the income tax should have been legal without an amendment. But that's not how it went down.
I take it you haven't heard of property taxes.
If I own a house or condominium in San Francisco, at a fundamental level I do not own the land or space the residence is sitting on. "Ownership" is basically a lease of the parcel from the city. The house structure is an improvement on leased land; this ties the property tax calculation to the value of the structure. The property tax is the rent on the land/space. I believe this is the constitutional justification for property taxes (no opposition from me).
It's interesting to me that medieval European peasants "renting" the land they farmed had much stronger ownership rights than Americans who "own" land do today.
> I believe this is the constitutional justification for property taxes
It isn't. The constitutional justification for property taxes is that they're assessed by the states, not by the federal government.
The federal government is free to assess property taxes too, except that it must apportion them between the states: https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S9-C4-1/...
> An 1861 federal tax on real property illustrates how the rule of apportionment operates. Congress enacted a direct tax of $20 million. After apportioning the direct tax among the states, territories, and the District of Columbia, the State of New York was liable for the largest portion of the tax [...]
What this meant was that the federal government delegated tax quotas to the states and the states were responsible for collecting them as they saw fit.
https://www.amazon.com/Seeing-like-State-Certain-Condition/d...
(I've read the book; it didn't strike me as related to this topic.)
But since you ask: the peasant's rights to land were exquisitely bespoke. No tax collector could figure out how much one family owed versus another in another county. The rules in one prefecture of one county may have been completely unresolvable with the rules of a county a hundred miles north. Everything was negotiated family to family over generations, with rights in one place having no corollary whatsoever with the rights in another area, making the tax man's duty a fool's errand.
So, I don't your first statement "European peasants "renting" the land they farmed had much stronger ownership rights than Americans who "own" land do today." is really meaningful. Because no generalization can be made about the rights of a European peasant. That problem is the whole reason for the systems of freehold tenure that prevail today: making the territory "seeable" by the state.
Landowners responded to that by adjusting the size of the units in which land rents were due, which is why a major demand of peasant movements was for standardized units.
The fact that rents were absolutely nonnegotiable led to other developments, such as the lord being so indifferent as to exactly who was renting from him that the renter was free to leave his status to whoever he chose in his will.
That's only true in a narrow and a relatively obtuse way. For starters that varied to a huge degree between regions and types of contracts.
e.g. in England freeholds were indeterminate and or more or less worked the way you are saying.
However most peasants didn't have those, before the plague the overwhelming majority of peasants were villeins (i.e. serfs), inheritance was customary and lords were not legally obliged to pass it to the serf's descendants (also there were all kinds of fees, fines and stuff besides the fact that they weren't legally free and there was no legal system to protect your rights).
Leaseholds and copyholds became much more common due to labour shortages after the plague. leaseholds were not inherited and market price based. Copyholds were inherited and rents customary fixes (but again lords could and would impose all kinds of arbitrary fees to get their cut).
Then you had the enclosures starting the 1400s (a lot of the land peasants relied on was common)
It's not particularly hard. Just have enough collateral to not get margin called. And, like the margin interest rate better than the tax hit. Shop around for rates. Notice, you don't have to pay the entire down payment this way.
If you have amassed 6 figures of stock and are buying a house, you're qualified to educate yourself on these topics. It's usually worth reading up anytime you incur that sizable a taxable event.
I am not saying this is a great idea, BTW. Just, it's an idea within many people's reach.
I believe the GP is just cautioning rando HN readers that they should not rush out and make their down payment in the manner described, as opposed to liquidating some of their stock options for "real cash" like the GGP had to do.
They are just explaining a reasonable method that the (above) average HN reader could use to be in the same situation as Bezos of having a 0% tax on their down payment.
In the US, there's a pretty massive exemption (well, deferral) for capital gains tax on the sale of a primary residence, so once you have one home to work with, the down payment is (kind of?) tax-free anyway.
Never give absolute financial advice to anyone who's situation you don't fully understand.
It's not uncommon when people buy deals while traveling or in hot markets.
See also Mr Money Mustache's articles on this topic. He assuredly is not Bezosesque.
Another very rational reason for such a margin loan for a home down payment is if the stock you wanted to sell hadn't been held for a year and therefore its sale would not yet qualify for long-term capital gains rates.
You might choose to pay margin interest for up to a year so that the stock sales become taxed at the much lower long-term capital gains rates instead of like income.
That might make sense for someone in the 24% federal bracket which ends at just under $200K of annual income, depending upon how much longer one needs to hold the position to achieve the more favorable taxation. Certainly far below the yacht-owning bracket.
How do we know whether they lie without a solid definition of net worth?
I'm not defending billionaires and I believe they should be heavily taxed, and huge inheritances should be outlawed, but what's Elon Musk's net worth, for example? He surely doesn't have $369 billion in cash. Can we tax him based on his Tesla shares? What happens if Tesla stock goes down by 99% next year? It's tricky.
They get to tell us what they are worth. Generally speaking, if you want to lie about your net worth you are choosing between tax fraud and insurance fraud. There are some areas that are tricky, like pre-market startups, but we have things like 409A valuations that help with that. Penalties should have no statute of limitations - if you lie about it, you get to look over your shoulder forever. It's not perfect, but as you have clearly recognized, there is no perfect system that allows for a reasonable degree of freedom.
> Can we tax him based on his Tesla shares? What happens if Tesla stock goes down by 99% next year?
Not really tricky! He gets taxed on the value of his shares in year 1 and he gets taxed on the value of the shares in year 2. If the value goes down 99%, you pay way less tax (or none if he's no longer wealthy enough to qualify). He can sell his shares to pay it, and I honestly do not care if he is not liquid enough to do that - that's a situation he put himself into. No he doesn't get a tax break on the loss - the rich have a sense of entitlement that their wealth belongs to them free of charge, and I think they should have to pay maintenance. Without public utilities (roads, electricity, air and sea traffic control, etc) and social stability, most of these billionaires would lose their wealth to warlords very quickly.
That doesn't make any sense. If I have $8B worth of shares and I have $2B in cash, and if the wealth tax is 20% I will have to pay all my cash this year. If my shares goes down to zero next year I'm broke. I couldn't just sell $2B worth of shares in the first year either because that would have affected the value of the shares. This is not how taxes should work.
Everyone agrees on income tax or capital gains tax because they are both cash, and the tax is also in the same currency. If we can find a way to tax wealth in the same "currency" (for example 20% of your share portfolio, plus 20% of your cash) then it might work. Obviously the state may not always be able to use shares to fund infrastructure, and cashing out those shares would diminish the value. Also it's still hard to do that for, say, real estate investments.
In any case, the whole thread about "net worth" is really besides my original point, which is that collateralizing stock for loans should be a taxable event. The only reason we got into net worth was because I said I'd only apply it to high net worth individuals, since they have almost exclusively benefitted from the economy over the last 10-20 years. This is also super achievable because to get the bank to loan you money, you have to declare the value of the assets and the bank has to agree with the valuation - super easy to determine tax on that number.
I don't feel that strongly about it if he is just sitting on the assets, but if he's leveraging them to buy Twitter, OpenAI or to donate money toward overthrowing the Democratic order, then yes, he should absolutely pay taxes for the privilege.
> collateralizing stock for loans should be a taxable event
I fully agree with this.
Disagree. We've been negotiating from the middle. We got the New Deal because the alternative for the wealthy was facing a socialist revolution.
Funnily enough there is (was?) legal activity about exactly this with our current POTUS.
Real estate assets when being accounted for tax purposes: "Worth: $x"
Same real estate assets when being accounted for loan collateral: "Worth: $10x".
But of course like most legal activity against POTUS, it's just been "abandoned".
> LoL - why it makes any sense to do this for universities and not billionaires is beyond me, but I'm sure half the country can explain it to me like I'm 5.
Because they already do it for billionaires: unlike university endowments, billionaire investment income is not tax-exempt by default, it's already subject to income tax [1].
[1] At least theoretically, ignoring the loopholes and tax-dodges billionaires can take advantage of with literal armies of accountants.
Very relevant in startup ecosystem as well (look up exchange funds, opportunity zones etc.)
Edit: it's an honest question. Maybe the top 1% paying 40% of all income taxes is too much tax. Maybe it's not enough. Without knowing how much of all the income they make it's a meaningless number.
My personal opinion is that income tax should be more progressive, but I know that plenty of smart people disagree on that.
[1] https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-in...
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/tax-foundation/
2. Your own link contradicts you. It says explicitly that that site hasn't failed any of their fact checks and doesn't use loaded words that they say are typical of that category. It says the categorization is because the site promotes libertarian policies.
It is also true for many “normal” one percenters. For example there is a service for incorporated anesthesiologists where you tell them where you plan to go on vacation and what dates, and they create a bullshit anesthesiology conference, including the brochure and other artifacts, that meet the letter of the law IRS definitions for a valid business expense. None of this stuff ever hits AGI.
Anyone can borrow money against their stocks, house, or credit card. It's tax-free as well.
> They can do schemes like borrowing against equities and using the tax-free cash for expenses or purchasing other assets.
Um, borrowing money is not "income". You have to pay it back, with interest.
UHNW individuals can borrow until they die. Their assets pass to their heirs with a stepped up cost basis. The heirs can liquidate whatever's needed to pay off the loan and incur no tax.
Normal people can't do this. If I die owing money, my creditors will take it out of my estate before it passes to my heirs. UHNW estates can be structured differently and creditors can accommodate different payment terms (get paid second) because they know the money's there, and it saves taxes.
You can also read: https://www.reddit.com/r/BuyBorrowDieExplained/comments/1f26...
I might have gotten some things wrong. Or maybe the poster has.
LOL, the stepped up basis gets hit with the inheritance tax.
> The heirs can liquidate whatever's needed to pay off the loan and incur no tax.
The loan and the interest payments and dont forget the inheritance tax.
> Normal people can't do this.
Yes, they can borrow money, die, the inheritors pay off the loan with the stocks, and then pay estate tax.
I assumed you asked a question to learn something. If you're not interested in learning, please continue believing that everyone gets the same tax system. Otherwise keep reading.
> the stepped up basis gets hit with the inheritance tax.
There's no federal inheritance tax. Only some states have it. You're thinking of the estate tax.
If you read the link I posted: https://www.reddit.com/r/BuyBorrowDieExplained/comments/1f26...
it has a fairly detailed explanation of how it's a completely different ballgame above a net worth of $300m. Grantor trusts allow sidestepping estate tax and...
> The loan and the interest payments
"The loan" otherwise known as "income" because that's what it really was. Income that would normally have been derived by selling assets. Obviously it has to be paid back. No one said it's free money. Only that it's (largely) tax-free money.
The interest payments are lower than the income tax would've been on the same amount of income.
> and dont forget the inheritance tax.
You mean estate tax. Explained above.
> Yes, they can borrow money, die, the inheritors pay off the loan with the stocks, and then pay estate tax.
Not in the same way, and not nearly as effectively.
If there are specific inaccuracies with https://www.reddit.com/r/BuyBorrowDieExplained/comments/1f26... I'm open to learning.
They're the same as far as this discussion is concerned, as the amount that the beneficiary gets is (roughly) the same.
> "The loan" otherwise known as "income" because that's what it really was
Borrowed money is not "income" in any sense of the word. When I was on summer vacation, I decided to take a class in accounting. One of the most productive uses of my time. I recommend it. P.S. if your business tries to classify borrowed money as "income", that's called fraud.
> If you read the link I posted
I rely on my CPA for tax advice, not the internet, nor do I care much for misusing accounting terms. I've read too many articles that confuse income with revenue, wealth with income, and so on.
The estate's value is reduced by what it owes.
> if your business tries to classify borrowed money as "income"
sigh C'mon man, engage in good faith here. Stop saying things I didn't say.
If you can borrow cash against assets, don't have to pay principle until you die, and only pay low interest payments then it's functionally the same as selling those assets at a low tax rate. That's the principle.
And if you can use trusts to avoid estate taxes then there are no (or very low) taxes due ever.
> I rely on my CPA for tax advice
Ok ask your CPA what they know about using trusts to avoid estate taxes. Maybe it's BS but maybe it's true. Without some curiosity, how will you ever know?
> not the internet
More reputable sources than Reddit indicate it may be possible to use trusts to greatly reduce or eliminate estate tax:
https://privatebank.jpmorgan.com/nam/en/insights/wealth-plan...
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/grat.asp
https://www.fidelity.com/learning-center/personal-finance/wh...
It's a progressive system overall - but it wasn't designed for the purpose of wealth redistribution, hence the payroll tax ceiling.
* More precisely, their monthly benefit at full retirement age increases by 90 cents for each additional dollar of pre-retirement average monthly earnings, whereas yours only increases by 15 cents.
So in practice, if "fair" is used in politics the appropriate reading is often as a euphemism for "I think we have the numbers to push this interpretation of the world on people; it'll be good for us".
I know he's out of favor with a lot of people, but would Elon have created SpaceX or The Boring Co or Neuralink, or helped start OpenAI if he hadn't had the spare billions to do so?
I'd much rather have multi-billionaires investing in the economy, and in the future, than giving additional money to the government.
Sure. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43687828
As for making lives better, Starlink was provided free to disaster victims in N Carolina and the LA fires. Something the government failed at. Enabled by cheap reusable SpaceX rockets, another thing the government failed at. Starlink is very popular, so it must be making peoples' lives better.
No he didn't.
> Starlink is very popular, so it must be making peoples' lives better.
So is meth.
Money was funnelled to Elon, he has a knack for getting government contracts. My memory is Tesla was powered by many grants for whoever was willing to work on electrification of society. The issue with that is that people want to put more money under the control of the government, despite it being the entity that funnelled money to Elon. I don't really understand that perspective, it seems a bit crazy - it'll end up with Elon getting more and more power and wealth. If we assume de-powering and de-wealthing Elon is a good, why push more money into the system that is wealthing and powering him? One theme in Elon's companies is they are positioned to hoover up money the US government is wasting and make sure it ends up in Elon's pockets.
Less government spending is more likely to hurt Elon than help him.
Musk also sold those rockets to NASA for 10% of what NASA would otherwise have to pay.
> One theme in Elon's companies is they are positioned to hoover up money the US government is wasting and make sure it ends up in Elon's pockets.
Tell us how that works.
> Less government spending is more likely to hurt Elon than help him.
Are you suggesting that Musk is doing what's right for the country rather than what's right for his fortune?
The suggestion is simply that the top 0.1% pay more - as they will be little affected by it.
Everything you tax away from wealthy people is removed from their investments.
For example, if all of Musk's income above $1m were taxed away, the following companies would never have existed:
1. Tesla
2. SpaceX
3. Starlink
4. Neuralink
If somebody cares about progress and is highly motivated, they should remain highly motivated to create incredible products and services, whether that buys them unchecked power or not. If some people would be less motivated and do less than they do now, it would be a lesser evil that creating oligarchs thirsty to dominate whenever they get the chance. As long as people can live a good and comfortable life, they do not have rights to more than that.
People who argue against progressive taxes tend to ignore the fact that modern capitalism is basically a game, one where the rules greatly favor the richest, who have virtually unlimited leverage compared to the average person. They make money exponentially more easily than others. It is absolutely right to correct this game through appropriate progressive taxes. Every once in a while an adult needs to step in to keep the game fun for everybody, and not just let the best player dominate others and make everybody else miserable. Maybe if we did this, the price gouging and constant turning of the screws would give way to a society where fair trade was the default cultural and economic norm.
Certainly hoarding more wealth than Smaug is a crime of grave injustice against humanity. For the mind completely sold to capitalism, this is impossible to understand. But people come before wealth and power.
If you tax their money away, they have that much less capital to invest.
> It is absolutely right to correct this game through appropriate progressive taxes.
Only if you don't like electric cars, cheap space rockets, cheap global communications, and enabling people with spinal injuries to need a lot less help.
> Certainly hoarding more wealth than Smaug is a crime of grave injustice against humanity. For the mind completely sold to capitalism, this is impossible to understand. But people come before wealth and power.
Nobody hoards wealth. They invest it. Nobody has a Smaug hoard. There are no Scrooge McDuck cash vaults.
I suggest you check out what happened under communism in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, Cuba, etc., under communism where people came before wealth and power. Your ideas sound good in a textbook and in the classroom, but they just don't work in the real world.
What sort of things can our society do to ensure that the people who dedicate their lives to eliminating the suffering of so many are compensated for what I'm sure we can agree are absolutely amazing accomplishments?
There are, unfortunately. [0] Though Putin's gold palace did have to be stripped for fungal problems, later.
Musk does go around with a large amount of debt, such as the 13bil he currently owes. So he's less likely to have a prepper vault. That does not mean that human greed doesn't turn to cartoons for inspiration, at times.
[0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=ipAnwilMncI
Most businesses are funded by taxpayers, either directly or indirectly. Elon Musk is a billionaire because of DOE funding, or there would have been no Tesla today.
By January 2009, Tesla had raised $187 million and delivered 147 cars. Musk had contributed $70 million of his money to the company.
In June 2009, Tesla was approved to receive $465 million in interest-bearing loans from the United States Department of Energy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla,_Inc.
Or to put it another way, if I make the same claim about millionaires; how do you expect to argue that they will be greatly affected by being taxed more? A 1% tax increase on someone's gross income is never going to "greatly" affect them unless, but if it happens 100 times they will be pennyless.
If you take money away from someone, they will have less money and do less because they have less resources.
Personally, I think that we should tax wealth more in general, and probably make the income tax a bit more progressive (I currently pay 52% which sucks, but if I had to pay a few pp more to get rid of homelessness and poverty in my country then I'd be ok with it).
They very obviously don't make only twice as much money as the bottom 80%, so how is that equal in the slightest?
There are ~300 million people in the US who are not billionaires. If they earn, on average, $4 each that balances out a billionaire by income [0]. Since there are <1,000 US billionaires, the average american income would need to drop back to something around the $4,000 range for billionaires to be out-earning them.
This is why taxes tend to land heavily on the middle class, the billionaires don't control most of the money. If politicians want access to money, the biggest pot isn't the billionaires.
[0] And billionaires don't generally make billions in income because it is a wealth measure.
I keep here this “the rich should pay more”, but rarely do I hear a number.
By whatever measure works, eg old school gini coefficient or something more modern.
You're right though: food fights over decimal points and gaming the rules nicely obfuscates any constructive debate about what kind of society we want.
And if the Gini coefficient is calculated pre-tax and pre-benefit distribution, it’s not going to change with high taxes and high redistribution (and yes you mentioned it may not be the right measure).
And if the Gini coefficient is calculated based on income data from the US, do we know if the better Gini from 1960’s wasn’t just due to income not being reported to the IRS?
Realpolitik. Proper Nordic levels of (lesser) inequity is not likely in the USA. But selling the nostalgia of our '60s era prosperity might fly.
> if the Gini coefficient is calculated pre-tax
Firstly, then pick a different different metric. Gini coefficient is merely the most familiar.
Secondly, you asked about proper income tax rate. In my pithy reply, I implied outcomes are more important than implementation details, but slap fights (like this one) about those details are used to distract. (I think the kids today call that "bike shedding".)
Also, I did not explicitly state that measures of wealth distribution is the central issue. I regret the omission.
--
While I have your attention: How do you think our tax regime should be structured?
Feel free to link to any prior explanations (posts) I may have missed, so you don't have to repeat yourself.
For one thing, many plumbers do make it to the 1%: Trades are a profitable line of work for the industrious.
But the median 1%’er is paying 3-4X the effective rate of the overall median earner.
You have conflated the tax rate with the tax amount.
I suspect you're using a different definition of "income" than the IRS. What is it?
I hear that sentiment a lot, but it doesn't seem right to me. My salary is pretty close to the median plumber's income, and my family's effective tax rate last year came in at... 1.6%. And that's with all retirement account contributions going toward Roth accounts. If we'd chosen to contribute to traditional IRA/401k accounts instead, the EITC and child tax credit would easily turn our tax bill negative.
It might also result in even more spending. I don't think that there is any "natural ceiling" when it comes to willingness of politicians to spend other people's money. The only ceiling is external - how much will the system bear.
That rent went up over 10% last year. For contrast, the rent control people want to cap rent increases to 7%.
Corporations are persons, right? Why is their tax rate just half that of real people?
Why aren't all persons taxed equally?
Anyone can install robinhood on their phone and trade using their credit card.
> Financial policy is very specifically against people saving their money
No, it isn't. People who save money are terrified of risk. There's nothing stopping anyone from investing the money.
> that's why a certain level of inflation is considered desirable to mainstream economists
That's the excuse the government makes to inflate the money. You'll never see a politician point out the real reason for inflation. It's so they can spend it without raising taxes, but it does cause inflation, and inflation has to be blamed on something else. Anything but the truth.
Buying a few stocks on an app is not anywhere near the same thing as being an accredited investor. Access to the most lucrative investment opportunities are not available to the average person, and that's almost entirely due to rules intentionally created to block anyone but the already wealthy.
The average worker in the US needs these sorts of opportunities to be self reliant. You don't need to be a billionaire to make money on the market, you just need a few dollars, some time, and the will to take a little risk. Stop hating on the average worker...
Second of all, at the end of the day it's other people money's they're using, and are entrusted to manage. You can't demand people to just lend money to anyone, any sort of free market of loans will quickly coalesce into a few capital allocators.
What? There is literally a class of people considered accredited or sophisticated investors.
To be considered an accredited investor by the SEC you must have a net worth of over $1M -not including- your primary residence, and you must have an annual household income of over $300K.
It is quite literally a wealth and income gate.
Low capital gains taxes aren't meaningfully encouraging somebody making 75k and saving 10k annually to continue with their saving plan.
And you earnestly can't understand why the poor want to increase taxes on the rich?
That's the gist I got from reading https://www.reddit.com/r/BuyBorrowDieExplained/comments/1f26...
There are finer points I don't understand such as:
1. Is the stepped-up cost basis available to the estate or only to the heirs? If it's to the estate, it's easier for the bank to trust they'll be paid back.
2. If the heir gets the stepped up cost basis, what legal guarantees does the bank have that the heir will pay the loan back?
And probably a lot else. I assume there's expensive lawyering and accounting involved in setting it up, so it isn't cost-effective unless you have a certain amount to shield from taxes in the first place.
Usually about the lowest rate you can get is a mortgage on your house.
Of course, if your credit is bad, you're not going to get a good rate.
Not to you or me. Giving powerful people who can send more business the bank's way a freebie on their personal accounts might make sense as a loss leader.
Long-term investment is rightly seen as something to be encouraged hence the lower tax rates. You can make the argument that the rate should be more like 0% since the money invested and risked was already taxed most likely...20% is a reasonable value for the market regulating infrastructure provided by gov't entities.
The simple truth is that wealth beyond the ~$10M level in the US pays essentially zero "income tax". It just doesn't happen, no one does it. Short term gains are only taxed for small investors who don't know any better.
"Entrepreneur Elon Musk announced on social networks that this year he will pay 11 billion dollars, thus becoming the largest taxpayer in the history of the USA."
From Google: "For the 2025 tax year, individual filers won't pay any capital gains tax if their total taxable income is $48,350 or less"
If you've got a smart phone and a credit card, you can buy stock. See robinhood.com
You're just saying "Well, that's the way the tax code works". I'm saying "The tax code sucks", and your point is non-responsive.
If you bought a house, and it goes up in value, that increase will be a capital gain taxed at capital gains rates.
"Let them eat cake" makes for extremely poor federal revenue policy.
The middle class isn't taking advantage of low capital gains rates to earn more from their taxable brokerage accounts because they haven't even filled up their tax-advantaged accounts.
Rich get richer, poor never see this advantage.
Once the money is in stocks, it doesn't get taxed unless you draw on it, but the billionaires can use strategies like buy, borrow, die (which last I checked only really works if you're north of ~ $300M) to avoid personal taxes.
They also operate at a scale where many tax breaks become viable. CEO owners aren’t paying themselves nominal salaries because they are actually working for free. Creating a shell company to own your 50k car isn’t useful but it’s damn well worth it if you’re buying a 50+m dollar yacht for personal use. Turning depreciation into a nominal loss offsetting capital gains etc.
Meanwhile people of lesser means get stuck with all kinds of crap like a 10% early withdrawal penalty on 401k plans.
Instead it’s mostly a question around who pays what share, and there’s some massive winners and losers.
Edit:
"We need to attack the universities in this country"
"The professors are the enemy"
Specific clip https://www.reddit.com/r/ABoringDystopia/comments/1ichg58/ya...
If you want the full speech it's on YT so if you reply with "context" you should back that up
> Current universities are openly anti intellectual.
RFK jr., really?
Edit: My comment was that the admin is anti intellectual and I provided quotes from JD Vance on all universities and professors.
How is this anti-intellectual?
That is before we even get into the explicitly racist hiring and admissions policies.
Evidence
https://archive.is/UeZ2A#selection-5289.442-5297.27
> Chavous and her colleagues did not collect demographic information from applicants. Instead, they were asked to submit statements addressing how they would advance D.E.I. goals, whether through research into “race, gender, diversity, equity and inclusion,” “significant academic achievement in the face of barriers” or “commitment to allyhood through learning about structural inequities.” Departments were invited to nominate candidates from an application pool created by the diversity center, which then oversaw further vetting.
https://archive.is/i6Gv9#selection-1183.358-1187.413
Ohio State Reports: DEI Litmus Test
https://www.nas.org/blogs/article/ohio-state-reports-dei-lit...
I don't agree with Ohio's diversity statements being used as part of the selection criteria. It's wrong.
What about every other university though? JD Vance's statement called universities the enemy. Most universities aren't connected to each other, they aren't a single organization and aren't responsible for what each does.
1. If only a few were using diversity statements as a part of the hiring process, which is wrong, what's the justification in calling all of them the enemy?
2. What about the professors? Most aren't responsible for setting hiring practices. Why are they the enemy?
> That is before we even get into the explicitly racist hiring and admissions policies. [ from your original comment ]
Same as the above for this. A University is a large insinuation of students, teachers, researchers, and various employees. Harvard employs 19k people and has 23k students.
#----------------
My opinion is that Vance is attacking universities not because he cares about merit based hiring or the quality of students but for selfish political reasons.
Why I think this:
1. As previously stated not all universities are doing what you claimed. Ohio for one, and the first link says "some" but there are thousands.
2. There are private schools that receive public money but discriminate against LGBQT [1] However nothing has been said or done about this by Trump in the past or now. These religious schools are more conservative and attacks would likely anger the base.
3. Republicans perform better with non-college educated voters [2] 2024 election:
No college 36% D , 62% R
Some college or 2yr degree: ~44% D, ~53% R
4-year degree: 53% D, 45% R
Graduate school+: 59% D , 38% R
Therefore reducing the number of people who go to higher education could benefit Republicans in elections.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-09-01/when-p... [2] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-elections/exit-polls
Not all, but most. It may have decreased as some universities have started to abandon it now that it is falling out of fashion, but it was a large percentage, I'd estimate 90% offhand, but it's not like there's a lot of sources on this. It is a movement led by an aggressive and militant minority who silences and drives out anyone who disagrees. Most professors, who just want to do their research on 19th century French poetry or the mating habits of dung beetles or whatever they care about just shut up and try to keep their heads down so they don't get denied tenure or have students protesting at their office because they said the wrong pronoun. If you know people in academia and they trust you they will tell you off the record that it is nearly universal and so, so much worse than what is publicly reported. Sorry, I can't provide sources for this. You can trust me or not, but I know what I've seen and what people have told me.
> There are private schools that receive public money but discriminate against LGBQT [1] However nothing has been said or done about this by Trump in the past or now. These religious schools are more conservative and attacks would likely anger the base.
There is a religious freedom issue, because religion is also a protected class. I don't know, religious schools are not that many and they are not a big factor in academia. If you really care about that religion, then you go there, if not there are lots of other places. I don't know why an LGBQT person would want to force their way into going to a school where everyone thinks they're sinful and destined for hell. Seems like masochism to me.
> My opinion is that Vance is attacking universities not because he cares about merit based hiring or the quality of students but for selfish political reasons.
Well, neither of us can read his mind, but he benefited from a system that espoused meritocracy and used it to improve his life from growing up very poor to becoming vice president of the United States. I think it's reasonable that he would want to preserve that so other people could also have that opportunity and not get denied because they were the wrong race.
>I'd estimate 90% offhand, but it's not like there's a lot of sources on this.
What is your estimate based on and what is your basis for claiming "most"?
How do you know this happens?
It's true they also said they want viewpoint diversity quotas and audits. I agree that goes too far. I think they would probably give that up if the university pushed back. This is what Trump does every time - make outlandish demands so you have something to give up in negotiation. He even wrote an entire book telling you exactly that's what he does, yet somehow the "intellectual elite" cannot wrap their heads around a very simple negotiating tactic. Every plumber, electrician, and carpenter that ever worked with Trump figured this out decades ago.
Harvard rejected the demands and Trump pulled funding. What negotiation happened?
Also, if everyone knows you're just demanding more than you'd accept what's the value of the negotiation tactic? Everyone would just reject demands initially knowing this
No, they had issues with some of the demands and wanted to open a dialog.
Harvard's response says they changed policies to protect Jewish students, made other changes to related to the protests, etc.
It also states
"It is unfortunate, then, that your letter disregards Harvard’s efforts and instead presents demands that, in contravention of the First Amendment, invade university freedoms ..."
#----------------------------- Finally they said:
"Harvard remains open to dialogue about what the university has done, and is planning to do, to improve the experience of every member of its community. But Harvard is not prepared to agree to demands that go beyond the lawful authority of this or any administration. "
This is extremely disingenous. Throughout this thread you've been arguing on the basis that hiring people simply to fit a political viewoint is wrong, but when it's pointed out that that's exactly what your team wants as well you fall back to name-calling.
1. You can get an education while advocating for causes
2. The letter doesn't only say advocating for a terrorist group.
From the gov demand letter:
"International Admissions Reform. By August 2025, the University must reform its recruitment, screening, and admissions of international students to prevent admitting students hostile to the American values and institutions inscribed in the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence, including students supportive of terrorism or anti-Semitism."
>Why is the US government expected to fund people who want to destroy the US government?
1. They aren't, Harvard does
2. Federal grants aren't targeted to specific students so revoking them isn't a targetted punishment
3. Harvard can still operate without these grants, including bringing in international students who the current admin might disagree with.
4. The US government gives money to people who want to destroy it all the time. Welfare, social security, etc is given to anti-gov US citizens with no restrictions based on those views.
5. Although only proposed Trump wanted to set up a fund for January 6th protestors who he pardoned. Some of whom attacked the US capital to disrupt a Democratic election process.
>Should you be required to pay people who want to kill you?
No. How is that related to this? You just overly generalized the entire situation in order to produce a question where I'd mostly likely to say "no" as a argument manipulation tactic.
> 2. Federal grants aren't targeted to specific students so revoking them isn't a targetted punishment
> 3. Harvard can still operate without these grants, including bringing in international students who the current admin might disagree with.
Harvard funds them with the money it gets from grants. If Harvard wants to fund activist students with their own money out of their endowment, nobody is stopping them from doing that.
No, they can't unilaterally import foreign students though, the government has to grant them a visa to come here, and it really doesn't seem prudent to grant visas to people who hate our country and everything it stands for. If they believe the US is so evil and awful, they should be quite relieved that they won't need to come here. Maybe Harvard can open a satellite campus in Gaza if they really feel that these are the best students who are most deserving of a Harvard education.
The grants fund students regardless of views. Yes they can use their endowment (I think) it's quite massive but the point is the government attacking universities for what a small amount of students say which is wrong.
It's also quite hypocritical considering views on free speech and "big government"
"Shutting down free speech will destroy our civilization." - JD Vance
>it really doesn't seem prudent to grant visas to people who hate our country and everything it stands for.
Why? In the case of attacking Israel that's not even our country? What if they hate the current government?
What is "our country" to you because most probably hate the government, a very common attitude for many inside the country.
If they hate our values of freedom then punishing them only says that those freedoms aren't that dear to us because we're willing to compromise.
The rest of your comment is Facebook level of like "If you don't like it leave". I do think your other comments are professional so I hope we can move back
>they should be quite relieved that they won't need to come here
How is it a punishment to send someone away from a place they hate?
For all the people chanting “from the river to the sea” and then crying about their free speech when their visas are revoked, where is their passion for free speech when someone draws a cartoon of Mohammad?
These are not people who care about the ideals of freedom. They only want to use our indulgence as a wedge to promulgate their own, much less free ideology.
Or to put things in maybe more HN-friendly terms - suppose you have a public facing service that you intend to be very liberal and accepting of any inputs. Does that mean you need to allow SQL injection attacks? Cross-site scripting? Spam? Not all actors are acting in good faith. Some are deliberately trying to harm you.
Name a student who was deported that hated America and provide evidence.
Let’s say I want to come live in your house. Do you need to prove to me why I shouldn’t be allowed to do that, or do I need to prove to you why I should? If I make speeches and write articles about how you’re an evil person and we should burn your house down, does that make you think it’s a good idea for me to live with you?
Definition of anti-intellectual
"a person who scorns intellectuals and their views and methods" from oxford
Intellectual
"of or relating to the intellect or its use", "given to study, reflection, and speculation", and ": engaged in activity requiring the creative use of the intellect" from MW.
I didn't define anything. If I said the administration was anti-education would that be better?
> the University must adopt and implement merit-based admissions policies and cease all preferences based on race, color, national origin, or proxies thereof, throughout its undergraduate program, each graduate program individually, each of its professional schools, and other programs.
In what way is hiring faculty and and admitting students based on merit instead of their identity anti-education? Is your position that you get a better education from a professor who was hired because of their race instead of the quality of their scholarly work?
It's not. Calling universities and professors the enemy is. The government taking away funding because you want international students to adhere to an ideology is wrong.
>is your position that you get a better education from a professor who was hired because of their race instead of the quality of their scholarly work?
How do you rank the quality of scholarly work?
In the case of hiring, typically a committee of other professors in the department would evaluate candidates, not a bunch of DEI bureaucrats. They would read what the candidates have published and see if the arguments they make are sound, and look at things like # of citations that indicate how prominent the work is in the field.
I don’t know if you’ve ever met any academics, but I promise you they have no problems forming opinions about the quality of work of other people in their field.
Like, if you were a physics professor and you were applying to a department where everyone was a string theorist, and your position was that string theory is a bunch of bullshit, you might not get that job. Or you might, if your work is otherwise solid, you never know.
But that's a disagreement about physics, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to evaluate a physics professor on. It's not about how enthusiastically they endorse some ideological dogma that has nothing to do with physics.
We're not talking about roughly equal candidates with similar qualifications and one getting the edge because of race. I'm telling you there are cases where PhD candidates with zero publications, people who have not even finished and defended their dissertation yet, are hired for tenure-track positions over other candidates who have had their degree for several years, published in top journals, won highly competitive fellowships, etc, because universities want someone of a particular race. It's not subtle.
You may not be able to say that one candidate is the unequivocal best when there are many qualified candidates, but you can definitely say that a particular candidate is unqualified or not even close to other candidates when, for example, they have not published at all.
None of these are objective measures of quality.
1. The more papers you write the more likely you'll be published more. This is connected to time and desire.
2. Judging yhe quality of a journal is subjective therefore can't be used as an objective measurement for something else
3. If you write a paper that more people have access to, is about a more popular subject, is the only paper for a subject, or is published in more popular journals it would increase your citations outside of the paper quality.
4. Awards are a subjective judgement
Of course all of these increase the probability of quality but it's not a guarantee.
> for example, they have not published at all.
I don't think anyone going for a position as a professor hasn't published since most PHds require it. This point probably adds more weight but I think it would be rare between candidates for job.
Whereas going by who can write the most enthusiastic essay about diversity, as judged by the blue-haired gender studies major in the diversity center, is a system that will only select for rabid ideologues and disingenuous bullshitters.
Why does this matter?
What does gender studies have to do with this situation or DEI ?
> is a system that will only select for rabid ideologues and disingenuous bullshitters.
Why?
Pretend you are an investment banker. You've spent the last 10 years living and breathing investment banking. You've worked 100 hour weeks. You can point to a long list of successful deals you've done. You have glowing references from every client and colleague that has ever worked with you.
Now, you're applying for a job at a major investment bank, but before your resume is reviewed by any of the investment bankers, you have to write an essay about how much you love baseball. This essay will be reviewed by a panel of baseball superfans. They will judge it on how much you know about baseball and how much you love baseball. If they feel you know enough about baseball and you sufficiently express your love for it, they will then pass your resume on to be reviewed by the investment bankers.
Now, maybe you like baseball, maybe you don't. Maybe you have no particular strong feelings about it. Mostly, you didn't have time to think much about baseball because you have spent your time obsessed with investment banking.
Do you think this is a good system to hire investment bankers? If someone said "hey, we should hire investment bankers based on their track record in investment banking and not how much they love baseball or if they are baseball players", would you call them "anti-investment banking"?
> The more papers you write the more likely you'll be published more. This is connected to time and desire.
Yes, someone who writes more and spends more time doing research and has more desire to do research is objectively better at research than someone who produces less. There is a possibility that one person writes lots of low quality papers and another person writes a few high quality papers, but in asserting this you are admitting that there is some objective measure of the quality of a paper (which there is). Since the reviewers would be reading the papers, they could also objectively assess the quality of the papers too.
> 2. Judging yhe quality of a journal is subjective therefore can't be used as an objective measurement for something else
No, the quality of the journal is not subjective. If journal A publishes anything they are sent without review and journal B rigorously reviews everything by sending it to other experts in the field, then journal B is objectively higher quality than journal A.
> If you write a paper that more people have access to, is about a more popular subject, is the only paper for a subject, or is published in more popular journals it would increase your citations outside of the paper quality.
If you write the only published paper on a subject, then you are objectively the world's leading expert on that subject. If the university wants someone who knows that subject, the only person in the world who has published on it is objectively the best choice.
Part of a professor's job might be to communicate about their research and bring it to a wider audience, and convince e.g. grant committees that it is important and deserves funding. Someone savvy enough to get published in popular journal is objectively more qualified to do this than someone who hasn't been able to accomplish that.
> Awards are a subjective judgement
The awards can be subjective, but whether you have won an award or not is an objective fact. If the job involves doing the kinds of thing that impress the people who give the award, then someone who has achieved that is objectively better than someone who has not.
Give me examples then because how could you know this?
- "quantity of publications" is a problem and directly leads to bad science, so is on aggregate a measure of anti-quality
- "quality of the journals published in" is all in the mind; prestigious journals with high impact factor have been repeatedly found not to have the best research. The rigour of the editing process is more important, but few researchers know that, and importantly they are heavily incentivised by funders to go for high impact factor, completely muddying the waters of who's a good researcher by that metric.
- number of citations would be a better measure, but unfortunately is directly linked to impact factor, in practice and in perception.
- awards won, books published - too niche and random to matter much.
- "every academic could tell you the top 5 journals in their field" haha, no, you'd be as surprised as I was when doing that research.
Academic publishers have been considering the measuring problem for decades, and no one has found a solution yet.
There is no good measure of the quality of a paper until many years after publication. It's easy to identify some true positives (high impact, no retraction), it's quasi-impossible by definition to identify false negatives (unfairly ignored papers), and most importantly this emphasis on prestige research is terribly harmful to Science. Science needs researchers who are happy to replicate studies, people who publish disappointing results, and people who study otherwise unglamorous topics, otherwise Science fails.
TLDR: measuring how 'good' a researcher is by their prestige is extremely destructive to Science. You can't do that.
I’m sure they would do just as good of a job. Because nobody could ever possibly objectively tell whether someone with a PhD in math is going to be better at teaching and researching math than a high school dropout, right?
For those who need spoonfed, here is the full speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FR65Cifnhw
It's JD Vance's keynote speech at the 2021 National Conservatism conference. The speech, which I've just skimread, is mostly well-worn US conservative complaints about US higher education. He also talks about red-pilling because he's down with the kids, and he adds Jesus sprinkles in case you forgot he's Christian.
The speech is dull but it's bookended with two spicy statements, both of which you mostly quoted. The latter statement is not his words but a quote from Nixon.
Opening statement: «So much of what we want to accomplish, so much of what we want to do in this movement in this country, I think are fundamentally dependent on going through a set of very hostile institutions - specifically the universities which control the knowledge in our society, which control what we call truth and what we call falsity, that provides research that gives credibility to some of the most ridiculous ideas that exist in our country and so I'm excited to close this conference with this particular set of remarks, because I think if any of us want to do the things that we want to do for our country, and for the people who live in it, we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.»
Closing statement: «I really want to end this on an inspirational note [...] and the person whose quote I ultimately had to land on was the great prophet and statesman Richard Milhous Nixon [...] there is a season for everything in this country and I think in this movement of National Conservatism, what we need more than inspiration is we need wisdom, and there is a wisdom in what Richard Nixon said approximately 40-50 years ago. He said, and I quote: "the professors are the enemy".»
EDIT: And for the context of the Nixon quote, it comes from a private conversation Nixon had with Henry Kissinger in the Oval Office on December 14, 1972, recordings of which were released in 2008: «Henry remember... we're gonna be around and outlive our enemies. And also, never forget, the press is the enemy. The press is the enemy. The press is the enemy. The establishment is the enemy. The professors are the enemy. The professors are the enemy. Write that on a blackboard 100 times and never forget it.». It's worth noting that Nixon was already keeping an "enemies list": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon%27s_Enemies_List
Posting the entire speech only bolsters my view. For example
"[To accomplish goals].. I think are fundamentally dependent on going through a set of very hostile institutions - specifically the universities..."
I'm confused about your argument. I don't consider it a smoking gun just a concise example of what Vance and MAGA Republicans belive. There's no context confusion, it's on video, and it being dull only shows how comfortable he is exposing insane views.
The speech they're from doesn't.
The speech defends and praises universities and their role in society. Vance even claims some academics prefer to ignore evidence that refutes their positions, and he's against that; that would be a valid pro-intellectual position if true (but it's completely nebulous and unsourced)
The thesis of his speech was he doesn't like the content of what academics profess and he thinks they ought to teach his political views (and his audience's political views) instead. That's not anti-intellectualism, i.e. "don't trust those book-learning types, look to the common man for answers". This guy still wants ivory towers provided his cronies are in them.
Also it's interesting to see where his quote came from. He clearly picked an on-theme Nixon quote just to appeal to his audience, and he seems to miss the context of the Nixon quote in that Nixon is a paranoid nutter saying it, not coming from a rational place like Vance thought he just did.
Which part ?
The other lens is simple as well: big fish don't go after the other big fish. That just ends in two hurt fish and no food. Trump thought he was going after a small fry and underestimated the response. just because Columbia folded doesn't mean all universities will.
lens #3: this clip explains it well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLbWnJGlyMU
He's a bully but if everyone realizes they outnumber (and outmatch him) he loses his power).
Converting the Corporation to Harvard Church is about the least shenanigany thing I could think of in this tale.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Harvard_University
I’m surprised USA doesn’t have a rule that industrial/commercial sections of any org is liable to all corporate tax laws.
That would be great that Harvard pays %14 on investment income on its 50 billion fund, considering I pay a minimum of 20% on my 'way less than $50 billion' in taxable investments, which was funded by my already taxed earnings, where as Harvard gets much of its endowment funds gifted to it.
Same goes for religious organizations, but it would be extremely hard to enforce, as they might say "government is interfering us practicing our religion", as practicing religions helps to not pay taxes and protected by the Constitution.
https://nehls.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/nehls.house.gov/f...
Taxing donations is really thorny. If people realize that the government is taking money they want to give away... they stop giving away money. It's a self-terminating cliche in action. So you either leave it alone if you want to encourage people stimulating charities, or you make the tax very small.
>Same goes for religious organizations,
I don't fully know. Some attempt at separattion of church and state. The government tries to maintain that except when other boundaries are crossed.
It does sort of fall into the same umbrella though, when regarding tithes.
Why did you even try that? Blew your whole argument.
Nothing that was taxed was "already taxed".
you should be questioning why you are getting screwed at all. it doesn't solve the government's revenue problems or even make a dent.
That's not true, the donations are tax exempt (deductible).
Taxing donations is just double dipping on your money. That's how you discourage donating.
A very large portion of the country vote Republican, and I would be surprised if they are by and large the most well-off part of the American public.
Worked for decades. Not so well when Trump so publicly tanked the economy and snatched one of the 3 untouchable things.
> Feels like they’re ghost riding the economy for the lulz
Yes. The abstract of "the economy" doesn't matter. The priorities are "owning the libs" on Twitter and other media, and their own personal bank accounts which can benefit from insider trading the tariffs, state-sponsored memecoins and so on.
And while we long forgotten: don't forget that all of this is illegal. to retract congressionally appropriated funds that were already budgeted. The time to yoink this stuff legally was a month ago.
I’d imagine “maintain and invest the original contribution in perpetuity” covers majority of the restricted funds, with use-specific restrictions in a distant but comfortable second. Since it’s Harvard, they probably also have more funky restrictions than the average bear (gifts of stock in kind with restrictions on timing of sale, voting, etc.).
[0]: https://finance.harvard.edu/files/fad/files/fy24_harvard_fin...
Sure, due to funding cuts students will suffer with slowly degrading infrastructure and will need to do plumbing fixes at some point. But that doesn't mean people who give them money for one purpose are happy with it being used for another purpose.
This is forced speech for all those of us who disagree with Harvard's politics and yet have our tax dollars sent to support it anyways.
You don’t get a veto on all speech from anyone who receives funds from the public purse, and it’s not a First Amendment issue that you don’t.
That’s such an incredibly odd premise; where do you get that idea from?
By free speech, they mean the lack thereof. By small government, they mean a monarch.
- Jean-Paul Sartre
Fascinating. Do I have a similar right to stop paying taxes, because I don’t support the things the President is saying, or the causes Mike Johnston is adding to the budget?
This is absolutely NOT what the 1st amendment is about, you are confusing tax and speech but they are treated separately in the Constitution.
The reason for that is simple, if every taxpayer could deny the funding of everything they didn't agree with, we'd have a very different Constitution. The ability to FULLY defund something YOU don't agree with requires the powers of a king... If you scale that ambition back a little and ask only for the power to decide where YOUR own money goes, you'd be speaking of something other than a tax because this isn't the way taxes work.
I'm not explaining this because I see much good coming out of Harvard, in fact I don't, but that's a different conversation. Both political parties, as well as certain private organizations have their hands deep in students' brains - it's the ultimate cookie jar after all. The real problem is the attempt to legitimize overt government meddling in the "cookie jar" instead of focusing on transparency and examination of the current forces involved in that process.
BTW can you elaborate on your assertion about "discrimination against Asians"? Neither the government letter nor Harvard's response mention Asians! Were you trying to comment on another post? Maybe something about the tariffs?
Could you explain how government research funding constitutes forced speech?
If an individual who receives a government tax credit (say EITC) speaks out contrary to your politics, is the government allowed to withhold that credit too?
There certainly is _no_ government spending supported by _all_ Americans, so your position isn't a very practical approach to governance.
> The Crimson analyzed the proposed Trump administration funding cuts and estimated that the five hospitals’ multi-year commitment from the NIH is over $6.2 billion and the University’s multi-year federal research funding exceeds $2.7 billion.
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/4/4/funding-review-h...
I’m sure that you have legitimate issues with politics at Harvard, but penalizing a number of independent non-profits that serve the community because they associate with a University that the administration disagrees with also seems to be forcing speech.
Stephen Miller made it clear this morning: "Under this country, under this administration, under President Trump, people who hate America, who threaten our citizens, who rape, who murder, and who support those who rape and murder are going to be ejected from this country."
If the government decides you "hate America" or your business supports some hypothetical rapist/murderer they imagined, you're going to end up ejected from this country without due process.
https://apnews.com/article/trump-citizens-prison-el-salvador...
Relevance is subjective.
Or do you agree that it is not a violation of free speech to fund police when there are citizens who disagree with it? You can't have it both ways.
That said, affiliated hospitals are not owned or operated by Harvard.
The affiliates could be pushed to drop their affiliation if NIH wanted to play hardball with Harvard.
That’s what makes stands like this hard for admin: you’re risking massive layoffs in the programs that are often the least political to defend the academic freedom of the programs that are often the most political. Columbia made one decision. Harvard is making another. You could make Lord Farquaad jokes here, but if it alone loses its federal funding in these expensive research areas, it will lose its preeminence in those areas for a long time.
[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/nih-freezes-all-rese...
They're quite happy to turn a blind eye to unfashionable political views being silenced, so there's a pinch of hypocrisy in making such a show of standing for openness.
All in all though, I'm happy to see this.
And while I agree and have been disgusted with Harvard's slow slide to demanding ideological conformity over the past decade plus (e.g. https://www.thefire.org/news/harvard-gets-worst-score-ever-f...), I believe they have made some belated changes in the right direction over the past year.
It effectively is. Just look up the history of the drinking age - a classic example of the federal government using extortion tactics to override state rights.
All other democracies on this rock just go and modify their constitution, that's the proper way. Y'all just are so completely gridlocked that this is all but impossible...
Should we also say that the president can strike down unconstitutional state laws because the Supreme Court is in the federal government?
Indeed, but this was a clear evasion of prior laws. I don't like such workarounds in principle - either Congress should have gone the proper way and go for a constitutional amendment, or it should have buried the fucking bill. This created the nasty precedent that the current admin is using to push through the SAVE Act.
That's right. And it's the function of the executive branch to enforce those laws.
Consider also the Equal Time rule and the Fairness Doctrine:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-time_rule
As I am not a lawyer, I suppose we'll have to see what the courts have to say about it.
But the government's list of demands includes all kinds of stuff that would be mildly insane even if offered in good faith. And we have seen enough already that any independent organization would be very irresponsible to assume good faith.
I would go so far as to say that any institution trying to make decisions based solely on merit is required to resist this kind of pressure very forcefully. There are many examples of the administration using "DEI" as a buzzword when firing meritorious women and minorities, all the while promoting totally meritless white men.
-JD '08
And their demands are so insane you couldn't name one. I've gone through it and it all seems incredibly reasonable
https://www.harvard.edu/research-funding/wp-content/uploads/...
> By August 2025, the University shall commission an external party, which shall satisfy the federal government as to its competence and good faith, to audit the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity, such that each department, field, or teaching unit must be individually viewpoint diverse.
This sounds like the federal government is demanding that they adhere to a department of Policing Wrongthink.
Insane
> Harvard must implement a comprehensive mask ban with serious and immediate penalties for violation, not less than suspension.
Insane
> reducing the power held by faculty (whether tenured or untenured) and administrators more committed to activism than scholarship
Is even insane if you think about it for two seconds; nobody wants the government deciding what counts as activism and what counts as "real" scholarship. A good heuristic: do any of the proponents want a Bernie Sanders or AOC wielding this authority?
I had to take critical race theory classes for my grad school program, I'm sure they can find a Christian to make a powerpoint on avoiding hate towards Christians.
This is all stuff which has been happening in reverse for decades. The real solution is for schools to find a funding route other than government, but until then these shinanigans have been happening for decades and this isn't suddenly "insane".
1. Universities aren't "incredibly hostile towards Republicans"
2. CRT: critical race theory is a real study. It's just understanding the historical context for the current socioeconomic landscape of America. Do you think black Americans were magically fixed after slavery ended? No? Congratulations, you support the fundamentals of CRT. It just became conservative spooky buzzword.
3. Avoiding hate towards Christians... who is out here hating Christians? This fetish for persecution is getting very strange. At absolute worst, people are asking Christians to avoid passing legislation using their religion. Which is happening at an alarming rate and should be concerning to every American who respects our Constitution!
4. "reverse"... yeah no, it's really not. Nobody has been silencing conservative voices, it's just difficult to hold a conservative voice while being in higher education. Because conservatism as an ideology is naturally opposed to higher education and new ways of thought. It's the same reason conservative pieces of media suck. Conservatism as an ideology is naturally opposed to artistic expression and radical creativity, so of course the media sucks. Nobody is doing it to them, it's just that the way they are is largely incompatible with that thing. There's other fun example of this, too. For instance, why does Christian Rock suck so bad? (Christianity and Rock as ideologies are antithetical).
I don’t want the government deciding what viewpoints need representation. And again, if you think about beyond the immediate case you may have a personal emotional investment in, I don’t think you do either.
I don’t want a future administration trying to enforce “viewpoint diversity” on oil and gas companies, investment banks, or rural family farms either, regardless of what federal contracts or subsidies they have. Exxon, Goldman Sachs, or an Iowa hog farm would be insane to submit to that.
Also, a mask ban enforced by suspension is just plain stupid. That’s not even viewpoint diversity, it’s just partisan chum, and it gives away the game on whether this exercise is in good faith.
> The University must immediately shutter all diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, offices, committees, positions, and initiatives, under whatever name, and stop all DEI-based policies, including DEI-based disciplinary or speech control policies, under whatever name
> Every department or field found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by hiring a critical mass of new faculty within that department or field who will provide viewpoint diversity
> In particular, Harvard must end support and recognition of those student groups or clubs that engaged in anti-Semitic activity since October 7th, 2023
> Discipline at Harvard must include immediate intervention and stoppage of disruptions or deplatforming, including by the Harvard police when necessary to stop a disruption or deplatforming
The letter is a complete joke. Giving it any sort of compliance would be giving validation to a set of rules that are literally impossible to follow by design. There is literally nothing Harvard could do to not be in trouble later.
Also buried in the letter is this gem:
> Harvard must implement a comprehensive mask ban with serious and immediate penalties for violation, not less than suspension.
Keep in mind Harvard also runs a medical school!
This is Maoist-style social reform through and through.
Aseptic surgical procedures may soon go the way of vaccines.
Ah yes I've heard of that, it's one of the "Programs with Egregious Records of Antisemitism or Other Bias" which most fuels antisemitic harassment and reflects ideological capture!
Here is an article about the Trump administration demands to our universities.
https://www-publico-pt.translate.goog/2025/04/11/ciencia/not...
Edit: I stand corrected, 49.81%. It doesn't change the point much. Especially when that ~49% includes many "working class"[1] voters. Who's going to participate in this general strike? A bunch of office workers?
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trumps-return-power-fueled-...
Also, research tells us that it only takes 3.5% to overthrow a government.
You're describing a coup or revolution. Isn't that highly anti-democratic considering this president just won an election? Why should the 50% be under the thumb of the 3.5%?
And just as just, violated his oath to the constitution. How long, precisely, should we allow him to violate his oath and our rights?