No response yet (due tomorrow BTW) from: Vanderbilt University of Texas University of Arizona
One potential reason to select a diverse set would be to point to a few who may be forced to accept by their state governments as examples to paint the refusers in a negative light.
But I think the way the US is set up (districting, gerrymandering, redlined, electoral college, etc) makes it far too easy for fringe beliefs to take over and dictate policy. So having states simply being more independent puts up far more barriers to all of us just losing our freedom.
I live in IL. (Not near Chicago). My kids public school only gets about 15% of its funding from the federal govt. We could just finally stop having our stupid flat income tax and make up the shortfall. It might set back the universal preschool system, perhaps (which would be a tragedy but better than complete destruction).
Meanwhile, schools might not even exist in many other states if federal funding disappeared.
Fight back against _what_? Look: our universities really do need reform, and the perceptive observer should be able to see that independent of political opinions. The current administration may be an imperfect vehicle for reform, but I don't see anyone else trying.
In particular, universities need to return to pursuing truth. Not every department at every school has abandoned the goal of seeking pure knowledge, granted, but the reality is that many have oriented themselves towards building a "better world" by preaching (there is no other word) the "right" ideas well past the point where they intersect with the real world.
It is damn hard for me to muster sympathy for the universities. I recall that they spent a decade demanding statements of ideological affiliation as a precondition of hiring, that they pollute the epistemic commons by suppressing inconvenient facts, and that they rationale injustice against individuals by gesturing at universal, cosmic justice that they claim they alone have the power to discern.
That said, as a fly on the wall, my obvious observation from people at large is a direct correlation between how much power states should have and whether or not they belong to the party in power. So it's definitely worth the exercise of seeing if you'd feel the same way still if your exact clone ran the federal government.
1.Equality in admissions- with certain exceptions, universities have to publish and commit to objective criteria for accepting new students.
2.Marketplace of ideas and civil discourse - a bit vague, but basically calling for non violent exchanges of opinions and ideas, specifically not discriminating against conservatives, who frankly are a significant minority at universities.
3.Nondiscrimination in faculty and administrative hiring
4.Institutional neutrality - frankly i'm not sure what that's supposed to mean
5.Student learning -Signatories must make certain “grade integrity” commitments, including neither “inflat[ing]” nor “deflat[ing]” grades for any “non-academic reason.”
6.Student equality -Signatories must treat students “as individuals and not on the basis of their immutable characteristics, with due exceptions for sex-based privacy, safety, and fairness”
7.Financial responsibility - a raft of ideas aimed at protecting students
8. More restrictions on foreign student admissions etc.
9.enforcement
[1]i got all my information from this article:https://www.ropesgray.com/en/insights/alerts/2025/10/white-h...
The only unnecessary part is explicitly calling out conservative opinions, some of which will have no place in some university subjects, e.g. a geology student insisting the Earth is 6000 years old.
The entire no kings protest is exactly about that - executive overreach overriding will of the people and causing irresponsible harm.
There's really no point trying to reform universities. They're completely dominated by ideological extremists who will go to the wall to preserve their academic freedom to be racist, sexist and full of intellectual fraud. Society doesn't need them either. The few professions that really need extensive technical training can run their own schools. The research is best done in corporate labs. The world doesn't need millions of P-hacked social studies papers.
I don't think this is meant to be funny but it definitely is.
andrewflnr•1h ago
quickthrowman•46m ago
They should have noted this in the article we are discussing since it does change the story, as you said.