He called for “a never-ending compliance review to ensure that Harvard follows the law” banning positive discrimination. He also wrote: “To scare universities straight, McMahon should start by taking a prize scalp. She should simply destroy Columbia University” by freezing research grant funding or preventing it receiving subsidised student loans.
His tactics have since been implemented: from withdrawing government grants and revoking visas of foreign students protesting on campuses, to deploying artificial intelligence and “control-F” text searches to identify diversity, equity and inclusion projects to shut down.
The administration has singled out Columbia and Harvard, while cutting funds at another four elite institutions — Princeton, Brown, Cornell and Northwestern — on a list of 60 to be investigated for a range of violations relating to antisemitic harassment and discrimination, according to a document unveiled last month by the Department of Justice.
The University of Pennsylvania has separately had $175mn in funding frozen for allowing a transgender athlete to participate in a swimming championship, although this complied with national rules at the time.
In a sign of other possible measures to come, Eden also called for a 37 per cent tax on university endowment income, and — in line with parallel recommendations from the right-wing Project 2025 group — an overhaul of the country’s accreditation systems.
He also singled out other universities that could be targeted, including Stanford, University of Washington, University of Illinois Chicago and the University of California system.
“a moment of reckoning has arrived for the west”
Our private research universities are not actually purely private. They are designed to be both a cryptic soft extension of the state (e.g. national security, priming the prosperity pipeline with blue sky research, truth adjudication, etc.), which is also oppositely intended as an independent check on the state and state power in times of abuse as well. This tacit and quiet knowledge, which used to be held at the AAU and the relevant professors, has been mostly lost.
So ‘overhead’ or ‘indirect costs’ is not actually overhead at all. It is supposed to be cryptic state support based on research merit to avoid political pressure to fund 3rd tier universities at the same level as Princeton. So the whole system was designed back in the Vannevar Bush era but without leaving the esoteric knowledge with modern academicians.
It’s a disaster. It was a quiet game which worked brilliantly to serve the nation and its population until lunatics started to get a foothold in the research universities.
This is why when you audit this stuff, you see waste. It wasn’t ever intended to be what it appears to be: this was the USG paying to have a totally ELITE and EXCLUSIVE quasi-private, quasi-public resource. Think Manhattan project. Think The Jasons. Think winning.
And, despite my deep dislike of how @realchrisrufo has acted towards me, his point is spot on. If the elite U.S. universities are so confused as to think that they are truly 100% private and that they should be allowed to destroy their role of ELITE service to the nation which built them up with federal dollars, that is a moment to remind them of the “Endless Frontier” agreement.
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US debt increase while Janet Yellen was in charge of Fed or US Treasury : $15 trillion
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There is another way:
Refuse taxpayer money.
