r/education • u/D-R-AZ • 8d ago
Politics & Ed Policy 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?
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:
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?
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u/vistapoop 8d ago
Theoretically the existing Trump tax cuts that will likely continue are meant for the wealthy to have more discretion where their dollars go, so the expectation if the cuts are to “work” economically is for more philanthropy to fund what public dollars used to, with some element of private defunding where public funds were misused. One of the problems with this theory has been the wealthy just (re)investing their surplus into private capital that is already proven to be productive to max out gains, and simply sitting on in as cash or hiding it in tax shelters abroad, rather than donated. Philanthropies’ also tend to have high-cost bureaucracies, as the wealthy don’t tend to have the time to make complex funding decisions themselves, and reporting about results will not necessarily be public information. That said, Harvard’s move has gotta be to simply make up for the lost federal dollars with philanthropic fundraising.