Sorry big donors, universities “take you for granted. They have no respect for you.”
“They’re happy to take your money, but you’re not getting the influence you think you’re getting by donating. What I do think they fear tremendously is cutoff of government funding, federal funding particularly, but also state funding. That is the hammer over their head.”
On May 16, 2024, I appeared on Top Story with Jonathan Tobin, a podcast of the Jewish News Syndicate.
I have been on the podcast multiple times in the past and also did a joint webinar with Jonathan.
- “William Jacobson: Why did the ADL just defend discrimination against Asians?” (August 7, 2023)
- William Jacobson: ADL is mired in leftist ideology (September 15, 2022)
- William Jacobson: Boycotted for Publishing the Truth (December 14, 2021)
- Webinar: The Failure of Jewish Leadership ‘Where is the ADL?’ (March 10, 2021)(The Jewish Leadership Project)
Jonathan, who is JNS Editor-in-Chief, also is an amazing and prolific columnist.
The podcast segment was given the title of William Jacobson: Defund universities that promote hatred of Jews, but that’s an oversimplification as all headlines are. We covered a lot more territory, as described in the JNS write up:
The surge of antisemitism on U.S. college campuses following the Hamas terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7 is the culmination of a decades-long process by which higher education has been handed over to leftist ideologues who hate the West, America and Israel.
That’s the analysis of Cornell Law School professor William Jacobson, also head of the Legal Insurrection Foundation that advocates for free speech and Western values.
Jacobson told JNS editor-in-chief Jonathan Tobin that at the heart of the problem is the lack of ideological diversity at American colleges, where conservative and pro-Israel professors are rapidly becoming extinct in an atmosphere where the woke left is intolerant of opposing ideas.
He says the left understood that “if you can take over education, you can shape a generation. And we gave our kids to them. We turned our kids over to the radical left who had taken over education.”
According to Jacobson, hard-left anti-Zionists and professional agitators, such as members of the antisemitic Students for Justice in Palestine, are organizing the protests that have created hostile campus environments for Jews. But the problem goes deeper than that. The atmosphere is such that support for “Palestine” has become a matter of political fashion, and so the facts of the conflict don’t seem to matter.
While the institutional capture of almost all of higher education seems irreversible, Jacobson says there is a way to effect change: Strip these schools of their federal funding. Federal intervention is necessary not so much to save the academic institutions but to protect Jewish students—and American society—from them.
Partial Transcript
The program was almost an hour, so it’s not practical for me to do the clean up needed to post the entire transcript. Here are select excerpts. As always, this is auto-transcribed, and there may be transcription errors, and is lightly edited for clarity.
WAJ Teaser Show Intro (00:00:00):
Academia is so far gone, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, that it is incapable of reforming itself internally. There is no internal opposition left. The question is not how do we reform the universities. The question is, how do we protect society from the universities?
Tobin (00:00:20):
Hello, I’m Jonathan Tobin, editor-in-Chief of the Jewish News syndicate jns.org. And you are listening to Top Story, a weekly podcast where I analyze the most important stories happening in Jewish news around the world….
Tobin (00:05:51):
Can American higher education be saved from the antisemitic surge? Can Jewish students be protected without violating the free speech? Rights of others is defunding these schools and their or their replacement by alternatives, viable options. And how can liberal Jews who are outraged about the impact of woke ideology on their children lives go on supporting or tolerating these ideologies with respect to other issues? To discuss all this, we’re pleased to have back with us today a man who has done as much as anyone to raise awareness of the destructive forces on American college campuses and the fight to defend Western principles that are under siege there…. William Jacobson, welcome back to Top Story….
I want to start by asking you the question that is on the minds of many Americans today, after the last seven months of campus protests, how did support for Hamas and for the destruction of Israel become so popular on American college campuses? And why is the cause of Palestine now not merely fashionable, but somehow dominant on the left?
WAJ (00:08:00):
There’s a lot wrapped into that question. I think you have to view this as a continuum that took place over 20 to 30 years on the campuses. Many different factors. I’ll just rattle off some of them and then we can talk about additional ones. So one of them is there’s been a purge of dissenting viewpoints on college campuses. There is no diversity of viewpoint, at least at the quote unquote elite level, but even not the elite level when it comes to the humanities and the social sciences. Conservatives have not been hired for 20 plus years. pro-Israel professors have not been hired for 20 plus years, maybe 30 years. And so what you get on campuses, you have a faculty which drives a lot of the issues, which is a monoculture. It’s an echo chamber, which is in many ways, anti-capitalist, in many ways anti-American views us as the source of the world’s problems, views us as irredeemably racist, baked into our system is some of the phraseology they sort of use the, um, anti-Israel component is part of that ideology that Israel is held out as the example of everything that’s gone wrong in the United States, but implanted into the Middle East.
WAJ (00:09:27):
So when they have an anti-colonial ideology on campuses, when they talk about white supremacy, when they talk about, you know, indigenous rights, things like that, they use Israel as their mutual object of hate.
So the way I would describe it is that it’s not so much that they hate Israel, which they do. It’s not so much that they hate Jews, which many of them do. It is that Israel is a very useful organizing mechanism for the people who hate western society, western civilization, hate the United States and hate capitalism.
Israel is something around which groups who have absolutely nothing in common can come together in hate. And that would be what’s frequently referred to as the Red-Green Alliance. So the Marxists and the anarchists and the Islamists, who in many ways are the exact opposite ideologically all come together to hate the Jews and hate Israel.
And so that has developed over 30 years. So it didn’t start on October 7th, but it bubbled up on October 7th….
WAJ (00:11:31):
And Cornell’s a great example where I teach, we are required now at the start of all events to recite a land acknowledgement, acknowledging effectively that we are in stolen land from the Cayuga Indian tribe, but they’re not willing to actually do anything about it. So they’re not willing to decolonize Cornell. My view is if you really believe that, and it’s not just virtue signaling, then leave, Cornell should vacate and give it back to the Native Americans, but they won’t do that.
So Israel becomes a very convenient object for them to attack because it allows them to virtue signal, it allows them to uphold their decolonization ideology without having to sacrifice anything themselves….
WAJ (00:14:10):
… There is not a week that goes by or barely a week that goes by that some faculty department doesn’t have an anti-Israel program. Now, they don’t say, this is an anti-Israel program, but it’s a program to demonize Israel. Yet I cannot recall a single program sponsored by an academic department at Cornell that reasonably could be called pro-Israel. To the extent there are any programs that are pro-Israel, they’re put on by other groups, by outside groups. The faculty who are active on this issue have put their foot on the scale on the campus ideology, and they drive a lot of this. They’ve been at the encampment that Cornell had. They work with the groups on campus who are anti-Israel … the faculty drives a lot of this. And that’s a problem because this was 20 to 30 years in the making, and it’s going take 20 to 30 years.
The handful of faculty on Cornell’s campus who I think could reasonably be called pro-Israel, and who are willing to talk publicly about it, you can count on one hand and they’re aging out…. The administrators, I think, are relatively indifferent, but to the extent they have a viewpoint that they’re willing to express, I think it leans towards the anti-Israel camp….
WAJ (00:17:07):
… You have to be anti-Israel on campuses if you are going to be socially accepted. And that’s just a fact. And that’s why a lot of the reaction that the American Jewish community has had over the last decade or two, the quote unquote pro-Israel community, Jewish and non-Jewish, has not really understood that arguing the merits doesn’t work.
This is a cultural problem, which has grown worse with social media. That in order to be accepted in the culture on many campuses, including the campuses where there is are problems, you have to be anti-Israel. It is a box you have to check, whether they understand it or not.
My guess is many of them don’t have a deep understanding. They hear figures and death tolls cited in the media, which are often completely fabricated, and they go with it. It’s the thing to do…. While I’ve seen those videos of students not knowing which sea and which river, and I think there’s something to that, I think there is an ideological group who understands it very well and has nefarious goals and as you know, in any revolution, the revolution is led by 2% of the population. 2% of the population can really move the population. And that’s what we’re seeing happen.
Tobin (00:19:12):
Or smaller if you listen to Lenin, but, you know, that worked for him. One of the issues that has become a source of controversy is the question of the role of the funding of these protests. How important is outside funding as well as the presence of outside organizers from radical groups ….
WAJ (00:22:57):
Well, it’s all of the above. There’s a lot of things going on here. We can’t oversimplify it. There’s no question that, particularly in cities, schools that are in cities, the outside activists have played an outsized role….
But at its core, it’s a cultural problem that we have a generation who gets their news from TikTok, who understands very simple themes. The other side is very good at creating very simple themes. They just keep repeating again and again, genocide, genocide, genocide. You can’t go anywhere without a sign about genocide. And that sinks in, they find a small, narrowly focused message, and they just repeat it endlessly.
Whereas we’re trying to have a discussion. Let’s talk about history. Let’s talk about the last hundred years. Let’s talk about who the real indigenous people is. That’s an hour long conversation. Accusing someone of genocide takes about three seconds. And so just messaging wise, the other side is extremely good at the messaging….
WAJ (00:26:34):
… Institutional capture is the best way of looking at it. The left understood that if you can capture the education system, you can really shape a generation. That’s why Bill Ayers, Obama’s mentor who helped hin launch his first campaign, went into academia. It’s why the students in Harvard Law School in the early 1980s, when I was there, who were anti-Israel before it was fashionable to be anti-Israel, who developed the tactic of forming coalitions of color against Israel, which predated even critical race theory. The inventor of the term critical race theory and intersectionality was my classmate. And I saw how those student groups operated, that they understood that if you can take over education, you can shape a generation. And the most radical students from my class at Harvard Law School went into academia.
Everybody else went into private law practice, and we gave our kids to them. We turned our kids over to the radical left who had taken over education. And so part of it is just straight out institutional capture. They understood, and we didn’t, how to do it….
WAJ (00:30:51):
And so that really, there is a reign of terror on campuses that affects faculty, which means that few dissenting voices get hired. The dissenting voices that there are, tend to get silenced or snuffed out by an elaborate system where you have anonymous bias reporting. Your career can be all but ruined by anonymous complaints about you. And so it’s really a terrible situation.
The way I view it, and I’ve been trying to sound the alarm for people, is that academia is so far gone, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, that it is incapable of reforming itself internally. There is no internal opposition left. And society needs to understand that, and needs to understand that, at least in the short term, the question is not how do we reform the universities.
The question is how do we protect society from the universities? And that’s something that I don’t think people have come to grips with….
WAJ (00:32:27):
Well, I think based on their public performance, based on what we’ve all been able to observe about it, [administrators] seem to be extremely afraid of the students. They seem to be afraid of their offices being occupied. They seem to be afraid of encampments on campus.
I have to hand it to these students and their facilitators, like SJP, they understood the pressure points. And you are seeing administration after administration completely capitulate to these encampments when there’s no reason to. So I think they are afraid of the students. To some extent, they might be afraid of faculty.
I don’t really think they’re afraid of donors. Sorry, donors. Sorry big donors, they take you for granted. They have no respect for you. It doesn’t matter if your name’s on a building or how much money you’ve donated, that may enable you to get a phone call with the president.
But when push comes to shove, they really don’t care. They’re happy to take your money, but you’re not getting the influence you think you’re getting by donating.
What I do think they fear tremendously is cutoff of government funding, federal funding particularly, but also state funding. That is the hammer over their head. Now, of course, the Biden administration is not going to wield that hammer. It’s not going bring it down on them. But if we get a Trump administration, hopefully they will. That is the big money. If Harvard or another school were to lose their federal funding, they very well might collapse.
Tobin (00:34:00):
Even Harvard with its billion dollar endowment?
WAJ (00:34:02):
Doesn’t matter, because a lot of those are restricted funds. They’ve got to pay people this week salaries or next week or how whatever the pay cycle is in Massachusetts, Harvard needs to pay people today. They can’t poach endowed restricted funds to do that. At least they can’t do it legally….
WAJ (00:39:41):
…. We cannot trust the universities, be they the faculty or the administrations, to do the right thing, because they won’t. And they don’t. And that’s why outside pressure, as much as I wish it didn’t have to take place, that’s why outside pressure is the only thing that can protect our society from what’s going on on the campuses.
Tobin (00:41:08):
Now, there are some optimists among conservatives in the Jewish community that were willing to claim that the embarrassment of the three elite university presidents at a congressional hearing in December, and the firing of two of them, was a sign that there is significant pushback against woke school administrators. And that this is a harbinger of an eventual return to sanity…. Is change even possible? I guess what you’ve been just telling me is, is the answer is No.
WAJ (00:41:46):
The answer is No. That unless we change the culture on the campuses, unless we get away from the obsession with race, the obsession with building coalitions based on race, the obsession with viewing our society as the great evil in the world, unless we can cure that problem on campus, who’s sitting at the top of this heap, really ultimately doesn’t matter … That’s why I just had a column, an op-ed in the New York Post where he said if Cornell is going to recover, it’s got to get rid of DEI and that the president leaving is the opportunity for the trustees to seize the day and get rid of this program she installed four years, July, the president imposed an anti-racism agenda on the campus, which has been completely destructive.
It’s got to be gotten rid of completely, not tweaked around the edges. When there was blowback this fall about what was happening at Cornell, she said, well, we’ll add an antisemitism module to it. Why wasn’t it there to begin with? That’s the proof positive about how destructive the DEI has been to the Jewish community, that Cornell didn’t even have an antisemitism module and was going to add one after students were chanting for an Intifada on campus. And one student who’s now in federal custody, threatened to slit the throats and shoot Jewish students. So that’s what it took to add a module on antisemitism.
And by the way, at the same time, she said they’re going to add a module on Islamophobia, which is not a serious problem on the Cornell campus, or statistically is not a serious problem in the United States.
So they couldn’t even give the Jewish community at Cornell a week or two to mourn what happened on October 7th. They couldn’t even understand what a unique moment it was in Jewish history, the greatest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust ….
They couldn’t even give us two weeks to mourn as Jews, not at Cornell, not anywhere. They had to lop into it their intersectional approach to the world. And that’s how perverted and sick the campuses have become….
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Comments
Isn’t it reasonable to assume that the academic leftist non-diversity is due to pressure applied by the large donors?
No. Marxists and marxist departments didn’t pop up because donors demanded them. They appeared because government money funded them and they allowed universities to accept tons of inadequate and under-par people who have no business being in college, at all, outside of allowing the schools to mark off some bean-counting desires by white-guilt laden administrators. That was how it all started … and then it just snowballed and really took off.
Half of the departments at most universities are jokes that have no business existing and produce nothing of value. Worse than that, many of them are purely destructive – destructive to the academy and to society. But schools can accept tons of students for them and those students get government loans to pay off the schools and build those sh*t departments the same as your run-of-the-mill mathematician or physicist. And the general public could not care less about mathematicians or physicists, even though they (and those other real departments) are what universities actually exist for and what drives society forward.
Sorry, TPOP, but do you think large donors are blind? They see the one-sided, non-diverse, leftist administrators and faculty, just as clearly as you and me. It’s not a subtle or hidden aspect. If the donors understand this, and continue to remit large donations, then one must assume they do so to support, encourage and enhance the leftist non-diversity of faculty and administration. I agreee with your explanation of how gov’t funds have disserved and ccorrupted that system, but not sure why you think the large donors should be given a wholesale pass.
I agree with both of you. There are a good number of donors that are politically active and donors can dictate what their money is used to fund.
Donors lose control of donations. There are plenty of recent examples of universities going left and breaking explicit promises to donors, and usually the donor doesn’t get their money back when they try.
Even if you buy the right to have your name on a building, it can be changed later. Yale used to have a Calhoun Hall, which I think was guaranteed to be a permanent name. But the current Salovey administration there changed it.
At Yale it started out that way, but in reverse. Elihu Yale promised a large donation to the school in New Haven if they would name it after him. They renamed it Yale University. That donation never materialized, but the name stuck. Old Elihu showed us the right way to treat a university and its politicians.
What has happed in academia also happens in business, especially big business, Think of it as a distillation process. They work to get rid of some people while hiring like minded people.
For example, as I rose in management, there was a small group of people who I kept around me, even as I changed companies.
I have seen this happen when a less than reputable person is hired to head a company, seen reputable companies ruined when a crooked disreputable CEO is hired, and then they populate middle management with similar people. It is damn near impossible to fix. Those companies often implode and then become subject to being acquired by another company.
I agree, JS100, but the difference is that businesses don’t have gratuitous donors, like colleges and universities enjoy. The donors’ motivation is the problem. They shouldn’t be assumed to be ignorant and blind. If they knowingly pour fuel on the destructive, raging, leftist fire, shouldn’t they be recognized for their disservice?
Yep. It’s a problem. Once culture and practices have set in, its near impossible to adjust without the place getting bought.
I’ve seen places get bought, and fixed by getting gutted. New owners aren’t so much buying a going concern; they’re buying a market position and perhaps some capabilities, which, if run better, will work better and be worth more. Been on the inside of a few of those. In the end, the weasel patronage systems are inefficient, compared to taking care of business. So, if you can get it working, by and tune it up may be worth it.
One reform in place that worked, until it didn’t, was “Neutron” Jack Welch. He had a well-formed theory of operating the business, much like an outside buyer cleaning encumbrance around capabilities n markets. When there were no more operations to clean up, the improvements stalled, leaving his successor to make synthetic “growth” numbers from increasingly sketchy financial shenanigans.
GE didn’t have tenure. Neutron Jack never would have bought into a place where he couldn’t say “you’re fired”. Trump couldn’t even say it to government employees who surely have weaker protections than tenured faculty who can claim whatever they did was within their academic freedom.
While you’re at it we also need to end tax free institutions. Including churches, the tax free crap has been horribly abused for personal wealth and power.
The thing is … the big donors don’t really care if the universities respect them. They only care that the people at the cocktail parties are impressed with their donations and might even think that the universities listen to what the big donors say. They have the “EF Hutton” fantasy for the parties and all the “important” social events that have nothing to do with education or research or anything of the sort.
Ever think, back in the day, that Legal Insurrection would be come mainstream? Nice.
As for university elites, and elites in general, who don’t they take for granted? But it looks like the jig might be up, They need work, so they perpetuate the fraud, just as Booker T. Washington described with race hustlers. They impress each other without knowing how they actually come off to most, increasingly deranged and hateful. One can only hope the momentum will grow, away from these pretenders, because it is healthy.
Once it has gone mainstream, it is likely to be snapped up by one of the major media outfits. Then it will really go mainstream and be useless. Then, it’ll all have to be started over again. Look what happened to Breitbart.
Yeah. Mechanically, once it has enough general market visibility, it becomes an interesting property for the “visitors” n “pops” numbers-driven “media” businesses.
For online presences, usually Conde Nast. They, they homogenize the content into blanded-down cafeteria food. This is what you get when you measure “engagement” by timing people sitting in their browsers, vs. participating, paying up $, kicking in other ways. See what happened to Ars Technica, vs. BoingBoing. Not that I begrudge the guy who started Ars cashing out. BUT, truth in advertising, once they buy there ought to be a disclaimer right on the “property” name, that it ain’t gonna be what the name meant before.
“They impress each other without knowing how they actually come off to most, increasingly deranged and hateful. ”
But, like the Professor states, an entire generation has been educated…indoctrinated…to not see this behavior/thought process as hateful and deranged, but correct.
Here’s what universities think of big donors: There’s one born every minute.
and some of the medium size donations are used to buy services, in particular admission for their kids. What happens if you’re caught not paying enough and still getting the service? College Admission Scandal!
And … I must state this again – every time there is any discussion about university funding, really –
One of the underhanded, despicable sleights of hand employed by the dirtbag dems and their Indonesian Imbecile to craft national socialized health care/insurance was to have the feral government COMPLETELY TAKE OVER the student loan business. Whereas, before, the feral government generally gave only loan guarantees and private lenders provided the actual loans, with BarkyCare the feral government took over the whole student loan industry so that the CBO could make laughable estimates of money flows and claim that BarkyCare was “revenue-neutral” for parliamentary reasons. It is beyond criminal for the America-hating democrats to have done that – taken over the entire student loan business; origination and all – only to have those same dirtbags now throw the cost of many of those loans onto the rest of the taxpayers (the same taxpayers who have been subject to highway robbery on their health insurance to pay for insurance cards for illegals and welfare cases and every person on the planet). This is really the ultimate in governmental criminal insults to the population. In a more sane, self-respecting society many of the people responsible for this would find themselves enjoying long rides in Brazen Bulls or sitting on spikes, decorating the road to Washington.
Every single damn thing about getting that “through” was twisted.
One wonders if Brandon’s “big f-ing deal” was about the successful shenanigans vs. the content — leash is off: they can do anything, now. That would be a big f-ing deal.
I can’t say Obama was the first. LBJ’s “Great Society” smelled the same, an infinite pot of money for stuff that’s worse than useless.
In academic medicine, it’s a combination of corporate money and NIH funding that rules the roost. Corporate money through clinical trials, contracted research, etc. particularly in high-priced areas such as oncology, immunology and other genetics-oriented scientific research brings in big bucks. With NIH, it’s a combination of anything that can get funded and often at a more basic science level. Although, NIH also does a lot of longitudinal research on course of disease such as hypertension and diabetes over a longer time frame that helps fund a lot of faculty and especially post-doc positions. Mostly what all of this funds is administrative positions with the “back office” charges attached to the grants. That’s what administrators want, and often they could care less if the research is high quality or not. Bonus if it is.
The funds for operational expenses of these Universities are definitely the key target. Some comes from alumni, some from big donors vanity ‘the X Building’, the Y Chair, the Z program for ABC’. Much of it comes from Govt. The Govt funding is gonna be hard to curtail. Frankly the best way to do so is to simply eliminate Federal funding grants outside of pure research and to restructure them to include:
1. Royalty payments to the govt for use of discoveries from that basic research. Will take someone much more knowledgeable than I to properly design the contours.
2. Basic requirement for academic freedom and Civil Rights protection with automatic triggers that end funding if violations occur. Again someone smarter than I will need to flesh that out with goal being objective and automatic v subjective and optional.
3. Move student loans back to private sector.
4. Stop funding graduate education other than replacement rate. So that if there are X many PhD History faculty positions in the US and Y # will be retiring over the next five years then that’s how many PhD in History that should be supported. Any extras can go but they gotta fund it on their own. This would decrease funding for soft social sciences, conversely this would increase funding for hard science, STEM.
I would add stopping foreign funding of our institutions too. How much Chinese, Saudi, and Qatar $ has gone into our universities- even middle and high schools? Qatar has funded “Arabic studies” in public schools for decades.
They have an agenda, and it’s not for the benefit of the USA.
Yep. At minimum every foreign $ donation should be transparent, so my h so that it is broken out as an easily available % of total revenue/income and in comparison by donor contributions and by donor nationality. So that the public could easily see that X % of total income was from donations, Y amount came from donations Z and that Qatari donors gave X %/amount v Canadian donor contributions.
“3. Move student loans back to private sector.”
Obamalamadingdong care would collapse. The interest paid on loans funds it.
Not that collapse would be a bad thing. My rates went from $500/mo for four people to now $1500/mo for one. No optical, no dental.
We can easily fix access to health insurance via HSA and ending tax deduction for all employee benefits. Take the current subsidies from Ocare and redirect to HSA. That takes care of the catastrophic issues via insurance from private sector with a simple bare bones catastrophic policy as the minimum coverage, though folks could opt to pay for elite policies with every bell/whistle. It helps folks to meet the deductible due to accumulated $ within the HSA.
Of course this would be met with intense resistance due to so many powerful special interest groups lobbying in opposition to it.
Most donors give to the wrong schools. They want to do good, but they also want to look good and impress their friends. Hence, they give to schools that already have too much money but have higher levels of prestige and media presence. If doing good was the only, or even primary, reason for giving, they would find worthy institutions with less prestige and public presence. Their gifts would have far greater impact on such schools, help students who really need it and, over time, increase the competition among schools and thereby their quality.
I think a big issue is there is no such thing as a donor who could equal Qatar and other nefarious foreign governments.
With some new laws banning foreign governments from investing in, providing money or goods or services or a stake in American educational institutions we could fix that.
All it takes is next time we are in charge throw the 21st century Ron Swanson Larp into the garbage and never extract it from the garbage and go back to actually governing.
One way to achieve better (or in fact actual) governance by Congress would be to require every rule/regulation from each agency to be reviewed and voted out of the particular committee of jurisdiction then pass a full vote in HoR and Senate.
Obviously the sheer number of rules/regulations proposed by the federal agencies would overwhelm Congress. The natural consequence would be that Congress removes ‘the Secretary of X shall make such’ power from the agencies and we return to our roots as Republic where the legislature makes laws and the executive simply executes those laws. We might even go back to Federalism where Congress doesn’t seek to usurp what should be local and State Govt issues to solve.
IOW limited govt as our Founders intended isn’t an idea that belongs on the trash heap but rather should be used to restore our Nation.
The government passed regulations in the 19th and 20th century all the time. If you go for any Republican president prior to the 21st century none of them meet anything that could in any way be close to Libertarian and neither do Democrat presidents.
Thomas Jefferson when confronted over his presidential actions said something along the lines of if they don’t like it they could impeach me.
I don’t see how your freedom depends on Qatar’s ability to shape the next generation of American leadership.
I also am unaware of any right Qatar has to shape the next generation of American leadership.
I am also unaware of any improvement to the public from the 20th to 21st century. Are we more politically united? Are our political traditions better protected? Is our flag more exalted than it was before? Are we less atomized? Is rule of law being better upheld? Can you for example be sure that if something happens in a blue state your rights will be as upheld as if it happened in Florida when the jury knows your politics? If I compared a California curriculum from the time of Ronald Raegan’s governorship to that of today when third graders are being taught “anti-racism” by anti-Semites will I be in awe of the improvements? Can someone working as a server work through undergrad and graduate school and be ready for major social mobility as a result without taking a single loan?
I could go on but the surrender of the institutions on the altar of libertarianism was an unmitigated catastrophe for both country and party and has to be reversed. If you want to retake the institutions the only path forward is with government help.
There is a major difference between a lawful government operating under constitutional constraints and a libertarian government pretending to be Ron Swanson surrendering every fight and leaving the country worst off than it was before.
You assume it’s possible with government help, and that the government help wouldn’t just be used to perpetuate the existing ills and create amazingly bad new ills.
I suspect the right role of government now is to cut off the money taps. Starve the beast, then when it’s sick and even dying, maybe some fruitful negotiation is possible — but this beast never becomes reasonable or compromises so probably not even then.
Example of the beast being impossible to talk to: after every Israeli military victory in its current war, we hear from the other side “Hamas is winning, they’ve practically won!” It’s not only delusional, it would force Israel to very bad terms, unrelated to the situation on the ground, to make any deal at all. And so there’s no alternative to continuing to attack Hamas until they are no more and won’t even be around to proclaim victory.
I don’t understand the “Government will do it back” argument. The Democrats have been using government to advance their agenda for decades (entire 21st century at least), have never adopted the Ron Swanson Larp that Republicans did, and are open about their desire to use government. I really don’t understand this “Democrats will use these tools” because they already are.
Second government pressure while it has a limit to how much it could impact private universities could most definitely impact public universities exactly the way we are going for.
The Universities aren’t the only thing. Teachers come from universities and bring the same indoctrination to the K-12 system which is increasingly succeeding in the same evil ends of the universities.
If we don’t fight for the institutions we lose. If a patient has a 100% chance of dying within 24 hours without a surgery and a 40% chance with the surgery give the surgery.
When in the past 100+ years have we operated under a libertarian framework? Since the Wilson admin at have been under the rule of technocrats in the bureaucracy. Nice straw man arguments and attempt to deflect though.
Surrendering every fight? Nah Cuz, that’s not how libertarian framework would operate. The govt at Federal, State and Local levels could only do what was the Constitution specified they could do and everything unspecified would be the right of the ‘people’; individual Citizens. Pesky 9th and 10th amendments.
It seems to me that surrendering every fight is what the chamber of commerce/country club set ‘conservatives’ have done. At best when the establishment ‘conservatives’ are in power they provide a temporary pause in the National decline before turning over power to the d/prog who then accelerate the decline.
If a Privately funded Univ wants to accept funds from Qatar that’s up to them…..so long as everyone knows about it and they remain 100% privately funded, no problem. Prospective students can evaluate whether they wish to attend or not. Alumni can evaluate whether to contribute financially. Employers can decide whether to hire graduates. Free market in action.
Once they accept State $ or Federal $ then the State and Federal govt do have a say…..just as when you and I shell out our hard earned money to a guy who cuts the lawn, we get to tell him how we want it done, how often, the height of blade we want used, to bag the clippings or not and so on. The lawn guy can tell us to pound sand b/c they don’t like our requirements and refuse our $ …..just as that Univ could choose to do however they can’t have the taxpayer $ without accepting taxpayer conditions on the $. Free market in action.
Libertarians don’t believe in no gov’t or no gov’t exercise of delegated authority from the people or that use of the properly delegated authority in legitimate interest is anathema, that is the position of anarchists. Please don’t conflate them.
Which DeSantis victory do you think is compatible with libertarianism?
INCREASING government power over businesses as a way to stop racial discrimination is by definition anti-libertarian,
INCREASING government power in order to regulate universities is by definition not libertarian
INCREASING government power in order to prevent institutions from forcing mask mandates is definitely not libertarian.
It is not a coincidence that the libertarian party is extremely woke
An anarchist wants no government, a libertarian wants government that is smaller than the current government, making use of government legislation to do good things is incompatible with both philosophies.
In the 2oth century Republicans understood that libertarianism should be pandered to because in practice they just rolled out the rhetoric as a pander to corporations that at the time still overwhelmingly backed Republican candidates, while at the same time making sure libertarianism had nothing whatsoever to do with how they actually governed (Ronald Raegan from expanding government regulations of radio to make sure they didn’t develop an oligarchic control of political speech, to neutralizing all political potential of your phone company to censor you, to his increasing the size of the military Raegan was in no way libertarian. He was however a constitutional conservative, who pandered to libertarians as a way of pandering to corporations).
In the 21st century Republican voters actually wanted a libertarian approach to the culture and got it good and hard from their politicians which is why states where Democrats are an endangered species like Utah saw their institutions (including the corporations) become super woke and at all steps along the way the Utah politicians did nothing about it.
Utah Republican politicians are not stupid, they gave their voters what they wanted good and hard which happened in the other red states to,
It is time to go back to government is restricted by what the constitution says we can’t do, and not by the notion that use of government for something other than basic law enforcement and defense is bad.
Today a lot of Republicans who aren’t libertarians still call themselves libertarians (sometimes before advocating super non-libertarian measures). If you are one of them just adopt the term constitutional conservative which is what our 20th century Republican presidents were.
On issue of Qatari investment in American educational institutions the Constitution explicitly gives the United States Federal Government the deciding vote in allowing or not allowing such investment which without doubt falls under the commerce clause.
The government has the explicit right from the constitution to reject Qatar having a role in shaping the next generation of leaders, we could already see Qatar (among other bad actors like China) have had a purely negative part…..
Libertarians would say no, government should not be using it’s power in reaction to a social development Harvard should be free to take foreign government money and no longer be beholden to American donors.
A constitutional conservative would see we have the right under the constitution, and the donors after saying no anti-semitism are more than likely (as many already are yelling at the top of their lungs) to also force no anti-White racism and no more ethnic studies programs. Even if the donors are rejected….well that is weaker ivies.
Ending Qatar’s presence on campus is purely a win win.
I know you also hate the results of Qatar on campus, I am just doubting the wisdom of your free market approach (that is the approach that got us to this point after all)
There was plenty of government regulation of all sorts of things in the 19th century (see the example of if you send a modern young woman in a short skirt and typical shirt back to any 1820 town).
Abraham Lincoln saying “give me enough of a tariff and I will give you a great economy” is hardly promotion of freedom of trade and commerce even if you think tariffs are needed to promote domestic industry today.
Tariffs of course are a government regulation that limits Americans ability to engage in commerce with foreign businesses by making it more expensive as a way to discourage such things.
Danny,
Your claim of Harvard and the State/Federal gov’t following my ‘free market approach’ is false. That’s not how it occurred. Further there would be simple, automatic triggers for enforcement mechanisms; accept $ from a non liberal democracy and A, B, C consequences follow from it without review or appeal or exception. IOW among other ramifications they would forfeit Federal funding to include loan funding for students.
As for tariffs…. what’s the big deal? They are in essence user fees and a direct form of taxation upon an individual that are transparent. So long as they are imposed across the board at a flat, consistent rate without favoring or disfavor for a particular industry I don’t have an issue. ‘Free Trader’ doesn’t mean no taxation and libertarians understand that even limited govt must be paid for….so lets have, simple, flat, direct and transparent taxes to raise finds to support those limited functions of govt….but not to engage in social engineering or nudge behavior.
Cutting off the money from subsidized loans. Wouldn’t that kill off small Bible or liberal arts colleges, while the mega endowed and State Us would survive?