"...once the government did take away funding and present its ultimatum—completely outside the process specified in Title VI law—Columbia’s administration quickly agreed to everything asked, to howls of outrage from the left-leaning faculty. Yet despite its total capitulation, the government has continued to hold Columbia’s medical research and other science funding hostage, while inventing a never-ending list of additional demands..."
I think the clearest and most cogent articulation I have seen was given by Marc Andreesen back in January, in a 4 hour podcast on Trump policy with Lex Friedman, starting at 58 min. His position was that University reform is not possible. Instead, the institutions themselves need to be destroyed so that new institutions can replace them with more agreeable values [1].
Relevant highlights IMO:
> I mean, think of the term academic freedom, and then think of what these people have done to it. It’s gone. That entire thing was fake and is completely rotten. And these people are completely giving up the entire moral foundation of the system that’s been built for them, which by the way, is paid for virtually 100% by taxpayer money.
...
>the population at large is going to realize the corruption in their industry and it’s going to withdraw the funding.
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>Okay, so let’s go through it. So the universities are funded by four primary sources of federal funding. The big one is a federal student loan program, which is in the many trillions of dollars at this point, and then only spiraling way faster than inflation. That’s number one. Number two is federal research funding, which is also very large. And you probably know that when a scientist at the university gets a research grant, the university rakes as much as 70% of the money for central uses. Number three is tax exemption at the operating level, which is based on the idea that these are nonprofit institutions as opposed to, let’s say, political institutions. And then number four is tax exemptions at the endowment level, which is the financial buffer that these places have. Anybody who’s been close to a university budget will basically see that what would happen if you withdrew those sources of federal taxpayer money, and then for the state schools, the state money, they all instantly go bankrupt. And then you could rebuild. Then you could rebuild.
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>Suppose you and I want to start a new university, and we want to hire all the free thinking professors, and we want to have the place that fixes all this, practically speaking, we can’t do it because we can’t get access to that money.
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>Charlie Munger actually had the best comment, this great investor, Charlie Munger has great comment. He was once asked, it’s like General Electric was going through all these challenges, and he was asked at a Q&A. It said, “How would you fix the culture at General Electric?” And he said, “Fix the culture at General Electric?” He said, “I couldn’t even fix the culture at a restaurant.”
It’s insane, like obviously you can’t do it. Nobody in business thinks you can do that, it’s impossible. Now look, having said all that, I should also express this because I have a lot of friends who work at these places and are involved in various attempts to fix these. I hope that I’m wrong, I would love to be wrong, I would love for the underpants gnome step two to be something clear and straightforward that they can figure out how to do. I would love to fix it, I’d love to see them come back to their spoken principles, I think that’d be great, I’d love to see the professors with tenure get bravery, it would be fantastic
For what it’s worth, thank you for posting this. I disagree with it. But at least it’s a coherent argument.
(Well, it’s wrong in assuming these institutions would go bankrupt without federal funding. They wouldn’t. The Tier II schools would. But Harvard is absolutely fine running as a private corporation.)
Thanks. For the record, I directionally agree with the problem statement, but not the proposed solution.
I dont think it would work unless they find a way to impact the public schools. They has far greater PR and legal challenges, but the institutions themselves are far more vulnerable to funding cuts if those are surmounted. For example, the University of California system has a 30 billion endowment, but supports 300k students plus 250k faculty, staff, and administrators. However, the UC endowments are growing rapidly, up from 20 billion in 2019.
If the federal government can somehow blow up all the state universities (e.g. loan denial), it wont matter if there are some Ivy League holdouts. Even then, this is probably worse than the problem.
End result: substantially reduced student immigration along with native brain drain out of the US. Other countries reap the benefits of our best and brightest. New institutions fail to attract cutting-edge researchers and become ideology-driven vocational schools in the Soviet tradition.
Also, Marc Andreesen is a repugnant neoreactionary toady.
I personally dont think his extreme position is realistic. It would take too long. Foundations are too big, public schools pose a major challenge, and the public is mixed on the topic
I think a much more interesting idea is breaking the Council for Higher Education Accreditation monopoly on accreditation, and replacing it with some standard metrics.
Letting incumbent universities decide if new universities can exist causes the same problems as giving hospitals a veto over new competition, and education is ripe for disruption.
I would love to see accreditation to any program that produces students that could pass some standard tests or metrics.
The shame IMO is that this is going to further polarize people along the lines of "Yay, stick it to those rich schools" and "Omg, this is literally the second coming of Hitler."
It would be lovely to have a broad conversation about why it makes no sense for the government to play HR manager for universities, and ALSO ask why billions in tax money is perennially given to ultra-wealthy, exclusive universities who are often more than capable of finding opportunities for profit in the private sector. Because the question seems to be: "Is Harvard capable of remaining solvent without a couple of billion per year? If that's the case, what's going on there? What is the taxpayer getting out of this that it wouldn't be able to get otherwise? Is there no other funding model?"
Which opens the question of whether or not cutting funding is likely to get what the government wants, or further drive universities to seek funding from potentially hostile foreign governments.
And I think depending on where the money goes and how it's spent, sometimes the answers range across a whole spectrum. But as I said, instead of that conversation, we're stuck with more politics as a team sport.
> "...more than capable of finding opportunities for profit in the private sector..."
You actually want research institutions to be even more patent-happy moneygrubbers than they already are today? That's going to keep even more technologies and drugs unaffordable without licensing and hold back progress.
That seems like a false dichotomy, unless you're really saying the two options are "Billions in federal funds" or "Ivy Leagues will become even more horrific in the world of patent law." In fact rewarding such bad behavior with billions seems insane, surely that money could be better spent on institutions willing to commit to less combative practices.
> The paper you linked is topically - and perhaps a bit ironically - co-authored with an Israel funded thinktank.
It's also made by a number of respected academics and academic institutions, and all you've done is ignore the content in favor of attacking a respectable source.
The fundamental question is about basing research funding on merit: Should government funding go to the best researchers with best ideas, regardless of which university they are affiliated with? Rich elite universities can attract many of the best researchers, because of the resources and prestige they offer. And those researchers then win competitive grants from the government.
Some argue that research grants should be deliberately spread wider in order to fund a wider range of ideas. Instead of considering each funding call in isolation and awarding grants to the top 10-20% of applications, maybe existing funding should be considered a negative merit, regardless of its source. Or maybe there should be stricter limits on how many grants a single PI can have at the same time.
I missed this. Good call out.