We’re closing in on college application deadlines. One of the albums that my mom kept included a recommendation letter for my own application to MIT in 1979. I was working at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center on the Pioneer Venus project (specifically, data analysis for information streamed back from the Orbiter). Goddard was a two-tiered plantation where the elites were federal government civil service employees and the slaves were employed by contractors. In my case, the contractor that actually sent me paychecks was Computer Sciences Corporation, though I worked on site at NASA every day. My boss was Naren Bewtra, who was born in India and came to the U.S. to earn a physics Ph.D. at Cornell.
Like Harvard, MIT takes an official position that inequality is bad. In an ideal world, all humans would have the same wealth and income and, therefore, all states would have the same wealth and income. Here’s an example from MIT’s official news page:
Inequality is “a threat to America’s values and political system”. MIT is a richer-than-average university and, thanks to the Feds pouring all of the nation’s wealth into higher ed and health care, its Massachusetts home is the richest state (Washington, D.C. is yet richer, but not a state). One would think that MIT would, therefore, refuse federal grant money, preferring to fund itself via state tax dollars and private/endowment dollars. Every dollar refused by MIT could be spent at University of Michigan, for example, a less-rich university in a poorer-than-average state.
Instead of refusing federal money, though, MIT is fighting to keep it while preserving the school’s passion for race-based admissions and Rainbow Flagism. The Hill:
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on Friday rejected the Trump administration’s proposed “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” which would have required sweeping changes on campus in exchange for a funding advantage in federal grant awards.
The 10-point memo was provided to nine higher learning institutions last week, requiring reforms such as a rewiring of the admissions process by adjusting the consideration of race or ethnicity, student grading and demanding that transgender women be excluded from women’s locker rooms and sports teams.
I still can’t figure out why the Trump administration wants to fund the Racism League schools. What institution ever changed in response to being showered with billions of dollars? The federal government could send its research dollars to universities that never engaged in race discrimination and/or never adopted Rainbow Flagism as an official religion. The Queers for Palestine universities would find a way to replace the federal funds with state and/or private funds and/or research groups would follow the federal money by moving to to the non-racist universities. Nowhere in the MIT Mission Statement is “hoover up as many federal tax dollars as possible”. In fact, the statement describes MIT as a purely altruistic enterprise working to help humanity and, therefore, anything that MIT can do to reduce inequality would be a positive step:
Here’s an example of two Nobelists moving from MIT to Zurich in response to a “CHF 26 million donation from the Lemann Foundation” (26 million Swiss Francs translates to 32.5 million post-Bidenflation dollars; see exchange rate chart below for how the USD was worth 1.4 Swiss Francs in 2003 and, thanks to the inflation-free environment that Congress has created via deficit spending, is now worth 0.8 Swiss Francs):
The Nobel Prize-winning economists Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee will join the University of Zurich in July 2026. Using external funds provided by the Lemann Foundation, the two researchers will establish a new center for development economics, education and public policy.
UCLA’s director of race and equity has been placed on leave over social media posts he made about the killing of Charlie Kirk, the Los Angeles Times reported Monday.
Jonathan Perkins, an official with UCLA’s Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Office, apparently published the remarks on BlueSky. The posts seemed to express both satisfaction and indifference to the fatal shooting of the conservative activist.
The posts were “written in my own hand, in my own voice, in no way the echo of my employer, UCLA,” Perkins said in a written statement provided to The Times, adding that they were protected by the First Amendment.
“It’s a truly sad day. My livelihood could ultimately be threatened for stating, in the clearest terms, that I felt no grief at the death of an avowed white nationalist- (a) man who dedicated his life to despising mine, to despising my people, to despising our very existence,” Perkins’s statement said. “I am devastated to learn of higher ed colleagues around the country, facing similar and much worse consequences, including termination. I admit, I thought UCLA was different. I hope we are.”
What I find interesting about this is that taxpayers, both California and federal, are forced to work extra hours every week in order to pay someone to be “director of race” in a society where a government-run enterprise isn’t supposed to be able to consider race (14th Amendment). (Why would taxpayers in Arkansas and Maine have to pay, you might ask? Despite decrying inequality, California universities insist on feeding at the federal trough rather than using state tax dollars and leaving the federal money for universities in poorer-than-average stages, such as the Islamic Republic of Michigan.)
What did the Director of Race at UCLA have to say? From the Daily Mail:
These sentiments are a little different from what my Democrat friends in Maskachusetts have said. They mostly say that they’re happy that Charlie Kirk was killed (and sad that Donald Trump wasn’t), but it isn’t personal as it apparently was with Director of Race Perkins. The Maskachusetts Democrats didn’t like what Charlie Kirk had to say and are happy that he was killed because now he can’t say anything more.
The rich university will have to write a check to the U.S. Treasury for $200 million?
The university will pay the $200 million in three installments over three years.
Columbia receives about $1.3 billion in federal research grants annually, and the university said it would have all been at risk if it had remained on the White House’s blacklist.
Grant Watch, a project run by research scientists who compiled information on the grants pulled by the Trump administration, estimated that about $1.2 billion in unspent funding from the N.I.H. to Columbia had been terminated or frozen. Other federal agencies, including the National Science Foundation, also pulled grants.
If I’m reading this correctly, over the next three years the university will get $billions in funding, every dollar of which will generate a profit for the nonprofit, but the profit might be a little less than it would have been in some ideal world of profitability from the nonprofit organization’s perspective.
Recent email from the president of the Queers for Palestine version of MIT:
The interesting part:
MIT now pays a 1.4% tax on that investment income. The current Senate version of the bill would hike this endowment tax rate to 8%. To give you a sense of scale, for MIT that proposed tax hike is equivalent to our entire annual undergraduate financial aid budget, which provides aid to about 60% of our undergraduates or about 2,600 students every year.
In other words, the university needs the massive endowment to fund “financial aid”. Also, only 8% of the income from the endowment is actually used for financial aid.
Note that what the elite schools call “financial aid” is referred to in Econ 101 as “price discrimination”, in which each consumer is charged the maximum that he/she/ze/they is willing to pay; if the school determines that a family has $X in free cashflow annually the entire $X will be extracted by MIT. From Wokipedia:
Price discrimination (differential pricing, equity pricing, preferential pricing, dual pricing, tiered pricing, and surveillance pricing) is a microeconomic pricing strategy where identical or largely similar goods or services are sold at different prices by the same provider to different buyers based on which market segment they are perceived to be part of. Price discrimination is distinguished from product differentiation by the difference in production cost for the differently priced products involved in the latter strategy. Price discrimination essentially relies on the variation in customers’ willingness to pay and in the elasticity of their demand. For price discrimination to succeed, a seller must have market power, such as a dominant market share, product uniqueness, sole pricing power, etc.
Our friend Atul Butte has died at age 55, a great physician and medical researcher who couldn’t be saved by our most advanced medicines and technology. He was always cheerful and curious.
Of his many online lectures, I think this one captures his spirit and enthusiasm well:
He and I were on opposite sides of the “saliva-soaked face rags for the general public will prevent SARS-CoV-2 transmission” debate, but it didn’t affect our friendship. Humans, even MD/PhDs, are social animals and it would have been tough for someone in the San Francisco Bay Area to take the “viruses are smarter than humans” position. Atul emphasized persuasion rather than coercion with respect to masks, unusual for an academic and doubly unusual for a University of California academic. (He did advocate coerced COVID vaccination, though, via employer mandates, and then COVID turned out not to be relevant to his own health and longevity.)
This is a sad loss for those of us who worked with Atul in the Boston area and, I’m sure, for the many younger researchers and docs whom he inspired. Also, on this Father’s Day, a terrible loss for his child. To channel Atul’s spirit, though, I guess we can be more optimistic about the future of medicine because of the techniques that Atul developed and taught to others. I’ll try to remember him every time I hear about a medical insight that came out of looking at a big data set.
From Atul’s PhD advisor:
Although Atul was always at the cutting edge of science he had the presence and expansive outlook of the intellectual giants of the previous century. His integrative approach to biomedicine has inspired thousands. But first he loved his family and friends with an enthusiasm that… https://t.co/YdYObFyBQvpic.twitter.com/J1AL1N2I8V
Young Americans hoping to stay elite or join the elites, e.g., via attending an elite university, are forced into behaviors that would have seemed completely unnatural back in the 1970s. A 1970s public school was a cruel bully-filled environment compared to today’s placid “kindness is everything” schools. Teenagers were expected to be solipsistic and certainly not expected to pretend to be committed do-gooders. Today, by contrast, the teenager who hopes to gain admittance to a decent college must feign passion for a social justice cause, helping the “underserved”, etc. Nobody seems to notice that teenagers have enough of their own problems to focus on and that folks who genuinely want to invest time and money in charity tend to be old.
If the Americans who fought World War II were the “Greatest Generation” then surely today’s college students are the “Kindest Generation” and those who attend the most elite schools are the kindest of the kindest. How to explain, then, the enthusiasm for Israel-haterd/Jew-hatred among the kindest of the kind? Here’s a theory from a friend in the Boston area (she’s a 60ish Clinton/Obama Democrat who questions the full Biden/Harris religion):
My theory is that they’re force-fed so much “kindness” that they’re desperate to be mean to someone — and, in reason #100 for antisemitism over the centuries, campus ideology and TikTok gave them the excuse…
I think that she’s on to something. Ivy League (“Queers for Palestine League”) schools demand thousands of young humans every year who are as kind as the kindest Buddhist philosopher. The U.S. doesn’t contain a sufficient size population of ultra-kind 18-year-olds. Therefore, the people admitted to elite schools are mostly those who’ve been great liars and pretenders regarding their kindness levels. They need to take their masks off occasionally (so to speak; of course, the same folks have been very diligent indeed about wearing their COVID-19 masks; #FollowTheScience). They can’t hold an on-campus demonstration to decry crimes committed by undocumented migrants or by Black Americans. They can’t rally against Muslims being reluctant to celebrate the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community. What is left? The only acceptable outlets for rage (Two Minutes Hate) are (1) anti-Trump/anti-Republican gatherings, and (2) anti-Israel/anti-Jew gatherings (sometimes layered with a “we don’t hate Jews, only Zionists” gloss).
A Facebook friend and social acquaintance from my Cambridge days, Lisa Randall, penned an article for the Boston Globe about how working class federal taxpayers should be forced to keep feeding a rich university in a rich state:
the Trump administration has done what has seldom been done before: unified the faculty behind a common, unwavering defense of academic freedom and their unrelenting belief in the value of universities, particularly their own.
(Remember that part of “academic freedom” is the freedom to use the peasants’ tax dollars to run racially segregated theaters, e.g., from 2021:
She posted a link to the article on Facebook. One of her friends, apparently a Deplorable, said “Not one penny of my tax$ for a $50B endowment woke factory thanks”. I trotted out my standard line about how it was unclear why Harvard, which officially says that inequality is “one of America’s most vexing problems”, would want or accept any federal money. Shouldn’t Harvard want to fund itself via donations from the rich and from state taxes and see federal money spent at universities that are in poorer-than-average states, e.g., in Michigan, Ohio, and Mississippi (stats on median household income by state; DC at the very top, of course, and Maskachusetts and New Jersey right underneath due to Medicare/Medicaid buying pharma and the Department of Education subsidizing universities)? I cited this 2016 piece from the Harvard Gazette, which calls itself “the official news website for Harvard University”.
The responses from her friends opened an interesting window into how academic elites think:
I was called “the dullest knife in the block” for thinking that an article in the Harvard Gazette by a “Harvard Staff Writer” and containing a series intro likely written by an editor was in any way related to an official Harvard position. It was an mere “opinion” piece and represented only the opinion of that one writer. (Which would mean that Harvard officially thinks that inequality is good? Or Harvard doesn’t think inequality is bad?)
Research grants should be allocated by merit and not by geography or wealth. An unstated assumption seemed to be that a Harvard lab couldn’t move if Harvard failed to secure private/state funding to replace the federal funding. Although it is, in fact, common for entire labs to move when a professor moves for whatever reason, the Harvard folks couldn’t imagine anyone leaving Harvard to follow the money. Our neighborhood here in Florida actually is periodically a destination for a moved lab, e.g., this neuroscience lab that moved in 2023 from University of California. Florida State University beat MIT in a competition to host the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in 1990 and the New York Times said FSU was “expected to draw scientists in biology, physics and engineering from all over the world”. Another NYT article said “M.I.T. felt that it deserved the project”. Today, the Chief Scientist down at FSU’s lab is Laura H. Greene while the hidebound MIT magnet lab is run by a white male, Robert Griffin.
A giant-brained Ph.D. participant from California disputed that Michigan was any poorer than Maskachusetts (Wokipedia says that MA median household income is nearly 50 percent higher than in MI). For those who only fly over the Midwest, it’s apparently plausible that the Rust Belt state and its biggest city of Detroit are both in prime fiscal condition.
The idea that the peasants of Michigan would benefit if $2 billion/year in federal money were redirected to, for example, University of Michigan from Harvard was questioned. Nobody but me was able to see that Michigan would be better off it were able to collect state income tax, property tax, and sales tax from the people paid by the $2 billion/year in grants. Nor that when those researchers went out to local retailers that the state would once again be able to collect more tax revenue as the retailers staffed up. (They would probably argue that the move of Citadel from Chicago to Miami didn’t hurt Chicago and didn’t help Miami (the Miami HQ for Citadel is expected to cost “$1 billion-plus” (translation: $2 billion?); imagine the cost for the building permit on this 54-story tower!).)
Here’s the HTML title tag for the Harvard Gazette:
<title>Harvard Gazette – Official news from Harvard University covering innovation in teaching, learning, and research — Harvard Gazette</title>
and here’s how it is rendered by Google when one searches:
Maybe the courts will block Donald Trump’s attempt to redirect the working class’s tax dollars to universities other than Harvard and similar. But if Trump does succeed, I think the elite schools and their elite graduates will be completely blindsided. Even after being told by the U.S. Supreme Court that they’re violating the U.S. Constitution by discriminating on the basis of race (especially against Asians), these schools imagine themselves to have gotten rich by being more virtuous than anyone else. A few fun points from the Boston Globe article…
We wouldn’t understand DNA if the working class didn’t fund Harvard:
The nature of DNA was discovered by an X-ray crystallographer, Rosalind Franklin, who was doing pure research to understand its molecular structure. Under the current funding crisis, Franklin might well have been laid off before making her groundbreaking discovery that accounts for much of modern medical research.
It is unclear how Rosalind Franklin, a British Jew working in pre-Islamic Britain with funding from a private company (Wokipedia says Turner & Newall), would have been disadvantaged by a change in where U.S. taxpayer money is spent.
The subtitle of the article is an interesting window into how elites think: “What happens when research is fully privatized?” There hasn’t been any proposal from the Trump dictatorship, or indeed anyone in Washington, D.C., to “fully privatize” research funding. The current dictatorship merely wants to take away money from the Queers for Palestine League schools that fail to comply with the dictator’s reading of the U.S. Constitution. Presumably the money taken away from Harvard would then be spent at schools that don’t engage in race discrimination, don’t support Hamas, etc. See, for example, “University of Florida denies appeal of pro-Palestinian student protester’s suspension” and “Protesters handcuffed, arrested at FSU amid nationwide demonstrations against Israel-Hamas War”.
Today is the deadline for accepting college admissions offers. For parents and kids who are disappointed, let’s consider the strategic mistakes that they might have made.
Most obviously, a child who fails to identify as Elizabeth Warren’s cousin (i.e., “Native American”), is at a disadvantage. Same deal for Black, Latinx, 2SLGBTQQIA+, etc. These identifications are often matters of personal choice and colleges and universities have made their prejudice against cisgender heterosexual whites and Asians clear so a failure to identify in some kind of preferred category isn’t excusable.
Some more nuanced lessons from the NYU data leak, from a friend in suburban Boston who is numbers-oriented and fed everything into a database management system:
The real comparison is between “cohorts” – basically they lump people into clusters by zip code, background, interests. NYU admissions rate for our [somewhat rich suburban public] high school was effectively 3%. Way lower than their average admission rate.
Moving to a zip code from which few people apply to the schools of interest could help. Moving to a less elite neighborhood within the same metro area, for example, could actually save a huge amount of money as well as enhancing a child’s admissions chances. Evincing an interest in less-popular majors, e.g., classics, could help. (My friend: “It isn’t enough just to say classics – you need Latin courses, participation in known Latin competitions, etc.”)
(Maybe the ultimate hack would be moving into a zip code that is 99% occupied by The Villages or similar kids-forbidden development. It’s virtually guaranteed that zero other kids will apply from that zip code if kids under age 19 aren’t allowed to live in 99% of that zip code.)
From a different friend whose child attends an elite private school in Philadelphia:
One kid got into [Queers for Palestine League] penn last year for deferred admission because of crew and now [the child’s] class has twice as many kids doing rowing than previous class
Let’s check in with Harvard, where they say that they hate inequality and also that they want as much federal money as possible funded to richer-than-average schools in richer-than-average states. (i.e., don’t send the money to universities in poorer-than-average Michigan, Ohio, and Mississippi where the result would be increased equality among states) Layla L. Hijjawi, a Crimson editor:
Mahmoud Khalil, for example, is a green card holder — otherwise known as a lawful permanent resident — who has been detained, apparently for pro-Palestine organizing at Columbia University. The Trump administration has linked his actions, which ought to be defended by the First Amendment, to terrorism, claiming he poses a threat to American foreign policy.
One doesn’t even need to organize pro-Palestinian protests to become a target; simply attending one is enough to merit condemnation and threatened deportation, as the case of Yunseo Chung makes clear.
Most egregiously, merely publishing a pro-Palestine opinion piece — as many editors of this very paper have — can apparently result in being snatched off the streets and detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement for supposedly supporting terrorism like Rumeysa Ozturk, another permanent resident of the U.S.
This is a clear escalation of its attack on pro-Palestine speech on campus. Harvard must not yield in the face of this right-wing pressure. The conciliatory approach of Harvard President Alan M. Garber’s email regarding funding review misses the mark by treating the review as being pursued in good faith, ignoring the obvious insidious and chilling intention of the campaign developing under the guise of preventing antisemitism.
I wouldn’t normally watch a basketball game, but the public school here texted out a message advising us that school uniforms wouldn’t be required today if students wanted to wear Gators or Cougars outfits instead (I would love to see the kid brave enough to wear a Houston shirt!).
Xfinity managed to stage a TV outage in our neighborhood (first time I’d tried to use cable since the Super Bowl), promising to have service restored by tomorrow evening, but I was able to see the end of the game via streaming.
Florida universities are searching for ways to pump more money into sports ahead of a proposed landmark NCAA settlement that would open the door for schools to directly pay athletes — and using state dollars could be on the table.
Florida has long held a bright line against putting tax dollars into college athletics. But that could change soon, as schools here and across the country grapple with revolutionary changes coming to the NCAA.
Athletic programs at Florida universities are by rule meant to be self-funded, paid for by student fees, ticket sales to events, NCAA distributions, sponsorships and donation dollars, among other sources.
