Could someone explain to me how Marc Andreesen has so much clout? Everything I’ve ever read by him says he’s a flaming goofball and wanna-be fascist. Here he is expounding on academia.

So he is afraid that the white children of Trump voters, a notoriously ignorant group that hates education (especially secular education), is being displaced from educational opportunities by ambitious immigrants and go-getter minorities. This is a non-issue. We’re supposed to prioritize lazy students (or to be fair, students who have been deprived of a good basic education by America’s fucked-up public education policy) over students who are willing to work hard because their parents voted for Trump? What an insane proposal.

As usual, this the dream of freaked out conservatives who think student radicals are dictating the course of higher education. Somehow these kooks get all kinds of mainstream coverage, despite the fact that their beliefs are entirely counter to facts and reason. As Henry Farrell says

…most mainstream American commentary about free speech in the modern American university labors under a misconception. It regularly suggests that out of control students and crazy professors are running the place. There is an entire intellectual industry of centrist and conservative commentary driving this narrative, including people like Bari Weiss, the proprietor of the Free Press, who made her bones by working with The David Project to attack Columbia professors for purported anti-Semitism. Marc Andreessen claims that “politically radical institutions” are driving a leftward shift by teaching students “how to be America-hating communists.”

Anyone who has day-to-day experience with actual American students knows that these claims are complete horseshit. Some students are left, some moderate, some conservative. Most are more interested in getting jobs than burning flags. America-Hating Communism 101 is not, actually, a required course on most campuses. Econ 101 often is. And those who are protesting what Israel is doing in Gaza? They have something to protest.

I know my students, and they’re diverse and you can’t pigeonhole them into the caricatures Weiss and Andreesen have fabricated. These students are here to learn — or to get certified for a better job — and they definitely do not sign up for a buttload of debt and years of work so they can tear down the establishment. What happens is they get into an environment where they are expected to pay attention to the world, and history, and politics, and they are outraged, honestly and righteously. You can’t change this, unless you think the university should be a propaganda mill that refuses to represent reality. It’s also the case that even if the student body was full of bomb-throwing radicals, it wouldn’t matter, because they don’t control our curriculum, and they don’t even control our big money investments, or the appointments of our faculty and administrators.

Ideally, I consider the students to be the voice of the university’s conscience, which is all too often ignored.

If you think students and a radical faculty are in charge, look at this news from Duke University.

Duke University School of Medicine (SOM) plans to implement new faculty productivity guidelines that would tie tenured professors’ salaries to external research funding, according to documents reviewed by The Chronicle.

Set to go in effect in 2026, the proposed policy would apply to the school’s basic science units, which include departments ranging from biochemistry to neurobiology and various centers and institutes such as the Duke Cancer Institute and the Duke Human Vaccine Institute. These units rely heavily on grants from the National Institutes of Health, which have been increasingly difficult to come by due to slowdowns in grant review processes, an uptick in terminations and a lack of new funding opportunities since President Donald Trump assumed office.

Under the guidelines, each department must establish a minimum expectation for external grant funding. Tenured faculty members who do not meet the threshold — measured as a three-year average — would be given the option to either enter a 12-month “Safe Harbor” period, after which further inability to meet productivity standards will result in salary reductions, or consider career transition alternatives.

I guarantee you that the faculty did not approve massive salary cuts, tied to getting grants at a time when the government is destroying the apparatus of grant disbursement. This was a decision made in contradiction to faculty interests.

Farrell also made this lovely table that compares the perceived hierarchy of power within academia to the actual, little known (to the public, or to asshole pundits like Andreesen and Weiss) hierarchy.

I guess I’m at about level 4 in the distribution of power at the university, and even that’s misleading. If we were to plot the influence quantitatively, we’d have to use a power law distribution. Everything is in the hands of the board of trustees. Even where we faculty have some say in decisions, we can be overruled by the Board. Tenure, for instance, is proposed by faculty, but then has to be approved by the president, who then passes on the nomination to the Board, who can kill the idea without anything like a hearing or a discussion from the affected parties.

And students? Hah. Sorry. If students want to affect the administration of the university, they have to SCREAM and take over buildings and do all the things conservative hate, because they have no other options.

I hate it, but this Epstein story is destroying my confidence in government, which was already in tatters by Trump’s election. Now Mike Johnson has shut down the house of representatives early, sending everyone home for an early vacation, in order to prevent a vote to release the Epstein files? That’s a blatant coverup. The secrets are dribbling out…now we learn that Trump is mentioned many times in the files, but we don’t know the context.

It’s also raising questions we should have considered long ago. How did Epstein transition from high school teacher to billionaire with a private plane and his very own island? Personally, I’d like to know how to do that, but if it involves sex trafficking I’ll pass. Is the market for young girls that lucrative? Who is buying that access?

I’m also wondering if giving someone a billion dollars flips a switch in their brain and turns them into predators on children, or if being a predatory pedophile makes it easier to become a billionaire. Either way, it’s another reason to outlaw billionaires.

Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) snuck a provision into a bill to fund the EPA that decreed that the Kennedy Center opera house would be renamed for…Melania Trump, a woman with no artistic talent or inclination, but who, presumably, sometimes sleeps with the president.

It’s a cult, I tell you.

Anyway, it’s unlikely that the bill will pass, and even if it did, I imagine the next time a Democrat is elected (if one is allowed to be elected), this is one of those things that would be casually and quickly deleted. I kind of hope Trump’s entire effort to buy his way into an association with the arts would be expunged at the first opportunity, because his idea of art is nothing but tacky kitsch, thinly plated with gold-colored stuff.