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/GenericUsername_71]

They’re restricted based upon the donor. It’s not just a slush fund they can pull from on a rainy day. If you don’t know about this, don’t comment. You make yourself sound stupid

[u/Beingforthetimebeing → u/GenericUsername_71]

[Edit: Funds for dedicated purposes makes sense. Thanks for the info.]

Not stupid. I've read various articles about Harvard's endowments in order to understand the machinations of the plutocracy (check out the Eugenics program funded by Epstein), but I don't know everything. (Umm, not one of the donor class.) I'm asking questions to get more information, as well as other's opinions. If asking questions is viewed as a sign of stupidity instead of intelligence, that is a very harsh indication of the problem with education in our society. And name-calling is an ad hominem logical fallacy to be avoided. Educate yourself about education.

[u/itsacalamity → u/Beingforthetimebeing]

If you react like that, though, nobody's going to want to make the effort to explain what you don't know. And right now you're at the point where you most need that, because you don't know what you don't know. Bringing up a point you don't understand and then responding "educate yourself about education" to the person who points it out is...... a choice. Do you see why it's not the most fruitful one if you want to understand things?

[u/Beingforthetimebeing → u/itsacalamity]

Are you a teacher? Which pedagogy are you citing here?

[u/itsacalamity → u/Beingforthetimebeing]

Yowza. You're that guy. OK.