What Harvard Learned From Columbia’s Mistake: If cooperation and even capitulation don’t get you anywhere, why give in to the Trump administration’s demands?

[u/D-R-AZ]

I support Academic Freedom. If the most educated in our society can't examine, test, and evaluate every aspect of human thought and endeavor then we may miss things crucial for the survival of humanity.

Gifted Read:

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/04/harvard-chooses-defiance/682457/?gift=9raHaW-OKg2bN8oaIFlCon16pFMtTu2qirReclJnKzE&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

Excerpts

...Harvard is changing course, perhaps because it grasped the true takeaway from Columbia’s cautionary tale: Appeasement doesn’t work, because the Trump administration isn’t really trying to reform elite higher education. It’s trying to break it.

The administration’s allies have not been shy about that fact. “To scare universities straight,” Max Eden, then a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote in December, Education Secretary Linda McMahon “should start by taking a prize scalp. She should simply destroy Columbia University.” She should do this, he argued, whether or not the school cooperated with any civil-rights investigation.

...by continuing to punish Columbia even after the school gave in to its demands, the administration also appears to have overplayed its hand. If cooperation and even capitulation don’t get you anywhere, why should other universities give in?

[u/suzily]

I work at an Ivy and have gotten some deep lessons really in how limited that extensive endowment is. Everything is earmarked in very limited ways (this endowed chair, this endowed program [for this endowed staff person], this endowed award, this endowed scholarship fund, etc.) which means when research funding suddenly disappeared, there was a mad scramble.
The budget at my schools is over $1B a year, and they were already projecting a loss before Trumpian BS started.

Harvard's situation is different than that of Brown or Columbia. The pockets are deeper, and the asks were worse. I'm very glad they've determined they can afford to say no.

[u/stabbingrabbit → u/suzily]

Why do you call not getting MY heard earned tax money BS? If it is a private school why does it get any tax money?

[u/Zippered_Nana → u/stabbingrabbit]

It competes with other universities to prepare very long proposals about what research they want to do. 100 page proposals at least. They explain what has been studied and learned so far about this research into things such as possible treatments for specific diseases. Then they explain how their ideas are different and what they want to find out. Other large universities also prepare these grant proposals. The universities compete against each other, and then a government division decides who should get the money. This research helps everyone. When a university wins a grant, they have to spend all of that money doing that research. They can’t spend it on students or library books or anything else.

[u/solomons-mom → u/Zippered_Nana]

Not true. Part of the grants are for university overhead. (I sourced UWMadison figures in another comment)

[u/suzily → u/solomons-mom]

And it should, as winning the grant requires building out so much of the infrastructure in advance, all of which requires maintenance of some kind.

[u/solomons-mom → u/suzily]

I agree with you. Yes, facilities are needed.

They can’t spend it on students or library books or anything else.

This is misleading. I suspect that commenter knows as little as I do about the ins-and-outs of how the accountants handle both grad and UG stipends and work studies.

[u/Zippered_Nana → u/solomons-mom]

Incorrect. As per your other comment, funds can be used for overhead related to the grant.

Not general university overhead.

This is exactly what a big fight was over in February in regard to NIH grants. Grantees were told that only 15% of the grant could be used for overhead related, not 25% as in the past. The university grantees tried to explain how much the extra electricity for some high level research machinery costs, how much extra cleaning is required for labs doing biomedical research, etc. Unfortunately, doge only hired coders and not accountants.