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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   14190 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 14, 2025

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I don’t know what the Ivy League is so worried about anyway, their endowments are equivalent to the GDP of a small country and they make more money every year due to their exorbitant tuition fees.

Having to suspend or scrap tons of ongoing research projects is fairly bad for them, and probably also society. I suppose they can float them out of endowments but not permanently.

It would be nice if we were laying off biochem grads for good reasons and not ideological shit test reasons.

If Harvard values racist discrimination so highly that they would rather allow funding for valuable research they're doing to be cut than to stop that, it really is a damn shame and, TBH, rather perverse. I'd hope that non-racist institutions could pick up the slack, but obviously researchers and research institutions aren't fungible, and that sort of adjustment would take a lot of time. Optimistically, it's possible that falling behind some years on this kind of research will be a decent trade-off for reducing racist discrimination in society's academic institutions in the long run, though even time might not be able to tell on that one.

Well if it’s such a terrible blow to society why don’t they liquidate .00001 percent of their endowment to cover the costs of these research programs?

University endowments are not general purpose slush funds for the University administration. They can't just allocate money from the endowment to replace research funding.

it's like 4% of their endowment

anyway, they could, and maybe they should spend more of their endowment on their own research, but that still doesn't mean "failed dumb ideological shit tests" is a solid reason for government to cancel science funding

'Science funding' isn't what is cancelled. Existing contracts allocating science funding to specific organizations gets cancelled.

The distinction is that- with the bureaucratic cycles- the funding that previously went to organization A can now go to organizations B, or C, instead.

The Supreme Court, at the behest of civil rights activists, cut a massive hole in prohibitions against government viewpoint discrimination because of "[t]he Government's fundamental, overriding interest in eradicating racial discrimination in education". The activists who pushed for this, and the Supreme Court justices who voted for it, no doubt thought this would never be used in a way they wouldn't approve of. It's taken a while, but now the Devil has turned tail.

Technically this would be the devil rounding on them, not turning tail. Both mean spinning around, but the opposite direction.
Either way, where will you hide, Roper?

Because 0.00001% of their endowment amounts to 5,000$.

The fact that my ridiculously, hyperbolically small percentage is still worth $5000 says a lot.

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