Colleges must give up federal funding to achieve true intellectual freedom
45 comments
·May 30, 2025duxup
AStonesThrow
Pope St. John Paul II responded to the minority report in 1990:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_corde_Ecclesiae
https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/apost_constit...
rayiner
It’s not “thought police stuff” to condition receipt of taxpayer money on those things. Harvard can think or say whatever it wants, but that doesn’t mean the federal government must fund it!
derbOac
Conditioning government support based on "viewpoint" is about as close as you can get to government constraining freedom of speech.
rayiner
It’s not “constraining freedom of speech.” It’s declining to subsidize speech with grants.
Recall that these are grants issued to specific universities for specific reasons, not generally available services it funds provided to everyone. Why are taxpayers required to allocate his money to organizations that (in the view of elected officials) don’t serve the public interest?
On top of that, it’s well accepted that the government can use the threat of revoking federal funds force universities to regulate speech: https://cei.org/blog/obama-administration-undermines-free-sp.... Under Title VI and Title IX, the government can force schools to regulate speech in ways that the government couldn’t regulate directly among private citizens.
duxup
They’re demanding Harvard hire someone to police staff and students viewpoints, and then adjust admissions and hiring to achieve the government’s desired ratio of viewpoints.
That’s exactly thought policing.
ecb_penguin
Everyone forgets the pendulum eventually swings back. For years, it was the opposite thought police. You had to have very specific viewpoints about gender and identity, even if it made no sense.
Edit: Flagged for wrongthink!
davidcbc
Don't recall the federal government doing that at all
ecb_penguin
Don't recall saying it was the federal government. Happy for you to show me where I did though!
Edit: It seems as though the federal government has flagged me. Oh, wait.
atrus
When did the feds send that memo?
lurk2
December 1st, 2014.
https://www.ed.gov/sites/ed/files/about/offices/list/ocr/doc...
ecb_penguin
When did I say the feds sent a memo previously? Is it easier to argue points that nobody makes?
An organization that receives federal funds is being told they can no longer restrict viewpoints after having done so. What part is confusing you?
crises-luff-6b
Some Harvard students are violating other Harvard students' federally protected civil rights. Imagine if they were on the quad threatening black people, linking arms together to prevent black kids going to class, to prevent black kids going to the library, physically intimidating black kids all across campus not just on the quad, interrupting finals for classes primarily attended by black kids... I think most of America would go "Full Luigi".
But thankfully Luigi can just rot in jail, because we have clear legal mechanisms we can leverage. If the university is violating constitutionally protected civil rights, as Harvard is clearly doing and their former president admitted in sworn congressional testimony, then they should not be receiving ANY public benefit: DOD/NIH/DOE/etc research grants, federal student loan guarantees, any sort of IRS benefit for student loan payments being tax deductible, IRS 501c3 benefits, all employee H1B1s should be revoked, increased scrutiny on any co-related tax entities. What's been done so far is not nearly enough, and there's a lot of fruit on the tree.
Harvard is NOT an institution in the public good. Get off the government teat.
duxup
I don’t understand this kind of “yeah well they’re bad” argument that props up. I don’t buy into your theory but even if I did my objection to the feds actions is just the same.
Are you ok with the government policing people’s views and adjusting employment and admissions as long as you don’t like the school?
Are you going to be ok with it if another party or politician does?
It’s unfortunate but it appears people have no real ideals now, just recriminations that can justify anything.
linguae
From the article: “But universities cannot get around the fact that federal grants, by their nature, selectively fund certain ideas at the expense of others. The government picks intellectual winners and losers among private citizens, which is the exact opposite of intellectual freedom.”
But couldn’t this be said about any source of funding? All funders, public or private, make decisions about the projects and people they choose to fund. This selection process is not an infringement on academic freedom. In fact, restricting who and how patrons choose to fund research is itself an infringement on their freedom to fund what they want. If I want to fund cancer research, how is this an infringement on physicists and mathematicians?
The real problem in academia regarding academic freedom isn’t federal research grants, but the dependence on external funding from any source to help maintain operations, and how this affects tenure decisions. Tenure-track professors should be able to do whatever research they want, but this freedom is tempered by two pressures: (1) publish-or-perish culture, and (2) the pressure to raise money for the university. In practice, this means having to do research that is more likely to get funded and published. Modern research universities are effectively think-tanks with researchers working on what could get published and funded. It’s still possible to do curiosity-driven work under such a setting, but one must still “play the game” to get tenure.
Getting rid of federal research grants won’t solve those problems. In fact, it may make things worse. I’m not confident about industry’s willingness to fund research, given the demise of legendary research labs such as Bell Labs and Xerox PARC and the overwhelming culture these days of only supporting research that has a high chance of getting productized immediately.
The consequence of getting rid of federal research funding is that a lot of universities will end up reverting to the pre-WWII model where there was very little funding to do research at all. This is the norm at many teaching-oriented universities, but research universities today rely heavily on research grants, particularly those from the federal government. Relying entirely on grants from private individuals and organizations won’t solve academic freedom issues if professors there are required to do publishable and fundable work in order to earn tenure, and with less money for research, this may make things worse.
garrettgarcia
> But couldn’t this be said about any source of funding? All funders, public or private, make decisions about the projects and people they choose to fund. This selection process is not an infringement on academic freedom.
The authors of the article are not claiming that this infringes on academic freedom, but intellectual freedom. They explain here:
"Intellectual freedom is the principle that all individuals have the right to think for themselves, to express their convictions on any subject, and to give their support, financial or otherwise, only to the ideas they choose. When government coercively seizes your money and uses it to subsidize some research program or viewpoint for any reason, it is violating your intellectual freedom. This is the injustice inherent in all government research grants. It is this that private universities like Harvard should now name and challenge.
Instead, they fight for “academic freedom,” which is actually the opposite of intellectual freedom. It asserts the right of universities and professors to teach, write and research whatever they see fit — and to do it at the taxpayer’s expense."
MattPalmer1086
It is certainly intellectually dishonest to claim that the government funding anything you don't like is a violation of your "intellectual freedom". You are still free to think and say anything you like.
Taken to its logical conclusion, it would mean that the government should not fund anything, ever, for any purpose, because someone might disagree with it? Isn't disagreement actually a sign of intellectual freedom?
crises-luff-6b
Why are these researchers allowed to keep their data private for their future benefit? The data generated here should be part of the public domain.
---
How about at the Library of Congress or National Archives? Just create a `nih-GR12345-2025-05-31.torrent` for all the data which would offer lots of benefits:
- small network traffic for LOC/NA to seed - American-skin-in-the-game to share the publicly funded data - more eyes on the prize, the "FOSS" case for data
I think public data would also help all of us, collectively, to lead us out of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
gibbitz
All the more reason to go abroad for school and try to immigrate to the country where you study. Soon there will be no reason to stay here except to lose weight on the poverty diet.
crises-luff-6b
Why do these researchers get to benefit from patents and other intellectual property generated using the public money? The IP generated here should immediately enter the public domain.
throwworhtthrow
For most of the essay, the author pretends to care about Harvard's loss of funding. But at the end they awkwardly transition into their real argument, which is that every tax dollar spent on something they potentially don't 100% agree with is morally wrong.
Colleges' problem is that they weren't taking enough federal funding. If they had achieved TBTF status then Trump wouldn't be harassing them now.
cratermoon
Let's be honest: private sector funding is going to come with as many if not more strings attached that will limit or warp 'true intellectual freedom'. The only way a college could avoid those pressures would be to be completely self-funded and put their endowment money in investments not subject to political whims.
garrettgarcia
The article addresses this: "Intellectual freedom is the principle that all individuals have the right to think for themselves, to express their convictions on any subject, and to give their support, financial or otherwise, only to the ideas they choose. When government coercively seizes your money and uses it to subsidize some research program or viewpoint for any reason, it is violating your intellectual freedom."
What is unique about the government funding as opposed to private-sector funding is that government funding comes from money coercively seized from people, and private sector funding doesn't.
cratermoon
> coercively seized
I categorically reject that characterization of how government works, but you do you.
garrettgarcia
Deny reality all you want, it doesn't change the truth. The fact is that taxes are collected under threat of force.
One need not express an opinion on whether there should be more or less taxation to acknowledge this truth. As you said previously, let's be honest.
BrenBarn
This is like saying if Trump says you have to pay for air, then you have to stop breathing to have true freedom.
No. We don't need this, and we also don't need a return to the status quo. What we need is a more equitable system where everyone's freedom is guaranteed and everyone accept that, such that actions like what we see Trump taking here are treated like an old crank on a street corner screaming about the apocalypse: we put him into a padded cell and move on with our lives.
null
garrettgarcia
> This is like saying if Trump says you have to pay for air, then you have to stop breathing to have true freedom.
Can you explain what you mean? I don't see how this follows from the arguments in the article.
BrenBarn
The article is saying that Trump's actions have illustrated how dependency on federal funds makes colleges vulnerable. The proposed solution is to eliminate that funding. But what I'm saying is that what is better is to remove the loopholes in our system that allow Trump to threaten it.
Rereading the article, it does seem to have a bit more generic right-wing-flavored "government shouldn't do stuff" than stuck with me on the first read, which may be why my logic was a bit unclear. Basically my point is that the government cannot use funding to control universities unless some individuals have discretion over how and whether to award that funding. I'm saying what should be reduced is not funding but discretion.
(I'm open to rethinking the system to make it less discretion-dependent; the article does have some ideas that could be relevant there that I wouldn't dismiss out of hand. But that an issue of how schools get funded, not whether.)
daft_pink
At the end of the day, the executive branch still has widely delegated authority to regulate foreigh student visas.
Trump could easily move towards a work visa style, where the universities would need to prove they can’t get Americans to fill their admissions spots and quickly eliminate virtually all foreign students from highly selective US universities while still allowing your local non-selective university to fill their roles with high paying foreign students.
This would totally align with his ideology and could easily and quickly happen.
smitty1e
Oh, like https://www.hillsdale.edu ?
rayiner
It would be easier for universities like Harvard to just stop violating the civil rights laws: https://manhattan.institute/article/harvards-civil-rights-vi...
Harvard may prevail on some of its challenges to the administration. But the gaping hole in its defense is that Title VI, by design, uses the threat of revoking federal money to regulate behavior in ways that would otherwise raise first amendment concerns. The Supreme Court is never going to rule that universities can invoke the first amendment as a shield against Title VI allegations, because that would gut the civil rights laws. If universities could, for example, engage in race conscious practices to increase diversity while still retaining federal funding, they could also engage in race conscious practices to decrease diversity while retaining federal funding.
The government, as a grant maker, obviously doesn’t have to provide federal funds to say neo-nazis. And if that’s true, it follows that the government can withhold federal funds based on any ideological disagreement. These organizations are of course free to say whatever they want, but the government doesn’t have to fund it!
The memo to Harvard directing them to hire someone approved by the feds and survey staff AND STUDENTS and then implement "Viewpoint Diversity" as it relates to admissions and hiring as directed by the feds was straight up thought police type stuff.