[rayiner]

It’s not “constraining freedom of speech.” It’s declining to subsidize speech with grants.

Recall that these are grants issued to specific universities for specific reasons, not generally available services it funds provided to everyone. Why are taxpayers required to allocate his money to organizations that (in the view of elected officials) don’t serve the public interest?

On top of that, it’s well accepted that the government can use the threat of revoking federal funds force universities to regulate speech: https://cei.org/blog/obama-administration-undermines-free-sp.... Under Title VI and Title IX, the government can force schools to regulate speech in ways that the government couldn’t regulate directly among private citizens.

[derbOac]

Withholding funds based on viewpoint is coercive by definition, otherwise the administration wouldn't be doing it. Because it's the government, it's government constraints on speech.

Title IX moreover is codified law passed by the legislative branch, not an executive order, and pertains to gender/sex nondiscrimination. It's not an executive order about how students are expressing their opinions about international policy pertaining to a foreign entity (note that no US citizens are being prosecuted currently for any of the things the administration is seeking leverage about with noncitizens, which suggests the viewpoints are protected speech).

[rayiner]

If your theory is that it’s a first amendment violation, then it’s irrelevant whether it’s a law passed by congress or an executive order.

It is well established that the government is allowed to make value judgments in deciding what activities to support with discretionary grants: https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/government-funding-a... (“The absence of an affirmative right for individuals to receive government aid has been central to this doctrine and these cases.”).

Title IX is an example of this. As interpreted today, it covers not only sex discrimination, but also speech, including speech by students, relating to sex and gender that would be protected by the first amendment outside the federal funding context: https://www.kgw.com/article/news/education/university-of-por....

[duxup]

Monitoring staff and students viewpoints and directing the school to hire, potentially fire, admit the governments prescribed people based on viewpoints has nothing to do with “declining to subsidize speech”.

If you’re a student or even random staff, you’re not likely even asking for a grant, but you are subject to having your viewpoint assessed under the system demanded by the current administration, for no reason other than the federal government demands it.

Presumably based on the letter prospective students would have to have their viewpoints assessed to make sure they have the correct viewpoints.

[rayiner]

The government is declining to fund with public money what it views as a hotbed of ideology that’s contrary to the public interest to subsidize. The things you mention are remedial measures Harvard could agree to implement if it wants to show the administration that it’s changed its character into something the government does want to subsidize.

Again, this is within precedent. Universities are already required—under threat of loss of federal funds—to have a compliance framework for Title VI and IX that requires, among other things, universities to police campus speech that would be beyond the government’s authority to regulate outside of campus.

[jauntywundrkind]

Rayiner, your continued love for political axe grinding and merciless screw-everyone-else conservatism is truly a thing of note & wonder on this site, standing above even the regular stand up conservative HN guy memes.

This is just so off the wall insane. "These grants are issued to specific universities for specific reasons," indeed. "Why are taxpayers [...] allocating this money to organizations" such as Harvard? Because this organization is a world leading researcher that does top notch research. Because they are perhaps the top institute in the whole world across numerous realms of science.

That's why they have for example 350 medical research grants. Because they are awesome, a national treasure, along with countless other research institutes. Both for the direct science they do, and for the offshoot enterprises, hands on training, and economic development these incredible unparalleled instituions create, that nothing else that we know of can reproduce.

There's no real question that Harvard deserves these grants, that they are very good at this, that they have some of the best research. That their 243 years of doing this have created a worthwhile institution that does amazing work.

But some people can just cast doubt and say these people don't serve the public interest - like you do, incessantly, with endless messages day in and day out Rayiner - because it's inconvenient for the administration that some of these people actually speak their mind. Most of them just do their research, but there's a couple things here & there the administration with it's pathetic streak of authoritianism cannot suffer to allow exist, and so the whole lot of the institution has be to directly assaulted at it's very core. Made to do exactly what Dear Leader insists or else.

You cite a paper vehemently arguing in favor of bullying, so long as it's not based on race or sex. Fine, ok, maybe people have rights to be awful. What I really don't get is what's the offense here? Where's the beef? Why is CEI and you so offended that Obama would write a letter to some universities that were allowing or promoting homophobia or bullying. It seems beyond compare to look at a sole letter, and compare it to cutting off all federal funding: an absurd victimhood complex, mountains of out of molehills. Did anyone feel any need to seek legal guidance or to go to court over this letter, was any damage done at all?

You cite Title VI of presumably the Civil Rights act, prohibiting discrimination based on race, color, or national origin. You cite Title IX, prohibiting sex-based discrimination. It's worth noting that these are negative liberties to citizens, protect their right to be meddled with for who they are, keep government money from being used in ways that constrain or exclude them. So yes, Congress has passed acts that constrain how federal funds are allocated with regards to what speech is acceptable. In Trumplandia there are two notable differences: first, there's no law here, no acts of Congress: Trump is using countless executive orders and hot air to bully & cause as much pain as he possible can, in whatever manner possible. There's sometimes a flimsy excuse that this is entirely over Harvard being anti-Semitic, but it's impossible to take that seriously, and there's nothing but the typical insane bluster of a self-serving authoritarian sniffing his own insane farts without bothering to explain or make a case for how this massive institution is actually doing any real harm or injury. How banning foreign students is going to help or hinder that cause is further unclear: like everything else, there's no moral or just cause, no attempt to improve, only a desire to inflict massive endless & total damage, not to actually find remedy.

[rayiner]

I think little-c conservatism is good, and credentialed managerial liberalism—of which Harvard is the beating heart—is bad. In my view, had the founders of modern India/Pakistan (Jinnah and Nehru) been conservatives like Lee Kuan Yew, instead of coming back from Oxbridge with highfalutin ideas about secular humanism and socialism, then my homeland would be a lot more prosperous today and I might still live where my ancestors did.

So I’m willing to do a lot to ensure my adopted homeland doesn’t suffer the same fate. Because in my estimation, the difference between India/Pakistan and the U.S. isn’t smart people, but the political and civic culture of ordinary people. What makes America great is the participatory democracy and deference to the wisdom of the common man that Alexis de Tocqueville admired. Not the modern trend of democracy as masses of mobilized demographic groups providing nudges to the Harvard-educated civil servants that actually run the country.

And viewing Harvard and its impact on the country as a negative is hardly some Trump invention. The quip that you’d rather be governed by the first 2,000 people listed in the Boston phone directory than the entire Harvard faculty is more than half a century old. The only difference is that the new right is willing to actually try and implement their vision of what would be good for the country. They’re willing to use the same legal and political tools—including control over discretionary federal funds—that liberals have long used to reshape society, culture, and civic institutions.

[jauntywundrkind]

I can recognize some admirable goals here, but holy heck, there's no replacement coming. Tax breaks for the ultra wealthy, destruction of opportunity and social safety net for everyone else, "for my friends anything, for everyone else the law" politics.

Liberals have tried helping everyone, endlessly. Giving chance and opportunity to all. That doesn't seem so unreasonable. They've lead not with restraint and threat (except to say you have to allow other people to be people). Conservatives are broadly against art and culture and science, perceiving them as liberal in mature and actively working to gut these institutions, with no replacement to be found. "The professors are the enemy" and so are the artist, the scientist, anyone who will not publicly supplicate themselves fully before this administration & it's madcap regex powered book burning scorched earth.

There's nothing like this intolerance, like this assault on not just a couple perceived Harvard elites, but on the tools America has used to bolsters the welfare and development of its people. This assault on speech and free thinking. This purposeful agenda to destroy a culture, to regress the Civil Rights of citizens, to undo a New Deal that finally saw to the common welfare of suffering people and built a nation that believed in its own greatness, to regress what chance reconstruction offered. This is a filthy mad quest to insure only a certain elite favoritism prevails and rules with absolute power, unchecked, with courts entirely stocked by radical extremeists that represent only the tiniest most wealthy and largely white nationalist oriented segment of society. That seems to controls speech and thoughts absolutely. Whatever the qualms with the Harvard elite, I just cannot see how much obvious imperious rulership, with nothing to offer other than destruction, is good. Control of discretionary funds should boost the welfare and liberty of this nation, broadly, not reduce us down and be used to allow meanness and grievance to flourish. I can't imagine at all how you can equate such control for such political and biased vicious ends, such narrowing and winnowing of the mind, with the boring and carrot-first center-left attempts to expand and enrich the world & human potential.

[jaybrendansmith]

So why repeat here your specific issues with credentialed managerial liberalism? Let's just reverse the meaning of that term: You are in favor of a fascist oligopoly that is lawless, arbitrary, and ignorant. A sadopopulist, elite, chaotic, authoritarian movement bent on the destruction of an egalitarian educational institution. Why ask an expert? The common man knows better! Why get a specialist? Fuck it, duck it! Hold my fucking beer!! You know, next time instead of hiring a devops specialist, I'm gonna go hire a fridge repairman to do my security and infrastructure on AWS. /s

[rayiner]

I’m in favor of Americanism. That means giving more respect to the college dropout who built a startup than the college professor who never built anything. That means bottom-up, participatory democracy, where the masses decide what direction to go and the experts figure out how to get there. And it means little-c conservatism—contrast the American revolution to the French revolution.

I think Harvard is great. Society needs elite scientists, etc. But they need to stay in their lane.

[jaybrendansmith]

You are arguing for the thing you are claiming to dislike. You think the college professor can't get a job at AWS? You think the college dropout deserves more respect than the professor? What's a lane? I would argue against lanes. This country should avoid having lanes, and classes, and castes. It should have as big of a middle class as possible, to allow for maximum numbers of college dropouts to become elite billionaires. Too bad killing colleges will destroy the middle class. Oh, well.

[rayiner]

Okay, when you make a classless society, you get back to me. In the meantime, we have classes. We have a cognitive elite who run almost everything that, from the civil service, to the internet, to the legal system, to the public health system, to the educational system. To use a net neutrality analogy, I think those people, at least in their professional capacity, should be “dumb pipes.” They shouldn’t use their control over the infrastructure of society to impose their own values onto society. They shouldn’t use their power to countermand what the majority wants to do.