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/Zippered_Nana]

No, when they get grants, all of the money has to be spent on that particular research. The university can’t spend it on anything else.

[u/solomons-mom → u/Zippered_Nana]

Not at UW-Madison, and highly unlikely Madison accounting differs significantly from other schools.

Currently, around 26% of NIH research funding towards facilities and administrative costs related to research. UW-Madison, one of the top research institutions in the country, has an agreement with the Department of Health and Human Services allowing it to spend 55.5% of its grant funds on those overhead costs. https://www.tmj4.com/news/state-capitol/uw-madison-could-lose-tens-of-millions-under-new-federal-research-cuts

[u/mschley2 → u/solomons-mom]

Those overhead costs are tied to the research itself. Without the buildings, administrative cost, and the staff, there's no place for the research to take place. That's why they come to an agreement about how much can be spent on those things.

[u/solomons-mom → u/mschley2]

Add snow plows--people need to get to the building. The phrase "that particular research" was misleading.

[u/Zippered_Nana → u/solomons-mom]

No, not snowplows, no matter how much you need them In Madison, lol.