Columbia University’s shame

They should be ashamed by their cowardice. Trump threatened and Columbia caved.

The US president has made no secret of his intent to control what is studied, thought, and debated. His administration sent a letter to Columbia University demanding sweeping changes, including placing the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African studies department under “academic receivership” for five years, abolishing the university judicial board, and centralizing all disciplinary processes under the office of the president. Such unprecedented intervention is blatantly illegal and a wholesale attack on academic freedom and free speech. On Friday, Columbia capitulated.

It is an embarrassment to Columbia, of course, but the embarrassment is not Columbia’s alone. The use of federal funding threats to control universities should be a five-alarm fire for the thousands of other universities, and yet the response from the majority of academic leadership has been silence.

It is, ultimately, about the money. Trump has destroyed the autonomy of federal research agencies, which is what allows him to hold research funds hostage and exercise that kind of leverage over the curriculum and control faculty and students. That’s why spineless Columbia surrendered.

The reasons are understandable. If any one university speaks out, they are scared Trump would pull funding. The president of that university will have to see the place they love and the people they are responsible for gutted by a $50 or $100 or $400 million cut, either to federal grants or scholarships. What if speaking out will change nothing? Why risk the all-critical research of their science faculty, important scholarships for their students, for a statement that might lead to naught?

It seems to me that one approach universities could take to this threat is to not stand alone. Shouldn’t we all be standing together to resist. After all, it is illegal, everyone says, why isn’t everyone responding with lawsuits and threats of legal action? Columbia’s actions are going to have repercussions for all of us, because it’s crippling research.

The reason this is different is because the government is attacking free speech and free inquiry itself. The current collective cowardice is self-defeating. Their refusal to stand together now only makes them more vulnerable in the future, and less credible when they say they are privately resisting. How can we trust they aren’t complying in advance, reshaping their curriculum and research dollars to avoid retribution? We can’t.

If university leaders, some of the most privileged people in our society, allow themselves to be bullied and blackmailed, and refuse to coordinate with each other on courage, how do we expect any other institutions – law firms, non-profits, businesses – to stand up?

Personally, I find the silence of the University of Minnesota worrying. Maybe they’re busy building a case to defend against Trumpian attacks? Or maybe there are a bunch of lawyers on the board of regents holding everyone back.

I should acknowledge that one provost of Columbia has spoken out strongly against the assault on academic freedom — in the pages of the New York Times, no less. Usually the NYT is doing their best to provide cover, in the form of ambiguity and weasel wording, for Republicans, so this was a surprise.

The Trump administration has sought to impose its will on higher education by withdrawing more than a billion dollars of funding from some universities and threatening others with similar punishment. It has sought to deport student protesters who are legal residents. All this represents a fundamental assault on the values and functioning of our university system. Columbia and Johns Hopkins, founded in 1876 and America’s first true research university, may be only the first to feel the effects of this needless use of a sledgehammer.

Columbia’s capitulation last week to the Trump administration, in which it agreed to a number of demands in order to restore federal funding, obliterates its leadership in defending free inquiry. If Columbia allows authoritarian-minded leaders to dictate what we can teach, then the federal government will dictate what we can read, what books we may have in our libraries, what art we can display, what problems scientists can explore. Then, we are no longer a free university.

They don’t want a free university! Having a bunch of intelligent, articulate people who can criticize the dumbass-in-chief and his wicked, self-destructive policies is not desirable. He loves the uneducated, remember!

Today, the stakes are higher. We are in a fight for survival and appeasement never works. Despite platitudes to the contrary, Columbia’s leaders have weakened our community and our leadership among the greatest educational institutions in the world. This is not the way to fight Mr. Trump’s efforts at silencing our great American universities. If we don’t resist collectively by all legal means, and by social influence and legislative pressure, we are apt to see the destruction of our most revered institutions and the enormous benefits they accrue to America.

Collective resistance sounds like a good plan. Who is organizing it? Not the Democratic party, that’s for sure.

Is this too much of an inside joke?

This little meme was posted by Will Stancil. I’m wondering if I’m just too online, because I got the joke immediately.

In case you haven’t heard of him (you live a blessed life), Steve Sailer is a notorious and ubiquitous racist and far right pundit who haunts many comment sections. Well, he would be ubiquitous, if reasonable people didn’t insta-block him as soon as he tries to intrude on a conversation. All you really need to know about him is this bit from his wikipedia page.

Sailer, along with Charles Murray and John McGinnis, was described as an “evolutionary conservative” in a 1999 National Review cover story by John O’Sullivan. Sailer’s work has frequently appeared at Taki’s Magazine, VDARE, and The Unz Review. He used the phrase “Invade the World, Invite the World” in the 2000s as a criticism of American foreign and immigration policies.

Sailer’s January 2003 article “Cousin Marriage Conundrum”, published in The American Conservative, argued that nation building in Iraq would likely fail because of the high degree of consanguinity among Iraqis due to the common practice of cousin marriage. This article was selected for The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004, edited by Steven Pinker.

He’s not an “evolutionary conservative”: although he likes to claim the authority of biology and evolution in his pronouncements about race, he’s really just a guy with an MBA in marketing. He knows nothing about science.

Anyway, what made me laugh about the little cartoon is that I’ve been using the fact of finding Sailer babbling in a thread as analogous to the site flying the black death quarantine flag — back away quickly and never return. There’s something wrong with a site that tolerates his disease. It’s why I shun Matt Yglesias and Tyler Cowen and Razib Khan, and that Steven Pinker would actually publish his poison is another nail in his coffin.

The fascist wrecking ball is here

The historians all saw this coming. In a prophetic post from long long ago (2023), Ruth Ben-Ghiat explains the authoritarian playbook, and it all starts with stifling the universities.

As the GOP transforms into an autocratic entity allied with foreign far-right parties and governments, it’s worth understanding how Orbán and other illiberal leaders target universities. They don’t only shut down intellectual freedom and change the content of learning to reinforce their ideological agendas, but also seek to remake higher education institutions into places that reward intolerance, conformism, and other values and behaviors authoritarians require.

She then reviews the strategies used by tyrants like Viktor Orbán, Benito Mussolini, Augusto Pinochet, César Ruiz Danyau, and Ron DeSantis, who all cracked down hard on the universities. Their usual approach is to declare themselves the guardians of public morality, while deploring the licentiousness and depravity going on with young people in college (an idea that can only be fostered if you’re totally ignorant of what’s going on in college — most of my students are more worried about grades, social rank, and what they’re going to do after they graduate.) Of course LGBTQ students are great scapegoats, but only if your imagination is unfettered by reality.

Much of this repression has centered on LGBTQ populations. A 2018 ban on gender studies preceded the 2020 end of legal recognition of transgender and intersex people. In 2021, a law outlawed any depiction or discussion of LGBTQ identities and sexual orientation, and some universities came under the authority of “public trusts” run by Orbán cronies.

LGBTQ students are even more worried about the future than our cis-het students. The authoritarian impulse is always to find the most threatened minority and bully them as an example to everyone else. They must destroy anyone who deviates from the mandatory, uniform pattern of behavior that the dictator demands…which means they must accuse both variations from the required breeder lifestyle and those who think seriously about the cultural consequences of our actions of being agents of chaos.

Watch for higher education professionals to be increasingly targeted as agents of the destruction of family, decency, and nation as GOP politicians compete to seem more extremist and authoritarian —which will bring them even further into line with autocrats such as Orbán.

Far from being “ivory towers” closed off from society, higher education institutions are often front-line targets of those who seek to destroy democracy. What happens on campus reflects, and often anticipates, transformations of societies as authoritarianism takes hold.

This was all written before the presidential election, at a time when many of us were pretty confident that the electorate couldn’t possibly put a criminal grifter in charge. Ha ha ha, we were so innocent.

New Mastodon server!

For those who care, I’ve switched my Mastodon server. I’m now @pzmyers@freethought.online.

HJ Hornbeck set this up for us a few years ago, but I didn’t bother to move at the time, but now I’ve made the shift. This server has been open for business for a while now, and is currently kind of empty (it’s me and HJ), but if anyone else is looking for a Mastodon instance to try out, come on over.

Don’t visit America

Warning: cancel your travel plans. The US is not a viable destination anymore.

Read this account by a Canadian professor who was trying to give a lecture in this country.

So much bureaucracy. So much confusion. So many intrusions into privacy. He didn’t make it to his talk, and had to struggle to get out of the us.

Stay home. Don’t come here. Maybe if we overcome these horrible people and make some steps to recover, then we’ll deserve your company.

They hate libraries, too

If this weren’t so horrifying, it would be ridiculous. Trump & Co. want to eliminate federal support for libraries.

When President Trump recently proposed eliminating the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), librarians and educators voiced outrage, confusion and fear. Soon afterward, the appointment of Keith E Sonderling as acting director of IMLS highlighted the administration’s intention to reshape the agency’s priorities toward “promoting American exceptionalism” and cultivating “patriotism”.

This is where Moms for Liberty and all those reactionary assholes who get worked up about drag queen story hour have gotten us. They’ve long wanted to police the content of libraries, so why not go all the way and get rid of them altogether? Especially since librarians tend to be sticklers for the free dissemination of knowledge.

They’re trying to close the Department of Education, too. So their vision of the future is no schools, no libraries, and every woman staying home and homeschooling their swarm of kids using conservatively approved materials. I guess they’ll plan on recruiting the scientists and engineers and medical professionals society needs from abroad…except that they hate immigrants, too.

What libraries we have left will be propaganda outlets. This whole insane notion of “American exceptionalism” has poisoned our country and wrecked our ability to cooperate and collaborate with everyone else in the world, and now it’s official American policy.

I’m not at all happy to be finding myself living in one of those dystopian YA novels.

That problem is too easy

I’ve seen this game of Telephone played out in my cell biology class, but to a greater degree.

Square units? Far too easy. Our first lab in cell biology is about observing cells and then doing a bunch of unit conversions — but we’re working with volumes and cubic units. For instance, we look at a sample of microorganisms taken from a local lake, and they calculate the density and size of cells, and have to estimate how many cells are in the lake and the volume they take up. I hate to tell you this, but our lake either contains one gigantic cell that fills the entire thing, or is a thick soup containing 10googolplex cells…mmmm, sounds tasty and nutritious.

Fascists erasing history for racist reasons

The people who hate DEI really hate it when you say they’re racist. They claim their motivations aren’t racist at all — they’re just trying to be fair. They’re concerned that minorities are getting an edge over white people. It’s the same attitude that fueled Reagan’s comments about “welfare queens”: the idea that DEI means minorities are getting a free ride from the government because of their skin color.

It’s a lie. It’s about a visceral, racist revulsion against people who don’t look like them.

We can see the true motivation in action by examining what’s going on in the Department of Defense. They’re busy expunging minorities from the historical record.

The entry for Army Maj. Gen. Charles C. Rogers, the highest-ranking Black servicemember to receive the Medal of Honor, was briefly deleted from the list of Medal of Honor recipient, until the news media noticed. They deleted it in such a clumsy and revealing way, too: they changed the name of Rogers’ page to hide it from their search engine. They stuck a “dei” prefix on the file name.

After the DOD profile on Rogers was taken down, its URL returned a “404 – Page Not Found” message — and as noted by social media users like Brandon Friedman, an Army veteran and former Obama administration official, the page’s URL in the Medal of Honor Monday series was modified to add “dei” to part of its URL: “deimedal-of-honor-monday-army-maj-gen-charles-calvin-rogers.” Attempts to load the original page redirected to that “dei” link instead, with the 404 message.

I guess he was awarded the medal because he was black, not because of his heroic actions.

Hours before dawn on Nov. 1, 1968, a heavy bombardment of mortars, rockets and rocket-propelled grenades hit the 1st Battalion forward fire support base positioned near a North Vietnamese supply route in South Vietnam, the citation states.

Rogers braved North Vietnamese Army fire to direct his men’s howitzers to target the enemy — and despite being knocked off his feet and wounded by an exploding round, he led a counterattack to repel attackers who breached the defensive perimeter, according to his medal citation. Rogers was wounded again, but as more attacks followed, he reinforced defensive positions. He was later seriously wounded after joining a howitzer crew whose members had been hit by mortar fire.

That’s DEI? Give us more DEI, then.

That’s not all, though. They’re erasing mention of the Nisei battalions that fought in WWII. It’s not enough that we threw families of Japanese descent into concentration camps, but also now we’re trying to delete the memory of the Japanese Americans who volunteered to fight for the country that treated them with such contempt.

They also removed the <a href=”https://www.axios.com/local/salt-lake-city/2025/03/17/navajo-code-talkers-trump-dei-military-websites-wwii>Native American Code Talkers.

Articles about the renowned Native American Code Talkers have disappeared from some military websites, with several broken URLs now labeled “DEI.”
…
The Defense department’s URLs were amended with the letters DEI, suggesting they were removed following President Trump’s executive order ending federal diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

Here’s a photo of a gang of DEI hires coasting through WWII.

The iconic photograph from 1945 by Joe Rosenthal of the Associated Press of U.S. Marines of the 28th Regiment, 5th Division, raising the American flag atop Mt. Suribachi, Iwo Jima, sat for years on a Pentagon web page honoring the contributions of Native Americans who served in World War II.

One of the six Marines in the photo was Pfc. Ira Hayes, a Pima Indian. The page is now gone, targeted in the Trump purge of DEI—diversity, equity and inclusion—which has also removed other pages focused on the contributions of other Native Americans, women, Black Americans, LGBTQ service members and others.

At this point, I think you can have a clear conscience when accusing the anti-DEI warriors (you know who they are) of being fucking racists.

Egregiously predictable

The fellow to the right is Damion Surles, a little-known troll whose previous claim to fame was distributing a doctored, fake photo of Kamala Harris standing next to notorious pedophile and rapist Jeffrey Epstein.

You all know exactly where this story is going, right?

Damion Surles, 40, was identified as the suspect who allegedly interacted inappropriately with a minor.

Surles was arrested on Aug. 15 and charged with first-degree rape and child sexual abuse.

He was booked into the Jackson County Jail.

Man, there’s such a strong correlation between MAGA Republicans and child rape. It’s almost as if you’d expect their president to also be guilty of sexual assault…oh, wait.

Another one! Ricci Wynne.

A MAGA influencer known for posting sensationalized videos of homeless people in San Francisco was indicted Tuesday on federal charges of producing child sex abuse material.

Ricci Wynne, 39, known as Raw Ricci to his more than 100,000 Instagram followers, was first arrested in November and charged with pimping and pandering by procuring, HuffPost previously reported. He was taken into custody alongside a woman shortly after arriving at San Francisco International Airport.