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A university president makes a case against cowardice

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450 points pseudolus | 1 comments | 03 Apr 25 12:29 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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carbocation ◴[03 Apr 25 13:17 UTC] No.43569175[source]▶
So far the fight/not fight decisions can be predicted in advanced based on whether an institution has a medical center with NIH grants.
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drooby ◴[03 Apr 25 13:49 UTC] No.43569620[source]▶
He states in the interview that Wesleyan has NIH grants. They are preparing to let scientists go if it comes to it.
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carbocation ◴[03 Apr 25 13:56 UTC] No.43569745[source]▶
Wesleyan does not have a medical center and according to the NIH’s public reporting, they have under $2 million in NIH grants, compared to $600 million for Columbia. (Edited from $400 million, which is the value cut.)

Wesleyan has a $250 million operating budget, so the (from what REPORTER indicates) $1.6 million in NIH funding represents 0.6% of their budget. In contrast, the $600 million in NIH funding to Columbia represents about 10% of its $6 billion operating budget.

So both in terms of absolute numbers and relative numbers, the NIH contributions to Wesleyan are de minimis.

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insane_dreamer ◴[03 Apr 25 19:15 UTC] No.43574081[source]▶
That makes a strong case for academic institutions not being substantially dependent on government research dollars.
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dcrazy ◴[03 Apr 25 20:54 UTC] No.43575264[source]▶
No it doesn’t. The First amendment is supposed to prevent the government from conditionalizing access to government services based on the speech of the recipient. Private institutions are not subject to such restrictions. If we want to encourage academic freedom, we want to find this behavior by the government to be illegal.
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insane_dreamer ◴[03 Apr 25 21:00 UTC] No.43575335[source]▶
> we want to find this behavior by the government to be illegal

of course we do - but we're sadly discovering how easy it is for the government to target and coerce these universities, with nobody stepping up to stop them

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1. dcrazy ◴[03 Apr 25 21:11 UTC] No.43575472[source]▶
So we want universities to get their funding from private sources that are expressly entitled to impose the same kind of conditions? Or do we want universities to spend more time and overhead on cobbling their funding together from a large number of intellectually and morally diverse sources? Where will these sources get their money without the power of taxation?