Marc Andreesen says universities will 'pay the price' for DEI

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/07/12/marc-andreessen-private-chat-universities-diversity/

58•perihelions•7mo ago

Comments

davidw•7mo ago

Guy who owes his fortune to public funding of research wants to tear it all down.

davidw•7mo ago

And it's all for some really ugly reasons

https://bsky.app/profile/sifill.bsky.social/post/3ltrkbtyam2...

arp242•6mo ago

I remember when the video first came out and EVERYONE was up in arms about it. Left, right, centre, far-right. People normally ranting about Deep State Democratic Nazi Communist Satan cult led by extreme-left Muslim Barrack HUSSEIN Obama were up in arms about it. Everyone. That's because it showed, at best, a wilful shocking disregard for someone in clear distress not just in the heat of the moment, but calmly for ten long minutes.

It's absolutely unreal how politicised it became.

davidw•6mo ago

Yeah, to your point, Mitt Romney marched in a George Floyd protest.

cameldrv•7mo ago

Yeah specifically NCSA where he and Eric Bina developed Mosaic was created by an NSF grant.

layer8•7mo ago

https://archive.ph/TDQk1

dahart•7mo ago

I wonder why Andreesen doesn’t suggest public funding of higher education, instead of fighting DEI. If education was free for all Americans, it would achieve what he’s arguing for and it would undermine and make DEI efforts completely moot. As far as I can tell, we can afford to fund university for all entirely on the extra income taxes that people with degrees make above people without degrees, at least according to income data studies I’ve read from the Fed. (I’m honestly curious why our country hasn’t come to this conclusion already - it certainly looks today like funding higher education for all would increase GDP and reduce the tax burden.)

hollerith•7mo ago

Even better: college degrees for everyone

chomp•7mo ago

That’s what the parent commenter is saying, if everyone has the same opportunity to go to college and get a degree, then colleges don’t need to pick and choose students. Right now, only people with means can do to college, and so universities wind up balancing the scales.

dahart•7mo ago

Yes, that’s definitely what I’m suggesting. Did I accidentally imply something else? I feel like taking the whether someone can afford college off the table would just immediately end this DEI argument and give Americans a boost. Why isn’t Adreesen fighting for that?

rbanffy•6mo ago

A much needed boost. China has about 200 million STEM graduates, which is the entire US workforce.

> Why isn’t Adreesen fighting for that?

We can only infer the best interests of the country and its people don’t align with his own plans.

malcolmgreaves•7mo ago

Most likely it’s because he doesn’t actually want what he claims. Billionaires become corrupted by their wealth. Like a junkie, they need their fix. And their fix is to see their wealth increase.

rbanffy•6mo ago

It’s not wealth and power that corrupts. It’s the fear of losing them.

UncleMeat•7mo ago

He also writes that the NSF should experience "the bureaucratic death penalty."

Andreesen doesn't actually give a shit about the university system whatsoever. He wants people like him to be at the top of society and everybody else to grovel at his feet.

arp242•6mo ago

Last year he wrote in his "techno-optimist manifesto" that anyone delaying roll-out of AI is guilty of murder. Andreesen has tons of investment in AI and stands to make loads of money from it. Completely unrelated, I am sure. He also said that growth through AI has no upper bounds. Obviously not mathematically possible. Maybe he's Jack Kennedy too now.

He is a deeply unserious person seemingly becoming more unserious by the day.

jmclnx•7mo ago

The title should be "The US will pay the price for the insane policies of Trump". I have a name for this guy, but I do not want to get banned :)

jaybrendansmith•7mo ago

It's very simple in my opinion. The discrimination we have in the US is all about wealth, not diversity. If we shift all DEI to simply focus on those who don't come from wealth, we will have solved discrimination without resorting to subjective racial or ethnic or sexual qualifications.

drcongo•6mo ago

This is low key genius.

ethbr1•6mo ago

That's been a sub-strain of post election US Democrat thinking: that it should be more about poor vs rich and less about identity.

Unfortunately, there's a large cottage industry that hitched their careers / thought leadership to identity and are fighting it tooth and nail.

Imho, it's pretty obvious and simple. Two poor folks have more in common with each other these days than the poor with the rich, whatever combination of other identities.

const_cast•6mo ago

It's simple, but not that simple, because poverty and outcomes are weighed and distributed by race. Meaning, if we do implement this sort of DEI, we will be helping black people WAY more than white people. And conservatives don't like that, that's their original complaint with DEI.

ethbr1•6mo ago

Don’t look at it from the perspective of leaders —- look at it from the perspective of voters.

Poor voters could care less which party actually helps more minorities, as long as they believe they’re going to be helped.

The modern GOP’s greatest sleight of hand was convincing poor voters they’d be helped by tax cuts for the rich.

rbanffy•6mo ago

When you do that you’ll realize it is also about identity, about how some ethnic and sexual minorities are discriminated against and end up with fewer economic opportunities than the white-cis-male-christian norm, whose privilege is encoded not in law, but in the fabric of our societies.

rbanffy•6mo ago

I see a very civil discussion here. It might be worth to unflag and give this discussion a second chance.

jrflowers•6mo ago

Seeing as the only form of “DEI” that existed in the education system 60 years ago was court-enforced desegregation, this guy has written a whole lot of words to convey his position that black people shouldn’t be allowed in schools with white people