I have all my respect to Tao.
But I think it's very justified for the federal to do something (not necessarily this thing) against institutions that show racist behaviors. e.g. Little Rock Nine.
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So are you in support of the current defunding?
> The lawsuit, filed more than a year ago, alleged that by not immediately ordering the encampment to be taken down, UCLA provided support to pro-Palestinian activists who “enforced” what it termed a “Jew Exclusion Zone,” prohibiting Jewish students and staff from passing through the camp’s makeshift barricades.
Personally I think this is a textbook racist behavior. Replace "Jewish" with "black" and "Palestinian' with "white" and see if you agree. I personally firmly believe if white activists try to enforce a "Non Black Zone" in the campus, the college administration has a responsibility to take it down and discipline said activists.
I'm not sure if this defunding is justified though, as it seems that UCLA has settled this case and the defunding sounds retrospective.
Edit: Incidentally, Trump absolutely gutted the Department of Education, including the Office of Civil Rights, appointing loyalists who explicitly don’t believe it should exist. Are these the actions of a president concerned with civil rights?
Also, indulge us in a wild guess as to what Trump would’ve done to the Little Rock 9. Consider that he signed a full-page newspaper ad calling for the death of the Central Park 5, a wrongfully convicted group of Black and Latino teenagers.
Invoking our civil rights legacy here is perverse.
A lot of the college protesters are in fact Jewish. This is a fact the pro-Israel propaganda would rather you not know about. Otherwise, how could they claim "antisemitism" whenever you criticize the actions of the foreign country.
for me it looks like not just a civil case with UCLA. To me it looks like a straight criminal case of violation of federal civil rights law that FBI is supposed to prosecute. I.e. instead of collective punishment for the whole UCLA, i'd go with criminal prosecution against the specific individuals who perpetrated (i.e. those protesters who perpetrated the discrimination of Jews) as well as who materially supported (i.e. the administrators for example) those crimes.
And, for the record, I think it's willfully ignorant to pretend that Jews and non-jews are given equal amounts of leeway by all Palestine protesters. While the majority may be doing so in good faith, I've seen far too many people being viewed with suspicion for wearing Jewish traditional headware by supposedly unbiased activists to believe that anti-Semites aren't using the movement to get a free ride.
Secondly, protests are escalatory by definition. If no one is listening to a protest, and absolutely no one is impacted, it will escalate until people listen.
You can denounce this form of protest - which I would argue is the only form of protest - from a high perch, but when push comes to shove, if it were your cause, you would do the exact same thing.
Look back at history, and you’ll see the same pattern in all high stakes college protests, from anti-war protests to anti-apartheid protests. The fact that you are either unaware or indifferent to this truth means the machine is working as intended.
https://epicenter.wcfia.harvard.edu/blog/student-protests-an...
I also want to add my own observation, which might be biased: There was a clear, sizeable fraction of the protests that was beyond "pro-Palestine / anti-Israel's Palestine policy". There was celebration of Hamas and of the attack, especially in the first days.
i wish institutions would do the work to publish their sources in a way that is clear complete and verifiable.
i would love to understand what others on hn do day-to-day other than takes cues from media they “trust”.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/02/gaza-famine-st...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/aug/02/the-us...
idk what you want, there’s mountains of evidence.