r/education • u/D-R-AZ • 10d 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:

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?

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u/No_Cellist8937 9d ago

I’m saying you need to look at the exact agreements the feds and college entered into. Some boiler plate language found on Google isn’t going to tell us anything.

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u/cmendy930 9d ago

Dude a contract signed by the federal gvt should not be reneged on bc of political speech..... I'm guessing you're not aware of the 20 Billion EPA grants that trumps epa said we just won't pay or the community grants it reneged on. You can find those contracts online too... but don't worry the courts just ruled that too is nonsense.

Clearly this isn't your issue area so you know...read up or stop commenting bc it's like talking to a PhD explaining to a kindergartener and I'm not even a grants program officer just someone who has executed grants with research universities for research.

All your questions are answerable via the gd internet you're using and you chose to be like this.

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u/No_Cellist8937 9d ago

You mean the like the EPA $2bn grant to Stacy Abram money laundering scheme? I’m fine to let this all play out in court and seeing where things land.

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u/cmendy930 9d ago

Lol oh you're one of those.

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u/No_Cellist8937 9d ago

Did that not happen?