This framing conveniently ignores the question of whether the president should have the authority to single-handedly withhold funding for universities, broadly considered to be one of the foundational pillars of America's strength in the 20th century. While I think it's interesting and answers the specific question it raises, it's wild that the economist has just accepted that the president has dictatorial powers.
"Conveniently" is the wrong word to use here. "Conveniently ignores" implies that the author intentionally disregarded some known facts to make their argument look more persuasive. However, this is not the case here. The article's argument is that a reduction in government funding is very damaging even when it is small relative to the endowment size. This argument would not lose any of its power if the author covered the topic of whether the president has the power to withdraw funding.
(On a side note, the word "framing" is also the wrong word to use.)
One way to phrase your message correctly would be: "This article is about the impact of the president's decision, but I wish it also talked about whether the president has the authority to make that decision in the first place".
"Conveniently" also insinuates that the author discarded some arguments or facts that don't suit their narrative, because they would then have to think more, which is precisely what is inconvenient. It's quite an insult, actually.
There's a reason that court cases typically address standing before addressing the underlying question. It matters much more that you're taking on a case before you determine the case on the merits. If the case doesn't have standing it is not worth considering.
"Conveniently Ignoring" the standing question is frankly an admission of compliance to something that is not the law. Who cares "why people can't live without food" if someone is saying "let's starve the population." One question isn't worth platforming while the other is on the table.
The word "dictatorial" doesn't apply here. What we're talking about is government funding being provided to private universities. And Congress hasn't appropriated specific amounts of money to specific universities. It has created a pool of funds and given the executive branch discretion to allocate those funds. The powers of the executive branch are invested in the president. See Article II, Section 1 ("The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.").
Congress, moreover, has enacted laws that use those funds as a hook to influence the behavior of private universities. Specifically, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 allows the executive branch to deny federal funds to universities that discriminate on the basis of race. Now, it just so happens that, in 2023, Harvard university, among others, was found by the Supreme Court to have flagrantly violated that law: https://www.ed.gov/media/document/dear-colleague-letter-sffa...
There is nothing "dictatorial" about the President withholding taxpayer dollars from a university that is in violation of the law, where Congress has authorized the executive branch to do so. Indeed, I'm at a loss to understand who else you think has the power to do this, if not the President?
I'm guessing that what GP meant with "dictatorial" was along the lines of the power you describe being wielded in a specific manner.
To put it differently: a state of affairs where the Executive/President has those powers may not be dictatorial, but this specific instance of him making use of that discretion in this specific way might be.
> There is nothing "dictatorial" about the President withholding taxpayer dollars from a university that is in violation of the law
Hey now, wait a minute. Has the “violation of law” been established yet? There’s a pretty wide gulf between “I believe a violation of the law has occurred” and having the matter adjudicated.
You’re clearly an intelligent person; there’s no need to try to sneak bullshit in through the back door. Let the strength of your arguments and facts speak for themselves. And make sure they are actual facts.
America is a democracy, not a bureaucracy. The executive branch is governed by a single representative elected by the people. It is becoming increasingly apparent that the people didn't make a great choice this time but our constitutional republic is also one of the foundational pillars of american strength and trump being an idiot doesn't change that.
The judicial branch has authority to stop him but they're only supposed to use it if they are convinced that what he's doing is unconstitutional. Some of the executive branch's appointee's have authority over him but only in specific circumstances (such as 25th amendment) and they're usually in agreement with him since he gets to appoint them anyways. Otherwise, all authority in the executive branch effectively belongs to the president and random midlevel bureaucrats can only exercise it on his behalf.
This is true only to the extent that Congress delegates its power to the executive. Per Article I of the Constitution, Congress has the plenary power of the purse.
So if it decides to spend $X on something specific, it has to be spent on whatever that something is. The President doesn't have discretion in that case.
> The judicial branch has authority to stop him but they're only supposed to use it if they are convinced that what he's doing is unconstitutional.
That omits a crucial issue that many amazingly overlook: The bar isn't constitutional but legal. Congress makes the laws, not the President. The President is bound by those laws, and in fact their job is to enforce the laws that Congress makes. They cannot do things unless empowered by the law.
If a presidential candidate promises to break the law in his campaign, that does not give him the authority to break the law. We are a constitutional republic and the constitution must be followed.
It's quite clear that the current President does not give a damn about the constitution, know anything about it, or have any compunction about blatant violation of the constitution.
> Otherwise, all authority in the executive branch effectively belongs to the president and random midlevel bureaucrats can only exercise it on his behalf.
This is a fair question, but it's being asked a lot already.
Let's imagine that completely legitimate circumstances lead to the US Government stopping the stream of grants to the Ivy League universities. How would they cope, given their enormous endowments that generate significant interest? This question is asked much less, and the answer is much less obvious. Hence the value of TFA.
Additionally, the follow-on questions are irrelevant. There are a million better questions to ask on the other side of this as well, before we ask why someone can't live without the money that they've been acquiring entirely above board and legally. "Why does the gov't think it has the authority to do this?"
Why do we need to have theoretical debates about legitimate circumstances, when there are real debates about illegitimate circumstances happening? having this irrelevant follow-on discussion is doing the gov't's work for them.
In a different setting I can see asking this question, but there is no need to ask this question while the circumstances are clearly illegitimate.
What's the point of such an abstract question? The university's goals and expected resolution for the problem would always depend critically on why the stream of grants stopped.
At some level, someone needs to have discretion on which grants to award and not award. You can call it "dictatorial", but I don't see how it's any less dictatorial if the decision-maker is some faceless, unaccountable bureaucrat vs a President that is accountable to voters. Surely, grants were being denied before for other reasons.
>Surely, grants were being denied before for other reasons.
Were they being denied? It might well be the case that grants were never denied except when the grant spigot ran dry waiting for the next year. I don't necessarily believe that is the case, but is there some evidence that it doesn't work like that?
Process matters, everything else is to a first approximation merely platitudes. What's the difference between faceless bureaucrats making these decisions vs the president? It's the difference between rule of law vs dictatorship. Faceless bureaucrats have to follow policy defined by Congress and the President. If the person making the policy is the same person making the decision, and especially when the "policy" is whatever their fancy is, that's not rule of law. America was founded on the principle, "a government of law, not of men".
Moreover, faceless bureaucrats risk criminal and financial punishments for things like self-dealing. The president faces no such risk. And when they're a lame duck, they (theoretically) face zero risk, period.
Bureaucracies are slow. They're costly. Like democracy generally, they're inefficient. They're worthwhile because, at least as far as government is concerned, they're a necessary element to maintain rule of law and avoiding dictatorship. The solution to government bureaucracy isn't to remove the bureaucracy, it's to remove the government involvement. Otherwise, you're just inviting dictatorship. This has happened countless times. When the people get upset about perceived government ineffectiveness and its democratic institutions are too slow to respond (e.g. gridlocked Congress), there are two routes: privatization (i.e. reducing the role of government, not merely something like syndicalism) or dictatorship.
What's the difference between Donald Trump's rise to power and approach to governance, versus Huge Chavez's? Not much. The parallels are amazing. Both came to power promising radical overhauls of perceived sclerotic institutions, including broken legislatures. Like Trump, Chavez was a media whore who spent most of his time talking on television, making impossible promises and blaming everyone and everything else for his own failures. (Castro was like this, too.) They both spout so much B.S. that most people can't even keep up; they just start taking them at their word, which is why Chavez was popular until the day he died. His successor has zero charisma; the policies haven't changed, but now people hate the exact same kind of government they had during Chavez, but have no power to change it. That's what happens when you choose government of men rather than government of law.
Do you honestly think Trump is individually reviewing grants?
Trump with help of various groups makes political appointees who either individually oversee grant reviews or administrate individuals that do. These people are just as faceless and unaccountable as with any other president ...
The difference here is that Congress who is much more accountable to voters deliberated and wrote laws authorizing various funding which is being completely overridden by the branch of government that is supposed to carry out the law.
It is dictatorial, not because one person gets to make the decision, but because the US constitution delineates the powers of the gov't, to which the President does not have this power. I really do not understand why this is such a hard concept for many people here to grasp. The separation of powers is such a fundamental aspect of our government that I am astounded to see you miss this point. When any one branch usurps the power of another branch it is the *EXACT* kind of tyranny the constitution was created to avoid.
You don't go and decide a case on the merits when you've thrown it out on standing.
Addressing the other question is a pre-requisite to considering the one included in this piece. And given that they are ignoring the presumable answer to the other question, they have not justified the existence of this article.
if you want to go that way, you're conveniently ignoring if congress should have the authority to allocate funds to nonprofits that aren't part of the government under the enumerated uses in article I section 8.
Yeeep. This is the only thing worth knowing about this whole mess. The people trust their reps to handle the money, and the reps are the only people who are supposed to be able to manage that money.
Yet here we have tacit acceptance that the president can fuck with citizens' money just because he's in his feels about something. Absolute clownery.
A few other commenters have alluded to it, but Obama's 2011 (and then 2014/2016) "Dear Colleague" letters are critical to understanding what's going on here. As FIRE tells it:
In April 2011, the United States Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) established new mandates requiring colleges and universities receiving federal funding to dramatically reduce students’ due process rights. Under the new regulations, announced in a letter from Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Russlynn Ali, colleges and universities were required to employ a “preponderance of the evidence” standard—a 50.01%, “more likely than not” evidentiary burden—when adjudicating student complaints concerning sexual harassment or sexual violence. The regulations further required that if a university judicial process allows the accused student to appeal a verdict, it must allow the accusing student the right to appeal as well, resulting in a type of “double jeopardy” for the accused. Additionally, OCR’s letter failed to recognize that truly harassing conduct (as defined by the law) is distinct from protected speech. Institutions that did not comply with OCR’s new regulations faced federal investigation and a potential loss of federal funding.
The innovation in these letters was realizing OCR could just come to a new understanding of what civil rights law required, then tell universities that since this is what civil rights law means, following the guidance would be a mandate for institutions to receive federal funding. So now Trump's come in and reinterpreted civil rights law once again.
At this point probably a supermajority of the country thinks this innovative idea for enacting ad-hoc nationwide policy changes has been abused by one or more administrations, but I haven't heard anyone seriously working on a generalized solution. Everyone's mostly given up on Congress and just hopes their team can take control of the magic pen.
Certainly one could argue if evidence of widespread racism by specific institutions should face punishment by the executive. It is entirely reasonable to believe that we should turn the cheek to institutional racism so that we can get good research out of it.
This question was not raised when the Obama administration dictated procedures and evidentiary standards to universities in cases of sexual assault, with threats of being found liable under Title IX for noncompliance. Well it was raised by some on the right, and then dismissed because, you know, the right, and who wants to defend campus rapists anyway? Those Duke University lacrosse kids should have hung -- even if they didn't actually rape that girl, they might have... or they might have raped some other girl.
When Orange Man exercises a power he presumes to have, it's "dictatorial", but when "Pen and a Phone" Obama exercised that same power -- together with the people, follow where Obama leads.
Obama threatened, but did not make good on those threats. Trump is threatening and actively withholding funds even to Columbia which bent the knee, because these are institutions which are seen as political enemies by the administration.
This unlimited relativism is bizarre. If Trump invaded Canada, is his argument that Roosevelt invaded Germany? There is a difference between one and the other.
What does the Duke lacrosse case have to do with it?
Why are you citing the these institutions' contribution to the 20th century? We are 25 years past the 20th century, 35 years since the end of the Cold War (which was the spiritual end of the 20th century).
What have these elite institutions contributed to the 1990+ world order?
But I think its an interesting question if the feds should be funding rich Ivies with small numbers of students vs more efficient state universities which educated 100s of thousands each at a fraction of the cost per student.
All of the Ivy League combined educate 65k undergrads.
SUNY by comparison educates 5x that many at a tuition of 1/5th to 1/10th depending on in/out of state and community vs vs 4 year college.
Obviously what he is doing is punitive.
BUT, I think the constant focus in the press on the Ivys when we talk about education is a huge distraction from how we are actually going to improve access, quality & cost to education in this county.
Too many people think these are funds to just run the universities. By and large, what is being withheld are funds for research.
Federally-funded academic science often looks like:
1. The university + government fund/run a project
2. Project creates new knowledge (cool!)
3. The government gets a pretty awesome license to use that knowledge
4. The government more often than not gives that knowledge away (or offers great accessible licensing), so that
5. Private industry can adapt, apply and commercialize the knowledge, driving new GDP growth and opportunities for improving life, etc.
Withholding these funds ends the research projects, because Universities are not startup incubators. So the research stops, and one of the highest returning pipelines of new GDP growth for the US dries up—unless today, the professors and universities kiss the president's ring and promise to wipe out 50-100 years of human rights improvements.
It's that last step - 5 - which I think is a missing piece of the discussion. A lot of private company pharma and medical research is often doing the 'last mile' work that started in university research programs. Stuff that looks promising is picked up and commercialized, but there's usually significant work the research people have done before big commercial players take it to market. They're not doing all their research from scratch - they're taking the best bits funded by our government research programs and bringing them to market. Cutting university research will damage the private sector pretty quickly.
On #3 "government gets a pretty awesome license" seems disingenuous. From what I've witnessed some specific agencies get to use that license in a rather limited way. It's often not broadly available to the public and commercial rights tend to be reserved to the University. Is that actually what most people would think of as "pretty awesome?"
On #4, "more often than not" and "offers great accessible licensing" seems equally disingenuous. Further, why should any of us have to license technology or patents that were primarily funded by tax revenue? Shouldn't that just be automatically and fully open? When the government decides to sequester that knowledge what process do I have to challenge that?
On #5, outside of pharmaceutical companies, what are these new GDP growth and returning pipelines that actually get created and impact citizens directly?
> By and large, what is being withheld are funds for research.
I don't know precisely, but I would assume the universities take about 50% to 60% of the granted research funding as administrative overhead, and only what remains goes to the actual research.
This is somewhat disingenuous. Something like half of the grant is handed over to the University as overhead. Much of that is legit to cover things like labs but a lot of it goes to a cover a massive amount of administrative bloat.
Also, nobody really objects to the research that leads directly to stuff private industry can use. That's not what people want to cut.
> But I think its an interesting question if the feds should be funding rich Ivies with small numbers of students vs more efficient state universities which educated 100s of thousands each at a fraction of the cost per student.
The funding at issue is research funding, not educational funding, and it goes to both kinds of universities (vastly more, in aggregate, to state universities than Ivies.)
> Obviously what he is doing is punitive. BUT, I think the constant focus in the press on the Ivys when we talk about education is a huge distraction from how we are actually going to improve access, quality & cost to education in this county.
If research funding is used as a lever to establish political control, those things literally do not matter, since whatever universities survive will simply be tools of totalitarian indoctrination by the regime.
Multiple people pointing this out, and absolutely right.
Some question though of how all the research grants do kind of cross-subsidize the education in a way as it pays for research professors, their graduate staff, etc? Otherwise why do we collocate research and teaching?
Many of the "good" universities in general seem more focused on prestige and acceptance rates than they do educating the masses. The Ivies could significantly expand the sizes of their student bodies (and to their credit they do make some content accessible online), but they don't because a lot of the value of a Harvard education is the exclusivity and the social network it gets you into.
And therein lies why a lot of Trump's base has a massive problem with them.
To be fair, the exclusive social network very much includes Trump, but it spent most of the last 50 years bringing itself capital at the expense of Trump's base.
Oh absolutely agreed, the GOP is anti-education however you slice it.
In a less partisan world, it would be nice to see a version of this that was more about efficient allocation of education dollars rather than an attack on education.
The feds are funding research, which elite schools have the best faculty and scholars who are conducting the very best research. May as well as why are VC’s funding promising startups instead of less promising ones, when those promising ones have already wealthy founders who have exited their previous venture.
Universities have two roles: education and research. The funding is overwhelmingly for research and it's going to those that provide the best return on investment. Should cancer research funding go to your local community college?
Educating the best and brightest is also of special value, but that is beside the point.
I disagree -- the funding isn't ROI based at all. Heck NIH doesn't even really audit how well the funds were spent, how could they? They don't even really assess if the research had impact, save for counting journal articles and impact factors, which are in themselves poor proxies for quality of work (and easily gamed).
> All of the Ivy League combined educate 65k undergrads. SUNY by comparison educates 5x that many
What a weird comparison. Yes, picking a group of universities that comprises 64 campuses is going to have more students than a group with a small fraction of that.
This framing is a little strange, since these universities serve multiple purposes. Much of this funding is for scientific research, which is somewhat distinct from the undergraduate teaching mission.
Comparing tuition is silly, IMO. Lots of people don't pay full-price at private universities, and nobody who is in-state pays the full-price for public universities.
If you care about efficiency, then divide the budget by the number of students.
Harvard has a budget of about $9B, which is about 4-5x larger on a per-student basis than a few public universities I compared (I couldn't find the SUNY budget with 30s of searching, you are welcome to provide that info if you have it).
So far, the funding in question is research grants. There's an argument that research is more effective at the universities that have concentrated the best researchers.
It's unfortunate that a rational discussion could not be had before the cuts were made. I can see a scenario where you and I and many others agree with cuts to many organizations.
Bureaucratic organizations and special interests there are entrenched. The people managing some of these endowments are getting annual compensations competitive with the best hedge funds. If we had a rational discussion they'd just work to run out the clock and keep the status quo.
The Ivies do a hell of a lot more for 'The Club' than for the people not in it.
(To be clear, I don't think giving Trump the authority to pull hundreds of millions in funding if they teach things he doesn't like, or allow anti-genocide protests etc, is in any way a solution to the above issue.)
> BUT, I think the constant focus in the press on the Ivys when we talk about education is a huge distraction from how we are actually going to improve access, quality & cost to education in this county.
Because the entire discussion around colleges of all sizes, who gets to go and who pays has been turned entirely into yet another fucking stupid culture war issue by Republicans, putting rural/tradesman "real" Americans against the "educated coastal elites" of which it is far easier to cast Ivy league schools, professors and students as, rather than your local grocery store stock boy who is attending a tech school to go into STEM.
At this point the notion of the actual issue as in: "how we are actually going to improve access, quality & cost to education" is barely a factor in it. It's just about pitting poor people against other poor people and a handful of rich nepo-babies who are so insulated from the consequences of our system they might as well not be considered to be part of it.
For anyone interested, college used to be nearly in totality funded by the state, not per student, but via the grant system. Our parents will talk about "working their way through college" working as waitstaff, because that was once an achievable thing: to work while you studied and pay your tuition, and graduate with little if any debt, and go on to do all sorts of things my generation struggles to do, like buy a home and a car, and not a run down refrigerator box and an old wreck from the side of the road that barely runs, no. They got to buy good homes, at fair prices, and cars that were if not new, really close to it.
Then as with everything Reagan fucked it up, the "no more free lunch" lobby got to add another notch to their bedpost as they set about destroying yet another fucking thing funded with public money that was doing exactly what it was supposed to be doing to pass yet another goddamn tax cut and worsen the ability of America to compete on the global stage.
> Because the entire discussion around colleges of all sizes, who gets to go and who pays has been turned entirely into yet another fucking stupid culture war issue by Republicans, putting rural/tradesman "real" Americans against the "educated coastal elites" of which it is far easier to cast Ivy league schools, professors and students as, rather than your local grocery store stock boy who is attending a tech school to go into STEM.
That can't happen in a vacuum, though.
50 years ago, there was a far narrower gap between the two groups. Now it's expanding. That "no more free lunch" crowd was that "educated coastal elite" of the time. Remember, Reagan was elected governor of California twice.
RE: our parents working their way through college, I think two things happened at least, yes.
Reagan gutted education spending.
But also the bifurcation of blue vs white collar wages really accelerated through the last 40 years. That is the spread between what my dad made working at a record store vs the professor/admin staff/etc at his college made increased tremendously. Think about it - minimum wage at federal level has only doubled in the last 40 years, while some quick googling looks like professors make 5-10x what they made 40 years ago (as most white collar has).
Plus all the discussion about the bloating of college non-teaching administrative staffing.
Funnily enough, when the law was passed giving the president the authority to meddle in university governance, Reagan vetoed it. And the left, in congress and the senate, forced it through.
This author presumably understands but buries the lede that for an endowment of $15 billion a university would typically only spend 5%, or $750 million, annually.
So "a mere $400m" is over half of the annual funds from the endowment (not including tuition income and donations) that might be available to a university with such an endowment.
It should be relatively obvious that spending into the principal of an endowment is not a sustainable practice over the long-term for universities that are operating at the scale of centuries.
At a scale of centuries, monetary units themselves become highly unstable. On this time scale it was recently that people thought deflation was good for the economy, and that spending 5% every year would be reckless.
Public schools in the US get a relatively small fraction of their budget from state funding. The distinction between public and private is not as large or substantial as one might imagine.
For example the 10-campus UC system's total budget is $54 billion of which $4.6 billion comes directly from the state's general fund.
https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/4998 - the federal funding here is the same as for private universities, to do research or other work in the form of contracts/ grants.
This is the double edge sword of moving away from voluntary transaction in the market and towards government-imposed funding. The government takes away your ability to choose what to fund, holds the purse, then smacks the purse at you filled with the weight of your own money.
The government, with laws as written, has more restrictions on when it can pull money than private parties, due to its legal obligation to be content-of-speech-neutral. We are discovering that United Stares law is meaningless.
Readit News
(On a side note, the word "framing" is also the wrong word to use.)
One way to phrase your message correctly would be: "This article is about the impact of the president's decision, but I wish it also talked about whether the president has the authority to make that decision in the first place".
"Conveniently Ignoring" the standing question is frankly an admission of compliance to something that is not the law. Who cares "why people can't live without food" if someone is saying "let's starve the population." One question isn't worth platforming while the other is on the table.
Congress, moreover, has enacted laws that use those funds as a hook to influence the behavior of private universities. Specifically, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 allows the executive branch to deny federal funds to universities that discriminate on the basis of race. Now, it just so happens that, in 2023, Harvard university, among others, was found by the Supreme Court to have flagrantly violated that law: https://www.ed.gov/media/document/dear-colleague-letter-sffa...
There is nothing "dictatorial" about the President withholding taxpayer dollars from a university that is in violation of the law, where Congress has authorized the executive branch to do so. Indeed, I'm at a loss to understand who else you think has the power to do this, if not the President?
To put it differently: a state of affairs where the Executive/President has those powers may not be dictatorial, but this specific instance of him making use of that discretion in this specific way might be.
Hey now, wait a minute. Has the “violation of law” been established yet? There’s a pretty wide gulf between “I believe a violation of the law has occurred” and having the matter adjudicated.
You’re clearly an intelligent person; there’s no need to try to sneak bullshit in through the back door. Let the strength of your arguments and facts speak for themselves. And make sure they are actual facts.
The judicial branch has authority to stop him but they're only supposed to use it if they are convinced that what he's doing is unconstitutional. Some of the executive branch's appointee's have authority over him but only in specific circumstances (such as 25th amendment) and they're usually in agreement with him since he gets to appoint them anyways. Otherwise, all authority in the executive branch effectively belongs to the president and random midlevel bureaucrats can only exercise it on his behalf.
So if it decides to spend $X on something specific, it has to be spent on whatever that something is. The President doesn't have discretion in that case.
This is not true. They can also stop him if what he is doing is illegal. Statute can absolutely constrain the executive.
That omits a crucial issue that many amazingly overlook: The bar isn't constitutional but legal. Congress makes the laws, not the President. The President is bound by those laws, and in fact their job is to enforce the laws that Congress makes. They cannot do things unless empowered by the law.
It's quite clear that the current President does not give a damn about the constitution, know anything about it, or have any compunction about blatant violation of the constitution.
> Otherwise, all authority in the executive branch effectively belongs to the president and random midlevel bureaucrats can only exercise it on his behalf.
This is factually wrong.
Choices. Congress can overturn any president's order, but they do nothing.
What a turn of phrase! Love it.
Deleted Comment
Let's imagine that completely legitimate circumstances lead to the US Government stopping the stream of grants to the Ivy League universities. How would they cope, given their enormous endowments that generate significant interest? This question is asked much less, and the answer is much less obvious. Hence the value of TFA.
Additionally, the follow-on questions are irrelevant. There are a million better questions to ask on the other side of this as well, before we ask why someone can't live without the money that they've been acquiring entirely above board and legally. "Why does the gov't think it has the authority to do this?"
Why do we need to have theoretical debates about legitimate circumstances, when there are real debates about illegitimate circumstances happening? having this irrelevant follow-on discussion is doing the gov't's work for them.
In a different setting I can see asking this question, but there is no need to ask this question while the circumstances are clearly illegitimate.
Were they being denied? It might well be the case that grants were never denied except when the grant spigot ran dry waiting for the next year. I don't necessarily believe that is the case, but is there some evidence that it doesn't work like that?
Then that person should not be a politician or political appointee who judges on the merits and not on the votes it will bring.
Moreover, faceless bureaucrats risk criminal and financial punishments for things like self-dealing. The president faces no such risk. And when they're a lame duck, they (theoretically) face zero risk, period.
Bureaucracies are slow. They're costly. Like democracy generally, they're inefficient. They're worthwhile because, at least as far as government is concerned, they're a necessary element to maintain rule of law and avoiding dictatorship. The solution to government bureaucracy isn't to remove the bureaucracy, it's to remove the government involvement. Otherwise, you're just inviting dictatorship. This has happened countless times. When the people get upset about perceived government ineffectiveness and its democratic institutions are too slow to respond (e.g. gridlocked Congress), there are two routes: privatization (i.e. reducing the role of government, not merely something like syndicalism) or dictatorship.
What's the difference between Donald Trump's rise to power and approach to governance, versus Huge Chavez's? Not much. The parallels are amazing. Both came to power promising radical overhauls of perceived sclerotic institutions, including broken legislatures. Like Trump, Chavez was a media whore who spent most of his time talking on television, making impossible promises and blaming everyone and everything else for his own failures. (Castro was like this, too.) They both spout so much B.S. that most people can't even keep up; they just start taking them at their word, which is why Chavez was popular until the day he died. His successor has zero charisma; the policies haven't changed, but now people hate the exact same kind of government they had during Chavez, but have no power to change it. That's what happens when you choose government of men rather than government of law.
Trump with help of various groups makes political appointees who either individually oversee grant reviews or administrate individuals that do. These people are just as faceless and unaccountable as with any other president ...
The difference here is that Congress who is much more accountable to voters deliberated and wrote laws authorizing various funding which is being completely overridden by the branch of government that is supposed to carry out the law.
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2025/04/24/who-will-...
Addressing the other question is a pre-requisite to considering the one included in this piece. And given that they are ignoring the presumable answer to the other question, they have not justified the existence of this article.
Yet here we have tacit acceptance that the president can fuck with citizens' money just because he's in his feels about something. Absolute clownery.
In April 2011, the United States Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) established new mandates requiring colleges and universities receiving federal funding to dramatically reduce students’ due process rights. Under the new regulations, announced in a letter from Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Russlynn Ali, colleges and universities were required to employ a “preponderance of the evidence” standard—a 50.01%, “more likely than not” evidentiary burden—when adjudicating student complaints concerning sexual harassment or sexual violence. The regulations further required that if a university judicial process allows the accused student to appeal a verdict, it must allow the accusing student the right to appeal as well, resulting in a type of “double jeopardy” for the accused. Additionally, OCR’s letter failed to recognize that truly harassing conduct (as defined by the law) is distinct from protected speech. Institutions that did not comply with OCR’s new regulations faced federal investigation and a potential loss of federal funding.
The innovation in these letters was realizing OCR could just come to a new understanding of what civil rights law required, then tell universities that since this is what civil rights law means, following the guidance would be a mandate for institutions to receive federal funding. So now Trump's come in and reinterpreted civil rights law once again.
At this point probably a supermajority of the country thinks this innovative idea for enacting ad-hoc nationwide policy changes has been abused by one or more administrations, but I haven't heard anyone seriously working on a generalized solution. Everyone's mostly given up on Congress and just hopes their team can take control of the magic pen.
https://www.thefire.org/cases/us-department-educations-offic...
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When Orange Man exercises a power he presumes to have, it's "dictatorial", but when "Pen and a Phone" Obama exercised that same power -- together with the people, follow where Obama leads.
What does the Duke lacrosse case have to do with it?
What have these elite institutions contributed to the 1990+ world order?
But I think its an interesting question if the feds should be funding rich Ivies with small numbers of students vs more efficient state universities which educated 100s of thousands each at a fraction of the cost per student.
All of the Ivy League combined educate 65k undergrads. SUNY by comparison educates 5x that many at a tuition of 1/5th to 1/10th depending on in/out of state and community vs vs 4 year college.
Obviously what he is doing is punitive. BUT, I think the constant focus in the press on the Ivys when we talk about education is a huge distraction from how we are actually going to improve access, quality & cost to education in this county.
Federally-funded academic science often looks like:
Withholding these funds ends the research projects, because Universities are not startup incubators. So the research stops, and one of the highest returning pipelines of new GDP growth for the US dries up—unless today, the professors and universities kiss the president's ring and promise to wipe out 50-100 years of human rights improvements.On #4, "more often than not" and "offers great accessible licensing" seems equally disingenuous. Further, why should any of us have to license technology or patents that were primarily funded by tax revenue? Shouldn't that just be automatically and fully open? When the government decides to sequester that knowledge what process do I have to challenge that?
On #5, outside of pharmaceutical companies, what are these new GDP growth and returning pipelines that actually get created and impact citizens directly?
I don't know precisely, but I would assume the universities take about 50% to 60% of the granted research funding as administrative overhead, and only what remains goes to the actual research.
Also, nobody really objects to the research that leads directly to stuff private industry can use. That's not what people want to cut.
The funding at issue is research funding, not educational funding, and it goes to both kinds of universities (vastly more, in aggregate, to state universities than Ivies.)
> Obviously what he is doing is punitive. BUT, I think the constant focus in the press on the Ivys when we talk about education is a huge distraction from how we are actually going to improve access, quality & cost to education in this county.
If research funding is used as a lever to establish political control, those things literally do not matter, since whatever universities survive will simply be tools of totalitarian indoctrination by the regime.
Some question though of how all the research grants do kind of cross-subsidize the education in a way as it pays for research professors, their graduate staff, etc? Otherwise why do we collocate research and teaching?
To be fair, the exclusive social network very much includes Trump, but it spent most of the last 50 years bringing itself capital at the expense of Trump's base.
In a less partisan world, it would be nice to see a version of this that was more about efficient allocation of education dollars rather than an attack on education.
Educating the best and brightest is also of special value, but that is beside the point.
What a weird comparison. Yes, picking a group of universities that comprises 64 campuses is going to have more students than a group with a small fraction of that.
If you care about efficiency, then divide the budget by the number of students.
Harvard has a budget of about $9B, which is about 4-5x larger on a per-student basis than a few public universities I compared (I couldn't find the SUNY budget with 30s of searching, you are welcome to provide that info if you have it).
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The Ivies do a hell of a lot more for 'The Club' than for the people not in it.
(To be clear, I don't think giving Trump the authority to pull hundreds of millions in funding if they teach things he doesn't like, or allow anti-genocide protests etc, is in any way a solution to the above issue.)
Because the entire discussion around colleges of all sizes, who gets to go and who pays has been turned entirely into yet another fucking stupid culture war issue by Republicans, putting rural/tradesman "real" Americans against the "educated coastal elites" of which it is far easier to cast Ivy league schools, professors and students as, rather than your local grocery store stock boy who is attending a tech school to go into STEM.
At this point the notion of the actual issue as in: "how we are actually going to improve access, quality & cost to education" is barely a factor in it. It's just about pitting poor people against other poor people and a handful of rich nepo-babies who are so insulated from the consequences of our system they might as well not be considered to be part of it.
For anyone interested, college used to be nearly in totality funded by the state, not per student, but via the grant system. Our parents will talk about "working their way through college" working as waitstaff, because that was once an achievable thing: to work while you studied and pay your tuition, and graduate with little if any debt, and go on to do all sorts of things my generation struggles to do, like buy a home and a car, and not a run down refrigerator box and an old wreck from the side of the road that barely runs, no. They got to buy good homes, at fair prices, and cars that were if not new, really close to it.
Then as with everything Reagan fucked it up, the "no more free lunch" lobby got to add another notch to their bedpost as they set about destroying yet another fucking thing funded with public money that was doing exactly what it was supposed to be doing to pass yet another goddamn tax cut and worsen the ability of America to compete on the global stage.
That can't happen in a vacuum, though.
50 years ago, there was a far narrower gap between the two groups. Now it's expanding. That "no more free lunch" crowd was that "educated coastal elite" of the time. Remember, Reagan was elected governor of California twice.
Reagan gutted education spending.
But also the bifurcation of blue vs white collar wages really accelerated through the last 40 years. That is the spread between what my dad made working at a record store vs the professor/admin staff/etc at his college made increased tremendously. Think about it - minimum wage at federal level has only doubled in the last 40 years, while some quick googling looks like professors make 5-10x what they made 40 years ago (as most white collar has).
Plus all the discussion about the bloating of college non-teaching administrative staffing.
It should be relatively obvious that spending into the principal of an endowment is not a sustainable practice over the long-term for universities that are operating at the scale of centuries.
For example the 10-campus UC system's total budget is $54 billion of which $4.6 billion comes directly from the state's general fund. https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/4998 - the federal funding here is the same as for private universities, to do research or other work in the form of contracts/ grants.
The government threatening to take away that funding based on "taste" is more of a problem of authoritarianism.
They were not in 1940.
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As "Ivies" grew their endowments at hundreds of percent faster than their student bodies, they became essentially hedge funds that do some education.
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