> The document also includes principles with which we disagree, including those that would restrict freedom of expression and our independence as an institution. And fundamentally, the premise of the document is inconsistent with our core belief that scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone.
> In our view, America’s leadership in science and innovation depends on independent thinking and open competition for excellence. In that free marketplace of ideas, the people of MIT gladly compete with the very best, without preferences. Therefore, with respect, we cannot support the proposed approach to addressing the issues facing higher education.
In a way, the overreach in the compact made this an obvious (though not easy) decision.
Obviously, an independent university cannot agree to government-mandated pricing or censorship of faculty members. Similarly, government intrusion into grading practices and proactively threatening to use "lawful force" against minors are immediately off the table.
That's all aside from the practicality of ongoing assessment, which would likely require something akin to commissars to monitor speech and discussions around grading.
The universities are fortunate the administration is not more subtle.
It's quite possible that an organization has multiple morals, and standing by one moral might feasibly compromise another---choosing which of these morals to violate might be difficult.
MIT is taking (lots of) money from federal government. That makes them dependent on the government and government is within its right to attach strings to the money.
MIT is free to not do what the government wants but then government is free to stop giving them (our) money.
Furthermore, MIT, like any other organization, must obey state and federal laws.
For example, there's a law that you cannot discriminate in hiring based on sex or religion. If IBM, MIT or a barber shop discriminates it's the role of the government to enforce the law and make them stop. The easy way is sending them a letter and asking. The hard way is to sue them in federal court.
> MIT is taking (lots of) money from federal government.
The People of the United States are getting some of their research business done by MIT, yes. MIT competes for that business. It is not a gift, subsidy or favor to MIT.
Of course grants and contracts have terms. I hope the government can come to terms with MIT because I want the best researchers doing our work.
I wish this was better understood more broadly. Grants aren't no-strings-attached gifts—far from it; they are contracts.
When a researcher at a university gets a grant, that's the federal government hiring that researcher and their team to complete a specific research project. The research team has a particular research question that the federal government has deemed important enough that U.S. tax payers would benefit from getting an answer.
So there's some department in the US government, which plans all the important research such as children looking at Facebook food ads or whether lonely rats crave cocaine more than happy rats [1] and the scientists compete for these? And it's not the scientists writing these up themselves and then asking government to finance the proposed research?
It’s a mixture of both top down priorities from government and bottom up opportunities from scientists. I suspect you know this and are being sarcastic because that’s cool. But I’ll describe it anyway.
The NSF, DARPA, DOE, NASA, etc etc have research program offices that set priorities. For example let’s have a DARPA program that pushes new stealth materials, or an NSF program on quantum computing (possibly partly motivated by another three-letter agency). The program managers understand the state of the art AND what the government (as the agent of the People) could really use Real Soon Now, or down the road for big bets.
They write a Call for Proposals that describes what they’d like to see.
Researchers watch out for CFPs they might be able to contribute to, and propose a project where their work could help. Sometimes the fit is easy, and sometimes the researcher will modulate their work to fit better, because they want support from somewhere.
The proposals compete for a share of the targeted pot of money.
This is how the government influences basic research, while still giving researchers the opportunity to propose novel stuff the government hasn’t thought of.
It’s the system that built the Internet and CRISPR, RNA vaccines and the laser, microelectronics and IVF.
For example, let's take cocaine rats, which is a real research paid by my tax dollars. Is it some kind of big government vision that created this? Can you locate a Call for Proposal that spawned this? How does it benefit me as a citizen and a taxpayer?
You can’t see any way that an improved understanding of happiness and/or drug use could help people? You don’t see any way that the government, on behalf of the People, would want to understand wellbeing and/or drug abuse better?
It’s not about the fucking rats. You KNOW this. Everyone knows this. The ‘cocaine rats durrrr’ type argument is not in good faith. I simply don’t believe people are that dumb.
>You can’t see any way that an improved understanding of happiness and/or drug use could help people?
I can't see how is this research helping anyone other than the researchers themselves. Also I can't see the Call for Proposal for that, I figure there was not any, as I expected.
> MIT is taking (lots of) money from federal government. That makes them dependent on the government and government is within its right to attach strings to the money.
Governments do not have rights (except in a metaphorical sense in relations with other governments, which doesn't apply here), so it is impossible for a government to be “within its rights” when interacting with an entity to subject to its governance.
It may be within legal exercise of its powers, but that is a very a very different thing than rights, and in any case there is a very good argument that the compact is not only unlawful as an exercise of government power, but that accepting and complying with it would require universities to act in conflict with existing federal civil rights laws which provide for private causes of actions against perpetrators.
Government grants are competitive, not gifts. MIT competes (along with private companies and individuals) for grants and if the grant is won, a very lengthy and detailed contract is signed that outlines the terms of the grant. This isn’t free money that’s being handed out willy nilly. If MIT (or anyone else) violates the terms of a contract, the government should seek to nullify that specific contract. That would be the normal (and legal) thing to do.
I mean, you're obviously right about this all. Which is why it's an easy decision. MIT chooses independence and so cannot agree to these terms.
Separately, there is the question of whether it is in the best interest of the US to part ways with organizations such as MIT.
> MIT is taking (lots of) money from federal government
Surely nobody is naive enough to think the federal government is giving money to institutions like MIT with no expectation of reciprocal benefit?
MIT is (was?) full of DoD asset tags to indicate which equipment was paid for by DoD grants. So another way of stating your point is the federal government is investing in programs at MIT to shape which basic research gets done so that it aligns with the best interest of the United States.
(A prior iteration of conservativism would have recognized outsourcing to MIT as a capital-light way of accomplishing a set of policy goals. The alternative being to spin up the whole apparatus in-house without cost sharing. Left to their own devices, engineering students are not likely to discover and research problems that are immediately germane to DoD.)
It is possible to be independent while also accepting grants from the USG. There's no contradiction there. The point of independence is that the Institute gets to determine how it runs its affairs. This Compact is an attempt to move that decision-making process to the White House. Maintaining independence in this environment therefore means abandoning federal research funding.
> It is possible to be independent while also accepting grants from the USG. There's no contradiction there. The point of independence is that the Institute gets to determine how it runs its affairs.
That hasn't been true for many decades. Accepting grants means being subject to a host of legal requirements tied to various different pieces of civil rights legislation.
Not at all. It applies only to institutions that are funded by the government. Receiving grants has been characterized as accepting government funding, which is strange on the fundamentals - those grants notionally represent the government paying for work it wants done.
Also characterized as accepting government funding is admitting students who get student loans from the government. This goes well beyond "strange on the fundamentals" - that money is notionally given to the student, not to the school.
> Signatories commit to using lawful force if necessary to prevent these violations and to swift, serious, and consistent sanctions for those who commit them.
Many students enter college as minors, so this is asking colleges to commit to using force against minors while only talking about hypothetical events.
1. Many people have an aversion to harming children. This aversion is not universally shared, but it is a very common stance nonetheless. Children, especially, tend to have an aversion to being harmed.
2. Universities need to recruit children to leave their families and be governed by them (e.g. housing, food, etc.).
3. Parents of children are required to get approval for those children to go to the universities, so that the universities can function.
4. It is harder to recruit children to a university that has agreed that in vague circumstances it is ready to harm them. Note here that everyone already knows that there are sanctions for breaking the law, and that the university is advertising that it is willing to go above and beyond normal law enforcement procedures in hurting children.
Did you read the rest of the paragraph prior to the sentence you quoted? Any use of lawful force has to be justified by prevention of the violations described thus:
> Signatories acknowledge that the freedom to debate requires conditions of civility. Civility includes protections against institutional punishment or individual harassment for one’s views. Universities shall neither support nor permit a heckler’s veto through, for example, disruptions, violence, intimidation, or vandalism. Universities shall be responsible for ensuring that they do not knowingly: (1) permit actions by the university, university employees, university students, or individuals external to the university community to delay or disrupt class instruction or disrupt libraries or other traditional study locations; (2) allow demonstrators to heckle or accost individual students or groups of students; or (3) allow obstruction
of access to parts of campus based on students’ race, ethnicity, nationality, or religion.
Misbehaving children need to dealt with too, within the bounds of what is allowed by law. Otherwise, what, you want a loophole for them to get away with all of the above?
Yes, I read that. As you said, the law is still operant. This is not about normal law enforcement, this is about willingness to be more aggressive than the police normally would.
> to delay or disrupt class instruction or disrupt libraries or other traditional study locations
No, I do not think that it is reasonable for a child to be beaten or shot because someone delayed a class somewhere on campus (note that this does not even indicate that the harmed student must have been part of the demonstration).
> allow demonstrators to heckle or accost individual students
I do not think this is generally enforceable outside of a police state. And no, I do not consider it reasonable for a child to be beaten or shot because a person was "heckled" somewhere on campus.
I am using "beaten or shot" because that's always a likely event when "lawful force" is exercised in America.
> you want a loophole for them to get away with all of the above
No, I want to fall back on our existing laws, which have the benefit of decades/centuries of precedent, and which are enforced in more transparent fora.
> Misbehaving children need to dealt with too, within the bounds of what is allowed by law. Otherwise, what, you want a loophole for them to get away with all of the above?
None of these establish heckling as illegal. The first two are about the police not being able to arrest the target of the heckling for incitement (which, yeah, clear 1st amendment violation), the last is about Stanford imposing limits, which is entirely different from the government doing so.
While the current climate is not comparable, I find the actions and general attitude of the current US government similar to that during the McCarthy era.
In it, the author described the attacks on specific personnels and public villainification of Harvard. More tellingly though, the author wrote the article for students in the 60s, who, growing up a mere decade after, most likely considered the events "an aberration which could not have lasted", and that, "the whole [McCarthy] period has an air of unreality".
Those who did not know history are bound to repeat it. Unfortunately, no amount of textbooks and historical resources seems to be sufficient to impart lessons to subsequent generations, and we are bound to repeat it after a few cycles.
Assuming lack of knowledge is the reason authoritarian tendencies show up periodically dismisses the fact that a lot of people think it’s a good thing. There were neo nazis right after wwii. They didn’t forget — they wanted it.
Yeah that worries me. The Nazi party ended on paper, the flags were taken down, but there is no military defeat that really changes the minds of the losing faction. They just went covert, stopped saying the quiet part, and waited.
That feels oversimplified. A lot of people would think people that oppose Nazis are the ones with the ideological problems. Who defines what a problem is in our society? The majority or some skewing of it. This is the problem that politics is supposed to solve, and then the problem that the electoral college was supposed to safeguard against. How do we avoid the tyranny of a demented majority? Aligning to a specific moral code? … like a theocracy? I can’t think of any way that doesn’t immediately instill the tyranny of a minority in its place.
We in the US have been very arrogant in assuming we’ve found the solution to all this when all it took was a few decades — a flash-in-the-pan, really — of consistent, strategic bad faith by the political rulers to undermine the whole thing.
> A lot of people would think people that oppose Nazis are the ones with the ideological problems. Who defines what a problem is in our society? The majority or some skewing of it.
Provable moral facts have nothing to do with this because humans aren’t philosophically consistent, and societies are ruled by humans. Defining them and getting enough people to agree to those definitions to enforce them is the problem democracy is supposed to solve, but in the end, flawed leaders will be ruling a flawed populace. No matter how cut-and-dried those moral facts are through rigorous philosophical analysis, societies always navigate through the lens of perception, which can be swayed.
Compelled speech is a bright line the U.S. has, so far, managed not to cross. We should be trying as hard as we can not to cross that line.
You may not see the harm in this particular instance, but establishing "we'll just force them to say it and punish them if they don't" as a tool in any government's toolbox is a very, very bad idea.
Yes, to the extent that any violation of constitution injures me.
Forcing me to say things I don't want to say under threat of punishment violates first amendment. It's been litigated and so concluded.
The fact that it's the 1st amendment indicates that founding fathers thought that it is indeed the greatest injury us government can inflict on us citizens.
> The fact that it's the 1st amendment indicates that founding fathers thought that it is indeed the greatest injury us government can inflict on us citizens.
By that argument the greatest injury that they were addressing was a weak central government that couldn’t provide for the security and financing of the state. It’s literally called the first amendment because the Bill of Rights was an addendum to the constitution.
Do you think that, to use this site's language, it would be a 1A violation to create a rule under which
> students can be reported for merely expressing their opinions about controversial political and social issues of the day or even if they prefer not to express support for American political allies and wars they may not support
> Yes, the federal government of the United States has always attached conditions to federal funding.
Sure, but that's a very high level of abstraction.
At a lower level, it is far less common (if precedented at all) for the federal executive to attempt to unilaterally impose conditions that violate the Federal Constitution and would require those subject to the conditions to violate federal civil rights law.
Not like this, no, and it has never shaken down schools like it has at Columbia or Harvard.
As much as I despise these institutions and their undergrads this does nothing to punish them and everything to increase the power of this current corrupt executive.
They hate the rest of us that didn’t get into elite schools and are permanent members of the upper caste of this country. Graduate school admission is more purely meritocratic on if you can do research but even that isn’t great.
Yes. I live in a city with two Ivy+ institutions and graduates from many more. They're all the same, except some are better at faking it than others.
And why wouldn't they? Why wouldn't they think people like me are lazy and genetically predisposed to be stupid? I didn't make $500k out of undergrad. HRT or OpenAI isn't going to recruit me anytime soon. My net worth isn't $12m at 29, it's a tenth that.
Whenever I ask what the difference between them and their infinite success and potential is and people like me they never have an answer. They're always so confused.
> My net worth isn't $12m at 29, it's a tenth that
This honestly reads like you are just bragging about how successful you are. I think you know this, but if you made $150k at 22 and have a net worth of $1M at 29, you are far more monetarily successful than the vast, vast majority of the country. I’m pretty sure you are rage baiting, which doesn’t belong on HN, but if not you are seriously out of touch and not grateful enough for your luck or proud enough of the work you have put in to get there.
This is not bragging to literally anybody that went to an Ivy+ school for CS ~10 years ago. A $15m+ net worth is their standard for success. Hell, it's their standard for _average_.
Is this like a humiliation fetish at this point? This is seriously unhealthy. We don't hate our friends that didn't a go to an eLiTe school because we're not sociopaths. Not sure why I'm even trying since you seem pretty dead set on this, but it's just a lot easier to go through life without made up enemies.
People that go to elite undergrads think the rest of us are a lower inferior caste. I don’t know how that’s even something you can deny. You’ve clearly expended a lot of effort to segregate yourself from the likes of people like me or people that go to SJSU because we don’t have “merit” or “potential”
isn't it? isn't this why we're at this place. Let's not not get caught up in facile pretexts. 'those coastal elitists' haven't thrown enough bones to the rest of the country, and they feel resentful for being marginalized. so we send troops into the city and harass the universities and break up with the europeans to 'fix' the situation, just like we fixed the California fires by venting freshwater into the ocean.
I can deny it because it's obvious bullshit lol. I don't think that way and neither does anybody I know from MIT think that way. This is reality versus your imagination. If there's anyone I look down on it's my classmates who could've worked anywhere and still went to palantir...
I can't claim 100% aren't assholes, but the vast majority realize the luck and arbitrary nature of it. Are you going to be stuck in decision day sadness mode for the rest of your life? Life is too short
I've asked people at MIT this repeatedly. They all say they came to MIT for the peer group. Peer group = people that are not _like me_. They shut up quick when I challenge them on that point though, or ask what the difference between them and me is. Even the non-assholes sometimes genuinely don't realize there's an entire parallel world beneath them with zero privilege or respect that made $150k out of undergrad instead of $500k.
I am nearly sure that you are not arguing in good faith, but just the fact that you think all elite school grads make $500k shows that you have not talked to a nearly representative sample. I went to an elite school and have friends that make much less even than $150k. Are you aware that there is an entire parallel world beneath you with zero privilege or respect that make $40k instead of $150k?
I’m not sure why you think anyone is targeting you specifically. The vast majority of students at elite schools, in my experience, know that we got lucky in addition to all the other things that we did well to get admitted.
A couple people in this thread now have told you that they don’t match your description of “every” and “all” graduates of elite schools, and the nice thing about using such strong descriptors is that a single counterexample disproves them.
> I went to an elite school and have friends that make much less even than $150k.
They're doing so by choice to do PhDs or go into public service. They (as in, the ones in quantitative majors and many even outside of it) _also_ had the choice to make several multiples of what I made by working at Jane Street or HRT or Citadel or now OpenAI and Anthropic.
I didn't have the choice. Nobody is selecting me for anything, I don't have the optionality of doing just anything. I took the best offer I got at a company that most elite school students would consider to be beneath them (Amazon).
Anyways, I'd also bet you make multiples of what I make now too as someone with a higher level if you're an SWE or adjacent.
I'm just trying to shatter the illusion. Stop wrecking your mental health because you can't hang with the IMO kids. Many of these people are, unsurprisingly, very insular unless you want to talk about math and TC all day. Sounds really fun. The red pill is to be happy you're already making a fuckton of money for typing shit into a computer and make some friends in pottery class
Maybe that's true. I'm sympathetic to the fact that these people aren't even interesting enough to be around. But then I see articles like this [0] sympathizing (?) with elite students that don't end up going into public service while still canonizing them and then I fall back into depression
You are simply wrong. Mechanical engineering majors, as an example of the most common non-CS major, don’t have any such high-paying opportunities until at least after a PhD (and even then they are lower than you are saying). Many make less than $100k out of college. Even CS majors have a hard time getting an interview at those top-paying companies.
Endowed funds are restricted- the donors can place constraints on how they are spent. They are not fungible and cannot reliably used to pay for a wide range of things that are currently paid for by federal funding.
Personally I would love to see the richest people in the nation contribute a lot more to universities in the form of unrestricted funds, to give these universities some options when it comes to being dependent on federal funding. But I guess you don't get rich by giving unrestricted funds to universities.
I really find it surprising how often people bring up endowments as if they are a resource that can be spent. The purpose of an endowment is to produce revenue via investment income; that investment income is already reflected in the operating revenue under "Investment return to operations". MIT cannot and should not spend their endowment beyond this investment income; doing so would jeopardize the long-term viability of MIT.
This is open to debate. Some endowments are intended to be spent directly, and not everybody agrees that spending some fraction of the endowment curses the university to oblivion. Some financial policies can be suspended (they are not absolute, fixed rules). Many at Harvard felt the endowment was far larger than necessary for long-term viability, and wanted to spend money on capital improvements.
In theory they could but in practice they don't want to. No company wants to loose $2B a year of free money.
Suddenly loosing 45% of revenues would be devastating.
And yes, MIT is a company. They have a CEO (under a different name), a board of directors, thousands of employees and they provide a service for a fee.
No one that works for MIT wants to loose that money. Not CEO, not board of directors, not employees.
Maybe they'll put ideology first and $2B second but I doubt it.
Remember, fascism is not an ideology or philosophical idea. It is a system of government. Gaining control of academia is a core part of this system. I applaud MIT for standing up to this.
I hope the other universities involved also resist. We'll see.
Yeah, I am very curious to see the responses from other institutions. The University of Texas (Austin) said they were "honored" to have received the compact.[1] That is obviously very concerning.
For anyone confused like me, a definition of motley is “Having elements of great variety or incongruity; heterogeneous.”
I think a lot of the neural connections to the word motley come from the expression “motley crew” which has fairly negative connotations. But the truth of the matter is, this is just a very varied group of schools; some great schools on the list. I won’t say any of the schools are not great, because of course some alum will come along and say “actually we had a great department for some niche computational thing” and I’ll be embarrassed to not have known that.
The list includes public & private institutions across a variety of states and size ranges. It singles out particular institutions in state university systems (e.g. University of Texas at Austin but not Texas A&M or University of Texas at El Paso). Half the list is in the northeast, while the midwest and Pacific Northwest are not represented. It's 9 institutions, not 10.
I was thinking it was a rare display of caution on the part of otherwise careless idiots. (or maybe we just got lucky) They aren't fucking with any of the universities responsible for managing national laboratories.
Interesting. I first heard about this from Newsom's statement that any university that signed it would lose California education funds instantly, but the only California university on it is the private USC. Thought for sure that at least UC Berkeley, UCLA, and Stanford would be on it, but I guess not. Maybe they chose USC because it seems to have a bit more of a conservative bent than most California schools.
> Thought for sure that at least UC Berkeley, UCLA, and Stanford would be on it, but I guess not.
UC and Stanford manage national laboratories for the US government. Someone might have realized the crisis that could come from that particular confrontation, and decided to steer clear for the moment.
No, the 2025 Republican party is definitely fascist.
Wikipedia: "Fascism is characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived interest of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy"
- Dictatorial leader - President Trump tries to push things through Executive Orders, which are supposed to go through Congress. And that one guy in his admin said he has "plenary" (I guess meaning total, unquestioned) authority
- Centralized autocracy - "Autocracy is a form of government in which absolute power is held by one person, known as an autocrat. It includes absolute monarchy and all forms of dictatorship, while it is contrasted with democracy and other forms of free government" - Same thing
- Militarism - The President has deployed National Guard and militarized ICE agents to American cities under the guise of improving public safety. The real reason is to terrorize non-white people and prepare for interfering with or preventing the next election. He also attacked ships from another country without any just cause.
- Forcible suppression of opposition - I believe right now Trump's administration is going after an Attorney General? ICE has also been detaining and physically harming people who try to (legally) film them. There is certainly more suppression I'm forgetting and more in the pipeline. The Republican party also generally seemed okay with violence against Democratic Party elected officials. I seem to recall violence against Nancy Pelosi's husband went un-remarked-upon.
- Belief in a natural social hierarchy - I don't have pull quotes from elected officials but there is a lot of white supremacy in the Republican party and among their voter base. They have ideas like "America First" where, when you dig into it, "American" means "pure-blood white person". They also seem to broadly look down on women, gay people, transgender people, the usual suspects. Patriachy is popular among the right, they'll say things like wives should submit to their husbands, women would categorically be happier as stay-at-home mothers, and some have opposed women's right to vote.
- Subordination of individual interests for the perceived interest of the nation or race - We are being asked to give up our civil rights, as well as our free trade (via tariffs that nobody wants) for some nonsense efforts from the President and the Republican Party.
- Strong regimentation of society and the economy - Kind of a restatement but again - Tariffs, deploying the military and the police without warrants against citizens and residents who have not been properly accused of any crime, yada yada
I like that your ideological counterparts have made the exact same statements about every administration ever.
Your post does not carry weight just because it is heavy.
When all you have is claims of fascism, everything is a nail.
Despite yours or my agreement on the topic of the day, this admin has pushed more power back to states than any in your lifetime. Those sneaky fascists, always giving up power…
How so? Am I mistaken about the military being deployed like this? Or am I correct but it’s not so bad? Or it is bad but nothing new? Help me out here.
Given that leftists have gained control of academia, are democrats fascists?
My claim of "leftists control academia" is based on data on political affiliation / donations by staff at major universities which is 80-90% democrats.
Pretty massive difference between "the federal government is using its influence to try to compel academia into bending the knee to it and it's fascistic methods of operating" and "most academics aren't in favor of the party that still doesn't believe in vaccines, hates them or their colleagues for having the wrong skin color and doesn't see any value in the liberal arts".
Fascism is a top-down system of government. If it's true that "leftists" gained control of academia, I don't see that as something that happened via top-down control, which is clearly what the Trump administration is attempting to impose.
Regardless of what's even in the document, the core issue is the administration effectively attempting to punish universities who do not agree to whatever standards they dictate. Not because anything actually against any enacted state or federal law, or even standards set out for every university, but based on policies the executive can arbitrarily decide for a handful of schools. That's why you're seeing such push back.
As for the document itself, it's a bit of a mixed bag, with a lot of subtle gatchas to make it sound enticing on the surface, but more sinister the closer you look. I honestly like some of the proposed tuition changes, but there's some language regarding enrollment that I find problematic. However, since the whole thing is being given to them with the threat of a knife hanging over their head, you're going to see a lot of universities be opposed to this.
Does it? The entire Compact document is contradictory. "We don't want diversity initiatives unless they benefit the white American and conservative thought."
"We want only the best and brightest to be let in, unless they are foreign or female."
The document was carefully written to look innocuous and reasonable (unlike most Trump communications). However, a close reading indicates that it's a clever trap that gives the government a great deal more power and oversight. Combined with the known ideology of Trump's supporters, it's not hard to see that the document was not intended to be a simple, good-faith attempt at undoing some of modern academia's excesses.
I agree with many of the principles in the document, but I'm good at reading between the lines and determining the true intent of the authors.
Government forcing institutions to conform to a specific ideology.
> Signatories commit themselves to revising governance structures as necessary to create such an environment, including but not limited to transforming or abolishing institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas.
> Institutions commit to defining and otherwise interpreting “male,” “female,” “woman,” and “man” according to reproductive function and biological processes.
I read the whole thing. Seems pretty fair to me, including the section prohibiting discrimination against conservative ideas. With all the coverage I expected something crazy.
I don't see how any company could possibly freeze prices for five years. How will they survive if tuition doesn't keep pace with costs in an inflationary environment?
This seems like a reasonable response by MIT. I’m struggling to understand where the core disagreement lies though. Would someone who is opposed to this “compact” care to explain their view? I’m not interested in baseless name-calling (“fascist” etc) but I am interested in cogent reasoning.
I didn’t read the compact itself, but I did read the wikipedia article about it, and it seems to be a very positive set of criteria (safeguarding individuality and merit, protecting against the formation of ideological monoculture, protecting against hostile nation-state actors, etc)
It’s bizarre actually, because these institutions should be doing all of these things already. I don’t know what to make of the fact that they aren’t.
Careful not to fall into the "People's Democratic Republic" trap: the way something is described and its purported aims are not at all the same as its actual effects (and, often, not even its intended ones). Politics is, in many cases, the art of selling you a box of spoons with "forks" printed on the label.
Instead of asking "does this agreement sound nice?", ask what power it gives, to whom, and what might they want to do with it.
Some prompts to spark a cogent reasoning process:
> Signatories commit themselves to [...] transforming or abolishing institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas
What "institutional units" might this mean? How are they identified? Who identifies them? What is the threshold for belittling conservative ideas that might trigger the "transforming or abolishing" remedy?
> Universities shall be responsible for ensuring that they do not knowingly: (1) permit actions by the university, university employees, university students, or individuals external to the university community to delay or disrupt class instruction or disrupt libraries or other traditional study locations [...] signatories commit to using lawful force if necessary to prevent these violations
What do "actions by" "university students" to "delay or disrupt class instruction" refer to? What kinds of disruptive action might the people writing this document be so concerned about that they would ask universities to "commit to using lawful force" to prevent? What sort of scenario is being envisaged here?
> Institutions commit to defining and otherwise interpreting "male," "female," "woman," and "man" according to reproductive function and biological processes.
Doesn't it seem oddly specific to assert a definition like this? Why can't a university decide for itself? How does this assertion square with "maintaining a vibrant marketplace of ideas" and the "empirical assessment of a broad spectrum of viewpoints"? Why only this definition and no others?
I could go on, but hopefully you get the picture. It's an important skill to practice critically reading a document the same way you might critically audit code. Don't ask what it seems like it does, ask what it might allow someone to do.
Notably, the language in the compact does not limit legal intervention to those violent actions. It requires action against even peaceful protesting in a library, or even in a hallway or outdoor area (as a student I often studied in both of these places).
Further, your "setting fire to university" video is in South Africa; it hardly seems relevant here. Access to global news will always provide extremes. To me, it's important that actions we take serve the everyday reality rather than the rare occurrences that happen in a few places but are amplified by human attraction to violence and drama.
The second result in your YouTube search is a PBS mini-doc called "Why Do College Campuses Have So Many Protests?"
The questions I offered were prompts to engage critically with why this compact exists. Perhaps watching that video might help you find answers beyond "playing dumb".
> In matters of bathroom, locker-room, and sports segregation, universities will define sex categories based on reproductive and biological criteria.
In other words, trans people can't use the bathrooms matching their gender identity.
> Calls for ideological diversity, not just at the campus level, "but within every field, department, school, and teaching unit."
In other words, every academic department is susceptible to ideological litmus tests defined by the state. If Trump's white house feels like your Computer Science department has too many Democrats in it, you fix that problem or you lose your funding.
> Restricts student visas to foreign students who ... "are ... supportive of, American and Western values."
In other words, another ideological litmus test, only in this case the consequence is that foreign students can be thrown out at will.
> Requires that "university employees, in their capacity as university representatives" as well as all colleges, faculties, departments, and other academic units "abstain from actions or speech relating to societal and political events"
In other words, tenured faculty lose their right to free speech.
> In other words, trans people can't use the bathrooms matching their gender identity.
I think trans people who "pass" can do whatever they want, and in practice it won't be an issue. I do support actual sex segregation in any area of life women will have no chance without it (like sports). The bathrooms thing is stupid, I agree.
> In other words, every academic department is susceptible to ideological litmus tests defined by the state. If Trump's white house feels like your Computer Science department has too many Democrats in it, you fix that problem or you lose your funding.
Every academic department already has really strong ideological litmus tests. It got way less intense with Trump's election, but it's still there. It's not subtle. You can be really good at what you do, but if you're religious or conservative you have no hope of getting a job in tons of fields. Sociology, for instance. It has nothing to do with how good you are at what you do, it's overt political testing. It was (in the case of many University of California schools, like Berkeley) actually the first line in hiring decisions.
> In other words, another ideological litmus test, only in this case the consequence is that foreign students can be thrown out at will.
I think this is reasonable if there's an objective standard. "Doesn't support listed terrorist organizations" is a reasonable standard. The standard should be written in.
> In other words, tenured faculty lose their right to free speech.
"...in their capacity as university representatives...". So no, nobody loses his or her right to free speech. It's just that when you're acting as the mouthpiece of the University, you shouldn't be political if you want federal $. And I wholeheartedly support this. University presidents being political was a fucking disaster (see Reif at MIT).
It is not. Trans people, frequently, look like the opposite sex. Hence there can be no reasonable enforcement of this policy. Cis people, frequently, look like transgender individuals of their own gender. Hence they are liable to receive harassment by any attempt to enforce such a policy. Harassing people, cis and trans, merely trying to use the bathroom in peace, is a far greater imposition than merely existing in the same space as someone else.
Nonetheless, even in cases where someone has managed to somewhat disguise themselves as the opposite sex - or think they have done so - they will still be expected to respect boundaries, and stay out of spaces designated for the opposite sex.
Respecting boundaries means not concerning yourself with the genitals of a person merely trying to use the bathroom. You cannot enforce a policy regarding someone's sex without inspecting their genitals. How is that respecting of their boundaries? How does that lead to a person feeling safer in the bathroom?
Why are you people who insist on male incursion of female spaces so obsessed with "genital inspection"? No-one is asking for this strawman.
Your assumption seems to be that if no-one physically stops these men, they can and will do what they like, with impunity, and that there's no chance of them simply respecting women's boundaries. Is that what you mean?
>Your assumption seems to be that if no-one physically stops these men, they can and will do what they like, with impunity
That seems like a reliable assumption to me. Your assumptions seems to be that if you make a "rule" concerning who can go into which bathroom based on a hidden characteristic, no one will take it upon themselves to enforce this rule, and thus to make frequently wrong guesses regarding this hidden characteristic. That seems like a poor assumption.
>and that there's no chance of them simply respecting women's boundaries
Different people have different boundaries. Different people have different standards as for who should be sorted into which bathrooms. One person's arbitrary standards cannot dominate everyone else's lives. Instead, rules must be made based on reason and fairness, as I demonstrated above.
Regardless of what is in the compact, it's important that our educational institutions have independence to run themselves as they see fit. To make funding conditional to a set of demands by the government takes away that independence.
This is why a couple of conservative schools don't accept any sort of federal money. Liberal schools might be considering doing the same.
Otherwise, yes, an independent school can do what they want. If you want to be truly independent, you have to be willing to walk away from the money. Anybody that gives money can attach conditions to it, including the government.
That is obviously the case that federal money comes with strings and strings curtail independence.
What you seem to imply that there should be no strings. Which is a position you can have but it has never been the case.
To wit, one of the things this compact wants is an enforcement of civil rights act and Biden admin did the same thing:
> The most important stipulation during the Biden administration attached to federal funding for universities was compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This law prohibits discrimination based on race, color, or national origin in any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance, including discrimination against Jewish students through antisemitic harassment or hostility on campus. Universities that fail to adequately address such issues risk federal investigations by the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) and potential loss of funding.
> Following the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and subsequent campus protests, the administration opened over 100 Title VI investigations into universities for alleged antisemitic discrimination—more than in the entire previous four years combined. This included guidance like a May 2024 "Dear Colleague" letter to colleges outlining examples of prohibited conduct, such as denying Jewish students equal access to education or tolerating harassment.
I didn't say there should be no strings. I believe institutions should follow laws, and if they or society find those laws to be unjust, we have recourse through our democratic institutions.
The Civil Rights Act was legislation put into place by Congress, signed by LBJ, and upheld by the Supreme Court. This compact was a letter sent by the White House telling universities to fall in line with their demands or be refused funding. I find those to be two completely different things.
Highly suggest reading the document[1] if you are interested.
The overarching problem is it moves management decisions from the colleges to the White House. But here are a couple of really problematic points:
- mandates government price setting
- requires institutions to promise to use force against minors when faced with unknown hypotheticals
- requires universities to monitor & censor staff and faculty
- requires government oversight of classroom grading, in the total absence of government standards
- bathroom fetish likely in conflict with state laws
- White House oversight of which academic programs are allowed, and the budgets attached to each. White House does not specify whether programs currently in flight will be allowed to continue through the school year, or whether students in those programs will need to leave immediately.
- White House decides what criteria can be used for admission
- White House decides which "institutional units" are allowed to function
- To enforce a parts of the Compact would effectively require the White House to install commissars at the institution to e.g. monitor speech and communications to ensure they are acceptable. This alone should be disqualifying.
- Many discretionary decisions like the above are made at the White House without any binding written guidance
Basically, an independent university would only agree to this if it would have to close otherwise.
The Compact is not conservative because it centralizes decisions best made lower down; it aims to radically reshape higher education; it mandates prices; it promulgates ideology, and more. Conservatives should also reject this Compact.
- Specifically calling out protecting "conservative ideas" in their section on creating an "intellectually open campus environment". This is a dog whistle that makes it patently clear which viewpoints will be protected, and which won't. See what happened to Mahmoud Khalil for a recent example of how this will work in practice.
- Preventing admissions of foreign students based on "hostility to America or our allies", which is obviously an attempt to silence dissent. Who is responsible for defining what "hostility" means? If a foreign student supports boycotting Israel due to their ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people, would they be barred from admission to an American university?
I would contend that threatening to annex Canada and Greenland constitutes "hostility to American allies", but since those talking points are being espoused by the sitting president, it stands to reason that this administration's justice department wouldn't intervene to prevent a potential student with similar views from from admitted to an American school.
- Forcing institutions to define bathroom usage criteria based on biological sex. Putting aside for a moment the fact that this is a blatant attempt to humiliate trans people -- how does this work in practice? Do you hire someone to stand at every bathroom door and prevent people from entering if they don't fit your notion of what that gender is "supposed" to look like? Do you demand identity documents before letting someone use the toilet?
There are plenty of videos online of cisgender people being accosted in the bathroom that aligns with their biological sex simply because other people _assume_ based on their appearance that they are trans.
Your "I don't know what words mean" is very selective.
So you don't know what "hostile to US" means.
Do you know what "Unwelcome verbal, nonverbal, or physical conduct based on protected characteristics" means? This is one of the many vague prescriptions in MIT code of conduct.
If I make a sour face at a gay person, is it "unwelcome nonverbal conduct"? Should I be punished for that? But not punished for shouting "from the river to the sea" i.e. demanding annihilation of Israel?
Is your argument that we should just scrap all code of conducts because it is by nature open to interpretation?
Or you just object to those that tickle your politics?
> And if someone violates that rule and is reported, they need to punish that person appropriately, just as they punish for any other violation of stated rules and regulations.
So how and where exactly is it established that a violation has occurred? If not Seal Team Six and DNA testing (the latter wouldn’t solve the problem conclusively in any case). How exactly are you, random bystander, supposed to know if an arbitrary stranger is male or female?
Real people get this judgment wrong about cisgendered strangers all the time, this isn’t a hypothetical. See sibling comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45543644 for a list of cited examples.
Do you intend for the accused to display their genitals as an affirmative defense? To whom? Is every random accusation going to cause an interaction with the police and a gross violation of privacy?
Because that’s what it sounds like you’re suggesting here.
What's with this bizarre fantasy that humans can't distinguish the sex of other humans? It has to be the most stupid of all the trans activist arguments.
More Republican politicians have been convicted of sexual misconduct in bathrooms than trans people. Perhaps we can start with the real issue, and ban them from public bathrooms first? Remember, facts don't care about your feelings!
> No, the expectation is that people will respect boundaries and voluntarily stay out of the single-sex spaces they have no right to be in.
So currently, these people have the right to be in these spaces (whether or not you disagree that they should, legally, they do), the expectation would, I assume, be that people will respect boundaries and not accost people based on assumptions about their genitals. And yet as GP said:
> There are plenty of videos online of cisgender people being accosted in the bathroom that aligns with their biological sex simply because other people _assume_ based on their appearance that they are trans.
Why would we expect people who are currently accosting people who are in the right place to respect them more when there is additional legal justification to harass them?
Perhaps phrased differently: would you support legal repercussions for someone who falsely or incorrectly reports someone as using an "incorrect" bathroom? If the assumption is that everyone is following the boundaries of these spaces, then breaking that assumption is, bad faith and grounds for a complaint of harassment. You'd agree?
If the policy of MIT or any other institution states that certain spaces are designated as single-sex only, then no, people of the opposite sex do not have the right to use these spaces.
I don't expect people to have a problem with understanding this, in practice. It's really not that difficult to understand what sex you are and where you're allowed to be. Children learn this quite early on.
(Edit: My account is now rate-limited because of downvotes, so I can't reply to any responses. However I would like to point out that if MIT is currently allowing staff and students to use single-sex spaces that are designated for the opposite sex, this is very likely to be a Title IX violation. Unfortunately, sexism is rife in institutions of higher education, and MIT is no exception.)
> If the policy of MIT or any other institution states that certain spaces are designated as single-sex only, then no, people of the opposite sex do not have the right to use these spaces.
Correct, but this is not MIT's policy today, responding to your edit, I do not believe your understanding of title IX is correct, See [0].
>I don't expect people to have a problem with understanding this, in practice. It's really not that difficult to understand what sex you are and where you're allowed to be. Children learn this quite early on.
But in places that do have such policies, people who are using the correct bathroom get harassed. Given that you assume this is easy to understand (and I think I agree), would you support laws that codify harassing people about using the incorrect bathroom as criminal, given that you assume these don't need enforcement, we should discourage vigilantism, right?
[0]: https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/LSB10953 suggests that there is a circuit split on whether policies banning students from using gender-identity matching bathrooms would be a Title IX violation, with the 4th and 7th circuits saying that disallowing students from using their preferred bathrooms is a violation, and the 11th saying it is not. Currently there is no circuit split around the opposite question: the 3rd and 9th (and presumably also the 4th and 7th) circuits agree that allowing students to use gender-identity matching bathrooms would not be a Title IX violation, and the 11th Circuit's argument doesn't appear to preclude to a school or district choosing to allow gender-segregated bathrooms, it just allows sex-segregated bathrooms. MIT is under the 1st circuit and I can't find any federal cases at the district level, so it is technically not required to act in any particular way, but given other circuit precedent (and, I think, supreme court precedent under Bostock which says basically the same thing for title VII), I would suspect your interpretation would open MIT to legal risk.
Regarding Title IX, there are still cases working their way through the courts, so we will have to see.
I would be very surprised if colleges letting males enjoy women's locker rooms, and therefore not providing women any single-sex place to change, isn't ruled as being sex discrimination.
Keep in mind this issue is about privacy and dignity and safety for women, not about giving men whatever they want whenever they want.
While you may have whatever feeling about any issue, legally this isn't about "privacy and safety and dignity for women", it's about discrimination. And it's extremely difficult to contort shared facilities into "discrimination".
How do you propose preventing situations such as these?
“The couple said they were in the women's lobby bathroom when a male security guard came in and started banging on the stall doors. Baker said she was in one of the stalls while Victor waited for her near the sinks… Baker was born a woman and identifies as a woman.” [1]
“Gerika Mudra, 18, went to dinner in April with a friend in Owatonna, about an hour south of Minneapolis. When she went to the restroom, a server followed her inside and banged on the stall door while saying: “This is a women’s restroom. The man needs to get out of here,”… Mudra said she felt she had to prove to the server that she is a woman, so she unzipped her hoodie to show she has breasts.” [2]
“Dani Davis was in the women’s restroom at the Walmart where she worked when she heard a man’s voice shouting from outside the stall. The man yelled a slur for transgender people and said he was going to beat them up, Davis said. She was the only person in the bathroom at the Lake City, Florida, store… Davis waited for the man to leave before exiting the bathroom and finishing her shift. Her immediate supervisor was supportive when she reported the incident, she said. So she was shocked and confused when she was fired around a week later for not reporting the incident to the right managers and creating a “security risk.””[3]
“She said that she had entered the restroom with her ex-girlfriend, who handed her a tampon, when two male deputies stormed in, shining flashlights into the stall and demanding she exit. Morton, still using the toilet, was stunned... When she finally exited the stall, she said she lifted her shirt to prove she was not a man, expecting the ordeal to end. Instead, she said one deputy continued to question her appearance, insisting she “looked like a man.””[4]
It would be unfair of me to presume that you believe that all women should wear skirts, keep their hair long, and perhaps shave down any overly square facial bones so as to not invoke any hint of possible masculinity. But if there is a rule in place, then the rule requires methods of being enforced. Expecting women to expose themselves to a security guard or some other investigatory party in order to prove that they should be allowed to pee there is a guaranteed violation of their dignity, whereas the occasional transgender woman using the next stall over is not.
Those already very rare instances will become even rarer when males stop insisting they have a right to access women's spaces based on supposedly womenly thoughts in their minds.
Thankfully, this fad is on the way out, and with it, the overvigilance that has led to unfortunate misunderstandings like you mention in your comment - none of which are justification for males to impose themselves on female spaces.
Try considering the opposite situation. Suppose Biden or Obama sent a mandate to universities making unilateral and ideologically-motivated demands of their curriculum, policies, and practices. Everyone cool with that scenario? Or, does each new presidential administration get to impose their will on institutions of higher learning? What would that be like?
There was an Obama "Dear Colleague" letter (actually, 3 of them) that I think at least partially qualify as unilateral and ideologically motivated.
Yes, every new administration can attempt to impose their will on institutions of higher learning (so long as the administration has some sort of leverage, like funding or legal threats). The wise administrations limit their imposition, preferring to allow academia to enjoy high levels of freedom, autonomy, and funding to achieve their mission.
The linked letter reminds schools of their requirements to comply with civil rights statutes that have been on the books in the US for many years. The trump admin, otoh, is on a witch-hunt to “protect” conservative views based on their own feelings and concerns. Not the same.
I think decisions based off race, sex, etc. could probably be eased off a bit. But I don’t know that it should be completely eliminated. Diversity and meritocracy don’t always go hand in hand - I think a healthy balance is important.
Let’s focus on #2: Marketplace of Ideas and Civil Discourse.
> Signatories commit themselves to revising governance structures as necessary to
create such an environment, including but not limited to transforming or abolishing institutional units that
purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas.
Only conservative ideas receive protected status under this compact. Why? It is objectively false that only conservative ideas are punished, belittled, and met with threats of violence on the relevant college campuses.
> Such policies also shall recognize that academic
freedom is not absolute, and universities shall adopt policies that prevent discriminatory, threatening,
harassing, or other behaviors that abridge the rights of other members of the university community.
Read strictly, this clause implies no protests or demonstrations of any kind of a college campus, including e.g., the annual pro-life demonstrations at my alma mater (which occasionally became violent, by the way). It is naive to imagine this clause will be enforced equitably.
> Signatories commit to rigorous, good faith, empirical assessment of a broad spectrum of viewpoints among faculty, students, and staff at all levels and to sharing the results of such assessments with the public; and to seek such a broad spectrum of viewpoints not just in the university as a whole, but within every field, department, school, and teaching unit.
Every biology department must hire creationist professors. Every astronomy department must hire flat-earthers. Every geology department must hire young-earthers. Every medical school must hire germ-theory-skeptical epidemiologists.
And across departments, too: we need mathematicians who believe in Fomenko’s new chronology and ultrafinitist historians.
I assume you’ll argue these are hyperbole, but I’ve encountered such people during my time in academia.
> Signatories acknowledge that the freedom to debate requires conditions of civility. Civility includes protections against institutional punishment or individual harassment for one’s views.
So, logically, a professor of classical philosophy must entertain homophobic assertions about Plato and Aristotle, and cannot sanction in any way the student interrupting class in this fashion.
I also see that a Christian student could occupy a Hillel building (a Jewish student organization) and could not be legally removed or administratively sanctioned for doing so under this section of the policy.
You might argue that these fall under the ban on “heckler’s veto” defined later in this paragraph, but strictly speaking they don’t. The “heckler’s veto” ban applies to the hypothetical Jewish students attempting to convince the Christian student to leave.
> Signatories shall adopt policies prohibiting incitement to violence, including calls for murder or genocide or support for entities designated by the U.S. government as terrorist organizations.
Recall how NSPM-7 recently expanded the definition of “terrorist organization” to include groups that display some of the following “common threads”: “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”
How any Islamic student group, no matter how explicitly pro-Israel and pro-Christianity, survives this definition is an real question.
> How any Islamic student group, no matter how explicitly pro-Israel and pro-Christianity, survives this definition is a real question.
This is a disingenuous example, Islamic student groups are not anti-capitalist, anti-American, or anti-Christian, and giving an example like this only creates FUD.
This administration is letting Qatar build an airbase on US soil. I think it’s wiser to believe what people do more so than what they say, or what others say about them.
> This administration is letting Qatar build an airbase on US soil. I think it’s wiser to believe what people do more so than what they say, or what others say about them.
I don't think looking at Trump's history of actions toward individual Muslims subject to the authority of the United States government (as distinct from, e.g., foreign states that give him multimillion dollar bribes) really helps your case here, though.
> I think it’s wiser to believe what people do more so than what they say
I agree, if only because the thing you just said is entirely incorrect. Qatar is not building an airbase on US soil, they are building facilities on a US-owned airbase. This happens every year from the NATO partners like Turkey who have been doing this for decades.
Please do your own research, don't just cite Twitter/X on this crap.
It’s the usual trick of writing something so that an uninterested reader assuming the common meaning of words will be completely nonplussed, but a lawyer or judge reading such a document adversarially will reach many unexpected conclusions.
"nonplussed" means "bewildered" or "really confused". Maybe you mean "not worried"?
If you mean "not worried", then yeah, I bet you're right that there are a bunch of things that could be entailed by the language that aren't obvious. Good point.
I am affiliated and have been affiliated with several top universities, including the two in Cambridge, MA. I'm an academic. I say that because this stuff directly affects my career prospects.
It's too bad MIT has taken this stance. I think the Compact is overall an obviously reasonable, good-faith effort to improve universities in the United States. The one area I'd change a bit is the specific mention of "conservative" ideas:
"...purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas."
It's entirely fair because these universities do purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas. But it's not what I'd want in such a document because next time around it could be "liberal" ideas, or "communist" ideas, or...
Everything else seems on the nose. I would hasten to remind you that the threat is not "we'll force you to do this stuff", it is "if you want federal funding, you'll do this stuff". Which seems fine to me. Much of the document is merely trying to actually enforce the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The purpose of a university is to expand knowledge, which is itself not a “conservative idea”.
A university that can’t “belittle” obviously false ideas like “the earth is flat” or “evolution isn’t real” or “the climate isn’t changing” just because they’re popular with whoever’s calling themselves “conservatives” at the time is not capable of functioning.
You’re picking out the quote that reveals the entire document for what it really is, and choosing to ignore it.
Can you imagine the conservatives at MIT (they are there!) being happy that MIT outsourced price-setting and hiring decisions to the White House?
This Compact aims to radically reshape the management of higher education. In that, it is anything but conservative. Conservatives should reject it for that reason alone.
> "if you want federal funding, you'll do this stuff"
There's another piece that keeps getting lost. That is: the US government has a set of policy goals it is trying to accomplish. Outsourcing to third parties some parts of the work of getting there is a cash-light approach. As an American, I think this is better than e.g. the DoD building duplicate capacity (and competing for researchers) at multiples of the cost.
In one sense, MIT gets federal funding in the same way that Raytheon gets federal funding (and there are DoD asset tags at MIT to prove it).
This isn't just MIT getting funding, it's also the US buying some capacity from MIT. It's a mutually beneficial transaction.
It's a power grab that makes the university effectively subordinate to the federal government.
The most important part is the end: if the university violates the agreement, they not only lose funding, they also have to give back what they received the previous year. Such a clawback would be devastating, much worse than merely denying funding going forward. And who determines whether there's a violation? The Department of Justice apparently has sole power to make that determination. There's no mention of any appeals process or oversight.
That means that if the President has a compliant Attorney General, they can demand pretty much anything of the university under threat of finding them in violation, regardless of whether they've actually done anything wrong.
It could be a reasonable, good-faith effort if it were put forth by reasonable, good-faith people. But it very much was not.
The power grab started decades ago when a distinct minority of the US started to take over our universities by preferentially hiring and promoting those who share their ideology.
Trump is an attempt by the voters (most of whom do not share the ideology) to undo the power grab.
This tells you who really wears the pants in the relationship. Western nations are screwed because their bedrock is enlightenment, but their adversaries have no such ideals to be held up to. The rule of law that many such organizations enjoy in the West would be denied to them in places their faculty members defend. It’s important to reflect on what works well while trying to fix what doesn’t; discourse often neglects or downplays the former.
Who are these adversaries you speak of? How have they attacked the US of A?
As an example, for a long time, spiritual and scientific enlightement was the calling card of the Warszaw pact countries: they just couldn't figure out how to earn money off it (free university education and intensive scentific curiculums in primary and high schools were common).
For China today, they are thoroughly convinced they are doing the same by restricting access to "bad information" (like "Western nations" are now starting to do with eg. porn, and did similar stuff with "fake news" during the pandemic) — the difference being that they did figure out how to earn money while doing that.
In the Middle East, people die and kill in the name of their version of "enlightenment".
Now, not saying there never was any enlightenment in the Western world, but it was built on slavery, exploitation and being first to many an industrial improvement (like using coal or oil to drive progress, that the whole world now suffers for).
Yes, I'd rather live in a "Western" country than any of the "adversaries", but they are only a risk to our way of life if we do not believe it is the right, enlightened way.
Because if it is, we are willing to pay for it. Are we?
> Yes, I'd rather live in a "Western" country than any of the "adversaries"
It’s important to reflect on why you say this because when push comes to shove, the moral relativism rings a hollow tone. The preceding parts of your post are just part of the education instilled in you from having been exposed to enlightenment-influenced frameworks.
Not really, it mostly speaks to the fact that I've been indoctrinated through my upbringing, education and environment that this is the "true" enlightenment. Even for people on the "other" side, they ask the same questions and they see the hipocrisy (it's not hard to see how capital corrupts) and get stuck. This is why morality moves in cycles even in the Western world: morality is a human construct created through reason to best enable civilization and progress.
I did not add that statement accidentally to "off myself": I did that to acknowledge that this is hard to overcome, and that none of us has a moral upper hand, really (me included).
I think people often conflate morality with mores. Morality is timeless (it’s always been unfashionable to kill someone, to lie, to display envy, and so on), while social mores can fluctuate with changing political, cultural or philosophical view points.
On top of that, sociopolitical self-preserving interests can muddle the discourse on what is moral or not, which is what you’re saying, more or less. The point being that ultimately the truth of an immoral act is unchanged by whatever abstractions we layer upon it. So, we make exceptions to ethics for selfish reasons, not moral ones.
What matters then are the outcomes for all the reasons we make exceptions, just as you think there’s some justified reason for moral relativism. It’s okay, people can do what they want, they just have to be honest about the trades they make when they do this.
From a geopolitical perspective, moral relativism is a nice diplomatic tool, it just has the troubling effect of producing unnecessary contrarianism in populations that would benefit from understanding the implications of that moral relativism.
> it’s always been unfashionable to kill someone, to lie, to display envy, and so on
Even if we restrict ourselves to recorded human history, there are plenty of examples where killing in particular and imposing one's will by force more generally was glorified.
This is really a very modern development (last hundred years?).
Just look at how women have been treated 50 years ago as the "weaker sex" (and to an extent, still are today).
But going back to morality of the Western world, how does that compute in terms of recent excursions in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria... All exceptions needed in the last 20 years?
My point is that I subscribe to the notion that "morality" has been developed as a human, reasoned construct to help with self-preservation when cohabiting in large social groups (aka civilization) — I am outright disagreeing with you. Compare with the "morality" of humans brought up outside society (kids lost in woods and similar). Too many counter-examples throughout history to consider it innate, IMO.
The simplest living beings have some idea of self and other, and life and death, and so understand, even implicitly, what it means to be killed and dying. So a primal impulse to fight back kicks in whenever something feels mortally threatened.
Bacteria might not be able to communicate that they don’t like being killed, but I don’t think their view of it changes despite that lack of ability to communicate. More complex and conscious organisms, like monkeys, take offense to lies and deception. Or dominant animals with higher-level cognition might punish members of their groups who display jealous traits. Who taught these animals human social mores? No one, they’re going purely off instinct.
There are primal instincts which drive some of these behaviors which have absolutely nothing to do with human culture or society. To paraphrase what I’ve already said, morality doesn’t change, but only how you think of it does. Humans are the only animals who elegantly communicate their selfishness about moral behaviors, and get away with it.
And I don’t get the point of the rest of your post about the Middle East, but I am going to leave it at that.
I don't think your examples show morality at work, but I already realised we disagree on this topic, and I am sure you'll interpret the dictionary definitions differently too.
> The document also includes principles with which we disagree, including those that would restrict freedom of expression and our independence as an institution. And fundamentally, the premise of the document is inconsistent with our core belief that scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone.
> In our view, America’s leadership in science and innovation depends on independent thinking and open competition for excellence. In that free marketplace of ideas, the people of MIT gladly compete with the very best, without preferences. Therefore, with respect, we cannot support the proposed approach to addressing the issues facing higher education.
Context (as I didn't know about this earlier): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_for_Academic_Excellenc... (current version: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Compact_for_Acade...).
I liked the “These values and other MIT practices meet or exceed many standards outlined in the document you sent” line.
What a ridiculous document.
In a way, the overreach in the compact made this an obvious (though not easy) decision.
Obviously, an independent university cannot agree to government-mandated pricing or censorship of faculty members. Similarly, government intrusion into grading practices and proactively threatening to use "lawful force" against minors are immediately off the table.
That's all aside from the practicality of ongoing assessment, which would likely require something akin to commissars to monitor speech and discussions around grading.
The universities are fortunate the administration is not more subtle.
> In a way, the overreach in the compact made this an obvious (though not easy) decision.
If you have morals but lack the conviction to stand by them, do you really have morals?
Unsure what you mean. Obviously MIT is standing on their conviction. That doesn't make it an easy thing to do!
It's quite possible that an organization has multiple morals, and standing by one moral might feasibly compromise another---choosing which of these morals to violate might be difficult.
> an independent university
MIT is taking (lots of) money from federal government. That makes them dependent on the government and government is within its right to attach strings to the money.
MIT is free to not do what the government wants but then government is free to stop giving them (our) money.
Furthermore, MIT, like any other organization, must obey state and federal laws.
For example, there's a law that you cannot discriminate in hiring based on sex or religion. If IBM, MIT or a barber shop discriminates it's the role of the government to enforce the law and make them stop. The easy way is sending them a letter and asking. The hard way is to sue them in federal court.
> MIT is taking (lots of) money from federal government.
The People of the United States are getting some of their research business done by MIT, yes. MIT competes for that business. It is not a gift, subsidy or favor to MIT.
Of course grants and contracts have terms. I hope the government can come to terms with MIT because I want the best researchers doing our work.
I wish this was better understood more broadly. Grants aren't no-strings-attached gifts—far from it; they are contracts.
When a researcher at a university gets a grant, that's the federal government hiring that researcher and their team to complete a specific research project. The research team has a particular research question that the federal government has deemed important enough that U.S. tax payers would benefit from getting an answer.
So there's some department in the US government, which plans all the important research such as children looking at Facebook food ads or whether lonely rats crave cocaine more than happy rats [1] and the scientists compete for these? And it's not the scientists writing these up themselves and then asking government to finance the proposed research?
1. https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/FESTIVUS-REP...
It’s a mixture of both top down priorities from government and bottom up opportunities from scientists. I suspect you know this and are being sarcastic because that’s cool. But I’ll describe it anyway.
The NSF, DARPA, DOE, NASA, etc etc have research program offices that set priorities. For example let’s have a DARPA program that pushes new stealth materials, or an NSF program on quantum computing (possibly partly motivated by another three-letter agency). The program managers understand the state of the art AND what the government (as the agent of the People) could really use Real Soon Now, or down the road for big bets. They write a Call for Proposals that describes what they’d like to see.
Researchers watch out for CFPs they might be able to contribute to, and propose a project where their work could help. Sometimes the fit is easy, and sometimes the researcher will modulate their work to fit better, because they want support from somewhere.
The proposals compete for a share of the targeted pot of money.
This is how the government influences basic research, while still giving researchers the opportunity to propose novel stuff the government hasn’t thought of.
It’s the system that built the Internet and CRISPR, RNA vaccines and the laser, microelectronics and IVF.
For example, let's take cocaine rats, which is a real research paid by my tax dollars. Is it some kind of big government vision that created this? Can you locate a Call for Proposal that spawned this? How does it benefit me as a citizen and a taxpayer?
You can’t see any way that an improved understanding of happiness and/or drug use could help people? You don’t see any way that the government, on behalf of the People, would want to understand wellbeing and/or drug abuse better?
It’s not about the fucking rats. You KNOW this. Everyone knows this. The ‘cocaine rats durrrr’ type argument is not in good faith. I simply don’t believe people are that dumb.
>You can’t see any way that an improved understanding of happiness and/or drug use could help people?
I can't see how is this research helping anyone other than the researchers themselves. Also I can't see the Call for Proposal for that, I figure there was not any, as I expected.
I am revising my belief.
> MIT is taking (lots of) money from federal government. That makes them dependent on the government and government is within its right to attach strings to the money.
Governments do not have rights (except in a metaphorical sense in relations with other governments, which doesn't apply here), so it is impossible for a government to be “within its rights” when interacting with an entity to subject to its governance.
It may be within legal exercise of its powers, but that is a very a very different thing than rights, and in any case there is a very good argument that the compact is not only unlawful as an exercise of government power, but that accepting and complying with it would require universities to act in conflict with existing federal civil rights laws which provide for private causes of actions against perpetrators.
Government grants are competitive, not gifts. MIT competes (along with private companies and individuals) for grants and if the grant is won, a very lengthy and detailed contract is signed that outlines the terms of the grant. This isn’t free money that’s being handed out willy nilly. If MIT (or anyone else) violates the terms of a contract, the government should seek to nullify that specific contract. That would be the normal (and legal) thing to do.
I mean, you're obviously right about this all. Which is why it's an easy decision. MIT chooses independence and so cannot agree to these terms.
Separately, there is the question of whether it is in the best interest of the US to part ways with organizations such as MIT.
> MIT is taking (lots of) money from federal government
Surely nobody is naive enough to think the federal government is giving money to institutions like MIT with no expectation of reciprocal benefit?
MIT is (was?) full of DoD asset tags to indicate which equipment was paid for by DoD grants. So another way of stating your point is the federal government is investing in programs at MIT to shape which basic research gets done so that it aligns with the best interest of the United States.
(A prior iteration of conservativism would have recognized outsourcing to MIT as a capital-light way of accomplishing a set of policy goals. The alternative being to spin up the whole apparatus in-house without cost sharing. Left to their own devices, engineering students are not likely to discover and research problems that are immediately germane to DoD.)
It is possible to be independent while also accepting grants from the USG. There's no contradiction there. The point of independence is that the Institute gets to determine how it runs its affairs. This Compact is an attempt to move that decision-making process to the White House. Maintaining independence in this environment therefore means abandoning federal research funding.
> It is possible to be independent while also accepting grants from the USG. There's no contradiction there. The point of independence is that the Institute gets to determine how it runs its affairs.
That hasn't been true for many decades. Accepting grants means being subject to a host of legal requirements tied to various different pieces of civil rights legislation.
The thing about that legislation is that since it is the law of the land, it applies whether or not an institution receives a grant.
Not at all. It applies only to institutions that are funded by the government. Receiving grants has been characterized as accepting government funding, which is strange on the fundamentals - those grants notionally represent the government paying for work it wants done.
Also characterized as accepting government funding is admitting students who get student loans from the government. This goes well beyond "strange on the fundamentals" - that money is notionally given to the student, not to the school.
> threatening to use "lawful force" against minors
What's the context here?
The text of the Compact:
> Signatories commit to using lawful force if necessary to prevent these violations and to swift, serious, and consistent sanctions for those who commit them.
Many students enter college as minors, so this is asking colleges to commit to using force against minors while only talking about hypothetical events.
What's wrong with that? They're still covered by the law.
I'll make it simple in a few steps:
1. Many people have an aversion to harming children. This aversion is not universally shared, but it is a very common stance nonetheless. Children, especially, tend to have an aversion to being harmed.
2. Universities need to recruit children to leave their families and be governed by them (e.g. housing, food, etc.).
3. Parents of children are required to get approval for those children to go to the universities, so that the universities can function.
4. It is harder to recruit children to a university that has agreed that in vague circumstances it is ready to harm them. Note here that everyone already knows that there are sanctions for breaking the law, and that the university is advertising that it is willing to go above and beyond normal law enforcement procedures in hurting children.
Does that clarify?
Did you read the rest of the paragraph prior to the sentence you quoted? Any use of lawful force has to be justified by prevention of the violations described thus:
> Signatories acknowledge that the freedom to debate requires conditions of civility. Civility includes protections against institutional punishment or individual harassment for one’s views. Universities shall neither support nor permit a heckler’s veto through, for example, disruptions, violence, intimidation, or vandalism. Universities shall be responsible for ensuring that they do not knowingly: (1) permit actions by the university, university employees, university students, or individuals external to the university community to delay or disrupt class instruction or disrupt libraries or other traditional study locations; (2) allow demonstrators to heckle or accost individual students or groups of students; or (3) allow obstruction of access to parts of campus based on students’ race, ethnicity, nationality, or religion.
Misbehaving children need to dealt with too, within the bounds of what is allowed by law. Otherwise, what, you want a loophole for them to get away with all of the above?
Yes, I read that. As you said, the law is still operant. This is not about normal law enforcement, this is about willingness to be more aggressive than the police normally would.
> to delay or disrupt class instruction or disrupt libraries or other traditional study locations
No, I do not think that it is reasonable for a child to be beaten or shot because someone delayed a class somewhere on campus (note that this does not even indicate that the harmed student must have been part of the demonstration).
> allow demonstrators to heckle or accost individual students
I do not think this is generally enforceable outside of a police state. And no, I do not consider it reasonable for a child to be beaten or shot because a person was "heckled" somewhere on campus.
I am using "beaten or shot" because that's always a likely event when "lawful force" is exercised in America.
> you want a loophole for them to get away with all of the above
No, I want to fall back on our existing laws, which have the benefit of decades/centuries of precedent, and which are enforced in more transparent fora.
> Misbehaving children need to dealt with too, within the bounds of what is allowed by law. Otherwise, what, you want a loophole for them to get away with all of the above?
Heckling is not against the law last I checked.
At first, I thought it was a protected form of speech. TIL, I was wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heckler%27s_veto
Your link does not back up your claim that heckling is illegal. In none of the cases mentioned in that article is heckling found to be illegal.
Here is a better article that I intended to post, plus a couple more for some nuance on 1a protected speech vs. regulated speech
https://nefac.org/is-heckling-a-speaker-a-crime/
https://www.aclumich.org/en/cases/hecklers-veto
https://stanfordmag.org/contents/the-first-amendment-does-no....
None of these establish heckling as illegal. The first two are about the police not being able to arrest the target of the heckling for incitement (which, yeah, clear 1st amendment violation), the last is about Stanford imposing limits, which is entirely different from the government doing so.
Is there any precedent in US history for what the administration is asking of the nations top universities? Incredible they have to deal with this.
While the current climate is not comparable, I find the actions and general attitude of the current US government similar to that during the McCarthy era.
Which led me to this very interesting article from 1965: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1965/6/17/the-university-...
In it, the author described the attacks on specific personnels and public villainification of Harvard. More tellingly though, the author wrote the article for students in the 60s, who, growing up a mere decade after, most likely considered the events "an aberration which could not have lasted", and that, "the whole [McCarthy] period has an air of unreality".
Those who did not know history are bound to repeat it. Unfortunately, no amount of textbooks and historical resources seems to be sufficient to impart lessons to subsequent generations, and we are bound to repeat it after a few cycles.
Assuming lack of knowledge is the reason authoritarian tendencies show up periodically dismisses the fact that a lot of people think it’s a good thing. There were neo nazis right after wwii. They didn’t forget — they wanted it.
Yeah that worries me. The Nazi party ended on paper, the flags were taken down, but there is no military defeat that really changes the minds of the losing faction. They just went covert, stopped saying the quiet part, and waited.
We won the war but never learned as a group how to handle the ideological problems.
That feels oversimplified. A lot of people would think people that oppose Nazis are the ones with the ideological problems. Who defines what a problem is in our society? The majority or some skewing of it. This is the problem that politics is supposed to solve, and then the problem that the electoral college was supposed to safeguard against. How do we avoid the tyranny of a demented majority? Aligning to a specific moral code? … like a theocracy? I can’t think of any way that doesn’t immediately instill the tyranny of a minority in its place.
We in the US have been very arrogant in assuming we’ve found the solution to all this when all it took was a few decades — a flash-in-the-pan, really — of consistent, strategic bad faith by the political rulers to undermine the whole thing.
> A lot of people would think people that oppose Nazis are the ones with the ideological problems. Who defines what a problem is in our society? The majority or some skewing of it.
This view presupposes there are not moral facts.
Provable moral facts have nothing to do with this because humans aren’t philosophically consistent, and societies are ruled by humans. Defining them and getting enough people to agree to those definitions to enforce them is the problem democracy is supposed to solve, but in the end, flawed leaders will be ruling a flawed populace. No matter how cut-and-dried those moral facts are through rigorous philosophical analysis, societies always navigate through the lens of perception, which can be swayed.
Dear Colleague letter.
Yes, the Biden Administration's promulgation of a Title IX interpretation that, among other things, would have compelled certain kinds of speech:
https://speechfirst.org/case/title-ix/
One example of many: it would have been a punishable offense to refuse to use someone's preferred pronouns.
Are you injured if you can't misgender someone?
Compelled speech is a bright line the U.S. has, so far, managed not to cross. We should be trying as hard as we can not to cross that line.
You may not see the harm in this particular instance, but establishing "we'll just force them to say it and punish them if they don't" as a tool in any government's toolbox is a very, very bad idea.
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Yes, to the extent that any violation of constitution injures me.
Forcing me to say things I don't want to say under threat of punishment violates first amendment. It's been litigated and so concluded.
The fact that it's the 1st amendment indicates that founding fathers thought that it is indeed the greatest injury us government can inflict on us citizens.
> The fact that it's the 1st amendment indicates that founding fathers thought that it is indeed the greatest injury us government can inflict on us citizens.
By that argument the greatest injury that they were addressing was a weak central government that couldn’t provide for the security and financing of the state. It’s literally called the first amendment because the Bill of Rights was an addendum to the constitution.
Do you think that, to use this site's language, it would be a 1A violation to create a rule under which
> students can be reported for merely expressing their opinions about controversial political and social issues of the day or even if they prefer not to express support for American political allies and wars they may not support
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Yes, the federal government of the United States has always attached conditions to federal funding.
> Yes, the federal government of the United States has always attached conditions to federal funding.
Sure, but that's a very high level of abstraction.
At a lower level, it is far less common (if precedented at all) for the federal executive to attempt to unilaterally impose conditions that violate the Federal Constitution and would require those subject to the conditions to violate federal civil rights law.
Not like this, no, and it has never shaken down schools like it has at Columbia or Harvard.
As much as I despise these institutions and their undergrads this does nothing to punish them and everything to increase the power of this current corrupt executive.
Why specifically the undergrads?
They hate the rest of us that didn’t get into elite schools and are permanent members of the upper caste of this country. Graduate school admission is more purely meritocratic on if you can do research but even that isn’t great.
Have you ever met undergrads from these schools? This as far from my experience as you could get.
Yes. I live in a city with two Ivy+ institutions and graduates from many more. They're all the same, except some are better at faking it than others.
And why wouldn't they? Why wouldn't they think people like me are lazy and genetically predisposed to be stupid? I didn't make $500k out of undergrad. HRT or OpenAI isn't going to recruit me anytime soon. My net worth isn't $12m at 29, it's a tenth that.
Whenever I ask what the difference between them and their infinite success and potential is and people like me they never have an answer. They're always so confused.
> My net worth isn't $12m at 29, it's a tenth that
This honestly reads like you are just bragging about how successful you are. I think you know this, but if you made $150k at 22 and have a net worth of $1M at 29, you are far more monetarily successful than the vast, vast majority of the country. I’m pretty sure you are rage baiting, which doesn’t belong on HN, but if not you are seriously out of touch and not grateful enough for your luck or proud enough of the work you have put in to get there.
This is not bragging to literally anybody that went to an Ivy+ school for CS ~10 years ago. A $15m+ net worth is their standard for success. Hell, it's their standard for _average_.
Is this like a humiliation fetish at this point? This is seriously unhealthy. We don't hate our friends that didn't a go to an eLiTe school because we're not sociopaths. Not sure why I'm even trying since you seem pretty dead set on this, but it's just a lot easier to go through life without made up enemies.
People that go to elite undergrads think the rest of us are a lower inferior caste. I don’t know how that’s even something you can deny. You’ve clearly expended a lot of effort to segregate yourself from the likes of people like me or people that go to SJSU because we don’t have “merit” or “potential”
This is not a productive point to make in this thread.
isn't it? isn't this why we're at this place. Let's not not get caught up in facile pretexts. 'those coastal elitists' haven't thrown enough bones to the rest of the country, and they feel resentful for being marginalized. so we send troops into the city and harass the universities and break up with the europeans to 'fix' the situation, just like we fixed the California fires by venting freshwater into the ocean.
Is it? Seems like the elite schools probably should be knocked down a few pegs but the state schools shouldn't.
I can deny it because it's obvious bullshit lol. I don't think that way and neither does anybody I know from MIT think that way. This is reality versus your imagination. If there's anyone I look down on it's my classmates who could've worked anywhere and still went to palantir...
I can't claim 100% aren't assholes, but the vast majority realize the luck and arbitrary nature of it. Are you going to be stuck in decision day sadness mode for the rest of your life? Life is too short
I've asked people at MIT this repeatedly. They all say they came to MIT for the peer group. Peer group = people that are not _like me_. They shut up quick when I challenge them on that point though, or ask what the difference between them and me is. Even the non-assholes sometimes genuinely don't realize there's an entire parallel world beneath them with zero privilege or respect that made $150k out of undergrad instead of $500k.
I am nearly sure that you are not arguing in good faith, but just the fact that you think all elite school grads make $500k shows that you have not talked to a nearly representative sample. I went to an elite school and have friends that make much less even than $150k. Are you aware that there is an entire parallel world beneath you with zero privilege or respect that make $40k instead of $150k?
I’m not sure why you think anyone is targeting you specifically. The vast majority of students at elite schools, in my experience, know that we got lucky in addition to all the other things that we did well to get admitted.
A couple people in this thread now have told you that they don’t match your description of “every” and “all” graduates of elite schools, and the nice thing about using such strong descriptors is that a single counterexample disproves them.
> I went to an elite school and have friends that make much less even than $150k.
They're doing so by choice to do PhDs or go into public service. They (as in, the ones in quantitative majors and many even outside of it) _also_ had the choice to make several multiples of what I made by working at Jane Street or HRT or Citadel or now OpenAI and Anthropic.
I didn't have the choice. Nobody is selecting me for anything, I don't have the optionality of doing just anything. I took the best offer I got at a company that most elite school students would consider to be beneath them (Amazon).
Anyways, I'd also bet you make multiples of what I make now too as someone with a higher level if you're an SWE or adjacent.
I'm just trying to shatter the illusion. Stop wrecking your mental health because you can't hang with the IMO kids. Many of these people are, unsurprisingly, very insular unless you want to talk about math and TC all day. Sounds really fun. The red pill is to be happy you're already making a fuckton of money for typing shit into a computer and make some friends in pottery class
> because you can't hang with the IMO kids
Maybe that's true. I'm sympathetic to the fact that these people aren't even interesting enough to be around. But then I see articles like this [0] sympathizing (?) with elite students that don't end up going into public service while still canonizing them and then I fall back into depression
[0] https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/09/elite-ivy-leagu...
You are simply wrong. Mechanical engineering majors, as an example of the most common non-CS major, don’t have any such high-paying opportunities until at least after a PhD (and even then they are lower than you are saying). Many make less than $100k out of college. Even CS majors have a hard time getting an interview at those top-paying companies.
Wait, are you saying Course 6 is still the most common major? And thus still has the most direct path to making $500k a year out of undergrad?
Of course, MechE's frequently also work at these companies or in finance too...
From MIT's financials (https://facts.mit.edu/operating-financials/):
Operating Revenue: $5.07B, out of which - Federal funding (sponsored support): $2.30B
Operating Costs: $4.78B, out of which - Sponsored research expenditure: $2.10B
Additionally, they seem to have $24.57B worth of endowed funds and get gifts and pledges of net ~$0.6B every year.
Looks like they can wane off their dependence on federal funding if only they tried. They don't have to deal with idiot politicians.
Endowed funds are restricted- the donors can place constraints on how they are spent. They are not fungible and cannot reliably used to pay for a wide range of things that are currently paid for by federal funding.
Personally I would love to see the richest people in the nation contribute a lot more to universities in the form of unrestricted funds, to give these universities some options when it comes to being dependent on federal funding. But I guess you don't get rich by giving unrestricted funds to universities.
I really find it surprising how often people bring up endowments as if they are a resource that can be spent. The purpose of an endowment is to produce revenue via investment income; that investment income is already reflected in the operating revenue under "Investment return to operations". MIT cannot and should not spend their endowment beyond this investment income; doing so would jeopardize the long-term viability of MIT.
This is open to debate. Some endowments are intended to be spent directly, and not everybody agrees that spending some fraction of the endowment curses the university to oblivion. Some financial policies can be suspended (they are not absolute, fixed rules). Many at Harvard felt the endowment was far larger than necessary for long-term viability, and wanted to spend money on capital improvements.
In theory they could but in practice they don't want to. No company wants to loose $2B a year of free money.
Suddenly loosing 45% of revenues would be devastating.
And yes, MIT is a company. They have a CEO (under a different name), a board of directors, thousands of employees and they provide a service for a fee.
No one that works for MIT wants to loose that money. Not CEO, not board of directors, not employees.
Maybe they'll put ideology first and $2B second but I doubt it.
Remember, fascism is not an ideology or philosophical idea. It is a system of government. Gaining control of academia is a core part of this system. I applaud MIT for standing up to this.
I hope the other universities involved also resist. We'll see.
Yeah, I am very curious to see the responses from other institutions. The University of Texas (Austin) said they were "honored" to have received the compact.[1] That is obviously very concerning.
[1] https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-white-house-sent-its-c...
The nine universities include:
Vanderbilt University
Dartmouth College
the University of Pennsylvania
the University of Southern California
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
the University of Texas at Austin
the University of Arizona
Brown University
the University of Virginia
This is a motley list. I am guessing the criteria for inclusion was an administration staffer (or their offspring) was not able to secure admission.
For anyone confused like me, a definition of motley is “Having elements of great variety or incongruity; heterogeneous.”
I think a lot of the neural connections to the word motley come from the expression “motley crew” which has fairly negative connotations. But the truth of the matter is, this is just a very varied group of schools; some great schools on the list. I won’t say any of the schools are not great, because of course some alum will come along and say “actually we had a great department for some niche computational thing” and I’ll be embarrassed to not have known that.
I meant it in the sense of heterogeneous.
The list includes public & private institutions across a variety of states and size ranges. It singles out particular institutions in state university systems (e.g. University of Texas at Austin but not Texas A&M or University of Texas at El Paso). Half the list is in the northeast, while the midwest and Pacific Northwest are not represented. It's 9 institutions, not 10.
It's just an odd list.
I 100% agree!
That's a very favorable interpretation.
It looks an awful lot like a sampling designed to identify who the "enemies" are.
I was thinking it was a rare display of caution on the part of otherwise careless idiots. (or maybe we just got lucky) They aren't fucking with any of the universities responsible for managing national laboratories.
MIT has Lincoln Lab which, while not a DoE national lab, serves a pretty similar purpose for DoD.
Interesting. I first heard about this from Newsom's statement that any university that signed it would lose California education funds instantly, but the only California university on it is the private USC. Thought for sure that at least UC Berkeley, UCLA, and Stanford would be on it, but I guess not. Maybe they chose USC because it seems to have a bit more of a conservative bent than most California schools.
> Thought for sure that at least UC Berkeley, UCLA, and Stanford would be on it, but I guess not.
UC and Stanford manage national laboratories for the US government. Someone might have realized the crisis that could come from that particular confrontation, and decided to steer clear for the moment.
I didn’t realize UA was here - even UVA and UT as more egalitarian institutions are a weird set to include.
UT is, for better or worse, still in Texas. And Texas has yet to discover a Trump/MAGA initiative it doesn't embrace.
> I hope the other universities involved also refuse to resist
I think you may have meant "refuse and resist" (or something similar) in your comment, based on the first half.
Sorry! Fixed!
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man the fascist attractor works every time, doesn't it?
No, the 2025 Republican party is definitely fascist.
Wikipedia: "Fascism is characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived interest of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy"
- Dictatorial leader - President Trump tries to push things through Executive Orders, which are supposed to go through Congress. And that one guy in his admin said he has "plenary" (I guess meaning total, unquestioned) authority
- Centralized autocracy - "Autocracy is a form of government in which absolute power is held by one person, known as an autocrat. It includes absolute monarchy and all forms of dictatorship, while it is contrasted with democracy and other forms of free government" - Same thing
- Militarism - The President has deployed National Guard and militarized ICE agents to American cities under the guise of improving public safety. The real reason is to terrorize non-white people and prepare for interfering with or preventing the next election. He also attacked ships from another country without any just cause.
- Forcible suppression of opposition - I believe right now Trump's administration is going after an Attorney General? ICE has also been detaining and physically harming people who try to (legally) film them. There is certainly more suppression I'm forgetting and more in the pipeline. The Republican party also generally seemed okay with violence against Democratic Party elected officials. I seem to recall violence against Nancy Pelosi's husband went un-remarked-upon.
- Belief in a natural social hierarchy - I don't have pull quotes from elected officials but there is a lot of white supremacy in the Republican party and among their voter base. They have ideas like "America First" where, when you dig into it, "American" means "pure-blood white person". They also seem to broadly look down on women, gay people, transgender people, the usual suspects. Patriachy is popular among the right, they'll say things like wives should submit to their husbands, women would categorically be happier as stay-at-home mothers, and some have opposed women's right to vote.
- Subordination of individual interests for the perceived interest of the nation or race - We are being asked to give up our civil rights, as well as our free trade (via tariffs that nobody wants) for some nonsense efforts from the President and the Republican Party.
- Strong regimentation of society and the economy - Kind of a restatement but again - Tariffs, deploying the military and the police without warrants against citizens and residents who have not been properly accused of any crime, yada yada
I like that your ideological counterparts have made the exact same statements about every administration ever.
Your post does not carry weight just because it is heavy.
When all you have is claims of fascism, everything is a nail.
Despite yours or my agreement on the topic of the day, this admin has pushed more power back to states than any in your lifetime. Those sneaky fascists, always giving up power…
It's not wrong just because the same is said by others about others.
The current administration is currently invading multiple states using the US military. That's kind of the opposite of giving power back to states.
Oh wow. An ideologue in with “my side good and just and their side is evil”… shocker.
You’re being played.
How so? Am I mistaken about the military being deployed like this? Or am I correct but it’s not so bad? Or it is bad but nothing new? Help me out here.
Given that leftists have gained control of academia, are democrats fascists?
My claim of "leftists control academia" is based on data on political affiliation / donations by staff at major universities which is 80-90% democrats.
Pretty massive difference between "the federal government is using its influence to try to compel academia into bending the knee to it and it's fascistic methods of operating" and "most academics aren't in favor of the party that still doesn't believe in vaccines, hates them or their colleagues for having the wrong skin color and doesn't see any value in the liberal arts".
Fascism is a top-down system of government. If it's true that "leftists" gained control of academia, I don't see that as something that happened via top-down control, which is clearly what the Trump administration is attempting to impose.
It sounds like MIT basically agrees with the Compact except for a few minor details. Unfortunate they didn't quote any specifics on what these are.
I think they completely disagree with the entire document, this is as kindly worded but complete rejection as they could make it.
Most of the document seems reasonable though.
Regardless of what's even in the document, the core issue is the administration effectively attempting to punish universities who do not agree to whatever standards they dictate. Not because anything actually against any enacted state or federal law, or even standards set out for every university, but based on policies the executive can arbitrarily decide for a handful of schools. That's why you're seeing such push back.
As for the document itself, it's a bit of a mixed bag, with a lot of subtle gatchas to make it sound enticing on the surface, but more sinister the closer you look. I honestly like some of the proposed tuition changes, but there's some language regarding enrollment that I find problematic. However, since the whole thing is being given to them with the threat of a knife hanging over their head, you're going to see a lot of universities be opposed to this.
Does it? The entire Compact document is contradictory. "We don't want diversity initiatives unless they benefit the white American and conservative thought."
"We want only the best and brightest to be let in, unless they are foreign or female."
MIT is clearly rejecting it diplomatically
The document was carefully written to look innocuous and reasonable (unlike most Trump communications). However, a close reading indicates that it's a clever trap that gives the government a great deal more power and oversight. Combined with the known ideology of Trump's supporters, it's not hard to see that the document was not intended to be a simple, good-faith attempt at undoing some of modern academia's excesses.
I agree with many of the principles in the document, but I'm good at reading between the lines and determining the true intent of the authors.
Because nobody (including the link from president.mit.edu) included the text of the Compact, I'm linking it here: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/1...
After a quick skim, I don't see an issue. Is the opposition to this based upon any rational argument, or is it just "Resist Trump"?
Government forcing institutions to conform to a specific ideology.
> Signatories commit themselves to revising governance structures as necessary to create such an environment, including but not limited to transforming or abolishing institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas.
> Institutions commit to defining and otherwise interpreting “male,” “female,” “woman,” and “man” according to reproductive function and biological processes.
It’s not an ideology. It was common sense for twenty millennia and only in the last few years has an ideology emerged.
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you tell me, as we can all see you have no competent argument besides insults
I read the whole thing. Seems pretty fair to me, including the section prohibiting discrimination against conservative ideas. With all the coverage I expected something crazy.
I don't see how any company could possibly freeze prices for five years. How will they survive if tuition doesn't keep pace with costs in an inflationary environment?
This seems like a reasonable response by MIT. I’m struggling to understand where the core disagreement lies though. Would someone who is opposed to this “compact” care to explain their view? I’m not interested in baseless name-calling (“fascist” etc) but I am interested in cogent reasoning.
I didn’t read the compact itself, but I did read the wikipedia article about it, and it seems to be a very positive set of criteria (safeguarding individuality and merit, protecting against the formation of ideological monoculture, protecting against hostile nation-state actors, etc)
It’s bizarre actually, because these institutions should be doing all of these things already. I don’t know what to make of the fact that they aren’t.
Careful not to fall into the "People's Democratic Republic" trap: the way something is described and its purported aims are not at all the same as its actual effects (and, often, not even its intended ones). Politics is, in many cases, the art of selling you a box of spoons with "forks" printed on the label.
Instead of asking "does this agreement sound nice?", ask what power it gives, to whom, and what might they want to do with it.
Some prompts to spark a cogent reasoning process:
> Signatories commit themselves to [...] transforming or abolishing institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas
What "institutional units" might this mean? How are they identified? Who identifies them? What is the threshold for belittling conservative ideas that might trigger the "transforming or abolishing" remedy?
> Universities shall be responsible for ensuring that they do not knowingly: (1) permit actions by the university, university employees, university students, or individuals external to the university community to delay or disrupt class instruction or disrupt libraries or other traditional study locations [...] signatories commit to using lawful force if necessary to prevent these violations
What do "actions by" "university students" to "delay or disrupt class instruction" refer to? What kinds of disruptive action might the people writing this document be so concerned about that they would ask universities to "commit to using lawful force" to prevent? What sort of scenario is being envisaged here?
> Institutions commit to defining and otherwise interpreting "male," "female," "woman," and "man" according to reproductive function and biological processes.
Doesn't it seem oddly specific to assert a definition like this? Why can't a university decide for itself? How does this assertion square with "maintaining a vibrant marketplace of ideas" and the "empirical assessment of a broad spectrum of viewpoints"? Why only this definition and no others?
I could go on, but hopefully you get the picture. It's an important skill to practice critically reading a document the same way you might critically audit code. Don't ask what it seems like it does, ask what it might allow someone to do.
There was a wave of violent disruptions across many universities under the guise of protests.
"protestors" took over libraries, disrupted lectures, vandalized university property, used the power of the mob to intimidate students who disagreed.
The universities have rules against all of that but failed to stop it, leading to weeks long disruptions on campus.
There are videos of all that on the internet.
And you're playing dumb asking what actions do they mean. Those actions: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=university+prot...
Actions like setting fire to university, which apparently happened yesterday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voqhFZZ9zyA
Actions like smashing windows by masked hooligans: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/CH2kUU3h9j4
Actins like breaking cop's nose: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyMssP-A09A
As to defining a "woman" as anything else than a woman: it's modern day flat earthism, not something a serious person should entertain.
Notably, the language in the compact does not limit legal intervention to those violent actions. It requires action against even peaceful protesting in a library, or even in a hallway or outdoor area (as a student I often studied in both of these places).
Further, your "setting fire to university" video is in South Africa; it hardly seems relevant here. Access to global news will always provide extremes. To me, it's important that actions we take serve the everyday reality rather than the rare occurrences that happen in a few places but are amplified by human attraction to violence and drama.
The second result in your YouTube search is a PBS mini-doc called "Why Do College Campuses Have So Many Protests?"
The questions I offered were prompts to engage critically with why this compact exists. Perhaps watching that video might help you find answers beyond "playing dumb".
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> In matters of bathroom, locker-room, and sports segregation, universities will define sex categories based on reproductive and biological criteria.
In other words, trans people can't use the bathrooms matching their gender identity.
> Calls for ideological diversity, not just at the campus level, "but within every field, department, school, and teaching unit."
In other words, every academic department is susceptible to ideological litmus tests defined by the state. If Trump's white house feels like your Computer Science department has too many Democrats in it, you fix that problem or you lose your funding.
> Restricts student visas to foreign students who ... "are ... supportive of, American and Western values."
In other words, another ideological litmus test, only in this case the consequence is that foreign students can be thrown out at will.
> Requires that "university employees, in their capacity as university representatives" as well as all colleges, faculties, departments, and other academic units "abstain from actions or speech relating to societal and political events"
In other words, tenured faculty lose their right to free speech.
> In other words, trans people can't use the bathrooms matching their gender identity.
I think trans people who "pass" can do whatever they want, and in practice it won't be an issue. I do support actual sex segregation in any area of life women will have no chance without it (like sports). The bathrooms thing is stupid, I agree.
> In other words, every academic department is susceptible to ideological litmus tests defined by the state. If Trump's white house feels like your Computer Science department has too many Democrats in it, you fix that problem or you lose your funding.
Every academic department already has really strong ideological litmus tests. It got way less intense with Trump's election, but it's still there. It's not subtle. You can be really good at what you do, but if you're religious or conservative you have no hope of getting a job in tons of fields. Sociology, for instance. It has nothing to do with how good you are at what you do, it's overt political testing. It was (in the case of many University of California schools, like Berkeley) actually the first line in hiring decisions.
> In other words, another ideological litmus test, only in this case the consequence is that foreign students can be thrown out at will.
I think this is reasonable if there's an objective standard. "Doesn't support listed terrorist organizations" is a reasonable standard. The standard should be written in.
> In other words, tenured faculty lose their right to free speech. "...in their capacity as university representatives...". So no, nobody loses his or her right to free speech. It's just that when you're acting as the mouthpiece of the University, you shouldn't be political if you want federal $. And I wholeheartedly support this. University presidents being political was a fucking disaster (see Reif at MIT).
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It is not. Trans people, frequently, look like the opposite sex. Hence there can be no reasonable enforcement of this policy. Cis people, frequently, look like transgender individuals of their own gender. Hence they are liable to receive harassment by any attempt to enforce such a policy. Harassing people, cis and trans, merely trying to use the bathroom in peace, is a far greater imposition than merely existing in the same space as someone else.
Nonetheless, even in cases where someone has managed to somewhat disguise themselves as the opposite sex - or think they have done so - they will still be expected to respect boundaries, and stay out of spaces designated for the opposite sex.
Respecting boundaries means not concerning yourself with the genitals of a person merely trying to use the bathroom. You cannot enforce a policy regarding someone's sex without inspecting their genitals. How is that respecting of their boundaries? How does that lead to a person feeling safer in the bathroom?
Why are you people who insist on male incursion of female spaces so obsessed with "genital inspection"? No-one is asking for this strawman.
Your assumption seems to be that if no-one physically stops these men, they can and will do what they like, with impunity, and that there's no chance of them simply respecting women's boundaries. Is that what you mean?
>Your assumption seems to be that if no-one physically stops these men, they can and will do what they like, with impunity
That seems like a reliable assumption to me. Your assumptions seems to be that if you make a "rule" concerning who can go into which bathroom based on a hidden characteristic, no one will take it upon themselves to enforce this rule, and thus to make frequently wrong guesses regarding this hidden characteristic. That seems like a poor assumption.
>and that there's no chance of them simply respecting women's boundaries
Different people have different boundaries. Different people have different standards as for who should be sorted into which bathrooms. One person's arbitrary standards cannot dominate everyone else's lives. Instead, rules must be made based on reason and fairness, as I demonstrated above.
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Would you like to elaborate on your abusive comment? Doesn't really say much.
Regardless of what is in the compact, it's important that our educational institutions have independence to run themselves as they see fit. To make funding conditional to a set of demands by the government takes away that independence.
He who pays the piper...
This is why a couple of conservative schools don't accept any sort of federal money. Liberal schools might be considering doing the same.
Otherwise, yes, an independent school can do what they want. If you want to be truly independent, you have to be willing to walk away from the money. Anybody that gives money can attach conditions to it, including the government.
That is obviously the case that federal money comes with strings and strings curtail independence.
What you seem to imply that there should be no strings. Which is a position you can have but it has never been the case.
To wit, one of the things this compact wants is an enforcement of civil rights act and Biden admin did the same thing:
> The most important stipulation during the Biden administration attached to federal funding for universities was compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This law prohibits discrimination based on race, color, or national origin in any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance, including discrimination against Jewish students through antisemitic harassment or hostility on campus. Universities that fail to adequately address such issues risk federal investigations by the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) and potential loss of funding.
> Following the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and subsequent campus protests, the administration opened over 100 Title VI investigations into universities for alleged antisemitic discrimination—more than in the entire previous four years combined. This included guidance like a May 2024 "Dear Colleague" letter to colleges outlining examples of prohibited conduct, such as denying Jewish students equal access to education or tolerating harassment.
I didn't say there should be no strings. I believe institutions should follow laws, and if they or society find those laws to be unjust, we have recourse through our democratic institutions.
The Civil Rights Act was legislation put into place by Congress, signed by LBJ, and upheld by the Supreme Court. This compact was a letter sent by the White House telling universities to fall in line with their demands or be refused funding. I find those to be two completely different things.
Highly suggest reading the document[1] if you are interested.
The overarching problem is it moves management decisions from the colleges to the White House. But here are a couple of really problematic points:
- mandates government price setting
- requires institutions to promise to use force against minors when faced with unknown hypotheticals
- requires universities to monitor & censor staff and faculty
- requires government oversight of classroom grading, in the total absence of government standards
- bathroom fetish likely in conflict with state laws
- White House oversight of which academic programs are allowed, and the budgets attached to each. White House does not specify whether programs currently in flight will be allowed to continue through the school year, or whether students in those programs will need to leave immediately.
- White House decides what criteria can be used for admission
- White House decides which "institutional units" are allowed to function
- To enforce a parts of the Compact would effectively require the White House to install commissars at the institution to e.g. monitor speech and communications to ensure they are acceptable. This alone should be disqualifying.
- Many discretionary decisions like the above are made at the White House without any binding written guidance
Basically, an independent university would only agree to this if it would have to close otherwise.
The Compact is not conservative because it centralizes decisions best made lower down; it aims to radically reshape higher education; it mandates prices; it promulgates ideology, and more. Conservatives should also reject this Compact.
1 - https://www.washingtonpost.com/documents/22e45e59-75ac-4a81-...
My main objections are to the following points:
- Specifically calling out protecting "conservative ideas" in their section on creating an "intellectually open campus environment". This is a dog whistle that makes it patently clear which viewpoints will be protected, and which won't. See what happened to Mahmoud Khalil for a recent example of how this will work in practice.
- Preventing admissions of foreign students based on "hostility to America or our allies", which is obviously an attempt to silence dissent. Who is responsible for defining what "hostility" means? If a foreign student supports boycotting Israel due to their ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people, would they be barred from admission to an American university?
I would contend that threatening to annex Canada and Greenland constitutes "hostility to American allies", but since those talking points are being espoused by the sitting president, it stands to reason that this administration's justice department wouldn't intervene to prevent a potential student with similar views from from admitted to an American school.
- Forcing institutions to define bathroom usage criteria based on biological sex. Putting aside for a moment the fact that this is a blatant attempt to humiliate trans people -- how does this work in practice? Do you hire someone to stand at every bathroom door and prevent people from entering if they don't fit your notion of what that gender is "supposed" to look like? Do you demand identity documents before letting someone use the toilet?
There are plenty of videos online of cisgender people being accosted in the bathroom that aligns with their biological sex simply because other people _assume_ based on their appearance that they are trans.
Your "I don't know what words mean" is very selective.
So you don't know what "hostile to US" means.
Do you know what "Unwelcome verbal, nonverbal, or physical conduct based on protected characteristics" means? This is one of the many vague prescriptions in MIT code of conduct.
If I make a sour face at a gay person, is it "unwelcome nonverbal conduct"? Should I be punished for that? But not punished for shouting "from the river to the sea" i.e. demanding annihilation of Israel?
Is your argument that we should just scrap all code of conducts because it is by nature open to interpretation?
Or you just object to those that tickle your politics?
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> And if someone violates that rule and is reported, they need to punish that person appropriately, just as they punish for any other violation of stated rules and regulations.
So how and where exactly is it established that a violation has occurred? If not Seal Team Six and DNA testing (the latter wouldn’t solve the problem conclusively in any case). How exactly are you, random bystander, supposed to know if an arbitrary stranger is male or female?
Real people get this judgment wrong about cisgendered strangers all the time, this isn’t a hypothetical. See sibling comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45543644 for a list of cited examples.
Do you intend for the accused to display their genitals as an affirmative defense? To whom? Is every random accusation going to cause an interaction with the police and a gross violation of privacy?
Because that’s what it sounds like you’re suggesting here.
What's with this bizarre fantasy that humans can't distinguish the sex of other humans? It has to be the most stupid of all the trans activist arguments.
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More Republican politicians have been convicted of sexual misconduct in bathrooms than trans people. Perhaps we can start with the real issue, and ban them from public bathrooms first? Remember, facts don't care about your feelings!
Source: https://www.complex.com/life/a/amanda-wicks/republican-legis...
Bathrooms aren't segregated by the political party one might belong to, so really your comment is an irrelevant aside.
> No, the expectation is that people will respect boundaries and voluntarily stay out of the single-sex spaces they have no right to be in.
So currently, these people have the right to be in these spaces (whether or not you disagree that they should, legally, they do), the expectation would, I assume, be that people will respect boundaries and not accost people based on assumptions about their genitals. And yet as GP said:
> There are plenty of videos online of cisgender people being accosted in the bathroom that aligns with their biological sex simply because other people _assume_ based on their appearance that they are trans.
Why would we expect people who are currently accosting people who are in the right place to respect them more when there is additional legal justification to harass them?
Perhaps phrased differently: would you support legal repercussions for someone who falsely or incorrectly reports someone as using an "incorrect" bathroom? If the assumption is that everyone is following the boundaries of these spaces, then breaking that assumption is, bad faith and grounds for a complaint of harassment. You'd agree?
If the policy of MIT or any other institution states that certain spaces are designated as single-sex only, then no, people of the opposite sex do not have the right to use these spaces.
I don't expect people to have a problem with understanding this, in practice. It's really not that difficult to understand what sex you are and where you're allowed to be. Children learn this quite early on.
(Edit: My account is now rate-limited because of downvotes, so I can't reply to any responses. However I would like to point out that if MIT is currently allowing staff and students to use single-sex spaces that are designated for the opposite sex, this is very likely to be a Title IX violation. Unfortunately, sexism is rife in institutions of higher education, and MIT is no exception.)
> If the policy of MIT or any other institution states that certain spaces are designated as single-sex only, then no, people of the opposite sex do not have the right to use these spaces.
Correct, but this is not MIT's policy today, responding to your edit, I do not believe your understanding of title IX is correct, See [0].
>I don't expect people to have a problem with understanding this, in practice. It's really not that difficult to understand what sex you are and where you're allowed to be. Children learn this quite early on.
But in places that do have such policies, people who are using the correct bathroom get harassed. Given that you assume this is easy to understand (and I think I agree), would you support laws that codify harassing people about using the incorrect bathroom as criminal, given that you assume these don't need enforcement, we should discourage vigilantism, right?
[0]: https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/LSB10953 suggests that there is a circuit split on whether policies banning students from using gender-identity matching bathrooms would be a Title IX violation, with the 4th and 7th circuits saying that disallowing students from using their preferred bathrooms is a violation, and the 11th saying it is not. Currently there is no circuit split around the opposite question: the 3rd and 9th (and presumably also the 4th and 7th) circuits agree that allowing students to use gender-identity matching bathrooms would not be a Title IX violation, and the 11th Circuit's argument doesn't appear to preclude to a school or district choosing to allow gender-segregated bathrooms, it just allows sex-segregated bathrooms. MIT is under the 1st circuit and I can't find any federal cases at the district level, so it is technically not required to act in any particular way, but given other circuit precedent (and, I think, supreme court precedent under Bostock which says basically the same thing for title VII), I would suspect your interpretation would open MIT to legal risk.
Regarding Title IX, there are still cases working their way through the courts, so we will have to see.
I would be very surprised if colleges letting males enjoy women's locker rooms, and therefore not providing women any single-sex place to change, isn't ruled as being sex discrimination.
Keep in mind this issue is about privacy and dignity and safety for women, not about giving men whatever they want whenever they want.
While you may have whatever feeling about any issue, legally this isn't about "privacy and safety and dignity for women", it's about discrimination. And it's extremely difficult to contort shared facilities into "discrimination".
How do you propose preventing situations such as these?
“The couple said they were in the women's lobby bathroom when a male security guard came in and started banging on the stall doors. Baker said she was in one of the stalls while Victor waited for her near the sinks… Baker was born a woman and identifies as a woman.” [1]
“Gerika Mudra, 18, went to dinner in April with a friend in Owatonna, about an hour south of Minneapolis. When she went to the restroom, a server followed her inside and banged on the stall door while saying: “This is a women’s restroom. The man needs to get out of here,”… Mudra said she felt she had to prove to the server that she is a woman, so she unzipped her hoodie to show she has breasts.” [2]
“Dani Davis was in the women’s restroom at the Walmart where she worked when she heard a man’s voice shouting from outside the stall. The man yelled a slur for transgender people and said he was going to beat them up, Davis said. She was the only person in the bathroom at the Lake City, Florida, store… Davis waited for the man to leave before exiting the bathroom and finishing her shift. Her immediate supervisor was supportive when she reported the incident, she said. So she was shocked and confused when she was fired around a week later for not reporting the incident to the right managers and creating a “security risk.””[3]
“She said that she had entered the restroom with her ex-girlfriend, who handed her a tampon, when two male deputies stormed in, shining flashlights into the stall and demanding she exit. Morton, still using the toilet, was stunned... When she finally exited the stall, she said she lifted her shirt to prove she was not a man, expecting the ordeal to end. Instead, she said one deputy continued to question her appearance, insisting she “looked like a man.””[4]
It would be unfair of me to presume that you believe that all women should wear skirts, keep their hair long, and perhaps shave down any overly square facial bones so as to not invoke any hint of possible masculinity. But if there is a rule in place, then the rule requires methods of being enforced. Expecting women to expose themselves to a security guard or some other investigatory party in order to prove that they should be allowed to pee there is a guaranteed violation of their dignity, whereas the occasional transgender woman using the next stall over is not.
[1]https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/boston/news/women-boston-liberty...
[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/minnesota-teen-says...
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2025/03/27/walmart-fir...
[4] https://www.advocate.com/news/lesbian-mistaken-transgender-a...
Those already very rare instances will become even rarer when males stop insisting they have a right to access women's spaces based on supposedly womenly thoughts in their minds.
Thankfully, this fad is on the way out, and with it, the overvigilance that has led to unfortunate misunderstandings like you mention in your comment - none of which are justification for males to impose themselves on female spaces.
Try considering the opposite situation. Suppose Biden or Obama sent a mandate to universities making unilateral and ideologically-motivated demands of their curriculum, policies, and practices. Everyone cool with that scenario? Or, does each new presidential administration get to impose their will on institutions of higher learning? What would that be like?
There was an Obama "Dear Colleague" letter (actually, 3 of them) that I think at least partially qualify as unilateral and ideologically motivated.
Yes, every new administration can attempt to impose their will on institutions of higher learning (so long as the administration has some sort of leverage, like funding or legal threats). The wise administrations limit their imposition, preferring to allow academia to enjoy high levels of freedom, autonomy, and funding to achieve their mission.
Don't think Obama or Biden threatened to withhold federal funds. Big difference.
That's precisely what the letters said: that federal funding was contingent on following the policy outlined in the letter. Here is one of the letters: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/dea...
The linked letter reminds schools of their requirements to comply with civil rights statutes that have been on the books in the US for many years. The trump admin, otoh, is on a witch-hunt to “protect” conservative views based on their own feelings and concerns. Not the same.
I think decisions based off race, sex, etc. could probably be eased off a bit. But I don’t know that it should be completely eliminated. Diversity and meritocracy don’t always go hand in hand - I think a healthy balance is important.
It is not baseless name-calling to dub someone a "fascist" when they exhibit all the well-known signs of fascism.
There's too much pussyfooting around it these days. Trump is a fascist, as are the upper echelons of his administration.
If people had been willing to say this in 2016, maybe he wouldn't have been elected twice, to all of our detriment.
Let’s focus on #2: Marketplace of Ideas and Civil Discourse.
> Signatories commit themselves to revising governance structures as necessary to create such an environment, including but not limited to transforming or abolishing institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas.
Only conservative ideas receive protected status under this compact. Why? It is objectively false that only conservative ideas are punished, belittled, and met with threats of violence on the relevant college campuses.
> Such policies also shall recognize that academic freedom is not absolute, and universities shall adopt policies that prevent discriminatory, threatening, harassing, or other behaviors that abridge the rights of other members of the university community.
Read strictly, this clause implies no protests or demonstrations of any kind of a college campus, including e.g., the annual pro-life demonstrations at my alma mater (which occasionally became violent, by the way). It is naive to imagine this clause will be enforced equitably.
> Signatories commit to rigorous, good faith, empirical assessment of a broad spectrum of viewpoints among faculty, students, and staff at all levels and to sharing the results of such assessments with the public; and to seek such a broad spectrum of viewpoints not just in the university as a whole, but within every field, department, school, and teaching unit.
Every biology department must hire creationist professors. Every astronomy department must hire flat-earthers. Every geology department must hire young-earthers. Every medical school must hire germ-theory-skeptical epidemiologists.
And across departments, too: we need mathematicians who believe in Fomenko’s new chronology and ultrafinitist historians.
I assume you’ll argue these are hyperbole, but I’ve encountered such people during my time in academia.
> Signatories acknowledge that the freedom to debate requires conditions of civility. Civility includes protections against institutional punishment or individual harassment for one’s views.
So, logically, a professor of classical philosophy must entertain homophobic assertions about Plato and Aristotle, and cannot sanction in any way the student interrupting class in this fashion.
I also see that a Christian student could occupy a Hillel building (a Jewish student organization) and could not be legally removed or administratively sanctioned for doing so under this section of the policy.
You might argue that these fall under the ban on “heckler’s veto” defined later in this paragraph, but strictly speaking they don’t. The “heckler’s veto” ban applies to the hypothetical Jewish students attempting to convince the Christian student to leave.
> Signatories shall adopt policies prohibiting incitement to violence, including calls for murder or genocide or support for entities designated by the U.S. government as terrorist organizations.
Recall how NSPM-7 recently expanded the definition of “terrorist organization” to include groups that display some of the following “common threads”: “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”
How any Islamic student group, no matter how explicitly pro-Israel and pro-Christianity, survives this definition is an real question.
EDIT: To those who believe this example is unjustified, please see https://www.christianity.com/newsletters/breakpoint/understa... for a typical American Evangelical opinion on the status of Islam.
> The university shall impartially and vigorously enforce all rights and restrictions it adopts with respect to free speech and expression.
As we have seen, this concluding sentence is contradicted by the whole of the policy that appears before it.
How is that for a breakdown? I didn’t say “fascist“ once, may I collect my five pounds?
> How any Islamic student group, no matter how explicitly pro-Israel and pro-Christianity, survives this definition is a real question.
This is a disingenuous example, Islamic student groups are not anti-capitalist, anti-American, or anti-Christian, and giving an example like this only creates FUD.
To you and me they are not, but to this administration I wouldn't be surprised if they were considered as such.
This administration is letting Qatar build an airbase on US soil. I think it’s wiser to believe what people do more so than what they say, or what others say about them.
> This administration is letting Qatar build an airbase on US soil. I think it’s wiser to believe what people do more so than what they say, or what others say about them.
I don't think looking at Trump's history of actions toward individual Muslims subject to the authority of the United States government (as distinct from, e.g., foreign states that give him multimillion dollar bribes) really helps your case here, though.
> I think it’s wiser to believe what people do more so than what they say
I agree, if only because the thing you just said is entirely incorrect. Qatar is not building an airbase on US soil, they are building facilities on a US-owned airbase. This happens every year from the NATO partners like Turkey who have been doing this for decades.
Please do your own research, don't just cite Twitter/X on this crap.
I did read the Compact and had a similar response: "This all sounds very reasonable".
I think the negative reaction to it is mostly a function of who is pushing it.
It’s the usual trick of writing something so that an uninterested reader assuming the common meaning of words will be completely nonplussed, but a lawyer or judge reading such a document adversarially will reach many unexpected conclusions.
"nonplussed" means "bewildered" or "really confused". Maybe you mean "not worried"?
If you mean "not worried", then yeah, I bet you're right that there are a bunch of things that could be entailed by the language that aren't obvious. Good point.
“Nonplussed” also means “unfazed, unaffected, or unimpressed.”
A bit like “cleave” in that way.
But yes, you read me correctly.
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I am affiliated and have been affiliated with several top universities, including the two in Cambridge, MA. I'm an academic. I say that because this stuff directly affects my career prospects.
The Compact itself can be found here: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/1... It's short, I ask that you read it before commenting.
It's too bad MIT has taken this stance. I think the Compact is overall an obviously reasonable, good-faith effort to improve universities in the United States. The one area I'd change a bit is the specific mention of "conservative" ideas:
"...purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas."
It's entirely fair because these universities do purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas. But it's not what I'd want in such a document because next time around it could be "liberal" ideas, or "communist" ideas, or...
Everything else seems on the nose. I would hasten to remind you that the threat is not "we'll force you to do this stuff", it is "if you want federal funding, you'll do this stuff". Which seems fine to me. Much of the document is merely trying to actually enforce the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
> obviously reasonable, good-faith effort to improve universities in the United States
I really find HN to be a truly surreal place at this time.
Don't underestimate the wealthy and their moral ambivalence
I think you probably don't understand just how batshit crazy universities had gotten.
The purpose of a university is to expand knowledge, which is itself not a “conservative idea”.
A university that can’t “belittle” obviously false ideas like “the earth is flat” or “evolution isn’t real” or “the climate isn’t changing” just because they’re popular with whoever’s calling themselves “conservatives” at the time is not capable of functioning.
You’re picking out the quote that reveals the entire document for what it really is, and choosing to ignore it.
I’m reminded of this classic:
Conservative: I have been censored for my conservative views
Me: Holy shit! You were censored for wanting lower taxes?
Con: LOL no...no not those views
Me: So....deregulation?
Con: Haha no not those views either
Me: Which views, exactly?
Con: Oh, you know the ones
Can you imagine the conservatives at MIT (they are there!) being happy that MIT outsourced price-setting and hiring decisions to the White House?
This Compact aims to radically reshape the management of higher education. In that, it is anything but conservative. Conservatives should reject it for that reason alone.
> "if you want federal funding, you'll do this stuff"
There's another piece that keeps getting lost. That is: the US government has a set of policy goals it is trying to accomplish. Outsourcing to third parties some parts of the work of getting there is a cash-light approach. As an American, I think this is better than e.g. the DoD building duplicate capacity (and competing for researchers) at multiples of the cost.
In one sense, MIT gets federal funding in the same way that Raytheon gets federal funding (and there are DoD asset tags at MIT to prove it).
This isn't just MIT getting funding, it's also the US buying some capacity from MIT. It's a mutually beneficial transaction.
It's a power grab that makes the university effectively subordinate to the federal government.
The most important part is the end: if the university violates the agreement, they not only lose funding, they also have to give back what they received the previous year. Such a clawback would be devastating, much worse than merely denying funding going forward. And who determines whether there's a violation? The Department of Justice apparently has sole power to make that determination. There's no mention of any appeals process or oversight.
That means that if the President has a compliant Attorney General, they can demand pretty much anything of the university under threat of finding them in violation, regardless of whether they've actually done anything wrong.
It could be a reasonable, good-faith effort if it were put forth by reasonable, good-faith people. But it very much was not.
The power grab started decades ago when a distinct minority of the US started to take over our universities by preferentially hiring and promoting those who share their ideology.
Trump is an attempt by the voters (most of whom do not share the ideology) to undo the power grab.
Funny how this doesn’t actually address what I said.
This tells you who really wears the pants in the relationship. Western nations are screwed because their bedrock is enlightenment, but their adversaries have no such ideals to be held up to. The rule of law that many such organizations enjoy in the West would be denied to them in places their faculty members defend. It’s important to reflect on what works well while trying to fix what doesn’t; discourse often neglects or downplays the former.
Who are these adversaries you speak of? How have they attacked the US of A?
As an example, for a long time, spiritual and scientific enlightement was the calling card of the Warszaw pact countries: they just couldn't figure out how to earn money off it (free university education and intensive scentific curiculums in primary and high schools were common).
For China today, they are thoroughly convinced they are doing the same by restricting access to "bad information" (like "Western nations" are now starting to do with eg. porn, and did similar stuff with "fake news" during the pandemic) — the difference being that they did figure out how to earn money while doing that.
In the Middle East, people die and kill in the name of their version of "enlightenment".
Now, not saying there never was any enlightenment in the Western world, but it was built on slavery, exploitation and being first to many an industrial improvement (like using coal or oil to drive progress, that the whole world now suffers for).
Yes, I'd rather live in a "Western" country than any of the "adversaries", but they are only a risk to our way of life if we do not believe it is the right, enlightened way.
Because if it is, we are willing to pay for it. Are we?
> Yes, I'd rather live in a "Western" country than any of the "adversaries"
It’s important to reflect on why you say this because when push comes to shove, the moral relativism rings a hollow tone. The preceding parts of your post are just part of the education instilled in you from having been exposed to enlightenment-influenced frameworks.
Not really, it mostly speaks to the fact that I've been indoctrinated through my upbringing, education and environment that this is the "true" enlightenment. Even for people on the "other" side, they ask the same questions and they see the hipocrisy (it's not hard to see how capital corrupts) and get stuck. This is why morality moves in cycles even in the Western world: morality is a human construct created through reason to best enable civilization and progress.
I did not add that statement accidentally to "off myself": I did that to acknowledge that this is hard to overcome, and that none of us has a moral upper hand, really (me included).
I think people often conflate morality with mores. Morality is timeless (it’s always been unfashionable to kill someone, to lie, to display envy, and so on), while social mores can fluctuate with changing political, cultural or philosophical view points.
On top of that, sociopolitical self-preserving interests can muddle the discourse on what is moral or not, which is what you’re saying, more or less. The point being that ultimately the truth of an immoral act is unchanged by whatever abstractions we layer upon it. So, we make exceptions to ethics for selfish reasons, not moral ones.
What matters then are the outcomes for all the reasons we make exceptions, just as you think there’s some justified reason for moral relativism. It’s okay, people can do what they want, they just have to be honest about the trades they make when they do this.
From a geopolitical perspective, moral relativism is a nice diplomatic tool, it just has the troubling effect of producing unnecessary contrarianism in populations that would benefit from understanding the implications of that moral relativism.
> it’s always been unfashionable to kill someone, to lie, to display envy, and so on
Even if we restrict ourselves to recorded human history, there are plenty of examples where killing in particular and imposing one's will by force more generally was glorified.
This is really a very modern development (last hundred years?). Just look at how women have been treated 50 years ago as the "weaker sex" (and to an extent, still are today).
But going back to morality of the Western world, how does that compute in terms of recent excursions in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria... All exceptions needed in the last 20 years?
My point is that I subscribe to the notion that "morality" has been developed as a human, reasoned construct to help with self-preservation when cohabiting in large social groups (aka civilization) — I am outright disagreeing with you. Compare with the "morality" of humans brought up outside society (kids lost in woods and similar). Too many counter-examples throughout history to consider it innate, IMO.
The simplest living beings have some idea of self and other, and life and death, and so understand, even implicitly, what it means to be killed and dying. So a primal impulse to fight back kicks in whenever something feels mortally threatened.
Bacteria might not be able to communicate that they don’t like being killed, but I don’t think their view of it changes despite that lack of ability to communicate. More complex and conscious organisms, like monkeys, take offense to lies and deception. Or dominant animals with higher-level cognition might punish members of their groups who display jealous traits. Who taught these animals human social mores? No one, they’re going purely off instinct.
There are primal instincts which drive some of these behaviors which have absolutely nothing to do with human culture or society. To paraphrase what I’ve already said, morality doesn’t change, but only how you think of it does. Humans are the only animals who elegantly communicate their selfishness about moral behaviors, and get away with it.
And I don’t get the point of the rest of your post about the Middle East, but I am going to leave it at that.
Only one paragraph was about the Middle East, where "Western" morality is on full display, mostly to show that there is no one true goodness anywhere.
You seem to be using a definition of morality that's a lot narrower than what we generally call moral and morality: https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/englis...
I don't think your examples show morality at work, but I already realised we disagree on this topic, and I am sure you'll interpret the dictionary definitions differently too.
Thanks for the discourse and enjoy the day.
Whatever is moral stays that despite disagreements, it’s more clear cut than people would care to admit.