How Three French Philosophers Ruined Us

Is France responsible for all the evils of the modern world. I don't think so, but read this:

Brivael Le Pogam
@brivael
Translated from French
I want to offer my apologies, on behalf of the French, for giving birth to French Theory (which in turn gave birth to the worst of all ideological monstrosities: wokism).

We gave the world Descartes, Pascal, Tocqueville. And then, in the intellectual ruins of post-1968, we gave Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze. Three brilliant men who forged, in the elegance of our language, the ideological weapon that today paralyzes the West.

We must understand what they did. Foucault taught that truth does not exist, that there are only power relations disguised as knowledge. That science, reason, justice, the medical institution, the school, the prison, sexuality—everything is merely a staging of domination. Derrida taught that texts have no stable meaning, that every signifier slips away, that every reading is a betrayal, that the author is dead and the reader reigns supreme. Deleuze taught that we should prefer the rhizome to the tree, the nomad to the sedentary, desire to the law, becoming to being, difference to identity.

Taken individually, these are debatable theses. Combined, exported, and popularized, they form a system. And that system is a poison.

For here’s what happened. These texts, unreadable in France, crossed the Atlantic. The departments of Yale, Berkeley, and Columbia absorbed them in the 1980s. They found there a soil that did not exist among us: American Puritanism, its racial guilt, its obsession with identity. French Theory married this substratum, and the child of that union is called wokism.

Judith Butler reads Foucault and invents performative gender. Edward Said reads Foucault and invents academic postcolonialism. Kimberlé Crenshaw inherits the framework and invents intersectionality. At every step, the matrix is French: there is no truth, there is only power, so every hierarchy is suspect, every institution is oppressive, every norm is violence, every identity is constructed and thus negotiable, every majority is guilty.

That’s how three Parisian philosophers, who probably never imagined their practical consequences, provided the operating software to an entire generation of activists, university bureaucrats, HR managers, journalists, and legislators. That’s how we ended up with a civilization that no longer knows how to say whether a woman is a woman, whether its own history is worth defending, whether merit exists, whether truth can be distinguished from opinion.

It’s shit for one simple reason, and it must be stated calmly. A civilization stands on three pillars: the belief that there exists a truth accessible to reason, the belief that there exists a good distinct from evil, the belief that there exists a heritage to be transmitted. French Theory set out to dynamite all three. Not out of malice. Out of intellectual play, fascination with suspicion, hatred of the bourgeoisie that had nurtured them. But the result is there. An entire generation learned to deconstruct and never learned to build. An entire generation knows how to suspect and no longer knows how to admire. An entire generation sees power everywhere and beauty nowhere.

I apologize because we French bear a particular responsibility. It’s our language, our universities, our publishers, our prestige that gave this nihilism its chic packaging. Without the legitimacy of the Sorbonne and Vincennes, these ideas would never have crossed the ocean. We exported doubt the way others export weapons.

What is being built now, in Silicon Valley, in AI labs, in startups, in workshops, in all the places where people still make things instead of deconstructing them — that is the response. A civilization is rebuilt by builders, not by commentators. By those who believe that truth exists and is worth devoting oneself to. By those who embrace a hierarchy of the beautiful, the true, the good, and are not ashamed to transmit it.

So, forgive us. And back to work.

Trump Limits Africans Flooding into USA

WSJ reports, in a long paywalled article:

As a boy, Majok Bior escaped a country engulfed in war. As a gifted student, he won a full scholarship to Duke University and looked toward a dazzling future.

Bior studied computer science at the North Carolina campus during his freshman year and was a winger on an intramural soccer team. After finishing the fall semester of his sophomore year, Bior returned to Uganda for winter break. He played chess with friends and recounted the brutal winters and demands of chemistry class.

Then President Trump began to ban students from Africa, starting with South Sudan where Bior was born. He hasn’t returned to campus since.

Duke is a great American college. Why is it giving free college to Uganda students, and rejecting so many Americans?

Colleges Drop Swim Tests

When I was in college, I had to pass a swim test. Everyone had to.

Not anymore. It is racist.

The age-old requirement that college seniors must pass a swimming test is being dumped due to fears it discriminates against people of color.

Dartmouth College just became the latest school to drop a mandatory swimming test from its graduation prerequisite.

In doing so, the Ivy League school joins a handful of other elite institutions that have abandoned their swimming requirements in recent years, including Williams, Hamilton and Washington and Lee.

“The shift says less about the merits of staying afloat than about universities’ preoccupation with racial equity,” reports The Economist.

666666666 Schools with a swimming test as part of their diploma obligations have been doing so since the early 1900s, the news outlet says.

If you failed the swim test, you had to take a swim class. It was too embarrassing when those classes filled up with Black students.

A lot of these colleges have also had to have remedial classes in reading, writing, and arithmetic. These too have become embarrassing, and colleges are re-packaging them as support labs or co-requisites or some other euphemism.

Whiteness is an Imaginary Thing

So says Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. From WABC:

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is facing criticism after comments resurfaced in which she said there is no “rich cultural heritage” that goes along with “whiteness.”

The New York Democrat made the remarks during a broader discussion about race, identity, and systemic power structures in the United States. Ocasio-Cortez argued that “whiteness” is not a cultural identity in the same way that specific ethnic identities are, but rather a social construct historically tied to power and exclusion.

Others say that there is no such thing as race, but that is not what she is saying.

I am wondering why anyone would say something so ridiculous.

Here is Rich Lowry trashing AOC.

Here is a girl who explains how she learned in college that IQ is meaningless and not studies anymore, and that some nations do better than others for reasons that have nothing to do with race and IQ. She is not happy saying it is culture either. It is the political system, or the money institutions, or the patriarchy.

This is wrong. A lot of national differences are attributable to race and IQ. IQ is measurable and useful. No doubt most of her generation has been brainwashed with falsehoods.

Professor puts Whites on Classical Pedestal

A Vassar college professor has this specialty:

Curtis Dozier is an internationally recognized expert on how extremists and hate groups invoke Greco-Roman antiquity to promote their politics.

He even has a book on the subject, where anyone who cites the Classics gets called a White supremacist. It gets a scathing review in (Jewish) Commentary magazine:

Curtis Dozier’s The White Pedestal is a godsend to white nationalists. If ever they needed a book to encourage the false impression that “white nationalism” simply means defending basic virtues and acknowledging obvious facts, this is it. ...

Unfortunately, Dozier believes “white nationalist thought” includes not just patently bigoted notions—e.g., “The white race is superior to all others”—but also completely defensible views—e.g., “Hierarchy is natural and desirable.” Each chapter argues that seemingly innocent admirers of Greece and Rome are trafficking in a mode of logic that “the far Right” also uses. ...

It is actually possible for educated people to know a lot about ancient Greece and Rome, to see even their heroes as flawed and their geniuses as limited, and still to wonder at their invaluable gifts to posterity. Most people naturally hope to preserve and cherish what’s best about the civilization they inherit. Curtis Dozier wants to convince them that they must either join him and his fellow travelers in “resisting and subverting the process that established ‘classics’ as a discipline in the first place,” or else abet the triumph of “white supremacy.” I can think of no better way to swell the ranks of actual, self-avowed racists than to force a choice between those two options. If Dozier really wants to know who’s burnishing the appeal of white nationalism, he should look within.

Stanford Students are Mentally Disabled

News:

The students at America's elite universities are supposed to be the smartest, most promising young people in the country. And yet, shocking percentages of them are claiming academic accommodations designed for students with learning disabilities. 

In an article published this week in The Atlantic, education reporter Rose Horowitch lays out some shocking numbers. At Brown and Harvard, 20 percent of undergraduate students are disabled. At Amherst College, that's 34 percent. At Stanford University, it's a galling 38 percent. Most of these students are claiming mental health conditions and learning disabilities, like anxiety, depression, and ADHD. 

Obviously, something is off here. The idea that some of the most elite, selective universities in America—schools that require 99th percentile SATs and sterling essays—would be educating large numbers of genuinely learning disabled students is clearly bogus.

I would think that colleges would want a reputation for rigorous standards and mentally competent graduates. Instead they have DEI admissions, mentally disabled students, and easy A grades on all the courses.

Dangerous Whites are Colorblind

This article is from six years ago:

During a guest lecture at Boston University on Monday, University of Washington Professor Robin DiAngelo told the audience a “dangerous white person” sees people as individuals rather than by skin color.

DiAngelo, whose main field of work is “whiteness studies,” added that those who say they were taught to treat everyone the same deny black people of their reality, she said.

In making the claim, DiAngelo said she was lifting the terminology from her frequent co-facilitator at speaking engagements, black scholar Erin Trent Johnson. ...

She encouraged the audience to think in terms of race, and not the character of individual people, because all white people are racist to some degree, no matter what.

DiAngelo is a frequent guest speaker at campuses across the nation, coined the term “white fragility,” and recently wrote a book on the subject titled “White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism.”

The world was going mad at that time. Do the race hustlers still say this?

Of course she is just saying what she is paid to say. And to accommodate Blacks who want free benefits.

LIsa Cook Fired from Federal Bank

In case you think Lisa Cook was unfairly fired from the Federal Reserve Bank for some minor mortgage application irregularities, check out her campaign to fire a prominent professor as racist for tweeting criticism of Black Lives Matter for trying to defund the police.

As the article says, this was in 2020, when the whole world went crazy over George Floyd.

Cook writes that "free speech has its limits" and should not be used to "spread hatred and violate the dignity of other people." She suggests that any and all criticism of MLK Jr. causes psychic harm to marginalized communities—"this is real pain you are inflicting"—and likened it to actual racist violence against civil rights protesters in the 1950s and 1960s.

Again, we are talking about a series of tweets in which Uhlig said that defunding the police was a bad idea, as well as an insinuation that he once said something mildly critical about MLK Jr., perhaps in jest. And the cancel culture campaign was successful, albeit temporarily: Uhlig was placed on leave pending an investigation, though eventually reinstated after cooler heads prevailed.

Most Good Research done by PhDs

Nate Silver was praised for posting:

The most important research paper of the past 10 years is the Google transformer paper ("Attention Is All You Need") and it was written by non-academics and published in an open-access journal.

His point is that non-academics are doing better research than academics.

It is true that there is nothing to stop non-academics from doing and distributing cutting edge research, but this is not an example. The work was done by PhD computer scientists and published at an academic conference.

To an outsider, getting a PhD must seem like a big waste of time. But nearly all the good research is done by PhDs.

The paper was one of the more important papers leading to AI large language models, and Google later got a patent on it. Some claim that the T stands for the transformer of this paper. OpenAI did not claim that until GPT-3. Curiously, Google only claimed it as an encoder-decoder model, and not the decoder model that the LLMs use. Others figured out how to use it for products like ChatGPT.

Rich Colleges are Assessed Minor Taxes

The MIT college president complains about the new tax bill:

MIT now pays a 1.4% tax on that investment income. The current Senate version of the bill would hike this endowment tax rate to 8%. To give you a sense of scale, for MIT that proposed tax hike is equivalent to our entire annual undergraduate financial aid budget

So MIT funds all of its financial aid with just 8% of its endowment income. What does it spend the other 92% on?

These super-rich colleges should be viewed like businesses that perpetuate themselves. Everyone else pays much higher taxes.

Ivy Colleges are Betraying America

Columbia U. is fighting efforts by the Trump administrations to make it obey the law. It has billions of dollars, and is run by radical leftists.

The NY Times reports:

Mamdani Identified as Asian and African American on College Application

As he runs for mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani has made his identity as a Muslim immigrant of South Asian descent a key part of his appeal.

But as a high school senior in 2009, Mr. Mamdani, the Democratic nominee, claimed another label when he applied to Columbia University. Asked to identify his race, he checked a box that he was “Asian” but also “Black or African American,” according to internal data derived from a hack of Columbia University that was shared with The New York Times.

Columbia, like many elite universities, used a race-conscious affirmative action admissions program at the time. Reporting that his race was Black or African American in addition to Asian could have given an advantage to Mr. Mamdani, who was born in Uganda and spent his earliest years there.

Our greatest assets are being turned over to foreigners who lie on their applications.

Mamdani was just taking advantage of free perks. Blacks complain about being discriminated against, but everyone knows that most of the discrimination is in their favor. Even a teenaged Mamdani knew that claiming to be African-American would get him into Columbia.

Mr. Mamdani’s father was a professor at Columbia at the time his son applied to college and remains so now. Mr. Mamdani has said he never really wanted to go to a university where his father was a professor, and wound up attending Bowdoin College in Maine, where he majored in Africana studies.

Mr. Mamdani was born in Kampala, Uganda, to Mira Nair, an acclaimed film director who grew up in India and later emigrated to the United States, and Mahmood Mamdani, then a college professor at Makerere University. Both his parents are of Indian descent, but his father’s family came to East Africa more than 100 years ago, Mr. Mamdani said.

When asked if any of his family had intermarried while in East Africa, he said in the interview on Thursday, “They’re all of Indian origin, from Gujarat.”

His family moved to New York City around the time Mahmood Mamdani joined the Columbia faculty in 1999. At the time of the move, Mr. Mamdani was 7. He was naturalized as a U.S. citizen in 2018 and is now a dual citizen of the United States and Uganda.

So he had a quite privileged background. He is not a dual citizen, as USA naturalization requires renouncing foreign allegiances. The fact that he claims Ugandan citizenship should disqualify him from USA political office.

Here is his father's web site:

Mahmood Mamdani

Research Interests
Slavery, Colonialism, Race, Racial Capitalism Empires, States, Sovereignties Institutions, Law, Governmentality

Biography
Mahmood Mamdani is the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government. He was also professor and executive director of Makerere Institute of Social Research (2010-2022) in Kampala, where he established an inter-disciplinary doctoral program in Social Studies. He received his PhD from Harvard University in 1974 and specializes in the study of colonialism, anti-colonialism and decolonisation. His works explore the intersection between politics and culture, a comparative study of colonialism since 1452, the history of civil war and genocide in Africa, the Cold War and the War on Terror, the history and theory of human rights, and the politics of knowledge production.

I wonder how much American tax money is going to support his anti-American politics.

I post this not to expose Mamdani jr. as a bad person. That much is obvious. It is to show how today's elite colleges are anti-American and anti-white, and how all the discrimination is in favor of African-Americans, not against.

Update: The NY Post reports:

Self-described “nepo baby” Zohran Mamdani declared a measly $2,000 in the bank on his latest state disclosures.

That’s despite his privileged upbringing and family money — and an annual salary of $131,000 as a state lawmaker, a job he’s had for five years.

The 33-year-old socialist Democratic nominee for NYC mayor did list one unusual asset — four acres of land in his native Uganda that he acquired about a decade ago, worth between $150,000 and $250,000.

He disclosed no US property or investments on the documents, released by the state this week.

The $2,000 on his form comes from a retirement plan from the housing-focused social-justice organization Chhaya, where he worked briefly as a “foreclosure prevention counselor” in 2019, before he was elected in 2020 to represent Queen’s 36th District in the state Assembly.

UPenn Disavows Transgenderism Craze

AP reports:

The University of Pennsylvania on Tuesday modified a trio of school records set by transgender swimmer Lia Thomas and said it would apologize to female athletes “disadvantaged” by her participation on the women’s swimming team, part of a resolution of a federal civil rights case.

The U.S. Education Department and Penn announced the voluntary agreement of the high-profile case that focused on Thomas, who last competed for the Ivy League school in 2022, when she became the first openly transgender athlete to win an NCAA Division I title.

The department investigated Penn as part of the Trump administration’s broader attempt to remove transgender athletes from girls’ and women’s sports, concluding the university in Philadelphia had violated the rights of female athletes.

Under the agreement, Penn agreed to restore all individual Division I records and titles to female athletes who lost to Thomas and send a personalized apology letter to each of those swimmers, the Education Department said.

This calls William Thomas "she", but he is a man who was allowed to compete against girls. He is known to have a penis, as he often showed it to the female swimmers at every opportunity. He is rumored to be engaged to another man who dresses as a woman.

Pinker on Harvard's Troubles

New podcast:

Today's guest is Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker. Pinker and Reason's Nick Gillespie discuss recent shifts at Harvard toward greater institutional neutrality and free speech, while warning that threats to academic freedom now come from both internal ideologies and external political forces—including pressure from the federal government under President Donald Trump.

Pinker defends the role of federal science funding but cautions against political micromanagement of academia, emphasizing the need for independent scholarly governance. The conversation also touches on Pinker's admiration for Richard Dawkins, the impact of declining religiosity on moral progress, and the concept of "common knowledge" as explored in Pinker's forthcoming book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows. 

It explains that Pinker published a 2023 essay on what Harvard must do to save itself. It is roughly the same as what Pres. Trump is now ordering it to do. So is he a Trump supporter?

Of course not. He is a Jewish atheist liberal professor Trump-hater. He said he became a USA citizen and voted against Trump. He speaks a lot about free speech, but he does not dare praise Trump.

I am curious about his new book:

But people also go to great lengths to avoid common knowledge — to ensure that even if everyone knows something, they can’t know that everyone else knows they know it. And so we get rituals like benign hypocrisy, veiled bribes and threats, sexual innuendo, and pretending not to see the elephant in the room.

He is very articulate, and his books have arguments that are well-supported and good to read, even when I disagree with them. And so I often criticize him.

I can think of a few things that everybody knows, but most do not like to acknowledge. That race is real. IQ correlates with success. Sex is binary. Trump is a great President, especially compared to Biden or Harris. Immigration is ruining Europe and the USA.

There is a famous common knowledge paradox, The blue-eyed islanders puzzle. Pinker will probably mention it.

He gives the story of the emperor with no clothes as an example. Everybody can see that he has no clothes, but they do not know that the others know until a boy blurts it out.

Another example is Pres. Biden dropping out of the race in 2024. Everyone knew that he was senile and the debate did not change many minds, except to convince everyone that everyone else knew that he was senile.

Maybe he would mention former FBI Director James Comey posting "86 47" as if it were a directive from God. Now everyone knows how much some people hate Trump.

For info on Harvard violating discrimination, see Christopher F. Rufo. Harvard already lost a case at the US Supreme Court.

I occasionally see someone describe his worldview as pro-Enlightenment or Enlightenment liberal, or something like that. Pinker wrote a popular book about it, so that is surely what they mean. They act as if it is the source of all modern goodness and something that everyone should agree with. I intend to post some more criticisms of it.

Pinker's book credits the views of a handful of philosophers in the late 18th century. I am dubious that any of them had any significant impact. He probably is going to say that everyone knew that there is no God, and once some 18C Enlightenment philosophers said it, and then the whole society got the industrial revolution, modern science, democracy, egalitarianism, and all other wonders of modern life.

I believe his view is seriously mistaken. Europe and American did pass up the rest of the world in wealth and accomplishments, and that needs explanations. I have posted many times on various explanations.

I would say that it was Christendom than leapfrogged ahead, not the Enlightment, because the big advance was many centuries earlier and entirely in Christian nations.

Princeton Disfavored Whites, Jews, Males

Christopher F. Rufo writes:

Amid the ongoing showdown between the Trump administration and the Ivy League, one university president has positioned himself as a leader of the academic resistance: Princeton’s Christopher L. Eisgruber.

Earlier this month, the Trump administration suspended hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded grants to Princeton as part of its investigation into racial discrimination and anti-Semitism at the New Jersey campus. Eisgruber, though, was defiant, telling the New York Times that he’s “not considering any concessions” and calling for other university presidents to follow his lead.

This isn’t Eisgruber’s first bid for the spotlight. After the death of George Floyd in 2020, he declared that Princeton—where he has served as president since 2013—was guilty of “systemic racism.” In a letter to students that September, he went so far as to claim that racism was embedded in the very “structures of the university itself.”

Eisgruber was right to say that he presides over a system of racial discrimination—but not in the way he imagines. The university does not discriminate against “oppressed” groups, such as blacks and Latinos, but against those seen as “oppressors.”

“At Princeton, it’s totally common knowledge that there are favored groups and disfavored groups,” one professor said. “And the disfavored groups are whites, Jews, males,” and others commonly disliked by the Left.

A City Journal investigation confirms that Princeton has, in fact, entrenched a system of racial discrimination and segregation. We have obtained more than a dozen internal documents and conducted interviews with a half-dozen employees, who confirm that the university has flagrantly violated the principles of the Civil Rights Act in the name of “social justice.”

The basic structure of this system is the university’s “diversity, equity, and inclusion” bureaucracy, which has expanded dramatically under Eisgruber’s tenure. An infographic circulated by Princeton shows at least 40 academic and administrative departments with established DEI committees, with the express purpose of adjusting the campus’s racial composition.

I went to Princeton. This has been going on for decades. It got worse in the last ten years. The administration does not believe it is accountable to national policy.

Harvard could lose Tax-exempt Status

AP reports:

For more than a century, the majority of colleges and universities have not paid most taxes. The Revenue Act of 1909 excused nonprofits operating “exclusively for religious, charitable, or educational purposes” in order to continue acting in the public interest.

President Donald Trump is looking to challenge that designation, complaining that colleges and universities are “indoctrinating” their students with “radical left” ideas, rather than educating them. And he has decided to start with the 388-year-old Harvard University, one of the world's most prestigious institutions of learning and the first college founded in the American colonies.

This is not as ridiculous as it sounds. The precedent here is Bob Jones University v. United States, where a college lost its tax-exempt status for similar reasons, and in 1983 lost 8-1 in the US Supreme Court. Bob Jones eventually gave into pressure and changed its policy in 2000, and got its tax-exempt status back in 2017.

Perhaps you will say that the case is not comparable, because Harvard is noble and honorable, and Bob Jones is so repugnant. The Bob Jones issue was that it was religiously opposed to interracial marriage. The Court acted as if there were a national consensus to promote interracial marriage, and so the Congress laws can be ignored.

I do not think that there was any such consensus, but that is not for me to say. That was considered racial discrimination, and now Harvard has been found guilty of even worse racial discrimination. It fought and lost at the Supreme Court, and it appears to be continuing its previous practices. It is also doing many other things that Trump could declare to be against the public interest.

You might say that the President should not have so much power. Or that colleges should have some First Amendment rights. But who spoke for Bob Jones in 1983? Almost no one. Even the court lone dissent was weak.

For some expert legal opinion, here is a famous Harvard Law professor predicting that Harvard would lose a court battle. The administration wants to settle, but the faculty does not.

Harvard Deserves to be Defunded

Academics are claiming McCarthyism about the Trump administration putting conditions on grants to Columbia and Harvard universities.

Let's get this in perspective. Columbia and Harvard have the worst free speech ratings of any USA colleges.

Harvard has a $50 billion endowment, and gets about $10 billion in federal grants a year.

The federal government has a long history of using such conditions to force wokism, leftism, feminism, and DEI on colleges. Boys sports programs were abolished to make room for girls sports programs, and then trans-identifying boys were allowed to compete against girls. Sexual behavior trials were held without the most basic fairness. Incompetent Blacks were promoted to the highest positions.

The colleges are now mostly anti-White, anti-man, and anti-Trump.

The Trump policies may seem a little heavy-handed, but it will take much more to get the colleges to be racially and politically neutral.

Fascism Expert leaves the USA

CNN reports:

Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley, who is leaving the prestigious Ivy League university for Toronto as the Trump administration’s battle with higher education in the US continues,...

Stanley set off a firestorm at the highest levels of American academia last Friday, when he decided to leave Yale and the United States largely, he said, because of the direction of the country under the Trump administration. ...

Amid the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration and pro-Palestinian demonstrations on college campuses, Columbia was the first to experience funding cuts as President Donald Trump threatened to halt federal money going to colleges accused of tolerating antisemitism amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas war that started in October 2023.

“It’s just humiliating,” Stanley told CNN. “They’re humiliating the universities and I don’t see the universities standing up to it.”

So you think he is a Palestinian Arab subject to deportation? No, he is a New York Jew!

This is crazy Jewish Leftism at work. He had a completely secure job and life, and Trump policies have made his life better. And yet he pretends to be persecuted.

The New Red Scare

The Princeton U president writes in The Atlantic magazine:

The United States is home to the best collection of research universities in the world. Those universities have contributed tremendously to America’s prosperity, health, and security. They are magnets for outstanding talent from throughout the country and around the world.

The Trump administration’s recent attack on Columbia University puts all of that at risk, presenting the greatest threat to American universities since the Red Scare of the 1950s. Every American should be concerned.

The rise of the American research university in the 20th century depended on many factors, including two crucial turning points. The first, at the start of the century, was the development of strong principles of academic freedom that allowed people and ideas to be judged by scholarly standards, not according to the whims or interests of powerful trustees, donors, or political officials.

This is the same college that fired a tenured classics professor because he denounced a student group, the Black Justice League, as “a small local terrorist organization”. Or maybe it was because he married one of his former students, it is hard to tell. At any rate, Princeton has already sold out its academic freedom.

Columbia and Harvard sold out even worse.

So why is he so upset? The Trump administration demands that recipients of federal funds do not racially discriminate, support free speech, and stop harassing Jews.

These colleges get a lot of federal money, with not much accountability to what taxpayers want. I think that they will have to face some cutbacks. Princeton is extremely rich, and does not need any federal money.

The Red Scare of the 1950s primarily affected professors who advocated Communism at a time that Communist countries were doing horrible things and were enemies of the USA. I am in favor of free speech, but the Commies were terrible and did not deserve taxdollar support.

The Decline of College Students

A philosophy professor rants:

The average college student today ...

Reading bores them, though. They are impatient to get through whatever burden of reading they have to, and move their eyes over the words just to get it done. They’re like me clicking through a mandatory online HR training. Students get exam questions wrong simply because they didn't even take the time to read the question properly. Reading anything more than a menu is a chore and to be avoided. ...

Their writing skills are at the 8th-grade level. Spelling is atrocious, grammar is random, and the correct use of apostrophes is cause for celebration. Worse is the resistance to original thought. ...

I can’t assign papers any more because I’ll just get AI back, and there’s nothing I can do to make it stop.

He also theorizes about why only 21% of college students are White boys.

Princeton's Endowment might be Taxed More

The Princeton U. magazine for alumni reports:

It sounds preposterous.

President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 warned in his annual State of the University letter in January that absent additional fundraising and income from investments, if Princeton University keeps spending 5% or more each year from its $34.1 billion endowment — which is its customary practice — it “will be gone in 20 years or less.”

Unless the world turns upside down, that is not actually going to happen. Princeton will keep fundraising and the endowment should keep producing returns, if not at the almost 10% a year rate of the past two decades. At the same time, the University will keep tapping the endowment, as it did this fiscal year for $1.7 billion as part of its $3.1 billion operating budget, which covers everything from student aid and faculty salaries to opening new labs and mowing the lawns.

It goes on to say that PU pays 1.4% tax on its investment earnings, and warns ominously that the rate could go up. One proposal is to tax university endowments like corporations.

PU has an endowment of $4 million per student, and so it is earning $400,000 per student. It brags about price discrimination, as if that were a good thing.

More than 70% of the financial aid Princeton provides comes from the endowment, according to the University. While tuition this year is $62,400 and room and board $20,250 on top of that, 62% of all undergraduates and 71% of first-year students receive financial aid. Most families with incomes up to $100,000 pay nothing, which Levine says makes Princeton “one of the cheapest schools in the country.”

PU has all the diseases plaguing other American colleges. Woke policies, DEI, discriminatory admissions, leftist Trump-hating faculty, no free speech, bloated administration, etc.