Faculty Civil War May Erupt As STEM Lose Grants Due To Radical Humanities Profs. Stoking Campus Mayhem
My appearance on Fox News Radio Evening Edit: “you have faculty in the hard sciences who are not as political, who are now paying the price for their gender studies and anthropology and political science faculty who have aided and abetted these protests, who have dug this hole for them.”
I appeared on Fox News Radio’s Evening Edition with Eben Brown, on the topic of how the Attempt To Deport Anti-Israel Activist Sparks Legal Discussion:
Anti-Israel activist Mahmoud Khalil will remain in ICE detention in Louisiana as he faces possible deportation proceedings, sparking more protests at Columbia University in New York City. Khalil, 30, a Palestinian raised in Syria, was arrested by ICE at his university-owned apartment for his alleged involvement in the massive anti-Israel protests at Columbia last year. Khalil’s green card has been revoked by the Trump administration but his supporters question why he hasn’t been charged with a crime.
FOX’s Eben Brown speaks with William A. Jacobson, Cornell University Law Professor & Founder of EqualProtect.org, who breaks down the legal reason these students can be removed from the country.
The audio is embedded at the bottom of this post.
At lot of what I said about Khalil and “free speech” was similar to what I said in my interview with Tony Katz and on Fox Business Evening Edit, though I did also get into recent developments and what we now know (and don’t know) about Khalil.
But towards the end I took a detour, and spoke about how there is a brewing conflict between STEM and other legitimate research faculty, on the one hand, and the radical anti-Israel faculty from the Humanities and Social Sciences who are encouraging the campus riots and mayhem that has resulted in Columbia University losing $400 million in federal grants.
My thoughts on this we sparked by two tweets from Steve McGuire on March 10 and 11:
NEW: Columbia has begun notifying faculty of cancelled grants. From an internal source there: “Grant cancellation notices flowing in now. Labs shutting down. Layoffs imminent. Faculty apoplectic at [Columbia President] Katrina Armstrong for letting it get to this point. She has to fix this fast.”
***
The funding cuts at Columbia are stoking a civil war among the faculty.
On one side: scientists who are losing their grants and just want to do their research.
On the other: scholar-activists in the humanities who have little grant money to lose and support the protests.
The problem is much deeper and has lasted much longer than than the anti-Israel protests. The radicalization of the campuses has turned half the country against academia, and that half of the country currently is in power.
In a political climate where higher education desperately need allies, it’s not going to find many because it spent several decades — but particularly the last decade — mocking, belittling, and denegrating the rest of the country. Not all of academia of course and not all institutions have been at war with the rest of the country, but enough of them have been, particularly elite schools like Columbia.
Much like the STEM researchers suffering because of the radical Humanities professors, the non-radicalized higher education institutions will be harmed by the backlash against higher ed in general.
Particularly in STEM the loss of federal funding can be devasting to a professor’s professional standing in more ways than you can imagine. In STEM its very common for professors to have “labs” (or similar groupings) to which they recruit graduate students to help on the research as they seek Ph.D.s. The loss of grant money and this support structure can be turned off like a switch when grant funding is lost, but it can’t be turned back on so easily if and when the money reappears.
So will STEM researchers and other non-political faculty stand up for themselves? Will administrators act to protect the institution. Will they go to war with the faculty who are ruining their life’s work to “free, free, Palestine”?
I’m not hopeful. The anti-Israel faculty as a group are just as belligerant and malicious as the anti-Israel students taking over and trashing buildings, setting up check points, and creating “Zionist Free Zones”. Faculty who take scientific and other research seriously are not cut from that activist cloth, but if they do nothing, their life’s work will be destroyed.
Here’s a short transcript excerpt of my full interview (my segment starts at about the 2:00 mark, and the discussion of the civil war starts at 17:50):
Brown (17:28):
Is there a lot of faculty pushback yet there? I know there’s been a lot of fear among faculty members at these institutions, and it’s not just in the Ivy League. This happens at state schools, this happens at smaller schools, but that faculty may not be standing up for what we would say is right, because there’s a fear of a backlash.
WAJ (17:50):
Faculty, I think it’s probably true, are afraid of student intimidation. I mean, when you take over a building, when you do these things like at Columbia and if you’re a faculty member who’s going to speak against that, you’re putting yourself at real risk, real physical risk. So I think a lot of faculty have been intimidated about speaking out about this.
But I think there’s a different type of backlash brewing, which is that a lot of the federal grants that are being pulled are for the hard sciences. So you have faculty in the hard sciences who are not as political, who are now paying the price for their gender studies and anthropology and political science faculty who have aided and abetted these protests, who have dug this hole for them.
So I think there’s going to be a lot of tension brewing on campuses between the faculty who instigated this situation and the faculty who are actually the ones paying the price because they’re losing their research grants and their funding. So that’s something to keep an eye on. Whether it bubbles up to the surface, I don’t know.
But there’s no question that there’s going to be a lot of tension from faculty who lost their federal grants because of the person down there who’s out in the streets rioting with the students, and got the school in trouble.
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65% of STEM grants are swallowed up by the colleges and Universities as “overhead”.
yeah- I got my CS department to let me sit in classes during the summer free of charge and do all the work, then take the classes officially later in the year as part of my full load. I was a student athlete and my reasoning wasn’t to save money (though that was a side effect) – I just couldn’t take a full load of hard sciences while competing/training at the level.
They were happy to help me out since the university was stiffing them on all the grant money they brought in.
CS graduate school slurps up far more student money than it deserves. I made it 9 hours of graduate credit progress (without being approved) until the graduate school found out and demanded I pay back their vig and go through a whole string of mea culpa steps before being let back in where I never had been.
Me: “So I’d need to go to school another two years at this amount of expenditure before getting a Masters in CS. What kind of job would this help me get?”
Advisor: “Job? Well, while working on your PhD, the University can pay you a few pennies….”
I fled for the real world and never regretted it.
STEM folks seem not to have the power. It might even be worse than stated. PhD students in STEM, who could be working for many years to get that degree, might have funding for projects cut off. Undergraduate STEM students might have more limited opportunities for graduate programs. I am starting to wonder if the blowback from unintended consequences of all Trump’s rapidfire actions might end up being politically perilous in the midterms.
Another idiot who believes that liberals can burn and destroy communities, academic institutions, and neighborhoods and don’t give a flying fuck what conservatives think.
But conservatives who don’t politely hold their tongue and let liberals abuse them are the bad guys.
Moron
Damn, place blame where it belongs, take money for those who caused this problem and reallocate it to STEM.
I have a grown child who bought the horse crap from liberal arts professors, Job prospects have been few and far between, and pay is low, Affirmative professors at U of M claimed otherwise and the child bought that crap. Some science or math would have made a huge difference. DEI indoctrination has led to a huge rift between us.
Yes, but only at Columbia.
These faculty members and students will be harmed because 1) they chose Columbia where the radicals were allowed to florish 2) they failed to stand up to the radicals.
This is also my comment to the Jewish or moral Alumni and students. Why would you continue to support, work at or attend a University that allows this behavior.
Change the behavior to ANY immoral acts. Let’s make it something like vocally supporting, celebrating and encouraging the Klu Klux Klan. Banners showing nooses for black students. Cross burnings every Tuesday.
Are you going to still support the University?
UW medical will get hit BIGGLY.
Med school tuitions and fees are the next big thing that should be examined. The costs are astronomical for what they provide, and they leave graduates impoverished for decades with burdensome loans.
And for the record, I am not saying that these loans should be forgiven.
Med school funding is very different from other academic units, and so are most, but not all health programs. Schools that are heavily research-intensive, like medicine, pharmacy, and core biomedical (pharmacology, some others, etc.) attract large amounts of external funding including industry. Their professors are often paid minimal salaries and then rely on the largesse from research grants to pick up the balance of their compensation. The tuition the students pay usually goes to the brick and mortar, support staff (student administration like admissions), and other undergrad related costs. The faculty in med programs also, unless at the Dean/Associate Dean/etc level usually also bill physician fees for their active practices which they are expected to maintain in addition to any research they conduct. Don’t see any of that in other schools except non-health STEM programs, or business programs. Humanities? PFFT…from what I’ve heard all of that money dried up faster than pure alcohol in a San Antonio sun.
STEM Programs actually perform a vital societal function adding to the intellectual talent pool to ensure the preservation of our national prowess. Higher Ed has forgotten its core competencies and allowed Communist to take over their campuses and exert oversized influence. Humanities should be relegated to fullfilling a few area Electives. No one should be majoring in these made up worthless degree programs that do little more than guarantee unemployment and massive student debt. If universities were forced to underwrite all student loans, then they would scale back their ethnic and gender studies degree programs as they would have to eat the high default rates. Institutions would have to actually operate like an unsubsidized enterprise concerned about academic outcomes and a return on investment, not on racial and gender quotas and trying to maintain their Neo-Marxist Social Justice BS…
Their claim that Trump has ceded control to billionares and is forcing them to do “bad things” such as igniting a civil war is the most damning indication that the left has an infantile mindset and a galactic ego.
And their capacity to be useful idiots, continually repeating the lies.
I recall a survey not too long ago that asked physicists if the stuff they were working on would stay the same if they could do anything they wanted instead of whatever they had gotten grants for. I don’t remember the exact numbers but well over half of them said no, if they could choose anything to work on it would be something entirely different.
Like everyone else, they do what pays. In the modern world, most of the (research) pay comes from the government. And the government has had absolutely screwed up priorities for a long time.
Get the government out of it completely. Let scientists learn to do science again, instead of doing whatever they could get a grant for.
They’d still need to seek grants, but from other sources.
Yep. If I could get a grant to study Swedish bikini models, I’d take it in a heartbeat. Of course my wife would make me give it back and return to my old job, but…
Sure, research what you want to research. But I’d like that cure for the common cold this decade, and that’s what we’re funding.
That’s how the climage change boondoggle is perpetuated; NIH only pays for grants it likes (read it: gov’t approved).
climate
I pray for the day when most ivy league schools die a rapid death.
From their self inflicted wounds.
This ought to be…interesting…as in the Chinese curse [May you live in interesting times…]. Columbia’s medical school does a LOT of NIH and other federally sponsored research, and has been a cash cow for them for years. Those types of research programs are not readily portable, because of the patients, institutional relationships (hospitals, etc.), and wars of reputation involved. Their medical school faculty is also one of the most notoriously politicized. They brought this on themselves!
No Oberlin STEM faculty supported the Gibsons, even though in the end they too suffered the loss of $45M (and future income from the $45M) due to the radical elements of faculty and administration taking control of the college. Colleges are in a retraction (size) phase and there will be a surplus of faculty, so best not rock the boat where you are. My guess is that perhaps 20% of the Oberlin faculty were raving lunatics, and the other 80% went along because at the time it was easier. Now we get to see how the radicalization plays out at other schools.
And STEM faculty deserves their demise because they decided it was safer to have a go along and get along approach. Sleep with whores, get STDs.
Exactly. A similar dynamic befell soon-to-be-ex-UT president Jay Hartzell.
He was brought in to clean up the mess left by former UT president Fenves (who went all-in on DEI, CRT, and wokeness), but quickly found that his life was a lot easier if he just gave into the wokesters rather than say no to them. Faculty who tried to warn him that this was an exceptionally unwise course were first belittled, then retaliated against when they blew the whistle.
Ultimately, the Texas Legislature stepped in and put a hard stop to DEI at state schools (at least on paper). And with the incoming Trump administration going hard after schools committed to DEI, he found himself berift of supporters: DEI opponents / agnostics knew he lacked the stones to actually stand up to the wokesters, and the wokesters viewed him as a cowardly squish who would cave when any pressure was put on him (a not-inaccurate view, IMO).
And thus he’s now running away to become the president of SMU.
I don’t ever remember seeing any Oberlin STEM faculty research hitting any of the big time scientific journals. It’s not a R1 institution, but perhaps fancies itself one.
Does it matter? Whole enterprise a complete racket
In “Systemantics” by John Gall, it’s called “Administrative Encirclement.” The people hired to order chalk and pencils wind up in charge of the entire system. (Mid 1970s, the earlier the edition the better. Conciseness)
I remember reading that when I was in high school around 50 years ago. Can’t remember a thing about it other than it opened my eyes.
They’d be better off promoting the janitors; I have had many inciteful conversations with them. They knew what was really going on.
The universities could discontinue fake courses like gender studies, fire the useless professor making bank off them and shift the saved money to actual courses not just the STEM ones. In other words, stop wasting money and get back to teaching useful courses instead of grievance study ones.
And the Federal Student Loan program should stop using Direct Student or Parent Plus Loans to pay for grievance studies.
The best way to determine… if compensation for those jobs is not equal to the ability to pay off the student loans within 10 years, then the loans shouldn’t be given.
Turn the loans back to the banks, and let the banks determine risk. We should not guarantee loans that guarantee that the recipient will be a barista.
Much better option: make colleges have to invest a significant percentage of their endowment in loans to their students before any of their students can be eligible for federal student loans. And for schools with endowments over $1 billion, cut of federal student loans entirely: make them invest their assets in their own students.
If the education these schools have on offer is truly worth the coin, it’s a sound investment: their graduates will have no problem repaying the loans if they are taught marketable skills, and student loans pay a decent rate of interest. But if the schools are unwilling (for obvious fiscal reasons) to invest their endowments in loans to students majoring in garbage fields like intersectional interpretive dance theory should the taxpayers?
Obama really screwed up the school loan financing by making it controlled and run by the gov’t.
By and large the Humanities studies are a disaster across the colleges today. The easiest way to get control of it is to put conditions on all grants. No dei. no student loans for any degree that does not prepare the student for a job outside of academia. No grant may be used for anything other than its stated purpose. Antisemitism, anti free speech, anti American riders attached to every dollar that flows to colleges and K-12 education systems. Don’t just make it an EO. Make it law. Let the demonrats rail against it. Once again something that’s common sense will make these lemmings run right over the cliff.
Easy to say. Hard to do. The ‘studies’ majors are cheap for a university to offer (at least on the surface). They take one professor who lives under a bridge, allow X number of students in the classroom, sell the class notes at a profit, and collect tuition. Studies grants are all paper. They don’t require reactors, hydraulic pumps, high-voltage lines, or detailed results. Studies classes rack in the undergrad cash. So what if the graduates wind up unemployable. The checks are already cashed. Short-Term gains.
STEM students are different. They take hardware, stuff that changes every year, burns up, needs maintenance, can’t just be scrounged for at the dump. The students are smart. They won’t accept some loser off the street as a professor. Brilliant students go to other universities, make big bucks, bring in dough to *them* unless substantial investments in real materials are made to attract them. Long-term gains.
STEM faculty may not be as radical as humanities faculty, but they still vote 97% Democrat. They’re not as loud, but they’re just as “progressive” in their views. They helped bring this about by years of silent approval of the openly radical faculty members and administrators at their institutions.
I can tell you that there is a significant, under-the-radar contingent of conservatives in STEM that don’t want to be targets. But we make excellent moles!!
In any interuniversity war I side with STEM. That’s my background. They also have the chemistry department.
You can only be intimidated if you ALLOW yourself to be intimidated. One should work daily on both physical strength and moral strength. Conservatives are SUPPOSED to believe in self reliance and overcoming. To hear of professors ‘afraid’ of their students or of their pasty screeching aging hippy coworkers is disgusting. One need not look far for those who faced much worse. Just a few years ago nurses went to work daily fighting the pandemic while most sheltered in their homes. Get in my face or block my path at your peril.
May be if enough Fed funds are cut off some of the humanities and Political Science Profs will have to find employment elsewhere. I think colleges and Universities would be better suited if the Ford, Rockefeller, McArthur and Pew foundations would support scientific research rather than NGO’s
“The Nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools.”
since “Stem” already existed BEFORE any political wokesters
what is the real purpose of STEM if not yet another lets get wht males out of the brain trust and get allll the rest in
by any means necessary
This is not new. I recall a STEM professor in the 1960s correctly predicting that campus radical activity would result in the state legislature cutting university funding.
At DePaul University we had a College of Arts and Scientists (A&S) with almost 500 faculty members. As a result, the sciences had to compete with the humanities and social sciences for resources and for positions on committees that governed the academic side of A&S. There was a substantial group of woke faculty in the some of the humanities and social science departments who were loosely organized and pushed DEI type initiatives. With the help of a like minded administration, they oriented hiring, merit raises, promotion and tenure decisions, invitation to speakers, conferences, curriculum and even the treatment of student organizations in a very political direction.
It was a whole of government approach that was aimed at establishing woke orthodoxy with respect to complex issues; pro-gun control; pro-choice (believe it or not Catholic DePaul was largely unsupportive of pro-life groups); conventional politics (very anti-Republican); anti-Israel; pro-affirmative action; pro-green new deal; against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; blamed 9/11 on Israel and US foreign policy; favored the elimination of the rights of the accused in sexual assault cases; supported the fiction that college was awash in hundreds if not thousands of cases rape a year; supported the narrative that various racial, ethnic, gender and sexual identities were defined by victimhood.
As a result, the needs of the science department were largely overlooked. For example, for five years, the math department (I was a member) was unable to hire any tenure track faculty in spite of a substantial increase in the number of courses we taught.
Eventually, the science departments along with the departments of psychology and nursing dropped out of A&S and formed its own School of Science. This infuriated the activists in the humanities and social sciences which could no longer pirate the resources that should have gone to the sciences for the hiring of more faculty who viewed all of life through the lens of race, gender, sexuality, class and ethnicity. One administrator suggested to me that the remaining A&S departments should become a college formed around the theme of social justice. I suggested it should be more appropriately be called the college of victimhood.
It is what they are doing to our culture and civilization writ small.
And why we have hoards of socialism deluded students fighting for terrorists and practicing wholesale antisemitism.
Simple solution. CU should terminate the faculty who aided and abetted the problem and switch those CU resources to STEM. Layoffs. Faculty were not hired by CU to engage in political activities involving violence, trespass (taking over buildings), or intimidating Jewish students. And if the displaced faculty sue there should be more cuts in their departments to pay for the suits.
The STEM faculties previous silence was consent.
Agreed, but look at what they did to Prof. Amy Wax.
For further reading on the effects of radical leftism on campus, read the long arduous story of Dr. James Miller, who finally secured a tenured position at Smith College: https://www.academia.org/cracking-the-ivory-curtain-at-smith/ Definitely worth a read. It is only a page or two.
The tendrils of radical leftists are far reaching.