Economic, educational, reputational ... it's hard to think of a dimension that the current administration is not destroying the US on.
Economic, educational, reputational ... it's hard to think of a dimension that the current administration is not destroying the US on.
Cowing Harvard - one of the world’s greatest universities - would mark a pivotal victory for the dictatorship taking shape before our eyes. Dictatorships derive their power from the submission of a society’s key institutions. That’s what’s at stake here.
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Where did you get those numbers? That's a little inflated by what pew gathered.
https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2025/03/26/am...
Unfortunately that account just regularly makes shit up.
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I have read lots of your comments over the years and you've had some great contributions, but I don't think this is one of them. What figure from the link supports your comment?
74% support deporting immigrants who are here illegally and have committed crimes.
That's a bit different than what you initially said
That poll has 74% support for "Deporting immigrants who are here illegally and have committed crimes".
It does not ask about "Trump's Deportations". I support deporting criminal immigrants. I even support deporting those with no criminal record who are here illegally (with some caveats). I don't support sending innocent people to brutal slave labor in a country not their own.
Supporting "Deporting immigrants who are here illegally and have committed crimes" is not the same as supporting "Trump's Deportations".
Who responds to polls? Old people, people with an ideological motive, and people who get paid. They mean almost nothing.
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This never happened, of course. On the single occurrence of it happening at UCLA, it was covered extensively.
That’s a very big claim. What evidence do you have of that happening?
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If this is for science it's cutting off the nose to spite the face: the scientists are the ones that need the billions that are getting cut off and who are shutting down their labs right now. The humanities people have miniscule research budgets: they maybe need a couple grand to travel to an archive from time to time and that's about it.
Ah yes, Harvard Business and Harvard Law, classic STEM institutions.
Speak for yourself. From a hiring standpoint, having gone to Harvard is a massive red flag.
Why?
“A nation is not lost because of the actions of the wicked, but because of the silence of the just.” — Napoleon Bonaparte
Good quote put pretty ironic coming from the guy that ruined France economically and demographically for the next 100 years, and left it to lag behind the UK and the other Empires of the 19th century.
A coalition of monarchies did gang up and wage war on the French republic, to stop their crazy ideas from spreading.
Kind of parallel to France demanding Haiti pay them compensation for slaves being freed.
In both cases we'd generally look more kindly on republics and freeing slaves from the modern perspective, and maybe put more blame on the people trying to undermine them.
Slight nitpick, but France was no longer a Republic in Napoleon's time. It had become the First French Empire.
The Empire was formed after Napoleon's success in the wars of the Republican era, which occurred exactly because "A coalition of monarchies did gang up and wage war on the French republic".
Napoleon did not just emerge from the head of Zeus as a fully-formed Emporer.
And, technically, Napoleon headed the French government first while it was still nominally a Republic, under the Consulate of the Constitution of Year VIII.
Napoleon was a French military officer from 1785 to 1800.
During that time, France was a monarchy and republic, before becoming an empire when he rose to political power and directed its military as ruler.
So, all of the above in his time?
Ok but as a French, we don't really think as 1789-1804 as "Napoleon's time". His empire was and remains what he his most remembered for. He's literally referred to as "l'empereur" (the emperor).
I don't think I need to expand on how his Empire wasn't really democratic, or a republic.
Napoleon is definitely remembered for his military campaigns and political actions before 1804.
Napoleon's Italian campaign of 1796-97 is one of the most brilliant campaigns in history.
Napoleon's legendary (and disastrous) Egyptian campaign took place from 1798-1801.
The 18th of Brumaire, Year VII (9 November 1799) is an extremely famous date in history, as the date that Napoleon overthrew the Directory.
Napoleon's crossing of the Alps and the crucial Battle of Marengo occurred in 1800.
If Napoleon had retired in 1803, he would still be one of the most famous figures in French history.
That's not a "slight" nitpick. While we can be grateful to Napoleon to bring modern law and scientific advances to the rest of Europe, he certainly didn't conquer it in the interest of democracy.
It's an incorrect nitpick.
The post I replied to said Napolean ruined France compared with nearby empires.
I said the nearby empires were hostile to revolution and so keen to keep a Franch Republic down.
Wikipedia says:
> As early as 1791, the other monarchies of Europe looked with outrage at the revolution and its upheavals; and they considered whether they should intervene, either in support of King Louis XVI to prevent the spread of revolution, or to take advantage of the chaos in France. Austria stationed significant troops on its French border and together with Prussia issued the Declaration of Pillnitz, which threatened severe consequences should anything happen to King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette.
Ok but did he have to go as far as Russia? Couldn't he just consolidate his forces instead of getting drunk on conquest and waging war all the way to eastern-most Europe?
That's probably exactly what the other "side" is thinking.
For example:
They think that allowing people with penises to to change in women's locker rooms just because they identify as women is wicked, so they aren't being silent about it.
> the locker room situation with Thomas, who although she has transitioned to being female hormonally and identified as a woman, still has male body parts https://www.swimmingworldmagazine.com/news/lia-thomas-teamma...
The pendulum eventually swings to the other side.
(I'm somewhere in the middle with I suspect a majority of people - it's the extremists that are the loudest.)
So both-sides then?
Look I think we should disagree on fiscal and social policy, and be able to deliberate over these issues.
And have a system of government that allows for that kind of debate and representative vote.
But "one side" is dismantling everything that was still democratic about the United States and turning into a massively one-sided (even one-manned) system of control. So whatever your opinion or mine on social policy no longer matter, because it's all up to the whims of a single person, with no recourse for the rest of us.
The biggest problem is that everyone has their own version of good and bad, so all need to get up and action, to form sort of equilibrium.
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> The democratic process is failing the majority of people so the people are replacing it
I see. And what is it that you are replacing it with?
A strongman. A Caesar. Someone to champion the cultural values and identity we believe in. You don't have to like it, agree with it or understand it for it to happen.
Honestly I am trolling a little bit(maybe a lot) but this is literally how people think and no amount of discussion is going to change their minds. They want outcome A, you want outcome B, and there are very little (perhaps 0) shared values to build a cohesive foundation on which to compromise.
> no amount of discussion is going to change their minds
It's a slow process. A MAGA extremist isn't going to read "LGBT rights are human rights!" and say "Ah, I didn't realize! Of course!" and become a liberal.
Maybe they argue with someone about how tariffs are going to be great for the country, and they don't change their mind. But a few months later their neighbor in trucking loses their job, and their friend in construction is talking about how hard it is now, and they start to have a few doubts. They think back to how the guy they were arguing with said this would happen.
And then they argue with someone that only illegal aliens are going to be deported, and they don't change their mind. But then when US citizens start being sent to the camps, they remember that they thought this wouldn't happen and even argued against it.
People do change their mind eventually. Even violent fanatics have changed their minds: the Maoist Red Guards lost steam, the IRA followed a peace process as did FARC in Colombia. If you love liberty, democracy, peace, and prosperity, then I think your best move is to persist in trying to convince MAGA extremists, while understanding that it will take a long time and potentially a lot of chaos and conflict.
One of the most important lessons I've learned is that minds are not changed overnight, and thinking you can will drive you crazy. One's goal in engaging with people whose mind you want to change shouldn't actually be to convince them right there and then, but rather to encourage them to think about their position over time.
> You don't have to like it, agree with it or understand it for it to happen.
Sure but the problem is: he's going to fail the majority as well, which means they're going to step in and replace him next.
> which means they're going to step in and replace him next.
Or discover they can't. The thing about strongmen dictators is they aren't that easy to just replace.
cultural values you say? like rape, corruption, extreme pettiness and selfishness?
these people are in a cult. their sunk cost bias is overwhelming most of their sanity.
and of course the world is not going in the way they wish, so their conflict resolution is to write a blank check to said strongman. (and project everything on him.)
If that's what it takes to undo the moral decline of the last 30 years then so be it.
I'm sick of seeing insanity in schools, at work, and on the news everyday.
Our culture has been totally deconstructed and reversed where drag and pedophilia is celebrated, being diverse is more important than being skilled/having ability, being white is seen as tainted or somehow lesser than someone who has a diverse background. Beauty has been replaced with vulgarity and queerness.
The reversal has been a long time coming. We have had a silent majority that was too afraid to act because of the legal implications of going against powerful special interests.
> these people are in a cult
yeah and I propose that "othering" anyone is the root of a problem, in itself. Don't become the thing you hate.
Othering is bad, sure.
But shipping people out of the country without due process, into a foreign high security prison, and ignoring a court order to bring him back, is a whole lot worse.
Let’s keep our eyes on the ball.
Is it the democratic process failing, or it being destroyed by monied interests?
Oh yes the country is going to shit but let's focus on fairness in sports that's really what matters
Yea, there's like 10 Trans NCAA athletes out of 10,000 so let's stop everything and focus on that.
Why aren't we laughing all day at the right because they're a bunch of fucking clowns?
(I identify as an independent).
>I'm somewhere in the middle with I suspect a majority of people - it's the extremists that are the loudest
Trump is the loudest and he represents his supporters
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Well, so far, they have just waffled on whether or not to drastically defund the military.
It's not destroying the US media industry like tv/movies/games. Why can I say that with confidence you ask? Simple! Because they have been doing that for ages before the current administration got to power ( * ´ ω ｀ * )
Have you seen the meadia landscape lately? It's filled with absolute garbage and generative AI is going to make to so much worse. They've also done everything they can to delegitimize every reliable source of truth. So I'd say they've done a great job destroying the media industry.
Lately as in since the election? Cause for me this has been happening for decades. I'm not even going to comment on the principles of scientific truth considering the nonsense people are peddling today is no better than the bible bashers on the right.
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It certainly depends on what you optimize for. For example, about 1/3 of the 320 American Nobel Prizes in science have gone to immigrants.
Currently, US universities license around 3,000 patents, 3,200 copyrights and 1,600 other licenses to startups and companies. They spin out over 1,100 science-based startups yearly, creating countless products and tens of thousands of jobs.
This university/government partnership became the model other countries try to copy post WWII, though the current administration has walked away from it.
The genius of the US system was indirect cost reimbursement. The government not only paid researchers' salaries but also funded their facilities and administration costs. This was the secret sauce that built world-class university labs that attracted scientists globally, causing other countries to worry about "brain drain" to the decentralized, collaborative US ecosystem combining massive government funding for university research with private industry scaling the solutions.
Meanwhile, Britain tried a centralized approach with government labs, achieving breakthroughs but lacking the scale, integration and capital to compete in the post-war world.
also a commitment to a robust library system, and Federal research being publicly owned.. tolerance for varying ideas outside the current government paternalism might be part of it..
sad to see the current crop of agitating political firebrands embedding into stable and tolerant education infrastructure. Also sad to see the reactionary care and feeding of authoritarianism by the Feds.. this is why we cant have nice things?
As the partner of someone who works at Harvard, I have a slight insight into what's happening there. Disclaimer: I may have misunderstood my partner when she described Harvard admissions.
As a rule, foreign students usually pay the full cost of attending Harvard. Then there are legacy students. Many domestic students, primarily low-income or socioeconomically disadvantaged ones, get significant aid, including a full ride.
This is common for foreign students in many countries. They might benefit from a scholarship grant indeed, but that would come from their own government.
The school might have government grants so it can provide better services to all their students, but foreigners usually pay more for the same things.
> Foreign students usually pay the full cost of attending Harvard
That's what I have always understood as well.
Typically, empires attracted the top 10% of the peripheral/vassal nations. Look at Rome, for example. It is a sign of global standing that premier educational institutions of country X are flooded with the top performers of the other nations. Most importantly (and this is the reason this has been practiced by world powers throughout history) having the elite of a nation be educated in one's institutions guarantees a sizable cadre of influential men and women who go back home and create an 'Atlanticist' front.
Reasonable question.
It depends, at top level, what the intention is. What the US government thinks it is buying. Is it buying global improvement in research? If so, surely you just hire smartest people out there. In fact it will probably be mostly non-Americans, because even if they come from a much-better-than-average educational system, still, they are something like 4% of global population.
Ok, so let's say not this. Perhaps US govt is strictly buying (indirect) improvement to US economy. Well, a lot of these students will stay in the US, find startups, or simply become good taxpayers. Most developed countries struggle to grow or keep their societies steady, US has this funnel of highly skilled workforce - universities. Even better, since these immigrants, if they stay, won't have generated primary education costs, and if they eventually leave, also will cost less in adult life than people who stay in the US all their life.
This is about undergrads, really. Postgraduate students are more like hard, underpaid jobs. People come and go, and perform the service of churning out research for an American University.
Finally, not sure how much the US govt is paying for these foreign undergrads. Rich undergrads will have to lay a good chunk of their own fees - perhaps all, either via cash or loans they have to repay.
I'm not in any way endorsing this kerfuffle, but it's always good to be clear why you are paying for things, as sooner or later someone will challenge it.
Maybe I'm old fashioned, but at one time it was believed that there was a foreign policy angle: The people who come here end up liking our country and bringing that good will back home with them. They also learn the reality of what it's like here, which is often contrary to the propaganda that they've received at home.
They also spread the prestige of Harvard. If Harvard were to adopt US-only admissions, their reputation would go down, and the degree would be less valuable for the remaining American students.
What's the proper ratio? If you want the best and brightest, statistically the vast majority will be from outside the US. Doesn't it benefit us to capture those people into our economy?
I wonder what percentage of those students stay in the U.S. after graduation.
I think that buying goodwill across the globe is also important for those that do not stay in the U.S. after graduation. And having educated neighbors is also important.
It’s because Harvard profits from selling fast-track access to american immigration.
Why wouldn't you want people who successfully graduate from Harvard to stay in US and become citizens? If anything, it's the other countries that should be complaining about brain drain.
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"Only white people allowed to run things" is a take, I suppose.
White people don't own Anglo-American culture.
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Here is a non-Anglo explaining what the term means. https://www.facebook.com/share/v/169CpBxje3/?mibextid=wwXIfr
Scalia's "American Anglo common culture" that makes him feel right at home in England is just a subset of the many cultures within central north america that have coexisted under the US flag for many generations.
It doesn't include the Chinese that brought rail to California, the multitudes of Latinos with ancestors under Viceroyalty of New Spain and elsewhere, the non Anglo Saxon Europeans that didn't ape the Anglo's after arriving at Ellis Island, etc.
Correct. But those cultures are the cultures of specific groups and communities, while Anglo-American culture and tradition is the basis of the whole country.
Excluding those groups that don't take on the whole cloth of "Anglo-American culture and tradition".
"America" consists of a venn diagram that isn't covered in whole with WASP's .. hence the existence of non-Anglo Americans as multi generational components of the USofA.
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No thanks, I’ll continue to use the correct terminology for referring to the foundational culture and tradition of the United States. Nobody appointed you king of the historical revision commission.
So basically feudalism because not very many poor people end up at Harvard.
Feudalism is the very mentality that foreign elites bring to America from their home countries.
The administration in power in America also wants feudalism so maybe it's a perfect fit! /s
Just when I think the Kool-aid can't get any worse, there's a new level of peak brain damage - another dispatch from the backwards bizarro world where all of the extreme benefits of global power are just taken for granted and forgotten about, with the remaining dynamics framed in terms of being liability and injustice instead.
In some sense the dynamic isn't surprising as it rhymes with how the left is often shouted down for criticizing while ignoring realpolitik, and maggots are coming from that place of self-centered entitlement cranked up to 11. It's still shocking though.
The "brain damage" is your hope-beyond-experience view that humans from different cultures are fungible, or that they somehow become American in beliefs and attitudes the moment they step foot on U.S. soil, or that somehow culture doesn't matter to a country.
Just because you can make up multiple straw men doesn't mean that I have to believe at least one of them.
The point is that the entire framing is backwards - treating "American elites" (and "spots at Harvard", for that matter) as some fixed quantity to be preserved. It ignores the overarching soft power dynamic of foreign students going back to their home country while remaining with some cultural ties to the US.
If foreign students want to then settle here and start climbing the US culture ladder to perhaps become part of "America's elites", that's a whole new process! And shamelessly professing aspects of their culture that go against American values will prevent them from climbing. Or at least I guess that was the case before they could find validation in the regressive anti-American maggot club.
I’m struggling to figure out what I said that you disagree with. You’re talking about what happens if they go back. I’m talking about what happens if they stay here.
Yes, I think America is pretty great and I want an elite that will perpetuate more of the same. You don’t have to agree. Which country’s culture would you rather import?
> Which country’s culture would you rather import?
The whole point is that this framing completely misses the larger overriding dynamic - Harvard is a means to export our culture! Foreign students come to Harvard because they (/their parents) want to partake in American culture.
Why is that the “larger overriding dynamic?” I don’t care about out there. I care about in here. And what’s more likely? That students will export, say, the quintessential American skepticism of book learning to India and China, or that students from those countries will import those societies’ excessive respect for academia to America’s elite professional class?
> I don’t care about out there. I care about in here
There's your misunderstanding. Our enviable lifestyles in here are largely supported by our foreign relations out there - in this context, that exporting of culture such that elites from other cultures still strive to send their kids to college in the United States! And while it would be theoretically possible to untangle in here from out there, doing so would require a team of surgeons rather than a gang of butchers.
As far as the specifics of culture, the example of the overemphasis on book learning is a bit rich in the context of our homegrown MBAs pathological love for living out Goodhart's law. I've certainly encountered my share of foreigners over reliant on rote memorization. The thing is as long as they stay that way, they don't get far in America - and this is obvious to their fellow students. They're not becoming members of the "elite professional class", and nobody is following their tack thinking it's a good way to learn.
> Our enviable lifestyles in here are largely supported by our foreign relations out there - in this context, that exporting of culture such that elites from other cultures still strive to send their kids to college in the United States!
Seems unlikely, given that the U.S. has been among the per-capita richest countries in the world for almost its entire existence, including when we almost shut down immigration completely for almost half the 20th century. But I know we don’t see eye to eye about “soft power.”
> As far as the specifics of culture, the example of the overemphasis on book learning is a bit rich in the context of our homegrown MBAs pathological love for living out Goodhart's law. I've certainly encountered my share of foreigners over reliant on rote memorization. The thing is as long as they stay that way, they don't get far in America - and this is obvious to their fellow students. They're not becoming members of the "elite professional class", and nobody is following their tack thinking it's a good way to learn.
I’m talking about something more fundamental than that, which is a fundamental deference to the wisdom of the common man. To use an example, Anglo-American tradition not only gave us jury trials, but the general attitude that ordinary people are capable of understanding and resolving sophisticated disputes. The vast majority of Asians I’ve encountered in America, by contrast, have traditional asian deference for academic knowledge and academic credentials.
To use another example, consider Nixon’s Checkers speech: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-senator-ni.... I was thinking about this today and realized that my parents wouldn’t really get the speech. They’d understand the gist, but they wouldn’t really understand it the way it was meant to be understood, because it invoked various WASP norms that are alien to them.
- He mentions growing up in modest circumstances, which is valued in WASP culture but looked down upon in desi culture.
- He mentions military service, which is distinctly valued in WASP culture and not valued in desi culture.
- He says his wife “doesn’t have a mink coat,” but “she does have a respectable Republican cloth coat.” My parents would understand this to mean he’s saying he didn’t accept illicit money to buy a mink coat. Which isn’t really what he meant—he was a private practice lawyer he could’ve afforded to legitimately buy his wife a mink coat. He was conveying that they’re not *the kind of people who wear mink coats—an appeal to WASP austerity that is alien to desi culture.
The Checkers speech was, of course, meant to be understood in substance as well as subtext by the American public at large. It’s not clear to me that would be true today.
> unlikely, given that the U.S. has been among the per-capita richest countries in the world for almost its entire existence
Sure, but currently the wealth of the US depends on maintaining the world's reserve currency. As I said, the reliance on international interdependence could be untangled, but it would require a team of surgeons rather than a gang of butchers. The gang of butchers will merely destroy what we do have, leaving us with a broken society.
As far as the general argument about culture, I was using an example somewhere in the realm of what you were talking about to demonstrate how foreign cultures don't automatically inject themselves into US culture. You're straight up ignoring the many hurdles between being a college student and becoming a member of the "US elite".
I will also point out (and I generally hate arguments that start this way, but you dredged up the context), that WASP culture was most certainly not the only culture in the US at the time. So the appeal wasn't to the "American public at large" but rather to the subset that "mattered" to swing votes - the idea of some singular overarching culture was an illusion promulgated by broadcast mass media, and that illusion has now been shattered. That sea change has certainly upset a lot of people, but you can't claim it resulted from something as simple as student visas.
>Sure, but currently the wealth of the US depends on maintaining the world's reserve currency.
Where does this bizarre belief come from?
I'm not saying that the US does not benefit from the fact that business all over the world is denominated in US dollars, but that is a far cry from the assertion that US wealth depends on that fact: the US is wealthy for many reasons in addition to that fact.
It seems more likely to me that the fact that the US was so rich and continues to be so rich caused businesspeople all over the world to choose to do their transaction in US dollars.
In general, among the countries of the world, the US is among the least dependent on other countries for its continued economic prosperity. (Other relatively independent countries are Argentina, France and most of SE Asia. Countries highly dependent on other countries for their continued economic prosperity include China, Germany and most of the third world.)
Our current level of wealth straightforwardly depends on that fact, because we're currently trading devalueable IOUs for lots of real physical goods. The bizarre belief is the political talking point of taking those physical goods for granted (or even as a liability!) rather than bonus wealth.
Furthermore, the current state of our economy is that most everything depends on imports. Dedollarization would mean those things shoot up in price, with no readily-available domestic substitutes. And if you think we're going to set up domestic factories, where does that equipment come from? Sure we can start rubbing three flattish surfaces together, or let the price of already-existing machine tools shoot up to the point that only factories making more machine tools can afford them, but that does not happen overnight.
Maybe losing that first part is inevitable. And as I've said, it's certainly possible to untangle that second bit while avoiding collapse. It just requires the subtlety of a targeted approach - not blunt force butchering that doesn't do even the first step to analyze the situation. If the economic neoliberalism of the past thirty years is a steamroller that went over our industrial base, the Trumpist/destructionist answer is to simplistically put it in reverse.
I don't understand why thats a bad thing. oh.. the Cream of the crop from some other country wants to come here, PAY to get educated and STAY here contributing to the US economy??
make it make sense!!
All universities are doing this, why is only Harvard targeted?
We are only 3 months in, they are going for the giants first.
A more neutral reading would be that Harvard lets foreign students (paying full tuition) to subsidize education for US-based students.
But of course you already know this. You just hate Harvard because you now support Trump and Trump hates Harvard.
I get it, it helps to have wealthy foreign donors and you don't have to give them aid.
I was more asking why is this acceptable? If its an American university, benefiting from American tax dollars, shouldn't it primarily benefit American students?
So many things we just accept at face value and don't question. I never really thought about it before, but it's weird now that I think about it. This is necessarily a scarce resource (by design). It doesn't have to be, they could vastly grow their class size without lowering standards. But they choose not to, to maintain elite status and make their donor class happy.
If they wanted to keep their class size the same, they could probably fund it entirely through their $53bn endowment, yet they still charge 50k+ a year.
And then they have the audacity to reject thousands of qualified American kids and give their seats to rich foreign kids? Come on
The taxpayer funding is for Harvard's research activities, not for its undergraduate teaching. The undergraduate teaching is funded by tuition (often paid in full by international students) and by returns on the endowment (including some earmarked for financial aid).
> they could vastly grow their class size without lowering standards
The issue isn't the quality of the students they are accepting, but the resources to educate and house them, including classroom space, dorms, and staff.
But you said it your self, 3/4 of the students are American students primarily benefitting. How high does that ratio need to be? Possibly non-American students might bring some value to the school and students also? Lots to consider, maybe people are not taking things at face value but rather seeing the whole picture.
Also, the mentioned fast tracking to a US citizen will bring/create highly educated, skilled people to the country and will be a future tax payers, innovators, employers that the country gained with the tiniest amount of temporal investment and with some pretty standard monetary investment that other schools get.
> And then they have the audacity to reject thousands of qualified American kids and give their seats to rich foreign kids?
Most of the international students at Harvard are graduate students. You can't assume they are rich because a significant fraction of those are pursuing science PhDs. At Harvard science PhD programs are fully funded regardless of the nationality of the student.
> Why should mostly wealthy foreign students benefit from US taxpayers funding?
Because it gets elites from across the globe to send their children to the US, including lots of money.
Harvard is looking for the best and americans make up less than 5% of the world. Why would all the best applicants be from the US/why should harvard give domestic students an admissions benefit?
Part of it is money but also part of it is, in my opinion, a view that nationalism is evil and leads to Nazism.
> Here's maybe a dumb question
serious question, why did you think your question might be dumb?