I have no idea. The capitulation of so many elites is the thing that scares me most, so I'm glad to see this.
Predictions: Harvard will win the court case, Trump will still not pay most of it. Maybe Harvard gets the money back from the next administration.
One interesting question here is whether this move is good for them from a fundraising perspective, especially in the context of the big anti-Palestine donor backlash. (They lost over $150m in donations just last year over not taking a hard stand on Palestinian protestors.)
The current front page of Harvard's webpage is interesting. The timing is such that they're not really in admissions season, so they've turned over the whole front page to promoting the value of their research.
Totally. It's been shocking to see all these disgraceful bullshit from law firms and universities. And media. And tech oligarchs.
4 to 1.
I'm really freaked out watching Trump flout the court over Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
The thing is, universities and lawfirms need people like me, speaking as a member of some class however you want to define it. They should strive to remain semi-respectable in my eyes.
MIT too, and Stanford has come out in support of Harvard. More like this please.
The kind of stuff Trump is trying is, you would think, an existential threat to both Harvard and big lawfirms. Once no one cares about the research/law stuff being done right (because politics determines the answer), then there's no point in paying for an institution that can do good research/law stuff.
Yeah I don't know how it plays out but even apart from the point in 1/4, Columbia has helpfully demonstrated that giving in doesn't get you any relief. Once the trumpers decide they're coming for your money, the only question is whether you give them your dignity too. I'm glad Harvard has decided not to (at the moment).
It kinda makes sense to me having been affiliated with both that Columbia behaved the way they did and Harvard's behaving this way. Columbia is always looking for scammy side hustles, and gives the impression of being willing to do anything for money, and Harvard is defined by a deep well of "fuck off" energy.
My favorite, possibly apocryphal story, is Harvard telling the MBTA to fuck off when they tried to eminent domain some land for the subway, because Harvard had a land grant from King George.
But some non-apocryphal ones that get at the same energy. Harvard has only given three honorary degrees not at commencement: George Washington (during the revolutionary war), Winston Churchill (during WW2), and Nelson Mandela (during his last US trip). Otherwise you have to go to commencement if you want the honorary degree. My first year of college Princeton set off a big bidding war where financial aid went way up, and lots of other schools scrambled to try to follow them. Harvard did nothing until after admissions was over, and only then did they announce that they'd increase financial aid more than Princeton did and do so immediately for the incoming students, I guess just to prove that they would still get the students they wanted without following Princeton. Just a deep well of fuck off energy.
Not that I'm short of things to genuinely worry about, but occasionally I wonder if Trump would decide he's tired of all this trouble from Boston and just decide to make an example of the city by nuking it or something. (I'm sure that here in the Dumbest Timeline, such an event would somehow target Boston-proper and not Cambridge and leave Harvard directly unscathed.)
Similarly, I have wondered whether Trump would nuke Sacramento.
He doesn't know what Sacramento is. He would nuke Berkeley.
No one knows what "San Jose" is. Go there for safety.
I suppose that if he were aiming for Newsom, he'd aim at Marin.
I'm sorry, Mr. President. There's just no...there there.
16 do you know the way?
Is our university administrators learning?
The secret with bullies is they don't pick on people who can and will stand up for themselves. If Harvard and the ruling class tell Trump and his morons to fuck off, they will. They'll slink off and declare victory on their propaganda channels. They're going after people people weaker than them (undocumented migrants, asylum seekers, foreign students) and people who've proven themselves spineless cowards (law firms, Columbia, congress, our spineless Democratic leadership).
Dealing with Fascism requires a degree of ruthlessness that the American center left doesn't seem really capable of at the moment.
Or at any time since Obama got elected.
It kinda makes sense to me having been affiliated with both that Columbia behaved the way they did and Harvard's behaving this way.
Maybe, but the order of operations probably helped a lot. Columbia caved and then got targeted with illegal impoundment anyway.
It's always cheering when not being a shit is the behavior with better outcomes than being a shit.
I think a key part of what's going on here is that there's 3 main parties here (no, neither students nor faculty make the list): the Trump administration, the university, and the big ticket donors. What has resulted in Universities caving to Trump is that the Trump administration was asking for the same thing that the big ticket donors were asking for (namely, anti-Palestine stuff). Now that Trump is asking for stuff that's totally unrelated to what the big ticket donors want, the Universities are more likely to stand up to the administration. Donors like science!
I remember when rich people just wanted buildings named after them.
I noticed Harvard's letter to the WH led off with, here are all the things we've been doing about anti-Semitism thank you very much - definitely donors as audience.
11
Osgood!
Aw, hi! Wouldn't have thought I ever commented enough to merit the welcome back, but you've made me feel warm and happy.
10 has more confidence in Harvard's backbone than I do, having worked here for, jeez, 13 years now. My sense of the place is that it's *extremely* risk averse, in every instance, and if there's a way to avoid sticking their neck out, you can count on university leadership to take it. I have been complaining about our public silence to anybody will listen for months, and am very pleasantly surprised to see some fighting spirit.
And I didn't know that about Mandela's honorary degree! My fun fact about that visit is that that night was my first date with the woman who's now my wife -- knowing that it had been Nelson Mandela day was the only way we were ever able to recall what the date was. (we were freshman at the time)
JMM observes the Trump letter to Harvard was on shaky ground even by his standards - demanding a cadre of MAGA political officers covering every department to validate "viewpoint diversity" and affirmative action-style hiring of employees / enrollment of students to make up any lack of diversity - and it probably helped that they waited for such a letter to be written formally.
Yeah, there's a few things. To say simultaneously that "viewpoint discrimination" won't be tolerated and also that every school, department, and teaching unit must have ideological balance is obviously incoherent. And as the lawyer letter says, there actually is some law under Title VI about how the government is supposed to process a complaint, and they've taken none of the steps that are required before withholding any funding, let alone all funding. Part of what I appreciated about both letters, the one from the lawyers and the one from Garber, is that they didn't stop there, though -- they went ahead and said that we have fundamental rights that we will defend, not just that these doofuses aren't acting through the proper channels.
I worry that 2 is correct, that we'll win in court and then they'll just refuse to comply with the injunction to restore "frozen" funding.
I don't know how much money Harvard University gets. More than Princeton probably but maybe less than Columbia. I say that because Columbia owns its hospitals. The Harvard teaching hospitals are affiliated, but they have their own governance and research operations.
I'm still kind of annoyed that Harvard/ Garber continues to equate pro Palestinuan/ anti-Gaza protests as antisemitism.
28 There's a bunch of that at work with the law firm concessions. Suppose some rich asshole client is paying you zillions, and says 'hey my friend DT is a deal guy, you should really go down and talk to him in person.' OK, you know that DT isn't actually a deal guy in any meaningful sense. But if all the deal has to be is some kind of faux feudal submission, and a commitment not to dissuade associates from taking conservative-aligned pro bono cases, if they want, well there's a bunch of people getting a bunch of money from rich assholes willing to take that deal.
10: I don't know if this is true or , if true, how widespread this view is, but there was a claim that a college admissions consultant said that Columbia's brand is now tainted. People with other options may go elsewhere.
25: I BEG TO DIFFER
35.2 I'm still kind of annoyed that Harvard/ Garber continues to equate pro Palestinuan/ anti-Gaza protests as antisemitism.
I am still EXTREMELY annoyed about this. I see the political benefit they can claim now from having taken that position all along but it's still offensive bullshit. I am also still very, very angry about the way Claudine Gay was treated. That's actually what got me started making myself pain in the ass around the office, was the abject refusal of anyone else in Mass Hall (or on the governing boards) (to be clear I do not work in Mass Hall or with the governing boards) to recognize the bad faith of the attacks on her and respond appropriately.
35: I mean, at this stage it makes sense for Harvard to conflate itself with its affiliated research institutions for defense purposes.
It makes sense for Harvard, sure, but less so for the hospitals. MGH can still go to court, or to the press, or whatever, and say "what on earth do protests in Harvard Yard have to do with us," and I imagine they value that distance.
41: So, it's all combined Mass General Brigham now. Formerly Partners MGH and the Brigham hospital (not physicians) no longer have independent voices allowed to speak to external audoences. Anne Klibanski, CEO of MGB, sent out an e-mail last night saying, "we value our clinical affiliation, but we're not Harvard University and none of this should affect us."
If I have to stick up for UPMC, I will.
Aw, hi! Wouldn't have thought I ever commented enough to merit the welcome back, but you've made me feel warm and happy.
But whatever happened to "Yousbad"?
I'm kind of hoping Trump will re-route science research funding to the Hoover institution for maximum hilarity.
43: we're not Harvard University and none of this should affect us.
Yes, Trump & Co. are known for their care about fine institutional distinctions.
Kilbanski may need someone to give her the apocryphal Trotsky quote about being interested in the war.
47:They're a for-profit business now that isn't taxed. Money is the only thing that matters. They'll cave just like the law firms.
Super late to this, but is "cajones" in the OP a deliberate pun? I had to look it up to get the exact meaning ("a big case?" was as far as I got on my own), but apparently one translation for the singular is "till". (Most frequent is "drawer" -- showing some drawers, bro.)
I didn't know that cajones didn't mean los pelotas de hombres.
Literally overheard conversation after I posted that:
Mom(?) to preschooler: ¿Cómo?
Preschooler: [indistinct talk]
Mom: Ohhhh, aircraft carrier. ¡Puede ser!
The kid is pretending to be an aircraft carrier, so mom uses the usted forn?
That hadn't occurred to me! Does one use "usted" but also "ella," I wonder? I guess I'm not even sure of aircraft carrier pronouns in English. In fact, is the nautical pronoun weirdness completely obsolete at this point?
The word you're looking for in 50 has two o's, which may be a memorable fact, but I know you love puzzles so I'll let you put it together. Hint: not "conejos."
I'll wait until Duo feels my balls are ready for a Spanish-speaking audience.
Apparently the meaning in the name of the San Diego suburb is "box" after the shape of the canyon it's in.
I learned "caja", but not any connotations.
Super late to this, but is "cajones" in the OP a deliberate pun?
Nope, afraid not! Just run of the mill absentmindedness.