rincebrain 9 days ago

There wasn't, historically, the level of enormous potential negative consequences legally and practically if the universities talked back.

Universities, like many institutions, have also become more like large incumbent businesses than previously - e.g. perpetuating their own existence over having strong core values.

  • toddmorey 9 days ago

    This is really well articulated. It's like how a company uses fiduciary responsibility to shareholders to justify a pivot away from some kind of principled stance.

  • cess11 9 days ago

    Might have been a mistake to let some of them turn into real estate hedge funds.

  • Thorrez 9 days ago

    Biden was considering withholding federal funds from schools over their vaccine policies[1], and tried to withhold federal funds from schools based on how they treat transgender students[2], but that was blocked by a judge. Obama did a similar thing regarding transgender students[3].

    Things like this are why Hillsdale College rejects all federal funds. So they can do what they want without threat of the government revoking funding[4].

    [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/biden-vaccines-delta...

    [2] https://www.texastribune.org/2024/06/12/texas-title-ix-lgbtq...

    [3] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/05/13/477896804...

    [4] https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/07/the-co...

    • rincebrain 9 days ago

      Sure, but my argument was not "the federal government has never done this", but that "colleges have usually felt secure that this would not be done to them if they defended student protests", or at least, if we're being cynical, "that they would have an opportunity to walk it back if their calculations were incorrect".

    • Aeolun 9 days ago

      I don’t feel like the reasons behind this are the same.

      Biden/Obama: We want you to accept and protect everyone

      Trump: I want you to deliberately reject certain races and nationalities, and close all the departments studying stuff I don’t like.

      • Jensson 9 days ago

        > Trump: I want you to deliberately reject certain races

        Which race are colleges not allowed to accept? Source for this?

CaptWillard 9 days ago

Not sure when you graduated, but I've seen a complete inversion.

Much like 90s rockers, they now rage exclusively on behalf of the machine.

  • techpineapple 9 days ago

    [flagged]

    • maeln 9 days ago

      Well I think that is the point. The university now are rolling over, not protecting their student.

    • dingaling 9 days ago

      [flagged]

      • SauciestGNU 9 days ago

        First we're not allowed to call the detention camps "concentration camps" because there aren't ovens, now we can't call them "disappearances" because they're not getting thrown out of helicopters. Forget that people are getting shipped to a foreign torture slave camp from which nobody has been released with, and with no due process.

        I think this language policing may be because people don't want to allow opposition to these things, rather than out of honor for the dead. The way to honor the dead is to prevent the circumstances of their deaths from happening again.

        Which is exactly why we must stand up against the disappearances, the camps, the collaborators, the secret police.

      • halfnormalform 9 days ago

        The fact that very bad things happened to the Disappeared of Argentina makes me more concerned about the Disappeared of US, not less.

      • alamortsubite 9 days ago

        Did you go down to Plaza de Mayo to speak to some of las Madres and ask how they feel about it, or where is your idea coming from?

      • techpineapple 9 days ago

        Kidnapped off the streets? I think for “bodies burned in pits” I might prefer “slaughtered” or “butchered”. Disappeared sounds rather light for what we’re currently discussing to my ear.

        • marcosdumay 9 days ago

          "Disappeared" does strongly imply that those people are dead, because that's what usually to happen to people that the government decides to kidnap.

          But then, that's what usually happen to the people that the government decides to kidnap. So the OP's usage is perfectly correct, and the expectation that those people are dead should exist. Including the people that we know that were sent to the concentration camp, because despite nobody claiming it's an extermination camp the leading one does strongly tend to morph into the later.

      • insane_dreamer 9 days ago

        I agree getting shipped off to a concentration camp ("detention center") without resource to justice is not on par with getting thrown out of a helicopter, but it's starting to get pretty damn close. And Trump is only getting started. If he had 7 years like the Junta did, we might wind up with our own contingent of desaparecidos.

      • [removed] 9 days ago
        [deleted]
Spooky23 9 days ago

Many universities are more like family offices that operate schools. Columbia is historically one of the biggest slumlords in NYC through their various entities.

insane_dreamer 9 days ago

> not the university culture I remember.

that's because universities are now businesses first, research institutions second, and academic institutions third

  • red_admiral 9 days ago

    This point gets to the heart of the matter. The more I look into it, everything else seems downstream from this.

  • dudinax 9 days ago

    And yet the US has some of the best universities in the world academically.

    • bdangubic 9 days ago

      it absolutely does not. you pay for paper and the network. the education, except at few rare exemptions, is subpar. talk to any asian and european and ask what they think of attending uni in the US :)