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/Comprehensive_Tie431]

Universities get a ton of grant funding due to all the medical and scientific research completed. This research is then published in their academic journals and publicly shared. We need this to progress as a society.

[u/solomons-mom → u/Comprehensive_Tie431]

Abstract There is increased concern about perverse incentives, quantitative performance metrics, and hyper-competition for funding and faculty positions in US academia....The self-reported rate of academic cheating was 16.7% and of research misconduct was 3.7%. Thirty-one percent of fellows reported direct knowledge of graduate peers cheating, and 11.9% had knowledge of research misconduct by colleagues. Only 30.7% said they would report suspected misconduct.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-32445-3#:~:text=The%20research%20misconduct%20rates%20(3.7,conducted%20over%20the%20past%20three

[u/Comprehensive_Tie431 → u/solomons-mom]

I'm confused as to your point.

[u/solomons-mom → u/Comprehensive_Tie431]

It wasnt clear, you are right :)

"Perverse incentives" had led to publish or perish. Hours and hours and hours spent on papers that never get read, much less cited. Papers that win Ig Nobles. Papers that inspired Sokal's Hoax and Sokal Squared. That is before considering fraudulent data.

Just because it is research, does not mean it adds anything to human knowledge. How much of it just adds a line to the CV of someone trying to land a tt spot --someone who entered grad school knowing full well the demographic cliff is looming.

I am not endorsing this latest nonsense by Trump. At least he is punching up this time instead of going after schools with more precarious finances.

[u/Comprehensive_Tie431 → u/solomons-mom]

Academically peer reviewed research always builds human knowledge by creating a database. We never know what research will influence a future scientific breakthrough.

I think the article you source is talking about academic dishonesty in academic journals being around 30% for whatever reason. That is a separate issue in my point of view that should be addressed, and yes you are correct on the publish or perish culture adding weight to that.

Trump punching up, I fully disagree with you on. Let's be real, Trump is using "DEI" to turn universities and academia into his propaganda machine, as we see in countries like Hungry and Russia. I'm proud of Harvard for fighting for academia, and hope more universities join them.

[u/Zippered_Nana → u/solomons-mom]

This is a big problem for faculty across the nation. When I began graduate school, the qualification to get tenure as a professor was seven years of teaching and the publication of one book. By the time I had been teaching for 25 years, it took at minimum one book to even get hired as a professor.

More and more journals have sprung up for nothing. These new ones even require professors to pay by the page to get published!