Category Archives: education

University Funding and University Overhead

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Maya Sen, Professor of Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, thinks the Trump administration’s insistence on a cap of 15% for “indirect costs” as part of all Federal research grants to colleges/universities is too low for too many such institutions; such caps should continue to be negotiated school by school. She insists, for instance, that Harvard needs its 69% cut of research grants for its indirect cost.

An across-the-board 15% cap, she insists, ignores any individualized considerations, leaving schools with higher costs in the lurch. And, she claims,

University research depends on federal money—11% of Harvard’s operating revenue comes from such grants.

Her alternative:

There’s a better solution than a blanket cap. Universities could instead commit to addressing administrative bloat and shoring up research integrity—both reasonable points that academics themselves have flagged.

Couple things about that. One is Harvard’s $53.2 billion endowment with its 2024 return on investment of 9.6%—a fairly typical ROI for Harvard; even if its yearly ROI varies quite a bit around that figure. That’s a lot of money carefully not being used for the school’s operating revenue, or its grant “indirect costs.”

The other is that proposed Universities could instead commit to addressing administrative bloat and shoring up research integrity. We’ve seen already the value of those commitments—empty virtue-signaling words in far too many cases. See for instance, Sen’s own Harvard and its refusal to enforce its commitment to protect Jewish students from Harvard’s population of pro-terrorist “students.”

Bonus thing regarding those schools with higher costs about which Sen worries being left in the lurch: any lurch is solely the product of those “higher cost” schools. They can straightforwardly cull their administrative bloat and adjust their spending allocations to deal with remaining costs. All that would take is a modicum of courage, with backbone injected via reduced revenues caused by reduced Federal froo-froo included in any research grants.

No. The administration’s across-the-board 15% cap needs to be implemented.

Bad Logic of the Progressive-Democrats

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There is a strong Republican move to completely eliminate the death tax the Federal government charges against heirs when their love ones die.

Supporters of the federal estate tax point out that it affects a relatively small number of estates.

Leave aside the simple fact that the death tax too often forces mom-and-pop business owner-inheritors to sell that business—their livelihood—just to raise the tax vig due under current law.

The tax only affects a few? That’s their logic? The tax only hurts a few Americans, and so it’s entirely OK to keep? Progressive-Democratic Party politicians won’t even offer any serious benefit to having this death tax. Their only claim here is that the inheritors don’t deserve the inheritance since they didn’t earn it, only inherited it. Sell that nonsense to the mom-and-pop inheritors.

This is yet another Party example of why it’s so hard for our nation to have nice things.

School Choice in Texas

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors are optimistic about school choice in Texas.

Texas. Everything is bigger here, but the Lone Star State has yet to prove it on school choice. Declaring ESAs an “emergency” item in his recent state of the state address, Republican Governor Greg Abbott is proposing a $1 billion program—twice as large as the $500 million he proposed in 2023.
The Senate last week passed a bill to provide scholarships of $10,000, with $2,000 for homeschoolers. House lawmakers, including Republicans, tanked ESAs last time around. But after the Governor backed school-choice proponents in the GOP primaries and November election, he has a new legislative majority that gives him a better chance of success. The House will likely take up ESA legislation in coming weeks.

I’m not sanguine at all about the bill. The nominally Republican-majority Texas House continues to be led by a Speaker who was elected by the Progressive-Democrats in the House along with a collection of nominally Republican politicians. It doesn’t matter that the Speaker is a different person than last session; he’s still in the hip pocket of Party, along with the cronies who voted with Party to elect him.

That’s enough to kill the Senate’s bill in the House. Actual Republicans and Conservatives need to be elected in those districts. Much progress was made last November toward replacing weak sister Republicans with those who have the courage of their Conservative convictions; we’ll need to make much more progress, though, in two years.

Blocking CRT in Schools and Teachers’ Feigned Fears

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The Trump administration is moving to deny Federal funding to K-12 schools that have Critical Race Theory in their curricula. Teachers are claiming to be in a panic about that. For instance,

[s]ome New England teachers are worried the new restrictions on teaching CRT could cause teachers to self-censor out of fear that any discussion on race would make them a target of the new administration….

No, those are supposedly grown adults sulking and threatening to throw toddler-level temper tantrums, planning to hold their breaths until they turn blue in the face, if the don’t get their way.

There’s nothing at all in banning CRT indoctrination—which in its overt bigotry insists on racially intrinsic oppressor/oppressee status depending on the skin color of the individual, which further insists that victimhood is inherent in one race or one gender and not at all a frame of mind with an inherent ability to overcome being a victim (including taking coherent effective action in those instances where a person really has been victimized)—that prevents teachers from discussing race, or teaching its effects, with such works as Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time or any of Zora Neale Hurston’s writing.

These pseudo-teachers would be no loss at all, were they to carry on their tantrums by quitting teaching altogether.

Eliminating DoEd, or Not

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As part of the ongoing…discussions…regarding the elimination or broad curtailment of the Department of Education, even news writers are getting in on the gaslighting. One such example:

It [the Department of Education] has released guidance saying it would evaluate claims of sex discrimination based on the “objective immutable characteristic of being born male or female” as opposed to gender identity. This effectively ended Biden-era protections for gay and transgender people in education.

Of course, it ended no such thing. What the guidance did—all that it did—was restore protections for boys and young men and for girls and young women, especially the latter, in spaces that must be reserved for girls and young women: restrooms, locker rooms, girls and women athletics. The Biden-era actions actively attacked with intent to destroy precisely these protections for girls and young women.

Protections for gay and transgender students remain in place where moves against discrimination matter: the selection or non-selection based on sexual orientation in the classroom, in discipline, in in- or after-school job opportunities, and on and on.