Terence Tao on the suspension of UCLA grants

UCLA has an endowment of 3.8bn$. Whilst I'm sympathetic to their desire to be further government financed for the work they do, I feel like government financing should be made available to those that actually need the money. The attitude that you have access to government funds even if you have the ability to pay yourself needs to change.

Endowments are often earmarked for certain use cases. They aren't necessarily permitted to spend it as they like.

UCLA gets about $800m a year in federal grants. $3.8bn wouldn’t last long if they were to self fund that.

Also: Even if they could, why would they? Grants are for research. Research only very indirectly affects their income. They could probably accept more students (so more tuition) if they would say to the faculty: no research, more teaching.

An uber driver who gets rich by other means will stop driving for uber, not drive for uber for free.

Source here https://efm.research.ucla.edu/#:~:text=Statistics%20for%20fi...

California higher education in general does not need of federal funds. These are typically mutually beneficially projects that doesn't necessarily need to be partnered with the US government.

The bigger problem is the recipients of these cuts seem to think it is about an "issue", and are incapable of accepting they are having sand kicked in their face.

Governments typically fund research because 1) it's seen as beneficial for the country, and hence falls under the remit of governments in democratic countries and 2) the uncertainty, time frame, or lack of direct commercialization of research typically means the private sector will not invest in it.

Your suggestion is saying that research should be privatised, and shows very little thought about how research works and who benefits from it.

Research 50 years ago, sure. Research now is very different. It’s short term, chasing money, trends, citations, prestige, hierarchy, academic power, and applications. Public should fund only the useful part of it.

Maybe taxes should be the same. I don't mind being taxed as much as I hate my taxes going to the wrong thing.

>UCLA has an endowment of 3.8bn$

you say that like it's a lot of money? I mean sure, in comparison to the amount of money I make yes, but in comparison to value derived from research, amounts of money collected from California, amount of money given to California, and amount of money federal government spends on other things - is it a lot of money? I have a feeling it's not.

>I feel like government financing should be made available to those that actually need the money.

yeah, if they actually needed the money they would shut down the programs using the money when they stopped getting the money.

You clearly didn't read the article. Dr. Tao provides a concrete example of the type of funding that very recently lead to an order of magnitude speedup of MRI imaging and likely has many military uses he is not allowed to speak about (my speculation but I'd bet on it). Your statement is false.

Now, find out if you agree with 10 random people about what is the right or the wrong thing.

Your Panglossian description of the purpose of publicly-funded research shows very little understanding of reality.

Military contractors have even more money but the budget to pay them only grows larger every year.

There is actually a stated issue that is the reason: anti-semitism. Isn’t it reasonable to want to understand more and gain the kind of influence to affect change of this magnitude?

Nothing has changed. What you describe today existed 50 years ago, and what you describe as being research 50 years ago, exists today.

The actions of the administration serve to force all academics not behaving as you describe research to start doing so, though. The criticism you have, is manufactured.

You make this statement as if it's fact. The actual reality of the matter is that neither you nor I know how research would progress were the government not stepping in and spending on our behalf. Your kind of argument is what is used to justify increasing amounts of government taxation and spending, over trusting the private sector to figure out ways of doing so, and the suggestion that government is the only way of incentivising the research you speak of is entirely lacking in imagination and faith in basic human ingenuity to solve problems.

Yes, there are coordination problems for projects at some scale, for which government involvement makes it possible, however these are far fewer than we are made to believe.

This is unfairly downvoted but strikes at the core of the matter. Democracy is fundamentally oppressive of a minority (and often majority). A vote in favour of a government to fund "basic research" (as it is generously described) is fundamentally not a vote to fund basic research, but rather a vote to expropriate wealth from a group that doesn't want it to be financed in order to finance it.

If the faculty itself is not willing to ask to spend the endowment on the research (and they know it most intimately), then why should the faculty ask the rest of us to pay?

Endowments are not piles of money that they just sit on. Universities typically spend 4-5% of their endowment every year. The endowment is invested and managed to try and make that 4-5% a year spending sustainable indefinitely.

If the policy was no government funding if you have an endowment the net result would be that endowments would be spent down, and then not only would they need government funding for the things the government now funds, they would also need government funding for the things that are currently funded from the endowment's earnings.

Also, money in endowments is often legally restricted. Donors put conditions on their donations which limit what they can be used for. For example a donor might donate several million dollars to create and pay the salary of a named professorship in a specific department. That money goes into the endowment, but it and its earnings can only be spent on paying whoever currently holds that professorship.

A typical endowments includes hundreds or thousands of such restricted donations.

I don't think there's a problem with spending an endowment down, however university administrators do, and that's a emotional step they need to get over.

Agreed on restrictions and would be good to know how large the unrestricted part is.

In California, your taxes are mostly earmarked for k-14 education, and the legislature can't change that.

There are tons of labs at universities that are privately funded. It’s not common but there’s plenty of them. And the one I know best is probably the top in the world for what it does (niche in physics)

Yes, however it is well documented that some of those issues exist, no one denies that. One of the civilian deaths early on in the Israel/Palestine protests was by a professor of a local college in LA. Perhaps a bigger problem for California is they have 20,000 Chinese students, 36% of international revenue. That will probably drop significantly.

UCLA does some pretty amazing work though. They recently published a study on the Los Angeles "mansion tax" that basically called it a failure. They did that for free, with no grants or funding. That is the kind of actual policy work and studies you would expect to see from a university, and it includes a master class on how modern urban property development works in mature urban areas such as Los Angeles.

Unfortunately work like that is overshadowed by the protesters that hijack other protests and bring in outsiders who cause property damage and violence.

https://www.lewis.ucla.edu/2025/05/14/los-angeless-mansion-t...

https://www.lewis.ucla.edu/research/the-unintended-consequen...

One thing I've learned is that people have no idea what an endowment is and how it works because it isn't a piggy bank you dip into. UCLA is also a public university that should get public money.