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#paywalled

4 posts3 participants0 posts today
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Update. "As Trump’s Cuts Loom Large, Colleges Are Under Pressure to Punish Anti-Israel Speech."
chronicle.com/article/as-trump
(#paywalled)

Kate Hidalgo Bellows gets this right. #Trump treats criticism of #Israel as #antisemitism and pressures colleges and universities to do the same.

"The #Trump administration has promised to pull funding from colleges that don’t punish people for criticizing Israel, on the basis that it is antisemitic."

But of course we have the same right to criticize Israel that we have to criticize any country. There's nothing intrinsically antisemitic about it.

Don't take my word for it. Ask the majority of Israelis who join this criticism.
voice7news.tv/public/world/new

#Academia #USPol #USPolitics
@academicchatter

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Update. "#NIH freezes funds to #Harvard and four other universities, but can’t tell them."
science.org/content/article/ni
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"After freezing all grants to #Columbia University last week, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is now stopping grant and contract payments to Harvard University and four other universities [#Brown, #Northwestern, #Cornell, #WeillCornell Medical School]…The move will both block new funding and halt payments to investigators currently working on NIH projects…The Department of Health and Human Services (#HHS)…instructed NIH staff not to provide any communication to these institutions or to Columbia about whether the funds are frozen or why, according to the email."

#Academia #DefendResearch #Funding #Trump #USPol #USPolitics
@academicchatter

Continued thread

Update. "Trump seeks to end climate research at premier U.S. climate agency. White House aims to end NOAA’s research office; NASA also targeted."
science.org/content/article/tr
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"President Donald Trump’s administration is seeking to end nearly all of the #climate research conducted by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (#NOAA)…The administration is also preparing to ask for deep cuts to #NASA’s science programs."

Continued thread

Update. Phillip Levine lists the 77 US #universities that stand to lose the most from three kinds of funding cuts threatened by the #Trump admin: (1) capping indirect costs for #NIH grants at 15%, (2) cutting the #NSF budget by two-thirds, and (3) endowment taxes.
chronicle.com/article/these-77
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PS: Note that there are other kinds of cuts that Levine does not bring into this calculation, like withholding funds from targeted institutions because of their DEI or antisemitism policies.

#Academia #DefendResearch #Funding #Trump #USPol #USPolitics
@academicchatter

#discord IS LITERALLY THE PROBLEM!

I'm shure fecking #dread has better moderation and I'd rather use #MicrosoftTeams + #Slack cuz those at least have proper #moderation tools.

  • And I'd rather subscribe to the #LKML and see my inbox getting hosed than using any shitty #SaaS!

Case in point: I'd rather #SelfHost all my comms infrastructure than to ever use something like Discord or any other #GDPR-violating SaaS that is just enshittification.

I'd rather recommend people to instead choose a tool that does everything but horrible to go with multiple smaller & good tools

Check @alternativeto and @european_alternatives for options.

Continued thread

Update. "Massive, Unarchivable Datasets of Cancer, Covid, and Alzheimer's Research Could Be Lost Forever"
404media.co/nih-archives-repos
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"Almost two dozen repositories of research and public #health #data supported by the #NIH are marked for “review” under the #Trump administration’s direction, and researchers and archivists say the data is at risk of being lost forever if the repositories go down. “The problem with archiving this data is that we can’t,” Lisa Chinn, Head of Research Data Services at the University of Chicago…Unlike other government datasets or web pages, downloading or otherwise archiving NIH data often requires a Data Use Agreement between a researcher institution and the agency, and those agreements are carefully administered through a disclosure risk review process."

404 Media · Massive, Unarchivable Datasets of Cancer, Covid, and Alzheimer's Research Could Be Lost ForeverDays before Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that 10,000 HHS staffers would lose their jobs, a message appeared on NIH research repository sites saying they were "under review."
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Update. #DOGE will review #NIH grant opportunities "to ensure the research that will be funded aligns with the priorities of President Donald Trump’s administration."
science.org/content/article/tr
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PS: Note that this is about content, politics, or ideology, not waste, fraud, or abuse.

"One NIH employee familiar with the matter worries that Trump officials reviewing the NOFOs [Notices of Funding Opportunities] “may not have the scientific background to understand why funding for research on certain topics is important.” Moreover, they added, “Having these decisions made by DOGE after months have been spent writing the NOFOs drafts and getting buy-in from [NIH’s institutes and centers] and offices is a huge waste of staff time and resources.”

Good points from Richard Thompson Ford, Stanford Law prof:
chronicle.com/article/gutting-
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"As lawyers across the political spectrum agree, the government cannot make giving up a constitutional right a condition of funding…Civil-rights laws do not permit the executive branch to run an extortion racket by withholding funding approved by Congress and then dictating terms for its return. Quite the opposite: Civil-rights laws require a careful, program-specific assessment to identify any violations, after which the Department of Education must give notice of its concerns and try to secure voluntary compliance. Only if such efforts fail may the department begin enforcement proceedings, which require it to submit a report to Congress 30 days before withholding funding. Even then, funds may only be withheld from the specific programs that violated the law. For example, the government can’t withhold grants from a medical school because of violations in the history department, much less, as in the case of Columbia, suspend a host of unrelated grants and contracts because of vaguely defined violations."

#Academia #DEI #Funding #Trump #Universities #USLaw #USPol #USPolitics
@academicchatter

Illustration of a section of chain links forming the letters DEI that are breaking under stress.
The Chronicle of Higher Education · Gutting DEI Won’t Save UsOnly a sustained and coordinated defense can meet this challenge.

#DavidAsch is right: "Colleges Face a Prisoner’s Dilemma. If we don’t band together, we’ll all get skewered alone."
chronicle.com/article/colleges
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"What is surprising is that these #universities, all facing the same challenges, and forewarned of them, are largely facing them alone. The absence of a meaningfully coordinated defense might have been predicted from the “prisoner’s dilemma,” a classic game-theory framework that reveals why rational actors often fail to cooperate against a common enemy — even when doing so would benefit them."

PS: Law firms too. Nonprofits too.

#Academia #PrisonersDilemma #Trump #USPol #USPolitics
@academicchatter

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Update. "Foreign interference laws ‘no protection from #Trump edicts’"
timeshighereducation.com/news/
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"A memo sent to Australian collaborators in US-funded research projects seeks assurances that they and their institutions have no involvement in diversity, equity and inclusion (#DEI) initiatives, “environmental justice”, “gender ideology extremism” or “any party that espouses anti-American beliefs”. It asks whether they have received any funding from China, including Confucius Institutes and “non-state actors”, along with Russia, Cuba or Iran. The 36 questions also include queries on how the projects “create measurable benefits” for the US."

Times Higher Education (THE) · Foreign interference laws ‘no protection from Trump edicts’Rules designed for adversaries do not help against friends, expert warns, as US grills Australian researchers on DEI, ‘environmental justice’, ‘gender ideology’ and China links
Continued thread

Update. Good advice from #MichaelIgnatieff, past President of the Central European University in Budapest and Vienna (2016-2021): "How a University Fights an Authoritarian Regime. Viktor #Orbán came for me. Donald #Trump is coming for you. Here’s what to do."
chronicle.com/article/how-a-un
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"You’re going to need an alliance that pulls together American families, employers, unions, companies, the whole network of people and institutions beyond your campus who understand that the universities of America are critical to everything that is good about the country: its commitment to freedom, its devotion to excellence, its leadership in science and medicine. This alliance is going to have to get political — to reach across red state and blue state, identify the members of Congress from both sides of the House who understand why universities matter to their communities, to the American economy, and to America’s deserved reputation for excellence. Don’t mince words. It’s too late to play nice. Call a spade a spade. Convince enough Americans that the administration’s strategy deserves only one name: vandalism."

#Academia #DefendResearch #Universities #USPol #USPolitics
@academicchatter