[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.

[jaybrendansmith]

They do it because they are educated. By definition, it cannot be a dumb pipe. The very process of education creates a perspective that is logical, balanced, and informed. An educated person understands that climate change is real, that CO2 warms the planet, how could they not? It is physics. They know that sex is informed by both the body and the brain, how could they not? That is physiology. They know that skin color is arbitrary. They read books, and they work with other cultures and races. A professor of Economics cannot teach trickle down, it's based in nonsense and simply untrue. No more than would a professor of Medicine teach you that someone can be told what sex to be. They don't mean to be elite in the same way that the rich don't mean to be rich: They just are. If you are truly educated, you would likely hold the same values that they do, because you've been exposed to the same set of clear and verified facts. I cannot understand this insistence that someone's faith or ignorance should be held with equal regard to my facts. Ignorance is they cause of most of the evils of this world, I do not confuse wrong from right, nor do I confuse educated from ignorant.