Terence Tao on the suspension of UCLA grants

It's really telling when an invaluable intellectual powerhouse specialized in a non politicized field gets its funds taken away because of politics

Edit:

This is a comment about the administration, not Tao.

thats why they should refrain from engaging in politics in the first place. the day the wind changes you lose.

Then it's maybe not a free country anymore if you have to think about how your actions are perceived by the president in power at every step.

You still lose when you aren't political enough.

I hate to state the obvious but if your livelihood depends on federal grants then by all means you need to take in account the fact that oresidents can change after a few years.

As a band recently put it in a festival: They'd like their music to be non-political, but sometimes politics enter music and then you have no choice.

There has been no precedent for what is happening right now. This is literally Project 2025 and the "you'll never have to vote again" people trying to turn the US into a dictatorship. If people don't speak out now, we might have MAGA in power for the next 25 years just like Putin was for the last.

“If you would escape moral and physical assassination, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing — court obscurity, for only in oblivion does safety lie.” E. Hubbard, ca. 1989

Facts and knowledge are immensely political if the powers that be feel threatened by them.

That's the thinking of pure power politics which is antithetical to modernity and democracy. It's a complete reversal to pre-enlightenment feudalism, where the lord has complete control over your fate.

i agree with you, but i think it's been the case in the US for the past 15 years already. The only difference is trump pushing toward different issues than biden.

Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you. - Pericles

False equivalence nonsense. If you can't see the difference between Trump's authoritarian actions and the Biden presidency, you are blinded by your own personal biases.

That was never true in the past. This is new.

Which president did anything like this anywhere close to that scale? You are getting confused by propaganda.

You don't though, unless your funding depends on him. If you're a contractor for Oracle, you'll probably get in trouble if you loudly proclaim different values than them - but that doesn't make it a non-free country.

Are you saying the 6 NSF-funded math institutes (IPAM being one) are engaging in politics?

It was much less a one-man thing, i agree. Looking at the US debates from europe however, I have the feeling monolithic thinking was very much in place in academia on a wide range of topics (gender theory, climate change, israel support, vaccine mandate, etc).

And not just academia if i look at zuckerberg's testimony over federal government censoring people arbitrarily on the platforms.

Or, to quote his lesser-known cousin:

"I thought I was safe in my hideout, but a kick to the groin proved me wrong." -Testicles

The style is very different, for sure. But testimonies of people feeling threatened over their academic career based on political statements on controversial topics isn't a new thing.

Don't get me wrong : i'm not defending what's happening here. It's absurd and a very bad sign for US democracy. What i'm saying is that people only wake up when they're the ones in the crosshairs.

To some degree I agree with you. This didn't come out of the blue. I think we have to look at the whole picture, which contains multitudes of those bad signs for US democracy, including that the president doesn't want to follow the law and doesn't have a good faith or even functioning understanding of how the system of government works.

Taken together, it makes it clear that we need to formulate even more clearly than before, what kind of society and country we want to live in. Not just oneliners, of course, those are now hollowed-out (see "freedom").

If academics want to make political statements on controversial topics, then that's an entirely different situation to academics having grants cancelled (not just not-renewed, but cancelling already allotted money) when they're not making political statements.

By the way, do you have an example of the academics feeling threatened by making political statements?

Seemed pretty consensual, but since you're asking, here's a top result i got on my first search on google's.

https://nypost.com/2025/04/23/us-news/psychiatrist-who-criti...

And there are tons of other. Gender theory was a pretty big drive for censorship.

Sorry. You are wrong. Your first assertion was that the only difference was trump pushing different issues than Biden. And your source for this false equivalence is an example of a professor fired by a University that has nothing to do with Biden in any way shape or form. You seem to have difficulty with the truth and difficulty engaging in a good faith dialog.

> You don't though, unless your funding depends on him.

Or your broadcasting license.

Or your public assistance.

Or your citizenship.

There's a difference between rights and privileges.

If the government gifts you $1000 a month because they like you so much, that's a privilege. Privileges can be taken away.

If the government gives you $1000 a month because it's the law, then they can't take it away without breaking the law (or changing it first).

Public funding for specific universities is not the law, so the government can stop giving it to someone (yes, yes, there are contracts and laws involved and what not, but the general point stands).

The government cannot imprison you for saying you like pineapple on pizza, but they can stop funding your pizza experiments.

Usually it's brought up by people on the left and I think they're right: freedom of speech is not freedom of consequences. Freedom of speech protects you from the government as in the executive branch can't just imprison you, but it doesn't protect you from any and all consequences. It's just that they usually don't find themselves the targets suffering those consequences.

And opinions often depend on whether you're affected.

i was answering to this question "By the way, do you have an example of the academics feeling threatened by making political statements?"

i mentionned biden's presidency. I think the date matches.

Indeed as i said elsewhere the style was different, much less a one-man decision. But biden's administration was pushing an agenda as well, and it wasn't soft on people that disagreed.

Your opinion is based on the constitutional republic of the past. In the authoritarian dictatorship that Trump is building, there's no difference between a right and a privilege because rights don't exist, only privilege for those who have the approval of the dictator, which may be revoked at any time. This whole "rule of law" idea you're professing is antiquated and a relic. The new world order is: might makes right.