Terence Tao on the suspension of UCLA grants

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.