Tag Archives: education

Professorial Disingenuosity

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Columbia University professors who support pro-Hamas, pro-Palestinian protests, mostly humanities and liberal arts professors, claim that those “protests” are actually innocent students exercising their free speech rights. Other professors at the school, mostly medical and STEM types, claim they’ve been too busy “doing their jobs” teaching and researching to worry about such mundane things as campus disruptions.

Those former either know better, and they’re being disingenuous in their wide-eyed innocence claims, or they’re breathtakingly ignorant of what free speech actually means. It’s not free speech when the “protestors” block others’ right to their own free speech by shutting off their ability to speak at all, or by shutting down the campus altogether, or by preventing others from exercising their free speech right to not listen to the “protestors.” The “protestors” are engaging in the abhorrence of censorship.

Neither are the “protestors” exercising free speech when they seize and occupy campus buildings and prevent the ordinary course of business in those buildings. Those “protestors” are executing illegal takings of others’ property and denying them and the users’ their accesses.

Neither are those “protestors” exercising free speech when they damage or destroy equipment in those illegally seized building or paint graffiti on and in the buildings. Those “protestors” are engaging in criminal destruction and in vandalism.

The medical and STEM professors also know better. As Pericles said a while ago, “Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn’t mean politics won’t take an interest in you.” And Plato: “Those who think they’re too smart to engage in politics are destined to be ruled by those who are dumber.” These professors are just being cowards, hiding away from their responsibilities.

They’re all worthless; they all need replacement.

Chit Chat

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The Trump administration has cut $400 million in grants and contracts from Columbia University, and a number of Federal agencies have ended their association with the school, both over the school’s management team’s overt decision to support pro-Hamas “protestors'” assaults on the school’s Jewish students and those “protestors'” seizure of and vandalism in school buildings. That tacit support clearly illustrates that management team’s own intrinsic antisemitic bigotry.

Now—and only now—is the head school manager, Interim President Katrina Armstrong, talking about beginning to enforce long-extant rules of comportment as applied to Jewish students and all other students and student groups. She wrote a letter.

“[T]he funding cuts will “immediately impact research and other critical functions,” she wrote.

She takes the cuts “very seriously” and is prepared to work with the government on its “legitimate concerns[,]” she wrote.

“When I accepted the role of Interim President in August 2024, I knew Columbia needed a reset from the previous year and the chaos of encampments and protests on our campus[.] The University also needed to acknowledge and repair the damage to our Jewish students, who were targeted, harassed, and made to feel unsafe or unwelcome on our campus last spring[,]” she wrote.

She “accepted” her role seven months ago.

Chit chat.

What has she actually done? She could have called in campus police and the city’s police to arrest these lawbreaking sham “protestors.” She didn’t do that beyond a couple of token/scapegoat arrests.

She could have expelled every one of those lawbreaking “protestors.” She didn’t do that.

She could have identified to the Federal government those lawbreaking “protestors” present on student visas with a view to having their visas canceled and those students sent back to their home countries. She didn’t do that.

In response to the funding and contract cancelations, she at the least could have done those last two. Instead, she chose to write a letter and call it a day. ‘Twas a very famous…victory.

Her words are insulting to our intelligence, and they’re insulting to the school’s Jewish student population.

A Good Start

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The Trump administration has pulled $400 million in grants and contracts from Columbia University in response to that institution’s management team’s decision to take no serious action against the antisemitic and terrorist-supporting “demonstrators” who seize university buildings and threaten the safety of Jewish students.

A federal antisemitism task force—convened by President Trump and including the Departments of Justice, Health and Human Services (HHS), and Education, as well as the General Services Administration (GSA)—announced the barring of US taxpayers’ money from funding the school.

DoEd Secretary Linda McMahon:

Since October 7, Jewish students have faced relentless violence, intimidation, and anti-Semitic harassment on their campuses—only to be ignored by those who are supposed to protect them[.]
Universities must comply with all federal antidiscrimination laws if they are going to receive federal funding. For too long, Columbia has abandoned that obligation to Jewish students studying on its campus. Today, we demonstrate to Columbia and other universities that we will not tolerate their appalling inaction any longer.

It’s only a beginning, though. No substantive change can be expected for the long run unless and until there’s been a complete replacement of all of Columbia’s management team from the middle tier on up. The incumbents have shown themselves to be utterly unrepentant antisemitic bigots and terrorist supporters. They won’t change. They can’t change. They’ll only spend their energies, and Columbia’s money—their students’ and parents’ and investors’ and donors’ money—looking for ways to weasel-word around any agreements they might pretend to make to get those $400 million back.

Research Grants and Overhead Caps

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Two letter writers to The Wall Street Journal‘s Wednesday Letters section disputed Harvard Professor’s Maya Sen’s “defense” of Harvard’s 69% “overhead” cut of any Federal research grant sent Harvard’s way. One noted that Sen had chosen to elide any actual facts regarding

the [overhead] costs that the reimbursement was intended to cover to support her claim that the 15% rate is insufficient.

He noted Sen’s disingenuousness in her expectation that we taxpayers should just trust the school’s managers to do the right thing. His view was that, in light of this attitude, research grants should be discontinued altogether.

The other letter writer cited Yale’s condition as a typical case:

Yale has a $6 billion annual budget with 8% coming from tuition and room and board, and 20% from grants and contract income. It has a $41 billion endowment and pays little in tax.

As he put it, this is Yale crying wolf.

No to Sen, almost entirely yes to the letter writers.

There’s no reason to believe the amount of money for research in a grant would fall as a result of lowered caps for grant overhead. The only thing that would be limited is that overhead; the money in the research part of the grant isn’t affected in the slightest—except by university managers who confiscate that research money for their overhead chimera.

I don’t entirely disagree with the first letter writer’s position regarding ceasing grants altogether, but I think it would be sufficient, instead of capping the overhead cut at 15%, to cap it at 0.00%, and the schools can accept that or get no grant at all. They can take their claimed overhead costs out of their endowments or jack their tuition further. Instead of us taxpayers paying for these confiscations, let the schools’ investors/donors or their students (parents) pay for them.

For those schools that have such puny endowments or that have properly low tuitions that they truly can’t hack the overhead costs on their own—rather than viewing the whole grant as income the way Sen confessed Harvard does—the relevant State government can make up the shortfall. The State’s taxpayers should be the only ones paying the costs of the schools in their State. That would magnify the voice of those taxpayers and perhaps lead to tightening up on school managers’ fraud, waste, and abuse.

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.