Deservedly or not, Harvard is the premiere research institution in the US, internationally renowned, magnificently endowed, so it’s shocking that Trump is demolishing our research capabilities nationwide.
The Faculty of Arts and Sciences slashed the number of Ph.D. student admissions slots for the Science division by more than 75 percent and for the Arts & Humanities division by about 60 percent for the next two years.
The scale of reductions in the Social Science division was not immediately clear, though several departments in the division experienced decreases over the coming two years ranging from 50 percent to 70 percent.
We’re used to thinking that STEM departments are safe…but no more.
The Organismic and Evolutionary Biology department will shrink its class size by roughly 75 percent to three new Ph.D. students, according to two professors. Molecular and Cellular Biology will reduce its figure to four new students, and Chemistry and Chemical Biology will go down to four or five admits, one of the professors added.
The reduction in admissions slots puts a figure to FAS Dean Hopi E. Hoekstra’s announcement in late September that the school would be admitting Ph.D. students at “significantly reduced levels.” Hoekstra cited uncertainty around research funding and an increase to the endowment tax — which could cost Harvard $300 million per year — as sources of financial pressure.
This isn’t just Harvard — universities across the country are tightening their belts to the point that whole disciplines are getting chopped. How do we recover from this?
All Trump knows how to do is destroy, just like he’s demolishing the east wing of the White House.
That’s symbolic of how this administration will be seen by history: a flag waving over a wrecking crew.
Trump has made “America”* .. a dictatorship. Not great. Backwards, broken in so many ways.
I fear it is now too late and the USA as we used to know it is gone.
With all that implies for the rest of our planet.
Those who didn’t vote for Kamala have done far more damage than I think most of them yet realise. Musk too maybe.
I don’t want to give in to defeatism but coming out of this and stopping and removing Trump and the Project2025 fascist crew now.. well, how and with what damage already done?
.* United States thereof.
At least Nero had the good grace to wait for one of Rome’s many great fires before building his domus aureus slap bang in the centre of the city.
Flee! Flee to Canada, Americans – the whole city is becoming a single house!
@2 cartomancer
That’d be “domus aurea”, or more correctly within your sentence the accusative “domum auream”. Now paint that on the walls 100 times!
Trump has that simple minded dictator thought pattern of wanting Harvard to be a top level research institute and only produce answers that he wants to hear. It’s very much a doublethink situation, where he offers them big funding but only if they promise the research will produce the answers he approves.
I’ve posted this half a dozen times but it is still true.
If you’ve read it before, good and skip it. There is a link to the original source which is written for a general audience.
Importance of science to the USA
Once again, it is time to point out that science is the leading driver of our civilization and responsible for the USA’s leading (don’t laugh, it was true up until January) position in the world.
Attacking science is like attacking your own feet and hands. It is national self harm.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.342.6160.817
If we stopped spending public money on science, in the short term nothing would happen.
The payoffs from science can be short term but most are long term.
In the long term, we would just fall further and further behind the rest of the world.
Another repeated comment.
Why Nations Fail Book Review
The USA is also now on the road to failure.
Just getting started.
With 346 million people and the world’s largest economy, we have a lot of momentum. It will take years and decades to show up.
It took Bush 8 years to wreck the US economy and it took Obama 4 years to fix it.
And here is why.
In 2012, this book, Why Nations Fail, came out.
It 2014 the authors won the Nobel prize in economics.
You need three conditions to succeed rather than fail.
.1. A strong central government.
.2. Taxes at least 10% of GDP.
.3. Rule of Law. A level playing field.
We in the USA have lost Rule of Law and Due Process.
Without that, societies end up being ruled by monopolies and oligarchies.
They get stagnant and go nowhere because the ruling class is more interested in keeping their power and money than the well being of the masses.
This is a key reason why the Third World is…The Third World.
Wikipedia: Why Nations Fail
Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, first published in 2012, is a book by economists Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, who jointly received the 2024 Nobel Economics Prize (alongside Simon Johnson) for their contribution in comparative studies of prosperity between nations.[1][2] The book applies insights from institutional economics, development economics, and economic history to understand why nations develop differently, with some succeeding in the accumulation of power and prosperity and others failing, according to a wide range of historical case studies.
While I fully accept that I misgendered the noun domus (for which I shall decimate myself later as punishment), the general protocol for translating is to use the orthographic and grammar rules of the target language, and English does not (for the most part) have an accusative case. Otherwise we’d be going round saying “hail Caesarem” and other such awkwardness.
On the other hand, a concerted effort to paint what remains of the White House with “Romani ite domum” might work wonders…
I’m going to amplify that last point in comment #9, Why Nations Fail.
What the USA has lost since Trump became president in January is Rule of Law and the associated Due Process.
This isn’t optional if you want to have a successful society.
Rule of Law protects innovators and allows for upward mobility.
Without Rule of Law you end up with entrenched, heavily intermarried oligarchies and monopolies. If anyone starts a company which challenges one of the oligarchy’s companies, they get bought out, coopted, or destroyed.
The rich people at the top of the society accumulate more and more power and money while the rest of the society is stagnant and gets poorer.
Winners and losers in the economy don’t appear based on merit. They get picked by the government based on bribes, corruption, nepotism, and favors. You see that with the tariffs.
There are a huge number of exemptions to the tariffs and bribing Trump like Apple did is one way to get them.
An oligarchy is the opposite of a meritocracy.
And, the USA has lost most of its Rule of Law.
A few examples.
.1. ICE are poorly trained, heavily armed right wing thugs. Their main purpose isn’t even immigration enforcement. It is to terrorize the US population.
They violate the law every day without thinking twice about it.
People including US citizens are getting disappeared.
.2. Trump is bailing our Argentina and US Hedge funds with $40 billion.
Who authorized that? No one. Spending is the right of congress.
Argentina is irrelevant to the USA, a perennial failure no matter what anyone does.
Why is it we have $40 billion to bail out Argentina but cut money for healthcare and science?
.3 The tariffs are arbitrary and exemptions are everywhere depending on who you know and who you bribe.
.4. Who gets TikTok? Some friends of Trump.
.5. Want to get out of prison? If you are a Republican it is easy to get a pardon.
This destruction of the Whitehouse is just one more example. It is illegal on many levels and yet it will be done in two more days.
The USA is on the way to being a mediocre has been country and these are the reasons why.
We have a lot of momentum so it will take a while but it will happen.
That photo of the destruction at the White House is the perfect visual metaphor for what Trump and his accomplices are doing to America. To say I’m pissed off is putting it mildly.
I am not truly shocked by much these days but, FUCK ME, how could a demolition crew be hired to knock down the East Wing of the White House and
A) Nobody appeared to have a clue it was going to happen
B) Paintings, furniture, etc must have been moved out over a period of weeks in advance
C) The demolition crew started munching away at the building
and
D) Nobody in the entire FUCKING country has any means, balls or authority to stop it! (P.S. Too late, it’s gone.)
I mean, not to get wound up or anything but What the Actual Fuck is going on?
Total silence from the media (to be expected; it’s dead) Total silence from Congress. Total silence from the Courts. So, I guess we’re at the Who Cares Anymore, Just Burn It All Down stage.
@ 1 StevoR
FTFY.
I’ve been reading various books on Wold War II and the contrast between Churchill and Hitler regarding the truth and loyalty. Churchill was well aware that people would want to tell the Chief the things he most likes to hear so that could lead to an outlook far more sanguine than the brutal facts allow. Hitler, by contrast, wanted people whose loyalty lay in never contradicting him.
@StevoR #1
-sigh-, ok, I’ll take the bait.
Trump didn’t come out from nowhere.
The condition that made the USA (and pretty much all “western” democracies) ripe for fascism didn’t come out from nowhere, and have been championed by both parties.
Voting, important as it is, would have only slowed down this.
You already got what you wanted, when people voted for Biden.
You successfully slowed down fascism* by four years.
And this is a good thing.
But you didn’t stop it.
Voting does not stop fascism.
So yes do vote, but stop obsessing over it and start thinking about alternative ways of repairing your society.
If you need an example, I’d throw in community building and joining local groups.
Fascism at home for white cis people. Fascism for people abroad, for Blacks and trans people went ahead as normal.
Sure, True.
Good question.
Who could have stopped this?
.1. Almost all of us who live here couldn’t have stopped it even if we had advance warning.
I couldn’t.
One old Boomer person on the West coast a few miles from the Pacific ocean.
Almost all of the 347 million people in the USA can say the same thing.
.2. So who could have stopped this?
It would have to be an organization with power equivalent to the US president.
That really leaves the US congress and the US courts.
I wouldn’t want to be the company that is tearing down the Whitehouse though.
For the record it is ACECO, a Maryland-based demolition contractor. ACECO is a subcontractor The general contractor for the project is Clark Construction, based in McLean.
If you look at who owns ACECO and Clark Construction, they will probably be raging MAGA cultists or outright Nazis.
This country has gone to shit and I’m actively rooting for its downfall and for the prosperity of its enemies. If, for instance, China takes Taiwan in the few years, I will publicly praise China.
The entire place was built on a foundation of bullshit. There were never truly any guardrails to prevent a dictatorship. Trump is just exposing the country for what it always was — a den of the wealthy thieves.
@14 raven
There are several answers.
1) The US Congress. The House of Representatives managed to impeach T-Rump twice during his first term, but the Republicans in the Senate couldn’t bring themselves to convict because they placed party over country. In the present term, Congress could have retracted the emergency powers being cited to issue tariffs, etc. or at least passed resolution clarifying that they do not consider the current use to be justified under current law. They have not done so because the Republicans have majorities in both houses and are putting party above country.
2) The US Courts. Most especially the Supreme Court, who decided in Trump’s favor several times. For example, deciding that the 14th amendment doesn’t say what it clearly says. Also, allowing geryymandering, bribery, etc.
3) The US population, who elected those cowards in (1); although distorted by gerrymandering (2)
Some people here probably know about Robert Arnold, and in fact PZ may have already linked to him. But if you don’t know him, he’s really worth listening to: https://www.youtube.com/@Defiance13