Trump cuts Columbia's grants over handling of student protests: Should he include universities that violated academic freedom?
Trump’s NIH and federal government is cutting contracts to Columbia over their handling of the middle east protests.
Many online are debating whether or not this action works to improve on campus conditions for students, if it targets the administrators who fell short, or unrelated faculty, and many other related questions. Yet, one thing is clear: it is a strong message and will surely make the administrators in question panic, suffer, and seek legal remedy. Even if grants ultimately reinstated, in part or whole, It is a powerful motivation for universities to do better on all future protests, balancing freedom of expression with safety.
Should a similar action be extended to universities which actively worked to constrain academic freedom? Stanford’s faculty senate censured Scott Atlas for saying schools should remain open, lockdowns were barbaric, and kids shouldn’t mask.
Stanford’s medicine chair directed Prof. Eran Bendavid to stop speaking publicly against lockdowns.
Pitt removed Norman Wang from its EP program directorship because he didn’t support race-motivated affirmative action
I am aware of dozens of additional examples of faculty losing teaching roles, being denied promotion, or simply being told to ‘be quiet’ for signing the Great Barrington Declaration, being critical of masking, or lockdowns or vaccine mandates.
In 100% of these cases, the view that was punished was the view that tended to be held by conservatives— though ironically, there is nothing about masking a two year old that makes it a liberal position— it just happened to fall there because of Trump derangement syndrome, i.e. since he was nonchalant about masking, the left had to do it as hard as possible.
How can NIH operationalize this proposal? Right now there is an NIH hotline and submission form for complaints about sexual harassment or fraud in research. These are investigated and grants can be cancelled or pulled. This mechanism should expanded to concerns that faculty were punished or told to remain quiet on policy issues. Universities with high rates of offenses could then have grant funding revoked.
Universities are not going to do the right thing without accountability. They are not going to foster a culture of debate on issues that fall on right/left lines because too many faculty members on the left view the debate itself as ‘violence.’ Small groups of faculty label views they dislike as ‘dangerous misinformation’ even as those views were correct. Many faculty stopped discussing these issues publicly because of retaliation in their jobs. Short of being fired— being denied the opportunity to teach, to present one’s work, to lecture, and being stripped of titles— is unjust retaliation and was conducted by many universities.
Stripping even a handful of institutions of large numbers of federal grants will wake up administrators. They do not yet understand that their conduct is precisely the reason why public trust is in the toilet. A stronger message is needed. I offer this suggestion only because I believe that in the long run, universities would be better off if they foster and encourage debate, and allow faculty to hold a range of ideas. And because I worry that if they don’t do that, they will increasingly become irrelevant.
Stanford gave a hard time to Scott Atlas and to Jay Bhattacharya for speaking their minds.
They also supported censorship programs like the Stanford Internet Observatory and the Virality Project.
Federal funding of Stanford should be cut down to zero until they offer a full disclosure and a public apology for all these activities.
It seems to me the only way to change anything with this kind of ilk is to hit them in the wallet. It will be the needed thing for them to stop believing they are untouchable. That’s the only way history will hopefully avoid getting repeated. The damage done to trust is immeasurable.