This is a tragedy. Our pre-eminence as a scientific and industrial powerhouse that really began post WWII is now disintegrating because of the actions of a few. The funding being pulled from Terence Tao and his institute without due process is not the start, it's merely one casualty among many that began at the start of this administration. This is like cutting one's nose to spite one's face.
Punishing urban intellectuals for being urban intellectuals appears to be a common theme in a lot of right wing American messaging and the Republican Party won the popular vote.
You can’t put this on a few. It’s the genuine desire of the American voter.
There is a great deal of evidence that the 2024 election was stolen, so it very well could be that this is not on the voters. This is most likely on the fascist minority.
Please provide the proof to back this up. Like I wasn't willing to believe Trump without proof when he stated the previous election was stolen, I won't become a hypocrite and just believe it on Trump's win.
They think urban intellectuals have a fair bit of power.
They also think they are not always correct, not always unbiased, and possibly not always honest; and the bias tends to be towards either things that benefit the urban elite, or "luxury beliefs" that have disproportionate costs on other people.
No one is always correct or always unbiased or always honest, and everyone's bias benefits themselves, and every person in the United States lives in a way that has disproportionate costs to other people. None of those reasons explain any of the antipathy. What does?
Bigotry. They are completely open that LGBT and other minority rights offend them, and they want to punish those who support such rights. These people are far more concentrated in urban centers.
Spite politics is the ultimate form of post industrial vanity. People are so well off and have so little to worry about that their biggest ask from their leaders is to bully those who they don't like.
Though I don't agree with it, I think many conservatives feel the same way about e.g. trans rights - that it's a form of post industrial vanity.
Group X does action A_x due to belief B_x. That B_x isn't logical or whatever doesn't matter. Members of group X generally don't know that group X is wrong, and instead think their own biases are common sense etc.
People are not perfectly rational spheres in a vacuum.
That you can substitute in a lot of different values for X, doesn't change any of this.
A majority of the voters voted for people other than Trump.
Edit: come on people, read things in context. I was responding to someone who was implying that a majority of American voters support this. To support that assertion about any President's policies at a minimum you need that President to have received a majority of the popular vote.
When third parties get enough votes that a President gets a plurality but not a majority you can't really infer anything about what a majority of voters want.
Even if all the third parties were on the same side of the left/right spectrum as the President's party you can't infer much because if those voters agreed with most or all of the President's policies they would have voted for the President.
The administration's stated reason is bias and anti-semitism, are you claiming that this is the definition of urban intellectual? If so how do you defend it? If not, how do you define it?
They may not be acting in good faith but there is extremely clear evidence that UCLA has engaged in illegal racial hiring and admissions practices and has supported antisemitism on campus. UCLA chose to give them that ammunition.
It is not actions of the few. This is action of many. There is whole party apparatus behind this, public support among conservative voters, support of tech leaders etc.
> It is not actions of the few. This is action of many.
The US House of Representatives has 219 GOPers that voted to pass certain legislation. The US Senate has 50 GOPers that voted to pass certain legislation and voted to confirm many appointments.
A large swath of the US public voted to put those 219+50 people into Congress and voted to put a convicted felon [1] and rapist [2] in the White House.
This. It’s easy to rationalise what can be seen as completely counter-productive and irrational actions as random acts of deranged minds. But Trump and proto-fascist republicans have genuine popular support. For terrible reasons, but still. And we can argue about how the US political system plays in their favour by giving them more power than their raw numbers would suggest, but even then they are a significant part of the population. Even more so since they managed to capture the broligarchs.
To my worried eyes this looks too much like Russia circa 2000 for comfort. Or Turkey early in Erdogan’s reign. Whatever happens, it will be painful and damaging.
Whilst I would imagine that to be the case, you should at the start of a phd have more than one professor across the many you have come into contact with that is willing to vouch for both your mathematical ability and your personality and ability to fit in a team.
I don't think anyone should get in just on the relation to Tao, likewise it is also important that they move to a program that they have an interest in.
I do hope those students find an appropriate course for themselves as this must be extremely challenging for them both regarding their career and also mentally and socially.
3 months ago, we were all wondering why the EU proudly launched their "Choose EU for Science" campaign, despite having much lower funding levels than in the US.
If they predicted this, then their actions would make a lot of sense. It is notoriously difficult for scientists to change careers after years in research. For people cut off from US funding like this, a EU-guaranteed middle-class income will appear much more attractive than hoping for this newly unpredictable US situation to turn out well.
As a fraction of GDP, the EU spends more on academic research than the US. And if you add the UK, the total is also higher in absolute terms. (The US spends more on R&D, but that's mostly business spending.)
From an individual perspective, the funding situation is (used to be?) better in the US than in Europe. Mostly because there is less competition, as the salary gap between the academia and the industry is wider in the US. Americans are less likely to do a PhD and pursue a career in the academia than Europeans.
Both the EU and its large member-states need to significantly ramp up funding to exfiltrate scientists from the US. This could be a force multiplier as important as getting German scientists was after WWII, or Russian ones during the Cold War. It would also be a tremendous amount of progress for not that much money, all things considered.
And I say this with no joy whatsoever, because all these developments are damaging great collaborations and personal relationships with friends and colleagues in the US.
It didn't need to be predicted, 3 months ago it was already clear what was happening. The list of banned words in applications, and so on, was already out by then.
I was also surprised to read that. The EU were obviously acting in direct response to the US administration declaring it as their immediate intention to pivot away from science.
This easily beats being persecuted because of your research. Humanity and researchers use to live on more modest means, and you don't need 100k's to do math research. So sure, come to France we would love to welcome all of you!
The government not funding something isn't persecution. If it were the vast majority of people on this forum would be persecuted, which clearly wouldn't be a right use of the term.
They just fired the commissioner of Labour Statistics. The great thing about autocrats is that they neuter their own country pretty quickly. When you make it risky for people to give you bad news, you end up with missiles that don't work and capital ships that sink.
That may be a comforting thought, but the reality is that it takes decades for these things to have an effect, and there's no guarantee that transitioning to a low trust and high corruption society will result in the removal of the autocrat.
See North Korea or Russia. People have been claiming they're on the verge of collapse for decades but the reality is that they just keep going.
There's already been a decade of trumpism (Trump in the republican party, and in american politics). In that time, people (politicians) who are not interested in trumpism have by and large adapted (pretend that they do) or left. This partly explains why this presidency is different from his last one.
Isn't that a bit too optimistic? Even before Trump, neoliberalism has wrecked the lives of the majority of Americans for decades at this point. See healthcare, housing, food safety, water supply, electrical grid, public transportation, broadband access, worker protection, wealth gap, and I'm sure I'm missing a lot more.
It does not take decades to ruin something. In the example here: scientists can go somewhere else and never come back. Even if the next administration vhanges course you will never know if there wont be constant flip-flopping. That's bad for business, science and life. People want predictability.
The UK. It had this huge navy, which amusingly is where its central bank comes from. An English Parliament wanted to buy the greatest navy the world had ever seen but that's very expensive, so their cunning scheme was, license some business people to run an exclusive Bank of England, secured by the word of the British government, the income from this funds a navy and the successors of that navy were still dominant into the 20th century.
The fact that the Bank of England was historically a private business is awkward when it comes to explaining to some modern country why it's not OK that their central bank is giving the leader's nephew $100M in unsecured loans, and this sort of discomfort is part of why it was bought by the British government and gradually ceased operating as a private bank in my lifetime. When I was younger I knew people whose mortgage was issued by the country's central bank. Not like celebrities or politicians or anything, just bureaucrats who got a good deal, sort of "mates rates" but for a house loan.
> but not at all unexpected given who’s running it
To be fair, this has felt like the natural consequence of the "maximize capitalism without regarding the downsides" maxim the US seems to have been operated under for a long time. Corporations have been (indirectly) running the country for some decades at this point, it's just way more obvious and in the face now when a "businessman" sits as president.
I agree. For decades our political and cultural leadership took actions that benefitted themselves and other beneficiaries (e.g., property owners in coastal metro areas, tech and finance workers, etc.), but life has gotten harder for the poor and the middle class. The hollowing out of middle America and the dramatic rise in costs of the three H’s (health care, higher education, and housing) has been painful for many Americans.
I thought things would look up after the 2012 election, when people were looking for meaningful change. Unfortunately a charismatic demagogue entered the scene and has taken power. Since then, we’ve been on the worst possible timeline, and I don’t see an easy way out of this mess. It’s going to take a lot of work for Americans to trust each other again and for the rest of the world to trust us.
I partly agree that white supremacy, particularly in the form of xenophobia, played a major role in Trump’s catapult to popularity (“Mexico’s not sending their best!” in 2015) and his enduring popularity (“they’re eating the cats!” in 2024). Let’s not also forget the Religious Right, which made a bargain to elect a protégé of Hugh Hefner in exchange for Supreme Court justices who would vote the Religious Right’s way on abortion and LGBT+ issues. When it comes to social issues, Trump has largely fulfilled his promises, and he continues to “stick it” to his “enemies” whenever and however he can.
However, Trump, at least in 2016, also attracted the votes of people who were fed up with the hollowing out of middle America and who resonated with his protectionist economic policies, and he also attracted people who were swayed by his “drain the swamp” rhetoric, which resonated with people who did not want an election featuring Clinton II (Hillary Clinton) vs Bush III (Jeb Bush). It is these people who have been fooled, who have not gotten politics purged of corruption. Much of the old GOP has completely capitulated to Trump, with the rest largely driven out of politics. The “swamp” never got drained; it’s now Chernobyl levels of toxic.
In addition, the two party system has made Republicans voters too loyal to their party. They’re so afraid of the Democratic Party, that their leaders will take away people’s guns, money, and free speech, that they don’t dismiss the warnings of authoritarianism as just plain fearmongering and “Trump derangement syndrome.” Well, the authoritarianism is here today. Right now it’s being directed at “enemies” like immigrants, anti-Trump politicians, scientists, and educators, but eventually the authoritarianism will affect Trump’s base. Unfortunately a lot of innocent people are suffering, and the nearest election is the 2026 midterms, which highlights a major weakness in the American government; we have no recall mechanism, nor do we have mechanisms like parliamentary systems where snap elections can be called.
While I would agree with you generally, in this case we’re talking about decisions that are precisely not desired by either business or investors. Which is to say, I think the American people and institutions are in a much worse place than at the whims of business alone: caught between an evangelical cultural coup and unrestrained capitalism. It’s actually surprising to me that the evangelicals appear to be dominating the concerns of business and investment — I don’t have a great explanation of why it has turned out like this. It leads to such a manifestly contradictory situation in which the government is betting the future on US AI global dominance and yet gutting the institutions that would enable it.
"open market laissez-faire capitalism" was the explicit policy goal for maybe 50 years.
The idea that if it was only somehow more pure in some ideological virtue, then it would have worked, you'll need really hard historical material empirical evidence to defend such a claim
Not that it wasn't white and pure enough but that if it was the shade whiter you advocate for, it would have somehow been a complete 180°, like some magical threshold
The US BLS does seem to have a bit of a history [0] with their job reporting though. The process they've been using appears biased to over report initially and then get revised down over time. I'm sure there are a lot of political considerations, but from a raw statistical perspective there is a pretty easy path to getting better results. They could eliminate the optimistic bias and aim for accuracy.
If it were me I'd be sacking people until they started getting a mean adjustment somewhere around 0. I doubt that is what Trump is doing, but the managers left themselves vulnerable to technical criticism.
The "history" you cite only goes back three years. Meanwhile, the BLS publishes the monthly corrections since 1979, and the average correction since 2003 is +9k between first and third estimates [1].
Moreover, do note that all published numbers come with standard errors [2] and 90% confidence intervals, which did include the corrections of -133k and -120k that were made for May and June. The current interval for July is -63k to +209k [3]. Anybody who understood high school stats knows the meaning and implications of this.
McEntarfer [0] had only been commissioner for around 18 months. The performance of the BLS in 1979 probably isn't reflective of her skills and talents.
And I'm not going to bother digging through the manuals to figure out how the BLS is calculating their standard errors, but there is a pretty decent chance they've been calculated assuming that the error mean is 0 when in fact it appears to be biased.
The source you cite is written by a man with literally zero training in economics or econometrics. He lost his job in 911 and started a blog in the GFC that gained an audience (https://mishtalk.com/economics/uk-high-school-student-asks-m...). Good for him. You assert with absolutely no basis in fact or any supporting citation that "there is a pretty easy path to getting better results." The BLS is run by the world's experts in how to measure what they are measuring. The private payroll company ADP reports their own numbers and has never demonstrated better accuracy despite the huge profit motive they have there. If it's so easy, then why don't you just write out a detailed explanation of how this supposed bias happens and how to fix it. You can't because it's not true that there is this sort of bias or that there is an easy fix (revisions are sometimes up and sometimes down, early data is not as reliable as later data). The BLS is constantly at work developing and testing new ways of doing their job better faster and cheaper. It's a difficult job done by thoughtful people. Bloomberg had a very contentious interview today with Peter Navarro and basically called him and Trump a liar over this made up allegation of political bias and/or incompetence at the BLS ("we just don't have evidence to support those instances here at Bloomberg"). This was the biggest miss in 50 years, yes. However, that's ignoring the fact that the economy is very much larger now and looking at the miss in terms of absolute job numbers revised is dumb, and the tariff uncertainty/TACO trade/Fed bullying/debt ceiling/and big beautiful bill drama is making this a particularly difficult time for this type of forecast.
> The BLS is run by the world's experts in how to measure what they are measuring.
And the commissioner was just sacked and the reason given was because she was incompetent. Goes to show the risks of being in a high performing environment and not having a trivially demonstrable track record of high performance. If a dude with no particular track record can clearly articulate why the numbers are biased then your employment might fall into question.
What clear articulation are you even talking about? Oh that's right. There is none. It's just a bunch of BS and hand waving, but that's apparently good enough for you.
The reason given [0] is that "A lengthy history of inaccuracies and incompetence by Erika McEntarfer, the former Biden-appointed Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, has completely eroded public trust in the government agency charged with disseminating key data used by policymakers and businesses to make consequential decisions. Under McEntarfer, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) consistently published overly optimistic jobs numbers — only for those numbers to be quietly revised later."
Which is certainly a political reason and easy to disagree with. But it is reasonable and factually defensible. Her Bureau has been publishing optimistic estimates.
The reason you state is just not factually true. It is false. A lie. Go watch that bloomberg interview from yesterday where the reporters tell Navarro to his face that they have seen "no evidence" of any of that.
No, that's the rationalizations some white house staffer wrote. The reasons Trump gave on Truth Social was that she purposefully changed the numbers to harm Trump.
Then the staffer has made a pretty good argument and has managed to justify firing her. Stroke of luck for Trump that he made a reasonable and easily defended decision by total accident.
Why sack them? It's not like they refused to mean adjust or failed to do so. The numbers came out, and before anybody has even had a chance to question them. Before any coherent criticism as had time to root, the person responsible is fired.
Firing people is not how you get more accurate numbers. It's how you get yes-men.
> It's not like they refused to mean adjust or failed to do so.
It is like they failed to do so - there is a timeseries of consistently negative adjustments. The BLS revising numbers down isn't an unexpected event, that is pretty standard for their jobs reports.
It is better to resolve things with a conversation rather than formal action. But if a conversation doesn't get immediate results it is fastest just to move people on at that level of seniority. The competition is fierce and it is more about finding the right person for the job than trying to micromanage performance.
Generally, firing statisticians because you don't like their numbers doesn't improve the accuracy of their estimates, but apparently people need to keep learning this lesson.
As far as I'm aware no statisticians have been fired and no suggestion has been made that they should be. McEntarfer is pretty high up in the food chain; she's there to be accountable for performance, not to crunch numbers.
Ok fair enough, but this is very very very like the Greek incident.
More generally, this is incredibly dumb in many, many ways. Like, the BLS can't control survey response rates, and the fact that Covid has broken the seasonal models for basically every long-run time series is also outside their control.
One could argue that they should be using IRS tax data to figure this out, but that would be a massive change.
And finally, if the numbers looked good, there would have been no firing (regardless of the errors). It's gonna be an interesting Monday on Wall St.
> Firing people is not how you get more accurate numbers. It's how you get yes-men.
When reality and truth do not matter, why would they want accurate numbers? They do not need the country to flourish, they just need their personal wealth to grow and the rest of the population to remain compliant. From that point of view, shooting the messenger before the message gets out of control makes perfect sense. It is working well enough for many autocratic regimes around the world.
> If it were me I'd be sacking people until they started getting a mean adjustment somewhere around 0. I doubt that is what Trump is doing, but the managers left themselves vulnerable to technical criticism.
When the jobs market is currently being impacted by a leader throwing around unprecedented tariffs, and upending decades of economic practice by throwing away national deals that he himself negotiated, you are not going to be able to accurately predict things - because they are unprecedented.
Facts have a well known liberal bias, the only way the right wing gets enough votes is to have more people who don't do facts. Promoting science would just reduce the number of votes they get.
Same with global warming, it causes migration, loads of immigrants is great for the right wing, scares people into voting for them, they have no incentive to fix the problem that's causing them to get more votes.
You don't though, unless your funding depends on him. If you're a contractor for Oracle, you'll probably get in trouble if you loudly proclaim different values than them - but that doesn't make it a non-free country.
I hate to state the obvious but if your livelihood depends on federal grants then by all means you need to take in account the fact that oresidents can change after a few years.
That's the thinking of pure power politics which is antithetical to modernity and democracy. It's a complete reversal to pre-enlightenment feudalism, where the lord has complete control over your fate.
There has been no precedent for what is happening right now. This is literally Project 2025 and the "you'll never have to vote again" people trying to turn the US into a dictatorship. If people don't speak out now, we might have MAGA in power for the next 25 years just like Putin was for the last.
i agree with you, but i think it's been the case in the US for the past 15 years already. The only difference is trump pushing toward different issues than biden.
It was much less a one-man thing, i agree. Looking at the US debates from europe however, I have the feeling monolithic thinking was very much in place in academia on a wide range of topics (gender theory, climate change, israel support, vaccine mandate, etc).
And not just academia if i look at zuckerberg's testimony over federal government censoring people arbitrarily on the platforms.
False equivalence nonsense. If you can't see the difference between Trump's authoritarian actions and the Biden presidency, you are blinded by your own personal biases.
The style is very different, for sure. But testimonies of people feeling threatened over their academic career based on political statements on controversial topics isn't a new thing.
Don't get me wrong : i'm not defending what's happening here. It's absurd and a very bad sign for US democracy. What i'm saying is that people only wake up when they're the ones in the crosshairs.
To some degree I agree with you. This didn't come out of the blue. I think we have to look at the whole picture, which contains multitudes of those bad signs for US democracy, including that the president doesn't want to follow the law and doesn't have a good faith or even functioning understanding of how the system of government works.
Taken together, it makes it clear that we need to formulate even more clearly than before, what kind of society and country we want to live in. Not just oneliners, of course, those are now hollowed-out (see "freedom").
If academics want to make political statements on controversial topics, then that's an entirely different situation to academics having grants cancelled (not just not-renewed, but cancelling already allotted money) when they're not making political statements.
By the way, do you have an example of the academics feeling threatened by making political statements?
Sorry. You are wrong. Your first assertion was that the only difference was trump pushing different issues than Biden. And your source for this false equivalence is an example of a professor fired by a University that has nothing to do with Biden in any way shape or form. You seem to have difficulty with the truth and difficulty engaging in a good faith dialog.
“If you would escape moral and physical assassination, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing — court obscurity, for only in oblivion does safety lie.” E. Hubbard, ca. 1989
Flipping the direction isn't some minor detail. That "flip" was the reason for the Allies to fight the second world war! The universities implement Nazi-like policies in which they try to keep Jews out illegally, others fought against them. If you aren't sure which side are in the wrong here, you need to ask yourself if it's yours.
It is purely Orwellian. They gaslit everyone into thinking that opposing an intolerant theocracy in Israel, and by extension the burgeoning autocracy in the US, was antisemitism, while at the same time moaning about Jews controlling and ruining the US. This naked cynicism is disgusting.
UCLA has an endowment of 3.8bn$. Whilst I'm sympathetic to their desire to be further government financed for the work they do, I feel like government financing should be made available to those that actually need the money. The attitude that you have access to government funds even if you have the ability to pay yourself needs to change.
Governments typically fund research because 1) it's seen as beneficial for the country, and hence falls under the remit of governments in democratic countries and 2) the uncertainty, time frame, or lack of direct commercialization of research typically means the private sector will not invest in it.
Your suggestion is saying that research should be privatised, and shows very little thought about how research works and who benefits from it.
You make this statement as if it's fact. The actual reality of the matter is that neither you nor I know how research would progress were the government not stepping in and spending on our behalf. Your kind of argument is what is used to justify increasing amounts of government taxation and spending, over trusting the private sector to figure out ways of doing so, and the suggestion that government is the only way of incentivising the research you speak of is entirely lacking in imagination and faith in basic human ingenuity to solve problems.
Yes, there are coordination problems for projects at some scale, for which government involvement makes it possible, however these are far fewer than we are made to believe.
There are tons of labs at universities that are privately funded. It’s not common but there’s plenty of them. And the one I know best is probably the top in the world for what it does (niche in physics)
Research 50 years ago, sure. Research now is very different. It’s short term, chasing money, trends, citations, prestige, hierarchy, academic power, and applications. Public should fund only the useful part of it.
Nothing has changed. What you describe today existed 50 years ago, and what you describe as being research 50 years ago, exists today.
The actions of the administration serve to force all academics not behaving as you describe research to start doing so, though. The criticism you have, is manufactured.
You clearly didn't read the article. Dr. Tao provides a concrete example of the type of funding that very recently lead to an order of magnitude speedup of MRI imaging and likely has many military uses he is not allowed to speak about (my speculation but I'd bet on it). Your statement is false.
you say that like it's a lot of money? I mean sure, in comparison to the amount of money I make yes, but in comparison to value derived from research, amounts of money collected from California, amount of money given to California, and amount of money federal government spends on other things - is it a lot of money? I have a feeling it's not.
>I feel like government financing should be made available to those that actually need the money.
yeah, if they actually needed the money they would shut down the programs using the money when they stopped getting the money.
This is unfairly downvoted but strikes at the core of the matter. Democracy is fundamentally oppressive of a minority (and often majority). A vote in favour of a government to fund "basic research" (as it is generously described) is fundamentally not a vote to fund basic research, but rather a vote to expropriate wealth from a group that doesn't want it to be financed in order to finance it.
Also: Even if they could, why would they? Grants are for research. Research only very indirectly affects their income. They could probably accept more students (so more tuition) if they would say to the faculty: no research, more teaching.
An uber driver who gets rich by other means will stop driving for uber, not drive for uber for free.
If the faculty itself is not willing to ask to spend the endowment on the research (and they know it most intimately), then why should the faculty ask the rest of us to pay?
Endowments are not piles of money that they just sit on. Universities typically spend 4-5% of their endowment every year. The endowment is invested and managed to try and make that 4-5% a year spending sustainable indefinitely.
If the policy was no government funding if you have an endowment the net result would be that endowments would be spent down, and then not only would they need government funding for the things the government now funds, they would also need government funding for the things that are currently funded from the endowment's earnings.
Also, money in endowments is often legally restricted. Donors put conditions on their donations which limit what they can be used for. For example a donor might donate several million dollars to create and pay the salary of a named professorship in a specific department. That money goes into the endowment, but it and its earnings can only be spent on paying whoever currently holds that professorship.
A typical endowments includes hundreds or thousands of such restricted donations.
I don't think there's a problem with spending an endowment down, however university administrators do, and that's a emotional step they need to get over.
Agreed on restrictions and would be good to know how large the unrestricted part is.
California higher education in general does not need of federal funds. These are typically mutually beneficially projects that doesn't necessarily need to be partnered with the US government.
The bigger problem is the recipients of these cuts seem to think it is about an "issue", and are incapable of accepting they are having sand kicked in their face.
There is actually a stated issue that is the reason: anti-semitism. Isn’t it reasonable to want to understand more and gain the kind of influence to affect change of this magnitude?
Being a PhD student at UCLA (or over public universities) was arguably risky in the best of times. When I applied to grad school a decade ago, I got an offer from UCLA Math and it was notable that funding was not guaranteed beyond the first year, meaning you may need to look for your own funding. Same thing with the offer from Berkeley Physics. In contrast, the private universities like Princeton guaranteed funding throughout the normal duration of the PhD program (you’re welcome to bring your own grants, but if you don’t and can’t find an advisor/lab to provide for you, the department with fix you up with TA jobs and stuff). Now it seems the public institutions got 100x shittier still (not saying private ones aren’t in a bind).
For someone at the level of Terence Tao, this may be a good idea if a university is willing to hire him, even if it were for a temporary position until 2029 when (hopefully) the regime changes and the destruction is over. I’m sure Terence Tao will have no problems finding such a university or institution.
It’s researchers who are not at the top of their fields who will have a much harder time leaving America to find research positions, since academic positions and funding haven’t been easy to obtain in places like Canada, Europe, Australia, and Japan for at least two decades.
What will most likely be the case is that scientific careers will be halted temporarily or permanently from these funding cuts. Graduate admissions are harder than ever now, it’s harder to find a research position, and I can’t imagine how much more difficult tenure will be to obtain if professors can’t fundraise and publish. Industry isn’t always an option, either. A lot of researcher’s careers will face major setbacks, some unrecoverable, all due to the capriciousness of our rulers.
There is nowhere to run and hide. Europe is worse than the US on this front. China also demands party loyalty. In a sense this is just the human condition. The ruling faction demands loyalty. Only a very advanced human civilization could move past that and allow criticism of the ruling class. Maybe the US had achieved that for a brief movement in the past or maybe it was just an illusion.
EDIT: For people wondering why I think it's worse in Europe, it's because in Europe the ruling class and the universities are on the same side. And when I say Europe, I mean UK, France and Germany.
My PhD friends are moving to Canada and Hong Kong now. Neither are perfect, but they are better than America now in terms of academic freedom, and won't yank your funding in the middle of a 5 year research project just for petty revenge. Half of what you hear about China is propaganda - America is the bad place now.
I'm in Europe. It's not even close to being worse than the US on that front. Places like the Fraunhofer Institute and the Max Planck Institute are perpetually well-funded, and are largely unaffected by politics. Good places to do research.
>Fraunhofer Institute and the Max Planck Institute are perpetually well-funded, and are largely unaffected by politics
Oh, so I can freely go up against the German government's policies and have my career in academia unaffected and keep my government funding?
I lived in Germany and don't remember people or organisations ever being able to break government rules with no consequences (unless they had high friends in politics).
Sorry I don't buy it. Which examples are there of academics going against the government policies and still keeping their jobs and funds?
I lived in Germany and the moment you don't do what the government says you get the full shaft. Nobody let's you rebel against the government with no consequences, not in US, not in Germany, not in UK, nowhere.
People painting Germany like a bastion of free speech are coping hard. Only if you consider free speech doing and saying only what the government says.
It's hard to prove a negative. Can you show us an example of anything like what's happening at UCLA (collective punishment of an entire institution) or an example of an individual professor being harshly penalized or sanctioned for expressing personal political opinions?
Don't spin this around, what I asked you is not a negative.
People here argued that the US is fascist because in academia you can't get away with breaking governments rules getting you defunded and pointing at Germany for being superior in this regard.
So then I asked for proof that in other countries you can get away in academia with breaking the government's rules and not get defunded. It really is that simple.
That's not what people have complained about. People complained about that in the US a government rule seems to be "don't criticize the government".
What about Christian Drosten who criticized a lot of the Corona decisions, Jan Boehmermann who is very critical but still employed by state-financed TV. Fridays for Future?
It's hard to prove what you're asking because it's intrinsically not newsworthy -- whereas the reverse is. Surely if it's so bad in Germany, you should be able to dig up an example or two?
Generally, I do agree that in most if not all places, if you get government funding, you can't go against government policy.
However, in this case, it's quite hard to argue that Terrence Tao had anything to do with antisemitism or anything against Trump's policies. Actually I don't think Terrence Tao did anything that Trump cared about. This isn't really a free speech issue, it's more like some fundamental instability in the US, and maybe the US government is running out on money and trying to cut down on research expenditure using excuses.
In this case, the analogy should be "Go work in German academia *where the students* criticize the FOREIGN government of Israel."
AFAICT, no German academic institutions have lost funding as a result of the student's protests. Those protests were stopped, police action etc., but no funding change to the academic institutions.
In any case, penalties would apply to the perpetrators themselves, as individuals. I've never heard of a case where the institution itself would suffer from a significant funding cut, to say nothing of a very sudden funding collapse.
> but free speech is much more sacred in the United States than in Germany.
In the abstract. In actual practice, it's not clear, and you could even build quite a strong case for the opposite view. "Cancellation" over mere words has been commonplace for over ten years, and is much more common to the US than to Europe. And as for laws... What just happened to Tao and UCLA has, to the best of my knowledge, never taken place in Europe in recent decades.
On the front of funding research? Considering that one is constantly adding more funds for research, while the other one is removing funds, I'm not sure how accurate that is.
In fairness, it can be either, and which it is depends if in the specific case it's more accurate to phrase it as "the ruling classes are on the side of the universities" (good) or as "the universities are on the side of the ruling class" (bad).
Yeah, it was called the United States and if it was an illusion it would not have been the weakness exploited in this way. America was real and can well be again: turns out allowing such diversity and multiculturalism gave rise to things like New York City, California etc etc. known for being giant piles of messy commerce and influence from all over the place.
It's never been any different, all the way back to when Germans or Irish or whoever were the 'demonized immigrants'. This is what made America great. Anytime we want it, those conditions can return. It was no illusion.
Like the German diplomats recently speaking out against their governments policy on Gaza and Israel?
Or Dutch professors openly criticizing the plans by the right-wing government (which just fell) as being damaging, unproductive amd sometimes unconstitutional?
The only examples I see are the opposite of what you say. Can you name any examples in Germany, Sweden, Norway or Holland? (Those are the countries that I'm confident talking about at least)
I wouldn't say it's "just as bad", but I also couldn't imagine a big university publicly and strongly going against the federal government in Germany on "culture war" issues.
If you're fully aligned, there's no telling what would happen if you weren't, and you can't use "nothing happens" as evidence that nothing would happen - you're always allowed to share the opinions of whoever funds you.
If Germany got a right-wing government on the federal level, I expect to see either funding being slashed or universities adjusting their positions.
It's silly to say that EU is better jut because people don't see the government interfere with universities in the EU, when EU universities would never go against the central government to begin with, because that's where all their money comes from. Why would you bite the hand that feeds you?
Meanwhile universities like Harvard have so much private money they can publicly tell Trump to shove it. EU universities don't have this privilege so they exercise a degree of self censorship based on how the government tells them to dance.
One of the worst excesses of this admin has been the attack on science and mathematics, stemming from their deliberate ignorance of evidence. A setback for the researchers and a tragedy for the people that might benefit from their work, the nation and the world as a whole.
Just for the record, not just on StackOverflow but everywhere it is good practice to not just post a link and nothing else. One should always include a TL;DR summary so that it is clear what the link is about without having to click. Especially on mobile, having to click to even know what some link is about is bad.
Linked article summary:
"UCLA agrees to $6.5m settlement with Jewish students over pro-Palestinian protests"
> The University of California, Los Angeles, will pay nearly $6.5m to settle a lawsuit by Jewish students and a professor who said the university allowed antisemitic discrimination to take place on campus during last year’s pro-Palestinian protests.
> The lawsuit alleged that with the “knowledge and acquiescence” of university officials, protesters prevented Jewish students from accessing parts of campus, and made antisemitic threats.
US universities do a lot of research on Palestine and Israel's occupation and apartheid there. In addition, universities are naturally liberal and are targets of the right wing anti-education movement.
Really? The situation in China (and Europe, for that matter) is far worse. Obviously Europe is much better than China for academics, but the US is still miles above that.
So sorry, that won't happen. This will "just" disappear, with no replacement.
Funding levels are lower. Salaries are lower. In physics, from the places I know in the US, about half of the faculty is foreign, and about 30% is German. This is at top universities. That wouldn't be the case if these people would find similar conditions in Europe. But it can change quickly.
Funding is always a lottery. It's not like everyone gets some, but it's less. It's more that less people get funds. So you really have to look at the average.
But you are right. That's why I said: can change quickly.
Remember that these claims of antisemitism are all false. What they actually mean is "they had a student encampment calling out Israel's genocide in Gaza and occupation of Palestine, that the US supports with weapons, troops, UN vetos, and bad faith negotiation"
And remember that this actually stokes antisemitism. Israel is demonstrably out there committing atrocities. If officials are conflating anti-Israel with anti-Jew then it prompts people opposed to those atrocities to oppose Jews.
The current war was initiated via a sneak attack by Hamas militants from Gaza who committed rather unspeakable atrocities against Israeli civilians. Not justifying their actions but as an uninvolved third party I’m going to at least acknowledge the history of the situation before judging their actions.
Have you looked at the history before that? It seems you're missing 77 years of frequent massacres by Israel, a brutal occupation/apartheid of the West Bank, and a 17-year blockade of Gaza.
If you look at Paul Biggar's profile and posts it seems that this Irishman is for some reason, while being clearly intelligent and energetic, is quite obsessed with Israel, Zionism and the "Palestinian cause".
I must wonder why that is, and if he is such a caring humanist, why does he show absolutely zero care to any other conflict, hunger, or atrocity anywhere else in the world?
Paul, man up, start showing some love for the Syrian people of which 500k-1M were extinguished, and just weeks ago a few thousands were murdered as well, the Yemeni who are starved and oppressed by the Huttis, and countless other horrors, conflicts and starvation in Africa and elsewhere around the globe.
I don’t think this administration cares about Jews one way or the other. “Antisemitism” is a cudgel to use on their enemies. Any other effect is incidental.
It's such a tragedy that we're deliberately destroying the very engine of our global science and tech research leadership. All for the sake of making the pro-Israeli lobby happy under the guise of protecting against "antisemitism".
The feds are forcing the universities to either protect the freedom of speech by banning peaceful protests against the genocide, or to have the universities research funding cut.
Given that so far we (U.S) have been unmatched in science and tech research, this is probably the biggest case of "self own" in recent memory.
Among the impacts of suspension of such science grants is the impact on PhD students. The PhD students themselves would do fine - they would just leave science and go to programming, finance, etc. - and most will that way do financially even better than staying in science. The issue here is the future of the science - for the precedent one can look at the Russian science today as similar thing - leaving science for better pastures en masse - happened there in the 90ies.
China is producing 77K STEM PhDs in 2025 and that number is quickly growing year over year, US - 42K/year. (and just ponder for a moment that those 77K are the smartest out of 1.5B population of a country where STEM is all the rage - those 77K are really top line smart and driven ones with all the support from the state)
The only people to blame for this are the Universities who are blatantly violating civil rights law -- even after a Supreme Court ruling!
Terence and other academics who have had nothing to do with promotion of this blatant discrimination should be angry at their University leadership and administrators for this outcome, not the Trump administration who is doing THE RIGHT THING.
The faculty should take this opportunity to make the Universities drastically reduce the dead weight of administrators who have grown much more than faculty and produce no value.
i would personally like to see organizations of any scale self-publish metrics about their performance on their SLAs and at least trends on their unit efficiency (throughput latency and cost per main types of work items). for the state department time to issue a passport passports issued per unit time internal cost to issue a passport etc. for the irs corresponding metrics for processing a return or an audit. for id.me success in catching bad actors failures in incorrectly blocking legitimate users.
for university administrative departments , thoughtful corresponding things that capture what they do all day in understandable and defensible ways.
That’s not at all clear. Regardless, there is no proportionality in the actions that this administration is taking against UCLA and other eminent universities. The tools for righting civil rights issues in education should be through consent decrees that permit the DOJ to set criteria and monitor for compliance. The destruction of a large part of the research enterprise for these claims, particularly when the claims are widely regarded as nonsense, is heavy-handed and gives the distinct impression of another agenda.
UCLA recently reached a settlement, which among other things included “opposing calls to boycott Israel". I'm not sure how boycotting a government engaged in what many legal organizations have identified as genocide counts as civil rights discrimination. If anything it seems to violate civil rights of Palestinian Americans and citizens in general.
Also, Tao points out maybe the most important criticism of the Trump administration, which is how is cutting off all federal research funding improving the ability of faculty to do their work, given that the reason for an antidiscrimination claim in that setting is that discrimination prevents faculty from doing their work?
I know very little about this topic but the example of racism you provided seems weak to me. It seems scientifically justifiable to want a person from a minority to do work on minority under-representation in scientific studies.
The point is if the problem is the same in both you need to re-examine the pros and cons. Given the other issues in America and other advantages in China it's no longer a simple equation.
Why reach for China before Europe? Similar sized economies; much smaller language barrier for an immigrant from the USA; and with stories like this being what makes you ask the question, relatively more freedom.
You get a job offer for very large amounts of money and their HR will handle you getting a work visa. If you’re making very large amounts of money and still feel like living in China after five years apply for a green card.
You would have to be insane to consider founding or investing in a Chinese startup when you could do so in Silicon Valley or even NYC or Austin.
But I think it's very justified for the federal to do something (not necessarily this thing) against institutions that show racist behaviors. e.g. Little Rock Nine.
Where do you see anything remotely comparable to the Little Rock 9 at UCLA?
Edit: Incidentally, Trump absolutely gutted the Department of Education, including the Office of Civil Rights, appointing loyalists who explicitly don’t believe it should exist. Are these the actions of a president concerned with civil rights?
Also, indulge us in a wild guess as to what Trump would’ve done to the Little Rock 9. Consider that he signed a full-page newspaper ad calling for the death of the Central Park 5, a wrongfully convicted group of Black and Latino teenagers.
Invoking our civil rights legacy here is perverse.
> The lawsuit, filed more than a year ago, alleged that by not immediately ordering the encampment to be taken down, UCLA provided support to pro-Palestinian activists who “enforced” what it termed a “Jew Exclusion Zone,” prohibiting Jewish students and staff from passing through the camp’s makeshift barricades.
Personally I think this is a textbook racist behavior. Replace "Jewish" with "black" and "Palestinian' with "white" and see if you agree. I personally firmly believe if white activists try to enforce a "Non Black Zone" in the campus, the college administration has a responsibility to take it down and discipline said activists.
I'm not sure if this defunding is justified though, as it seems that UCLA has settled this case and the defunding sounds retrospective.
You can term anything whatever you want, doesn't make it true. The "Jew Exclusion Zone" term was coined by the plaintiff in this case.
A lot of the college protesters are in fact Jewish. This is a fact the pro-Israel propaganda would rather you not know about. Otherwise, how could they claim "antisemitism" whenever you criticize the actions of the foreign country.
I don't particularly care what the cause is, physically barring students from entering an area of campus is bloody absurd.
And, for the record, I think it's willfully ignorant to pretend that Jews and non-jews are given equal amounts of leeway by all Palestine protesters. While the majority may be doing so in good faith, I've seen far too many people being viewed with suspicion for wearing Jewish traditional headware by supposedly unbiased activists to believe that anti-Semites aren't using the movement to get a free ride.
Firstly, as others have noted, the claim that these protests were anti-Jewish is used by detractors to denounce the topic of the protests. There is absolutely zero evidence that Jews were targeted or excluded in any way.
Secondly, protests are escalatory by definition. If no one is listening to a protest, and absolutely no one is impacted, it will escalate until people listen.
You can denounce this form of protest - which I would argue is the only form of protest - from a high perch, but when push comes to shove, if it were your cause, you would do the exact same thing.
Look back at history, and you’ll see the same pattern in all high stakes college protests, from anti-war protests to anti-apartheid protests. The fact that you are either unaware or indifferent to this truth means the machine is working as intended.
From what I know, some received the death threats because they were Jewish, some because they supported Israel. One of them had the photos of the missing hostages up on the door. They were torn down repeatedly.
It's a strongly divisive issue. A number of the protestors on campus were Jewish and upset with the behaviour of factions in Israel. From my reading of material across several countries and various points of view a lot of death threats were thrown about at a great many people spanning all sides of the dispute.
My point is this: I do think that some universities gave the protestors way too much leeway. It clearly created a hostile work environment for some - Jewish, and I grant you also Muslim students. The universities responsibility is to keep that in check, and some failed badly. Some did better.
I also want to add my own observation, which might be biased: There was a clear, sizeable fraction of the protests that was beyond "pro-Palestine / anti-Israel's Palestine policy". There was celebration of Hamas and of the attack, especially in the first days.
In your opinion, should any university that punishes this alleged celebration of Hamas also crack down on any group or movement that is openly sympathetic towards Netanyahu / far-right factions in Israel? Just trying to figure out what consistent policy we’re meant to follow here.
Don't you see how one-sided this article is? The language almost exclusively assumes the allegations of antisemitic vitriol while dedicating a single paragraph to a lawyer who provides an opposing viewpoint. This is not a source for someone seeking a description of the situation grounded in reality.
>pro-Palestinian activists who “enforced” what it termed a “Jew Exclusion Zone,” prohibiting Jewish students and staff from passing through the camp’s makeshift barricades.
for me it looks like not just a civil case with UCLA. To me it looks like a straight criminal case of violation of federal civil rights law that FBI is supposed to prosecute. I.e. instead of collective punishment for the whole UCLA, i'd go with criminal prosecution against the specific individuals who perpetrated (i.e. those protesters who perpetrated the discrimination of Jews) as well as who materially supported (i.e. the administrators for example) those crimes.
As best as I can tell, the protestors committed a trespass and used their free speech rights to espouse certain racist ideologies. Protesting against alleged (I take no position here, it's complicated is all I got) mistreatment of Palestinians and Gazans is not a crime or anti-Semitic in itself. The administration committed no crime by failing to immediately remove the trespassers. It is reasonable for the administration to have taken some time to assess the issue and develop a plan and execute the plan. It is reasonable to change tactics as new facts arise. It is reasonable to re-assess the situation as the public and government provides their input on the situation. Did the protestors do some gross/racist things? Yes I think. Did they commit a serious crime? Probably not I think. Did the administration? I doubt it.
The term was invented by the suers, not the protestors. It’s possible to criticize Israel’s actions without being antisemitic, holocaust scholars call what’s happening there a genocide
it is extremely hard to form a reasonable opinion of what is happening in gaza with the current level of vitriol online. i feel i’d have to do a substantial personal research project to see if i can believe the cumulative casualty numbers that are being bandied about. not to mention the numbers about deaths from starvation.
i wish institutions would do the work to publish their sources in a way that is clear complete and verifiable.
i would love to understand what others on hn do day-to-day other than takes cues from media they “trust”.
This is a tragedy. Our pre-eminence as a scientific and industrial powerhouse that really began post WWII is now disintegrating because of the actions of a few. The funding being pulled from Terence Tao and his institute without due process is not the start, it's merely one casualty among many that began at the start of this administration. This is like cutting one's nose to spite one's face.
Punishing urban intellectuals for being urban intellectuals appears to be a common theme in a lot of right wing American messaging and the Republican Party won the popular vote.
You can’t put this on a few. It’s the genuine desire of the American voter.
There is a great deal of evidence that the 2024 election was stolen, so it very well could be that this is not on the voters. This is most likely on the fascist minority.
Please check out the Election Truth Sllisnce.
Please provide the proof to back this up. Like I wasn't willing to believe Trump without proof when he stated the previous election was stolen, I won't become a hypocrite and just believe it on Trump's win.
They think urban intellectuals have a fair bit of power.
They also think they are not always correct, not always unbiased, and possibly not always honest; and the bias tends to be towards either things that benefit the urban elite, or "luxury beliefs" that have disproportionate costs on other people.
Are you talking about math PhDs? What power do they have, politically?
I imagine many go on to be analysts of markets
No one is always correct or always unbiased or always honest, and everyone's bias benefits themselves, and every person in the United States lives in a way that has disproportionate costs to other people. None of those reasons explain any of the antipathy. What does?
Bigotry. They are completely open that LGBT and other minority rights offend them, and they want to punish those who support such rights. These people are far more concentrated in urban centers.
Spite politics is the ultimate form of post industrial vanity. People are so well off and have so little to worry about that their biggest ask from their leaders is to bully those who they don't like.
Though I don't agree with it, I think many conservatives feel the same way about e.g. trans rights - that it's a form of post industrial vanity.
They think urban intellectuals have a fair bit of power.
And the basis for that power is that they are supposedly right about things.
Is it possible to not speak in riddles please?
I am confused why you see that as a riddle.
Group X does action A_x due to belief B_x. That B_x isn't logical or whatever doesn't matter. Members of group X generally don't know that group X is wrong, and instead think their own biases are common sense etc.
People are not perfectly rational spheres in a vacuum.
That you can substitute in a lot of different values for X, doesn't change any of this.
Few Americans pay enough attention to politics to expect this, and less than a third of the country voted for this regime anyway.
A majority of the voters voted for people other than Trump.
Edit: come on people, read things in context. I was responding to someone who was implying that a majority of American voters support this. To support that assertion about any President's policies at a minimum you need that President to have received a majority of the popular vote.
When third parties get enough votes that a President gets a plurality but not a majority you can't really infer anything about what a majority of voters want.
Even if all the third parties were on the same side of the left/right spectrum as the President's party you can't infer much because if those voters agreed with most or all of the President's policies they would have voted for the President.
49,8% popular vote, 50,2 is a majority but at that point I would say it’s clearly half the American population that wanted him in power.
They're technically correct (the best kind etc) because they said "voted for people other than Trump" not "voted for Harris".
Voted for Trump: 77.3M
Voted for Harris: 75M
Voted for other candidates: 2.6M
Harris + others = 77.6M, which is greater than Trump's 77.3M
That's not even technically correct unless you assume every non Trump candidate was left wing.
The statement made was "A majority of the voters voted for people other than Trump", not "A majority of voters voted for left wing candidates".
The administration's stated reason is bias and anti-semitism, are you claiming that this is the definition of urban intellectual? If so how do you defend it? If not, how do you define it?
Why do we assume that the administration is acting in good faith when all evidence has shown otherwise?
They may not be acting in good faith but there is extremely clear evidence that UCLA has engaged in illegal racial hiring and admissions practices and has supported antisemitism on campus. UCLA chose to give them that ammunition.
Could you provide some sources?
Probably a reference to https://freebeacon.com/campus/a-failed-medical-school-how-ra...
> and has supported antisemitism on campus
You mean there were protests against genocide? Oops did I do an antisemitism by calling it a genocide?
The administration's stated reasons are bullshit.
It is not actions of the few. This is action of many. There is whole party apparatus behind this, public support among conservative voters, support of tech leaders etc.
> It is not actions of the few. This is action of many.
The US House of Representatives has 219 GOPers that voted to pass certain legislation. The US Senate has 50 GOPers that voted to pass certain legislation and voted to confirm many appointments.
A large swath of the US public voted to put those 219+50 people into Congress and voted to put a convicted felon [1] and rapist [2] in the White House.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/trump-trial-deliberations-jury-te...
[2] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/12/30/appeals-court-upho...
This. It’s easy to rationalise what can be seen as completely counter-productive and irrational actions as random acts of deranged minds. But Trump and proto-fascist republicans have genuine popular support. For terrible reasons, but still. And we can argue about how the US political system plays in their favour by giving them more power than their raw numbers would suggest, but even then they are a significant part of the population. Even more so since they managed to capture the broligarchs.
To my worried eyes this looks too much like Russia circa 2000 for comfort. Or Turkey early in Erdogan’s reign. Whatever happens, it will be painful and damaging.
Every phd student of Terence Tao is probably welcome at the Max Planck Institute For Mathematics:
https://www.mpim-bonn.mpg.de/application
Usually you need 2 letters of recommendation, I’d strongly assume that in the case of Tao one is enough.
Generally please consider the new „ Max Planck Transatlantic Program“:
https://www.mpg.de/25034916/max-planck-transatlantic-program
Whilst I would imagine that to be the case, you should at the start of a phd have more than one professor across the many you have come into contact with that is willing to vouch for both your mathematical ability and your personality and ability to fit in a team.
I don't think anyone should get in just on the relation to Tao, likewise it is also important that they move to a program that they have an interest in.
I do hope those students find an appropriate course for themselves as this must be extremely challenging for them both regarding their career and also mentally and socially.
3 months ago, we were all wondering why the EU proudly launched their "Choose EU for Science" campaign, despite having much lower funding levels than in the US.
If they predicted this, then their actions would make a lot of sense. It is notoriously difficult for scientists to change careers after years in research. For people cut off from US funding like this, a EU-guaranteed middle-class income will appear much more attractive than hoping for this newly unpredictable US situation to turn out well.
As a fraction of GDP, the EU spends more on academic research than the US. And if you add the UK, the total is also higher in absolute terms. (The US spends more on R&D, but that's mostly business spending.)
From an individual perspective, the funding situation is (used to be?) better in the US than in Europe. Mostly because there is less competition, as the salary gap between the academia and the industry is wider in the US. Americans are less likely to do a PhD and pursue a career in the academia than Europeans.
Both the EU and its large member-states need to significantly ramp up funding to exfiltrate scientists from the US. This could be a force multiplier as important as getting German scientists was after WWII, or Russian ones during the Cold War. It would also be a tremendous amount of progress for not that much money, all things considered.
And I say this with no joy whatsoever, because all these developments are damaging great collaborations and personal relationships with friends and colleagues in the US.
It didn't need to be predicted, 3 months ago it was already clear what was happening. The list of banned words in applications, and so on, was already out by then.
I was also surprised to read that. The EU were obviously acting in direct response to the US administration declaring it as their immediate intention to pivot away from science.
"prediction" skills was not needed.
Intelligent, smart, critical citizens are a nuisance for absocapitalism goals.
Scientists please come to the EU, we can't pay you much, you won't be able to find a place to live and we don't do air conditioning, but plz come.
/s
This easily beats being persecuted because of your research. Humanity and researchers use to live on more modest means, and you don't need 100k's to do math research. So sure, come to France we would love to welcome all of you!
The government not funding something isn't persecution. If it were the vast majority of people on this forum would be persecuted, which clearly wouldn't be a right use of the term.
It’s pretty clear that the only numbers this administration are interested in are ones that support the narrative that the great leader is infallible.
They just fired the commissioner of Labour Statistics. The great thing about autocrats is that they neuter their own country pretty quickly. When you make it risky for people to give you bad news, you end up with missiles that don't work and capital ships that sink.
That may be a comforting thought, but the reality is that it takes decades for these things to have an effect, and there's no guarantee that transitioning to a low trust and high corruption society will result in the removal of the autocrat.
See North Korea or Russia. People have been claiming they're on the verge of collapse for decades but the reality is that they just keep going.
There's already been a decade of trumpism (Trump in the republican party, and in american politics). In that time, people (politicians) who are not interested in trumpism have by and large adapted (pretend that they do) or left. This partly explains why this presidency is different from his last one.
Isn't that a bit too optimistic? Even before Trump, neoliberalism has wrecked the lives of the majority of Americans for decades at this point. See healthcare, housing, food safety, water supply, electrical grid, public transportation, broadband access, worker protection, wealth gap, and I'm sure I'm missing a lot more.
It does not take decades to ruin something. In the example here: scientists can go somewhere else and never come back. Even if the next administration vhanges course you will never know if there wont be constant flip-flopping. That's bad for business, science and life. People want predictability.
Yep. It’s odd to see classic third world dictator antics in the most powerful country in the world, but not at all unexpected given who’s running it.
> the most powerful country in the world.
For now, I live in the former most powerful country in the world prior to the rise of the US.
Which is, the UK? China?
The UK. It had this huge navy, which amusingly is where its central bank comes from. An English Parliament wanted to buy the greatest navy the world had ever seen but that's very expensive, so their cunning scheme was, license some business people to run an exclusive Bank of England, secured by the word of the British government, the income from this funds a navy and the successors of that navy were still dominant into the 20th century.
The fact that the Bank of England was historically a private business is awkward when it comes to explaining to some modern country why it's not OK that their central bank is giving the leader's nephew $100M in unsecured loans, and this sort of discomfort is part of why it was bought by the British government and gradually ceased operating as a private bank in my lifetime. When I was younger I knew people whose mortgage was issued by the country's central bank. Not like celebrities or politicians or anything, just bureaucrats who got a good deal, sort of "mates rates" but for a house loan.
> but not at all unexpected given who’s running it
To be fair, this has felt like the natural consequence of the "maximize capitalism without regarding the downsides" maxim the US seems to have been operated under for a long time. Corporations have been (indirectly) running the country for some decades at this point, it's just way more obvious and in the face now when a "businessman" sits as president.
I agree. For decades our political and cultural leadership took actions that benefitted themselves and other beneficiaries (e.g., property owners in coastal metro areas, tech and finance workers, etc.), but life has gotten harder for the poor and the middle class. The hollowing out of middle America and the dramatic rise in costs of the three H’s (health care, higher education, and housing) has been painful for many Americans.
I thought things would look up after the 2012 election, when people were looking for meaningful change. Unfortunately a charismatic demagogue entered the scene and has taken power. Since then, we’ve been on the worst possible timeline, and I don’t see an easy way out of this mess. It’s going to take a lot of work for Americans to trust each other again and for the rest of the world to trust us.
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I partly agree that white supremacy, particularly in the form of xenophobia, played a major role in Trump’s catapult to popularity (“Mexico’s not sending their best!” in 2015) and his enduring popularity (“they’re eating the cats!” in 2024). Let’s not also forget the Religious Right, which made a bargain to elect a protégé of Hugh Hefner in exchange for Supreme Court justices who would vote the Religious Right’s way on abortion and LGBT+ issues. When it comes to social issues, Trump has largely fulfilled his promises, and he continues to “stick it” to his “enemies” whenever and however he can.
However, Trump, at least in 2016, also attracted the votes of people who were fed up with the hollowing out of middle America and who resonated with his protectionist economic policies, and he also attracted people who were swayed by his “drain the swamp” rhetoric, which resonated with people who did not want an election featuring Clinton II (Hillary Clinton) vs Bush III (Jeb Bush). It is these people who have been fooled, who have not gotten politics purged of corruption. Much of the old GOP has completely capitulated to Trump, with the rest largely driven out of politics. The “swamp” never got drained; it’s now Chernobyl levels of toxic.
In addition, the two party system has made Republicans voters too loyal to their party. They’re so afraid of the Democratic Party, that their leaders will take away people’s guns, money, and free speech, that they don’t dismiss the warnings of authoritarianism as just plain fearmongering and “Trump derangement syndrome.” Well, the authoritarianism is here today. Right now it’s being directed at “enemies” like immigrants, anti-Trump politicians, scientists, and educators, but eventually the authoritarianism will affect Trump’s base. Unfortunately a lot of innocent people are suffering, and the nearest election is the 2026 midterms, which highlights a major weakness in the American government; we have no recall mechanism, nor do we have mechanisms like parliamentary systems where snap elections can be called.
While I would agree with you generally, in this case we’re talking about decisions that are precisely not desired by either business or investors. Which is to say, I think the American people and institutions are in a much worse place than at the whims of business alone: caught between an evangelical cultural coup and unrestrained capitalism. It’s actually surprising to me that the evangelicals appear to be dominating the concerns of business and investment — I don’t have a great explanation of why it has turned out like this. It leads to such a manifestly contradictory situation in which the government is betting the future on US AI global dominance and yet gutting the institutions that would enable it.
Maximize crony capitalism and oligarchy, perhaps.
The US drifted far from any form of pure open market laissez-faire capitalism or balanced regulated capitalism some time past.
"open market laissez-faire capitalism" was the explicit policy goal for maybe 50 years.
The idea that if it was only somehow more pure in some ideological virtue, then it would have worked, you'll need really hard historical material empirical evidence to defend such a claim
Not that it wasn't white and pure enough but that if it was the shade whiter you advocate for, it would have somehow been a complete 180°, like some magical threshold
Yes, your "pure" capitalism tends to do that.
Kinda similar to the people who say of the SU "but it was not true communism".
The people that founded the SU openly declared that it wasn't communism, just a managed phase on the way to actual communism (that never happened).
Either way, we're talking here about small in groups treating a larger out group as sheep to be manipulated and harvested.
The US BLS does seem to have a bit of a history [0] with their job reporting though. The process they've been using appears biased to over report initially and then get revised down over time. I'm sure there are a lot of political considerations, but from a raw statistical perspective there is a pretty easy path to getting better results. They could eliminate the optimistic bias and aim for accuracy.
If it were me I'd be sacking people until they started getting a mean adjustment somewhere around 0. I doubt that is what Trump is doing, but the managers left themselves vulnerable to technical criticism.
[0] https://mishtalk.com/economics/in-honor-of-labor-day-lets-re...
The "history" you cite only goes back three years. Meanwhile, the BLS publishes the monthly corrections since 1979, and the average correction since 2003 is +9k between first and third estimates [1].
Moreover, do note that all published numbers come with standard errors [2] and 90% confidence intervals, which did include the corrections of -133k and -120k that were made for May and June. The current interval for July is -63k to +209k [3]. Anybody who understood high school stats knows the meaning and implications of this.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cesnaicsrev.htm#Summary
[2] https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cesvarae.htm
[3] https://www.bls.gov/ces/
McEntarfer [0] had only been commissioner for around 18 months. The performance of the BLS in 1979 probably isn't reflective of her skills and talents.
And I'm not going to bother digging through the manuals to figure out how the BLS is calculating their standard errors, but there is a pretty decent chance they've been calculated assuming that the error mean is 0 when in fact it appears to be biased.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erika_McEntarfer
The source you cite is written by a man with literally zero training in economics or econometrics. He lost his job in 911 and started a blog in the GFC that gained an audience (https://mishtalk.com/economics/uk-high-school-student-asks-m...). Good for him. You assert with absolutely no basis in fact or any supporting citation that "there is a pretty easy path to getting better results." The BLS is run by the world's experts in how to measure what they are measuring. The private payroll company ADP reports their own numbers and has never demonstrated better accuracy despite the huge profit motive they have there. If it's so easy, then why don't you just write out a detailed explanation of how this supposed bias happens and how to fix it. You can't because it's not true that there is this sort of bias or that there is an easy fix (revisions are sometimes up and sometimes down, early data is not as reliable as later data). The BLS is constantly at work developing and testing new ways of doing their job better faster and cheaper. It's a difficult job done by thoughtful people. Bloomberg had a very contentious interview today with Peter Navarro and basically called him and Trump a liar over this made up allegation of political bias and/or incompetence at the BLS ("we just don't have evidence to support those instances here at Bloomberg"). This was the biggest miss in 50 years, yes. However, that's ignoring the fact that the economy is very much larger now and looking at the miss in terms of absolute job numbers revised is dumb, and the tariff uncertainty/TACO trade/Fed bullying/debt ceiling/and big beautiful bill drama is making this a particularly difficult time for this type of forecast.
> The BLS is run by the world's experts in how to measure what they are measuring.
And the commissioner was just sacked and the reason given was because she was incompetent. Goes to show the risks of being in a high performing environment and not having a trivially demonstrable track record of high performance. If a dude with no particular track record can clearly articulate why the numbers are biased then your employment might fall into question.
What clear articulation are you even talking about? Oh that's right. There is none. It's just a bunch of BS and hand waving, but that's apparently good enough for you.
> And the commissioner was just sacked and the reason given was because she was incompetent
The reason given was she purposefully changed the numbers to make Trump look bad. There was of course no evidence given for that.
The reason given [0] is that "A lengthy history of inaccuracies and incompetence by Erika McEntarfer, the former Biden-appointed Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, has completely eroded public trust in the government agency charged with disseminating key data used by policymakers and businesses to make consequential decisions. Under McEntarfer, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) consistently published overly optimistic jobs numbers — only for those numbers to be quietly revised later."
Which is certainly a political reason and easy to disagree with. But it is reasonable and factually defensible. Her Bureau has been publishing optimistic estimates.
[0] https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/08/bls-has-lengthy-...
The reason you state is just not factually true. It is false. A lie. Go watch that bloomberg interview from yesterday where the reporters tell Navarro to his face that they have seen "no evidence" of any of that.
No, that's the rationalizations some white house staffer wrote. The reasons Trump gave on Truth Social was that she purposefully changed the numbers to harm Trump.
Then the staffer has made a pretty good argument and has managed to justify firing her. Stroke of luck for Trump that he made a reasonable and easily defended decision by total accident.
> If it were me I'd be sacking people
Why sack them? It's not like they refused to mean adjust or failed to do so. The numbers came out, and before anybody has even had a chance to question them. Before any coherent criticism as had time to root, the person responsible is fired.
Firing people is not how you get more accurate numbers. It's how you get yes-men.
> It's not like they refused to mean adjust or failed to do so.
It is like they failed to do so - there is a timeseries of consistently negative adjustments. The BLS revising numbers down isn't an unexpected event, that is pretty standard for their jobs reports.
It is better to resolve things with a conversation rather than formal action. But if a conversation doesn't get immediate results it is fastest just to move people on at that level of seniority. The competition is fierce and it is more about finding the right person for the job than trying to micromanage performance.
Generally, firing statisticians because you don't like their numbers doesn't improve the accuracy of their estimates, but apparently people need to keep learning this lesson.
As far as I'm aware no statisticians have been fired and no suggestion has been made that they should be. McEntarfer is pretty high up in the food chain; she's there to be accountable for performance, not to crunch numbers.
Ok fair enough, but this is very very very like the Greek incident.
More generally, this is incredibly dumb in many, many ways. Like, the BLS can't control survey response rates, and the fact that Covid has broken the seasonal models for basically every long-run time series is also outside their control.
One could argue that they should be using IRS tax data to figure this out, but that would be a massive change.
And finally, if the numbers looked good, there would have been no firing (regardless of the errors). It's gonna be an interesting Monday on Wall St.
> As far as I'm aware no statisticians have been fired
And nobody at CBS has been arrested, but that doesn't mean corruption isn't happening.
> Firing people is not how you get more accurate numbers. It's how you get yes-men.
When reality and truth do not matter, why would they want accurate numbers? They do not need the country to flourish, they just need their personal wealth to grow and the rest of the population to remain compliant. From that point of view, shooting the messenger before the message gets out of control makes perfect sense. It is working well enough for many autocratic regimes around the world.
> If it were me I'd be sacking people until they started getting a mean adjustment somewhere around 0. I doubt that is what Trump is doing, but the managers left themselves vulnerable to technical criticism.
When the jobs market is currently being impacted by a leader throwing around unprecedented tariffs, and upending decades of economic practice by throwing away national deals that he himself negotiated, you are not going to be able to accurately predict things - because they are unprecedented.
Facts have a well known liberal bias, the only way the right wing gets enough votes is to have more people who don't do facts. Promoting science would just reduce the number of votes they get.
Same with global warming, it causes migration, loads of immigrants is great for the right wing, scares people into voting for them, they have no incentive to fix the problem that's causing them to get more votes.
It's really telling when an invaluable intellectual powerhouse specialized in a non politicized field gets its funds taken away because of politics
Edit:
This is a comment about the administration, not Tao.
Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you. - Pericles
Or, to quote his lesser-known cousin:
"I thought I was safe in my hideout, but a kick to the groin proved me wrong." -Testicles
Facts and knowledge are immensely political if the powers that be feel threatened by them.
thats why they should refrain from engaging in politics in the first place. the day the wind changes you lose.
Then it's maybe not a free country anymore if you have to think about how your actions are perceived by the president in power at every step.
You don't though, unless your funding depends on him. If you're a contractor for Oracle, you'll probably get in trouble if you loudly proclaim different values than them - but that doesn't make it a non-free country.
I hate to state the obvious but if your livelihood depends on federal grants then by all means you need to take in account the fact that oresidents can change after a few years.
That's the thinking of pure power politics which is antithetical to modernity and democracy. It's a complete reversal to pre-enlightenment feudalism, where the lord has complete control over your fate.
That was never true in the past. This is new.
There has been no precedent for what is happening right now. This is literally Project 2025 and the "you'll never have to vote again" people trying to turn the US into a dictatorship. If people don't speak out now, we might have MAGA in power for the next 25 years just like Putin was for the last.
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i agree with you, but i think it's been the case in the US for the past 15 years already. The only difference is trump pushing toward different issues than biden.
Which president did anything like this anywhere close to that scale? You are getting confused by propaganda.
It was much less a one-man thing, i agree. Looking at the US debates from europe however, I have the feeling monolithic thinking was very much in place in academia on a wide range of topics (gender theory, climate change, israel support, vaccine mandate, etc).
And not just academia if i look at zuckerberg's testimony over federal government censoring people arbitrarily on the platforms.
False equivalence nonsense. If you can't see the difference between Trump's authoritarian actions and the Biden presidency, you are blinded by your own personal biases.
The style is very different, for sure. But testimonies of people feeling threatened over their academic career based on political statements on controversial topics isn't a new thing.
Don't get me wrong : i'm not defending what's happening here. It's absurd and a very bad sign for US democracy. What i'm saying is that people only wake up when they're the ones in the crosshairs.
To some degree I agree with you. This didn't come out of the blue. I think we have to look at the whole picture, which contains multitudes of those bad signs for US democracy, including that the president doesn't want to follow the law and doesn't have a good faith or even functioning understanding of how the system of government works.
Taken together, it makes it clear that we need to formulate even more clearly than before, what kind of society and country we want to live in. Not just oneliners, of course, those are now hollowed-out (see "freedom").
If academics want to make political statements on controversial topics, then that's an entirely different situation to academics having grants cancelled (not just not-renewed, but cancelling already allotted money) when they're not making political statements.
By the way, do you have an example of the academics feeling threatened by making political statements?
Seemed pretty consensual, but since you're asking, here's a top result i got on my first search on google's.
https://nypost.com/2025/04/23/us-news/psychiatrist-who-criti...
And there are tons of other. Gender theory was a pretty big drive for censorship.
Sorry. You are wrong. Your first assertion was that the only difference was trump pushing different issues than Biden. And your source for this false equivalence is an example of a professor fired by a University that has nothing to do with Biden in any way shape or form. You seem to have difficulty with the truth and difficulty engaging in a good faith dialog.
As a band recently put it in a festival: They'd like their music to be non-political, but sometimes politics enter music and then you have no choice.
Are you saying the 6 NSF-funded math institutes (IPAM being one) are engaging in politics?
You still lose when you aren't political enough.
“If you would escape moral and physical assassination, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing — court obscurity, for only in oblivion does safety lie.” E. Hubbard, ca. 1989
>on the grounds that UCLA was “failing to promote a research environment free of antisemitism and bias”
This really has very Germany 1930s vibes even if the direction of the anti is flipped.
Flipping the direction isn't some minor detail. That "flip" was the reason for the Allies to fight the second world war! The universities implement Nazi-like policies in which they try to keep Jews out illegally, others fought against them. If you aren't sure which side are in the wrong here, you need to ask yourself if it's yours.
Where are they keeping out Jewish people? Extraordinary claims and all that
Would you have said the same about universities illegally keeping out Nazis, if the Allies had supported their genocide of the Jews?
It is purely Orwellian. They gaslit everyone into thinking that opposing an intolerant theocracy in Israel, and by extension the burgeoning autocracy in the US, was antisemitism, while at the same time moaning about Jews controlling and ruining the US. This naked cynicism is disgusting.
Intolerant theocracy? And you’re using this phrase to refer to Israel?
State sponsor of genocide might be a more apt term, I agree. Intolerant is way too weak of a term.
UCLA has an endowment of 3.8bn$. Whilst I'm sympathetic to their desire to be further government financed for the work they do, I feel like government financing should be made available to those that actually need the money. The attitude that you have access to government funds even if you have the ability to pay yourself needs to change.
Governments typically fund research because 1) it's seen as beneficial for the country, and hence falls under the remit of governments in democratic countries and 2) the uncertainty, time frame, or lack of direct commercialization of research typically means the private sector will not invest in it.
Your suggestion is saying that research should be privatised, and shows very little thought about how research works and who benefits from it.
You make this statement as if it's fact. The actual reality of the matter is that neither you nor I know how research would progress were the government not stepping in and spending on our behalf. Your kind of argument is what is used to justify increasing amounts of government taxation and spending, over trusting the private sector to figure out ways of doing so, and the suggestion that government is the only way of incentivising the research you speak of is entirely lacking in imagination and faith in basic human ingenuity to solve problems.
Yes, there are coordination problems for projects at some scale, for which government involvement makes it possible, however these are far fewer than we are made to believe.
There are tons of labs at universities that are privately funded. It’s not common but there’s plenty of them. And the one I know best is probably the top in the world for what it does (niche in physics)
Research 50 years ago, sure. Research now is very different. It’s short term, chasing money, trends, citations, prestige, hierarchy, academic power, and applications. Public should fund only the useful part of it.
Nothing has changed. What you describe today existed 50 years ago, and what you describe as being research 50 years ago, exists today.
The actions of the administration serve to force all academics not behaving as you describe research to start doing so, though. The criticism you have, is manufactured.
You clearly didn't read the article. Dr. Tao provides a concrete example of the type of funding that very recently lead to an order of magnitude speedup of MRI imaging and likely has many military uses he is not allowed to speak about (my speculation but I'd bet on it). Your statement is false.
Your Panglossian description of the purpose of publicly-funded research shows very little understanding of reality.
>UCLA has an endowment of 3.8bn$
you say that like it's a lot of money? I mean sure, in comparison to the amount of money I make yes, but in comparison to value derived from research, amounts of money collected from California, amount of money given to California, and amount of money federal government spends on other things - is it a lot of money? I have a feeling it's not.
>I feel like government financing should be made available to those that actually need the money.
yeah, if they actually needed the money they would shut down the programs using the money when they stopped getting the money.
Endowments are often earmarked for certain use cases. They aren't necessarily permitted to spend it as they like.
Maybe taxes should be the same. I don't mind being taxed as much as I hate my taxes going to the wrong thing.
In California, your taxes are mostly earmarked for k-14 education, and the legislature can't change that.
Now, find out if you agree with 10 random people about what is the right or the wrong thing.
This is unfairly downvoted but strikes at the core of the matter. Democracy is fundamentally oppressive of a minority (and often majority). A vote in favour of a government to fund "basic research" (as it is generously described) is fundamentally not a vote to fund basic research, but rather a vote to expropriate wealth from a group that doesn't want it to be financed in order to finance it.
UCLA gets about $800m a year in federal grants. $3.8bn wouldn’t last long if they were to self fund that.
Also: Even if they could, why would they? Grants are for research. Research only very indirectly affects their income. They could probably accept more students (so more tuition) if they would say to the faculty: no research, more teaching.
An uber driver who gets rich by other means will stop driving for uber, not drive for uber for free.
If the faculty itself is not willing to ask to spend the endowment on the research (and they know it most intimately), then why should the faculty ask the rest of us to pay?
Source here https://efm.research.ucla.edu/#:~:text=Statistics%20for%20fi...
Endowments are not piles of money that they just sit on. Universities typically spend 4-5% of their endowment every year. The endowment is invested and managed to try and make that 4-5% a year spending sustainable indefinitely.
If the policy was no government funding if you have an endowment the net result would be that endowments would be spent down, and then not only would they need government funding for the things the government now funds, they would also need government funding for the things that are currently funded from the endowment's earnings.
Also, money in endowments is often legally restricted. Donors put conditions on their donations which limit what they can be used for. For example a donor might donate several million dollars to create and pay the salary of a named professorship in a specific department. That money goes into the endowment, but it and its earnings can only be spent on paying whoever currently holds that professorship.
A typical endowments includes hundreds or thousands of such restricted donations.
I don't think there's a problem with spending an endowment down, however university administrators do, and that's a emotional step they need to get over.
Agreed on restrictions and would be good to know how large the unrestricted part is.
California higher education in general does not need of federal funds. These are typically mutually beneficially projects that doesn't necessarily need to be partnered with the US government.
The bigger problem is the recipients of these cuts seem to think it is about an "issue", and are incapable of accepting they are having sand kicked in their face.
There is actually a stated issue that is the reason: anti-semitism. Isn’t it reasonable to want to understand more and gain the kind of influence to affect change of this magnitude?
Military contractors have even more money but the budget to pay them only grows larger every year.
Being a PhD student at UCLA (or over public universities) was arguably risky in the best of times. When I applied to grad school a decade ago, I got an offer from UCLA Math and it was notable that funding was not guaranteed beyond the first year, meaning you may need to look for your own funding. Same thing with the offer from Berkeley Physics. In contrast, the private universities like Princeton guaranteed funding throughout the normal duration of the PhD program (you’re welcome to bring your own grants, but if you don’t and can’t find an advisor/lab to provide for you, the department with fix you up with TA jobs and stuff). Now it seems the public institutions got 100x shittier still (not saying private ones aren’t in a bind).
Maybe it's time to move to Europe or China
For someone at the level of Terence Tao, this may be a good idea if a university is willing to hire him, even if it were for a temporary position until 2029 when (hopefully) the regime changes and the destruction is over. I’m sure Terence Tao will have no problems finding such a university or institution.
It’s researchers who are not at the top of their fields who will have a much harder time leaving America to find research positions, since academic positions and funding haven’t been easy to obtain in places like Canada, Europe, Australia, and Japan for at least two decades.
What will most likely be the case is that scientific careers will be halted temporarily or permanently from these funding cuts. Graduate admissions are harder than ever now, it’s harder to find a research position, and I can’t imagine how much more difficult tenure will be to obtain if professors can’t fundraise and publish. Industry isn’t always an option, either. A lot of researcher’s careers will face major setbacks, some unrecoverable, all due to the capriciousness of our rulers.
There is nowhere to run and hide. Europe is worse than the US on this front. China also demands party loyalty. In a sense this is just the human condition. The ruling faction demands loyalty. Only a very advanced human civilization could move past that and allow criticism of the ruling class. Maybe the US had achieved that for a brief movement in the past or maybe it was just an illusion.
EDIT: For people wondering why I think it's worse in Europe, it's because in Europe the ruling class and the universities are on the same side. And when I say Europe, I mean UK, France and Germany.
My PhD friends are moving to Canada and Hong Kong now. Neither are perfect, but they are better than America now in terms of academic freedom, and won't yank your funding in the middle of a 5 year research project just for petty revenge. Half of what you hear about China is propaganda - America is the bad place now.
I'm in Europe. It's not even close to being worse than the US on that front. Places like the Fraunhofer Institute and the Max Planck Institute are perpetually well-funded, and are largely unaffected by politics. Good places to do research.
>Fraunhofer Institute and the Max Planck Institute are perpetually well-funded, and are largely unaffected by politics
Oh, so I can freely go up against the German government's policies and have my career in academia unaffected and keep my government funding?
I lived in Germany and don't remember people or organisations ever being able to break government rules with no consequences (unless they had high friends in politics).
Something smells here.
As long as you are not a "Beamte", i.e. a special case of state employee, yes.
Sorry I don't buy it. Which examples are there of academics going against the government policies and still keeping their jobs and funds?
I lived in Germany and the moment you don't do what the government says you get the full shaft. Nobody let's you rebel against the government with no consequences, not in US, not in Germany, not in UK, nowhere.
People painting Germany like a bastion of free speech are coping hard. Only if you consider free speech doing and saying only what the government says.
Does AfD support qualify as forbidden speech?
It's hard to prove a negative. Can you show us an example of anything like what's happening at UCLA (collective punishment of an entire institution) or an example of an individual professor being harshly penalized or sanctioned for expressing personal political opinions?
Don't spin this around, what I asked you is not a negative.
People here argued that the US is fascist because in academia you can't get away with breaking governments rules getting you defunded and pointing at Germany for being superior in this regard.
So then I asked for proof that in other countries you can get away in academia with breaking the government's rules and not get defunded. It really is that simple.
I agree that that was the opposite of proving a negative. The difficult thing would be demonstrating nobody ever did x.
That's not what people have complained about. People complained about that in the US a government rule seems to be "don't criticize the government".
What about Christian Drosten who criticized a lot of the Corona decisions, Jan Boehmermann who is very critical but still employed by state-financed TV. Fridays for Future?
> So I asked for proof that in other countries you can get away with breaking the government's rules.
Other countries like the way the US used to be 15 years ago? Is your argument really "other people don't have rights, therefore we shouldn't either"?
It's hard to prove what you're asking because it's intrinsically not newsworthy -- whereas the reverse is. Surely if it's so bad in Germany, you should be able to dig up an example or two?
Generally, I do agree that in most if not all places, if you get government funding, you can't go against government policy.
However, in this case, it's quite hard to argue that Terrence Tao had anything to do with antisemitism or anything against Trump's policies. Actually I don't think Terrence Tao did anything that Trump cared about. This isn't really a free speech issue, it's more like some fundamental instability in the US, and maybe the US government is running out on money and trying to cut down on research expenditure using excuses.
Funny thing is that UCLA is getting defunded because some people there were criticising a FOREIGN government.
Go work in German academia and criticize the FOREIGN government of Israel.
I'm sure the German government will react with much more leniency than the US.
In this case, the analogy should be "Go work in German academia *where the students* criticize the FOREIGN government of Israel."
AFAICT, no German academic institutions have lost funding as a result of the student's protests. Those protests were stopped, police action etc., but no funding change to the academic institutions.
Note that you are affected by OTHER people's opinion on a foreign nation.
Wouldn't get to this because in Germany such a demonstration would be dispersed far earlier, not to mention the nazi symbolism displayed in UCLA
In any case, penalties would apply to the perpetrators themselves, as individuals. I've never heard of a case where the institution itself would suffer from a significant funding cut, to say nothing of a very sudden funding collapse.
That could be the case, but free speech is much more sacred in the United States than in Germany.
For example the anti-swastika or anti-cult laws, which I am not against, it's just a different approach to something like this happening
> but free speech is much more sacred in the United States than in Germany.
In the abstract. In actual practice, it's not clear, and you could even build quite a strong case for the opposite view. "Cancellation" over mere words has been commonplace for over ten years, and is much more common to the US than to Europe. And as for laws... What just happened to Tao and UCLA has, to the best of my knowledge, never taken place in Europe in recent decades.
> Europe is worse than the US on this front.
On the front of funding research? Considering that one is constantly adding more funds for research, while the other one is removing funds, I'm not sure how accurate that is.
>Europe is worse than the US on this front
Would you please expand on this?
> why I think it's worse in Europe, it's because in Europe the ruling class and the universities are on the same side
Sounds like a feature, not a bug.
> And when I say Europe, I mean UK, France and Germany.
Europe is much larger and more diverse than those three countries. Scandinavia for example consistently top the list in most well-being statistics.
> Sounds like a feature, not a bug.
In fairness, it can be either, and which it is depends if in the specific case it's more accurate to phrase it as "the ruling classes are on the side of the universities" (good) or as "the universities are on the side of the ruling class" (bad).
Yeah, it was called the United States and if it was an illusion it would not have been the weakness exploited in this way. America was real and can well be again: turns out allowing such diversity and multiculturalism gave rise to things like New York City, California etc etc. known for being giant piles of messy commerce and influence from all over the place.
It's never been any different, all the way back to when Germans or Irish or whoever were the 'demonized immigrants'. This is what made America great. Anytime we want it, those conditions can return. It was no illusion.
Like the German diplomats recently speaking out against their governments policy on Gaza and Israel?
Or Dutch professors openly criticizing the plans by the right-wing government (which just fell) as being damaging, unproductive amd sometimes unconstitutional?
The only examples I see are the opposite of what you say. Can you name any examples in Germany, Sweden, Norway or Holland? (Those are the countries that I'm confident talking about at least)
What are you on about? I live in Europe. We don't terminate all contact to random universities because they said something the führer didn't like.
If you truly believe that the whole world is "just as bad" as this, then you are unimaginably far to the right.
I agree with you, but that choice of word doesn't make much sense here.
I wouldn't say it's "just as bad", but I also couldn't imagine a big university publicly and strongly going against the federal government in Germany on "culture war" issues.
If you're fully aligned, there's no telling what would happen if you weren't, and you can't use "nothing happens" as evidence that nothing would happen - you're always allowed to share the opinions of whoever funds you.
If Germany got a right-wing government on the federal level, I expect to see either funding being slashed or universities adjusting their positions.
Thank you for the voice or reason.
It's silly to say that EU is better jut because people don't see the government interfere with universities in the EU, when EU universities would never go against the central government to begin with, because that's where all their money comes from. Why would you bite the hand that feeds you?
Meanwhile universities like Harvard have so much private money they can publicly tell Trump to shove it. EU universities don't have this privilege so they exercise a degree of self censorship based on how the government tells them to dance.
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One of the worst excesses of this admin has been the attack on science and mathematics, stemming from their deliberate ignorance of evidence. A setback for the researchers and a tragedy for the people that might benefit from their work, the nation and the world as a whole.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/29/ucla-lawsuit...
Just for the record, not just on StackOverflow but everywhere it is good practice to not just post a link and nothing else. One should always include a TL;DR summary so that it is clear what the link is about without having to click. Especially on mobile, having to click to even know what some link is about is bad.
Linked article summary:
"UCLA agrees to $6.5m settlement with Jewish students over pro-Palestinian protests"
> The University of California, Los Angeles, will pay nearly $6.5m to settle a lawsuit by Jewish students and a professor who said the university allowed antisemitic discrimination to take place on campus during last year’s pro-Palestinian protests.
> The lawsuit alleged that with the “knowledge and acquiescence” of university officials, protesters prevented Jewish students from accessing parts of campus, and made antisemitic threats.
Come home Terry, we miss you
- Australia
> if nothing else this unprecedented decision does not appear to have followed the usual standards of due process
On par for this administration.
Suspension already being discussed here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44755429
It is time for operation Büroklammer.
Shameful. What a disgrace.
Come to Europe!
> UCLA was “failing to promote a research environment free of antisemitism and bias”
Is Trump using antisemitism as an excuse to crack down on liberal universities? Because this will make people only more critical of Israel.
Probably yes, since antisemitism doesn't seem to be an impediment to getting jobs in his administration [1].
[1] https://www.npr.org/2025/05/14/nx-s1-5387299/trump-white-hou...
Yes, this is part of Project Esther by the Heritage Foundation. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/18/us/project-esther-heritag...
US universities do a lot of research on Palestine and Israel's occupation and apartheid there. In addition, universities are naturally liberal and are targets of the right wing anti-education movement.
all the best people are going to move to china anyway
stop rearranging chairs on the deck of a sinking ship and move on terence
Really? The situation in China (and Europe, for that matter) is far worse. Obviously Europe is much better than China for academics, but the US is still miles above that. So sorry, that won't happen. This will "just" disappear, with no replacement.
In which way is the situation far worse in Europe?
Funding levels are lower. Salaries are lower. In physics, from the places I know in the US, about half of the faculty is foreign, and about 30% is German. This is at top universities. That wouldn't be the case if these people would find similar conditions in Europe. But it can change quickly.
Hard to argue it's lower than zero. Not to mention that low and consistent is better than moderate but at the whim of a tyrant.
Funding is always a lottery. It's not like everyone gets some, but it's less. It's more that less people get funds. So you really have to look at the average.
But you are right. That's why I said: can change quickly.
What are you even talking about? Pure American exceptionalism. Take a look at this and think about what it means: https://www.nature.com/nature-index/research-leaders/2025/in...
The Trump government probably thinks: Who needs mathematicans, if we already have the best AI in the world?
Remember that these claims of antisemitism are all false. What they actually mean is "they had a student encampment calling out Israel's genocide in Gaza and occupation of Palestine, that the US supports with weapons, troops, UN vetos, and bad faith negotiation"
And remember that this actually stokes antisemitism. Israel is demonstrably out there committing atrocities. If officials are conflating anti-Israel with anti-Jew then it prompts people opposed to those atrocities to oppose Jews.
The current war was initiated via a sneak attack by Hamas militants from Gaza who committed rather unspeakable atrocities against Israeli civilians. Not justifying their actions but as an uninvolved third party I’m going to at least acknowledge the history of the situation before judging their actions.
No unspeakable crimes would cause Paul to open his eyes and think about what he's busy doing.
Have you looked at the history before that? It seems you're missing 77 years of frequent massacres by Israel, a brutal occupation/apartheid of the West Bank, and a 17-year blockade of Gaza.
If you’re not justifying their actions then what is the point of this reply?
If you look at Paul Biggar's profile and posts it seems that this Irishman is for some reason, while being clearly intelligent and energetic, is quite obsessed with Israel, Zionism and the "Palestinian cause".
I must wonder why that is, and if he is such a caring humanist, why does he show absolutely zero care to any other conflict, hunger, or atrocity anywhere else in the world?
Paul, man up, start showing some love for the Syrian people of which 500k-1M were extinguished, and just weeks ago a few thousands were murdered as well, the Yemeni who are starved and oppressed by the Huttis, and countless other horrors, conflicts and starvation in Africa and elsewhere around the globe.
Is this the “write a reply that doesn’t make sense as a reply” thread or something?
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The cynic in me thinks this is deliberate.
I don’t think this administration cares about Jews one way or the other. “Antisemitism” is a cudgel to use on their enemies. Any other effect is incidental.
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We'd be VERY happy to welcome Terrence Tao or his graduate students in France! Please come!
It's such a tragedy that we're deliberately destroying the very engine of our global science and tech research leadership. All for the sake of making the pro-Israeli lobby happy under the guise of protecting against "antisemitism".
The feds are forcing the universities to either protect the freedom of speech by banning peaceful protests against the genocide, or to have the universities research funding cut.
Given that so far we (U.S) have been unmatched in science and tech research, this is probably the biggest case of "self own" in recent memory.
Among the impacts of suspension of such science grants is the impact on PhD students. The PhD students themselves would do fine - they would just leave science and go to programming, finance, etc. - and most will that way do financially even better than staying in science. The issue here is the future of the science - for the precedent one can look at the Russian science today as similar thing - leaving science for better pastures en masse - happened there in the 90ies.
China is producing 77K STEM PhDs in 2025 and that number is quickly growing year over year, US - 42K/year. (and just ponder for a moment that those 77K are the smartest out of 1.5B population of a country where STEM is all the rage - those 77K are really top line smart and driven ones with all the support from the state)
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The only people to blame for this are the Universities who are blatantly violating civil rights law -- even after a Supreme Court ruling! Terence and other academics who have had nothing to do with promotion of this blatant discrimination should be angry at their University leadership and administrators for this outcome, not the Trump administration who is doing THE RIGHT THING.
The faculty should take this opportunity to make the Universities drastically reduce the dead weight of administrators who have grown much more than faculty and produce no value.
i would personally like to see organizations of any scale self-publish metrics about their performance on their SLAs and at least trends on their unit efficiency (throughput latency and cost per main types of work items). for the state department time to issue a passport passports issued per unit time internal cost to issue a passport etc. for the irs corresponding metrics for processing a return or an audit. for id.me success in catching bad actors failures in incorrectly blocking legitimate users.
for university administrative departments , thoughtful corresponding things that capture what they do all day in understandable and defensible ways.
> blatantly violating civil rights law
That’s not at all clear. Regardless, there is no proportionality in the actions that this administration is taking against UCLA and other eminent universities. The tools for righting civil rights issues in education should be through consent decrees that permit the DOJ to set criteria and monitor for compliance. The destruction of a large part of the research enterprise for these claims, particularly when the claims are widely regarded as nonsense, is heavy-handed and gives the distinct impression of another agenda.
UCLA recently reached a settlement, which among other things included “opposing calls to boycott Israel". I'm not sure how boycotting a government engaged in what many legal organizations have identified as genocide counts as civil rights discrimination. If anything it seems to violate civil rights of Palestinian Americans and citizens in general.
Also, Tao points out maybe the most important criticism of the Trump administration, which is how is cutting off all federal research funding improving the ability of faculty to do their work, given that the reason for an antidiscrimination claim in that setting is that discrimination prevents faculty from doing their work?
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Yeah, better to take that money from UCLA and give it to ICE so they can be totally not racist with it.
Antisemitism is a pretext here, the Trump administration is targeting organizations that it considers too liberal.
Well, obviously. “Too liberal” just means “racist” these days. It’s an evil ideology, the fight against it is righteous.
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I know very little about this topic but the example of racism you provided seems weak to me. It seems scientifically justifiable to want a person from a minority to do work on minority under-representation in scientific studies.
Terence Tao work on the Prime Radiant predicts the third crisis. Trump is the Mule.
Fuck it hurts me to say this as a former China hawk. But:
How does Chinese immigration work for STEM?
What does residency look like for someone making $500+ k in America?
What are the Y Combinators? (No CCP Tans.)
Right, because in China universities can totally run afoul of the central government with no impact to their funding.
The point is if the problem is the same in both you need to re-examine the pros and cons. Given the other issues in America and other advantages in China it's no longer a simple equation.
Why reach for China before Europe? Similar sized economies; much smaller language barrier for an immigrant from the USA; and with stories like this being what makes you ask the question, relatively more freedom.
can speak to the yc part. one's called https://www.miracleplus.com/, run by the former yc china head Lu Qi. similar investment terms and philosophy.
You get a job offer for very large amounts of money and their HR will handle you getting a work visa. If you’re making very large amounts of money and still feel like living in China after five years apply for a green card.
You would have to be insane to consider founding or investing in a Chinese startup when you could do so in Silicon Valley or even NYC or Austin.
> You would have to be insane to consider founding or investing in a Chinese startup when you could do so in Silicon Valley or even NYC or Austin.
With all due respect, you´re not thinking long-term, or dare I say even medium-term.
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I have all my respect to Tao.
But I think it's very justified for the federal to do something (not necessarily this thing) against institutions that show racist behaviors. e.g. Little Rock Nine.
Where do you see anything remotely comparable to the Little Rock 9 at UCLA?
Edit: Incidentally, Trump absolutely gutted the Department of Education, including the Office of Civil Rights, appointing loyalists who explicitly don’t believe it should exist. Are these the actions of a president concerned with civil rights?
Also, indulge us in a wild guess as to what Trump would’ve done to the Little Rock 9. Consider that he signed a full-page newspaper ad calling for the death of the Central Park 5, a wrongfully convicted group of Black and Latino teenagers.
Invoking our civil rights legacy here is perverse.
Also, Republicans just torched the DOJ's division for for prosecuting Civil Rights violations, staffing down by 70%.
Their goal isn't to build legal cases against actual offenses, their goal is extortion.
And no college being defunded right now has shown any racist behaviors whatsoever.
So are you in support of the current defunding?
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-07-29/ucla-set...
> The lawsuit, filed more than a year ago, alleged that by not immediately ordering the encampment to be taken down, UCLA provided support to pro-Palestinian activists who “enforced” what it termed a “Jew Exclusion Zone,” prohibiting Jewish students and staff from passing through the camp’s makeshift barricades.
Personally I think this is a textbook racist behavior. Replace "Jewish" with "black" and "Palestinian' with "white" and see if you agree. I personally firmly believe if white activists try to enforce a "Non Black Zone" in the campus, the college administration has a responsibility to take it down and discipline said activists.
I'm not sure if this defunding is justified though, as it seems that UCLA has settled this case and the defunding sounds retrospective.
You can term anything whatever you want, doesn't make it true. The "Jew Exclusion Zone" term was coined by the plaintiff in this case.
A lot of the college protesters are in fact Jewish. This is a fact the pro-Israel propaganda would rather you not know about. Otherwise, how could they claim "antisemitism" whenever you criticize the actions of the foreign country.
I don't particularly care what the cause is, physically barring students from entering an area of campus is bloody absurd.
And, for the record, I think it's willfully ignorant to pretend that Jews and non-jews are given equal amounts of leeway by all Palestine protesters. While the majority may be doing so in good faith, I've seen far too many people being viewed with suspicion for wearing Jewish traditional headware by supposedly unbiased activists to believe that anti-Semites aren't using the movement to get a free ride.
Firstly, as others have noted, the claim that these protests were anti-Jewish is used by detractors to denounce the topic of the protests. There is absolutely zero evidence that Jews were targeted or excluded in any way.
Secondly, protests are escalatory by definition. If no one is listening to a protest, and absolutely no one is impacted, it will escalate until people listen.
You can denounce this form of protest - which I would argue is the only form of protest - from a high perch, but when push comes to shove, if it were your cause, you would do the exact same thing.
Look back at history, and you’ll see the same pattern in all high stakes college protests, from anti-war protests to anti-apartheid protests. The fact that you are either unaware or indifferent to this truth means the machine is working as intended.
https://epicenter.wcfia.harvard.edu/blog/student-protests-an...
To add some more anec-data: I have a couple of Jewish colleagues. Several of them received death threats. This is not acceptable.
I agree that is unacceptable, however it's unclear whether your colleagues received death threats for supporting Palestine or supporting Israel.
From what I know, some received the death threats because they were Jewish, some because they supported Israel. One of them had the photos of the missing hostages up on the door. They were torn down repeatedly.
It's a strongly divisive issue. A number of the protestors on campus were Jewish and upset with the behaviour of factions in Israel. From my reading of material across several countries and various points of view a lot of death threats were thrown about at a great many people spanning all sides of the dispute.
My point is this: I do think that some universities gave the protestors way too much leeway. It clearly created a hostile work environment for some - Jewish, and I grant you also Muslim students. The universities responsibility is to keep that in check, and some failed badly. Some did better.
I also want to add my own observation, which might be biased: There was a clear, sizeable fraction of the protests that was beyond "pro-Palestine / anti-Israel's Palestine policy". There was celebration of Hamas and of the attack, especially in the first days.
In your opinion, should any university that punishes this alleged celebration of Hamas also crack down on any group or movement that is openly sympathetic towards Netanyahu / far-right factions in Israel? Just trying to figure out what consistent policy we’re meant to follow here.
Don't you see how one-sided this article is? The language almost exclusively assumes the allegations of antisemitic vitriol while dedicating a single paragraph to a lawyer who provides an opposing viewpoint. This is not a source for someone seeking a description of the situation grounded in reality.
>pro-Palestinian activists who “enforced” what it termed a “Jew Exclusion Zone,” prohibiting Jewish students and staff from passing through the camp’s makeshift barricades.
for me it looks like not just a civil case with UCLA. To me it looks like a straight criminal case of violation of federal civil rights law that FBI is supposed to prosecute. I.e. instead of collective punishment for the whole UCLA, i'd go with criminal prosecution against the specific individuals who perpetrated (i.e. those protesters who perpetrated the discrimination of Jews) as well as who materially supported (i.e. the administrators for example) those crimes.
As best as I can tell, the protestors committed a trespass and used their free speech rights to espouse certain racist ideologies. Protesting against alleged (I take no position here, it's complicated is all I got) mistreatment of Palestinians and Gazans is not a crime or anti-Semitic in itself. The administration committed no crime by failing to immediately remove the trespassers. It is reasonable for the administration to have taken some time to assess the issue and develop a plan and execute the plan. It is reasonable to change tactics as new facts arise. It is reasonable to re-assess the situation as the public and government provides their input on the situation. Did the protestors do some gross/racist things? Yes I think. Did they commit a serious crime? Probably not I think. Did the administration? I doubt it.
The term was invented by the suers, not the protestors. It’s possible to criticize Israel’s actions without being antisemitic, holocaust scholars call what’s happening there a genocide
it is extremely hard to form a reasonable opinion of what is happening in gaza with the current level of vitriol online. i feel i’d have to do a substantial personal research project to see if i can believe the cumulative casualty numbers that are being bandied about. not to mention the numbers about deaths from starvation.
i wish institutions would do the work to publish their sources in a way that is clear complete and verifiable.
i would love to understand what others on hn do day-to-day other than takes cues from media they “trust”.