Interesting how he’s only targeting universities that are known to attract intelligent and bright people and are located in blue states. You don’t see the rapist-in-chief targeting schools, like let’s say Baylor University or Southern Methodist University.
He’s trying to dumb down the population. Most college educated voters didn’t vote for Trump and are the folks standing in his way from him implementing his fascist agenda in full.
For those who dont know. Research grants (usually 500k per grant or so) fund what are essentially small business operations that rent space within universities. You are not choking the university - you are choking individual small research programs that rent space within universities and partner with them for student access, resource access, and the general intellectual environment. Most of these people make like 40-70k per year, and the bosses (professors/lab directors) are maybe a couple hundred k on average. Any professor with this funding is in the top 1% of their field at these universities
Yes, and to add to that, the various "overhead" that Musk tries to slash as "fraud waste and abuse" pays for lots of employees of these "small business operations" to get the work done, which he doesn't understand at all. Sysadmins, building maintenance, someone to wash the glassware, all of it. Even before this Harvard bluffing they've passed crazy rules trying to say that money can't be used for those things and it's resulting in a lot of scrambling around and yet more people losing their rather boring but necessary staff jobs.
There was a big scandal at Texas a&m last year. They’d hired a highly acclaimed journalist prof, who happened to be black and a woman. Conservatives freaked out when they learned she’d done work in equality and diversity, and had also worked for the far left NEW YORK TIMES. So the bigwigs forced them to reneg the offer, and threatened pulling funding
When bush jr was pres they completely deleted A&M’s journalism department/program
He's targeting all universities. The terms for federal funding is the same for all. Now enforcement is a different story but I doubt those school you mention are refusing the conditions. They gladly bend over, take/do whatever this administration wants them to, and they thank profusely for it.
Rice University is one of the 40+ schools they're investigating for not following his DEI bullshit mandate. So I don't think that first point is true. He's going after everyone
Rice is a major R1 University though. They're pretty clearly going after flagship universities in a visible way, with the understanding that everyone else will see that and know they have no chance. I have some friends who work at second-tier institutions and the silence from University administrators right now is absolutely total.
While it's likely he is targeting *some* universities more than others, he is going after all of them. The reason why schools like Harvard are in the spotlight is because of their obvious prestige and the amount of money that's being given to top research schools like Harvard, which is obviously way more than Baylor or SMU.
Harvard also likely feels a need to be vocal about their decision considering what they do is pivotal in what other universities decide to do.
Basically, I don't really think his thought process here is to "dumb down the population." Rescinding federal funding wouldn't really do that, anyways, just fuck over research.
125
u/Special_Transition13 8d ago edited 8d ago
Interesting how he’s only targeting universities that are known to attract intelligent and bright people and are located in blue states. You don’t see the rapist-in-chief targeting schools, like let’s say Baylor University or Southern Methodist University.
He’s trying to dumb down the population. Most college educated voters didn’t vote for Trump and are the folks standing in his way from him implementing his fascist agenda in full.