Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Annals of craven cowardice, Hunter College edition

The Governor of New York is a disgrace, but so are the Hunter College officials who rolled over on their core responsibility to academic freedom so quickly:

The Hunter College job listing for Palestinian studies called for scholars who could “take a critical lens” to issues including “settler colonialism, genocide, human rights, apartheid” and other topics.

When the listing was posted last weekend, Jewish groups protested the inclusion of words that they said are antisemitic when applied to Israel. Their objections were first reported in The New York Post.

By Tuesday, Gov. Kathy Hochul demanded that the college, a part of the City University of New York, take down the listing.

“Governor Hochul directed CUNY to immediately remove this posting and conduct a thorough review of the position to ensure that antisemitic theories are not promoted in the classroom,” a spokesperson said in a statement, adding, “Hateful rhetoric of any kind has no place at CUNY or anywhere in New York State.”

The college, as part of the CUNY system, depends on state funding.

The university’s chancellor and board chair immediately approved Governor Hochul’s directive to remove the listing.

I feel for the "spokesperson" who has to issue such dishonest blather:  there is no "hateful" language in the ad, there is an ad that calls for applicants to investigate certain topics, which are real topics, in relationship to the Palestinians.  Faculty at Hunter College should be up in arms about this naked violation of the academic freedom rights of faculty.

(Thanks to Michael DeNiro for the pointer.)

More on the monster child's obsession with Canada

Suitably cutting, especially about those pathetic American media ideologists who treat this grotesque display seriously.

(Thanks to Evan Thompson for the pointer.)

More signs of the times: Northwestern University to make 10% cuts in non-personnel expenditures, and to scrutinize future hiring and pay raises centrally

Here.  Northwestern is a top 20 recipient of NIH funding, but the announcement also notes concern about the effect of an increased endowment tax.

An interview in Portuguese about legal realism, the American constitutional crisis, naturalism, and other topics...

...in a leading Brazilian newspaper, Estadão.  I was in Brazil last week for some lectures and seminars on legal philosophy, at the Pontifical Catholic University of Sao Paulo and the University of Sao Paulo.  I learned many very interesting things, which I'll write more about in the near future.  Below the fold, a photo of me and Professor Ronaldo Macedo on the grand staircase of the "old" law school building at USP (American law schools don't look like this!):

Heading for the doors of America

Not surprising:

On February 8, German newsmagazine Der Spiegel reported that the Max Planck Society—one of the world’s top scientific research institutions—is experiencing an uptick in applications from American scientists. Its president said the society regards the U.S. as “a new talent pool” at a time when the Trump administration seeks to cut billions in funding to the National Institutes of Health. There’s a deep historical irony in these recent developments: During the Third Reich, it was the Max Planck Society—then known as the Kaiser Wilhelm Society—that lost its best and brightest to the U.S. and other countries, including Albert Einstein.

A day prior, Irish broadcaster RTÉ reported that Ireland’s Department of Foreign Affairs has seen a 50 percent increase in the number of Americans seeking Irish passports, with some people specifically citing the new administration as a reason. Searches for terms like “dual citizenship” and “jus sanguinis” likewise saw significant spikes on Election Day and Inauguration Day, according to Google Trends. And a representative of Polaron, an Australian company that helps people obtain European citizenship by descent, told me that her firm has also “seen a steep increase in Americans wishing to leave their country, with many more keen to use their EU passport as a plan B"....

With Trump back in office and faithfully executing the blueprint for wrecking the country known as Project 2025 while collaborating with the world’s richest man to trash democracy and wage a war on brain cells in the federal government, a growing number of people in this country see the writing on the wall, and they’re looking for their bug-out plan.

A note about memorial notices

I have never tried to post memorial notices for all the many teachers of philosophy who die in a given year (I just do not have the time for that).  I have tried to limit memorial notices to those who are widely known in the profession.  Prior to 2020 that meant posting about 20-25 memorial notices per year.  In 2024, there were well over forty (scroll through the "Year in Review" category to see the annual lists on December 31 of every year).  I don't think it's that more well-known philosophers were dying, but rather that it's hard to say "no" to folks who ask for a memorial notice to be posted about someone they knew.  I'm going to start saying "no" a bit more, with apologies in advance.  But it's becoming clear that as I've grown more relaxed about the criteria for blog memorial notices, the demand for them has increased, and I will have to start saying 'no' a lot more.  Please feel free to share news with me of the death of philosophers, but please understand that I may not always post about them.  The main criteria are that the philosopher was widely known at least nationally, and preferably internationally, and known outside their narrow specialty (if they had a narrow specialty). Thank you.

More on the collapse of the AAUP...

...from law professor Matthew Finkin, a leading authority on the law of academic freedom (among other topics).

Canadian philosophy and American imperialism...

...at the APA blog.

(Thanks to Trevor Sanderson for the pointer.)

Stephenson from Southampton to LMU Munich

Andrew Stephenson (Kant, philosophy of mind, epistemology, logic), Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Southampton, will take up a position in philosophy ("Associate Professor" equivalent; "W2 Professor" in Munich's system) at LMU Munich in August 2025.

Advice to prospective PhD students in light of...well, everything!

Philosophy PhD student Charles Bakker writes:

I have always appreciated your efforts to help prospective graduate students make informed decisions as they consider which philosophy programs to apply to. In light of where things are at currently in our field - the shuttering of philosophy departments around the world, the attacks on academia by the U.S. government, the general lack of funding for graduate students [BL:  in some departments, in some the funding is very good], and the already hyper-competitive job market for recent PhD graduates - I would be curious to know what your guidance would now be to a prospective philosophy graduate student. Would you recommend that they think twice about entering a program? Would you advise them not to expect to get a job for X number of years on average after graduating? Bear in mind that as departments close, as more and more courses get offloaded to cheaper contract instructors, and as tenure gets stripped away in places controlled by right wing ideologues, the number of experienced academics entering the job market also increases, making it even less likely that junior academics will find a place in academia. 

The first five weeks of Trump II--which have been a disaster, worse than even I expected (and my expectations were low)--adds to all these concerns, since Trump II promises to be very bad for higher education in the U.S.  (I'll write more about that soon.)   Still my advice now would simply be a variation on the advice I've given individual students for the last 15 years or so (on the assumption that someone is getting a PhD with an eye to earning a living as a PhD philosopher):  do not go to a graduate program unless you get funding; and only go to a top PhD program, if not overall, then at least in your field.  What is a "top PhD program"?  Top 20ish in the U.S. is a reasonable cut-off, with any other Anglophone program ranked equivalent being comparable.  Examples of "top" in a specialty would be UC Irvine's program in "Logic and Philosophy of Science."   These are good rules of thumb.  If you are considering schools not in these categories, scrutinize the placement data carefully.   There are far too many schools offering a PhD in philosophy, as we have noted before, and if these PhD programs are adequately funding their students, then that is something.   But I do think now is an especially important moment for PhD programs in the U.S. to think about whether they ought to exist.  Terminal M.A. programs (which I started emphasizing in the PGR a quarter-century ago) have played a very important role in helping develop students for success in PhD programs and also helping students figure out whether an academic career is for them.  The profession, especially given what's coming, could benefit from more good terminal MA programs and fewer PhD programs.

I would invite perspectives from readers but you must include a full name if you are a faculty member and, regardless, a valid email address (which will not appear).

Determinism

The blog, from philosopher Stephen Maitzen.

If Trump defies the courts, what can the courts do?

A very informative piece by two NYU law professors.  Because court orders are usually directed at particular officials within agencies, courts can cause those miscreants some pain, including imposing financial penalties they have to pay in their personal capacity.  At the end of the day, of course, law runs out, and the best protection is that there will be an economic calamity if Trump the Holmesian Bad Man defies the courts.  My guess is he won't cross that red line, for the same reason that his nominees related to financial and business matters were fairly normal Republican choices, rather than batshit crazies like RFK Jr. and Peter Hegseth.  But we'll soon know whether that is too optimistic!

Trump's war on Canada: Canadians are not amused

Quite understandably:

(Thanks to Paul Russell for the pointer.)

 

Open access philosophy books: a thread

MOVING TO FRONT FROM FEBRUARY 3--MORE LINKS TO 'OPEN ACCESS' BOOKS WELCOME (new links at #24, below)

I've been periodically announcing open access books, sometimes in the Cambridge Elements series, where books are available for free for a couple of weeks or a month upon publication, and sometimes books for which authors have paid for permanet open access (see, e.g., OUP's terms).

In light of the growing number of these volumes, I am going to run a thread periodically in which I invite authors or readers to share links to philosophical works that are currently or permanently "open access."  Please use your full name and a valid email address (the latter will not appear) and include the URL for the book (give the title and the author, if you are not the author).  Authors or readers can only say something about the work and what it tries to do.  Please indicate if the "open access" period is limited.  If the thread doesn't get too long, I'll move it to the front periodically to encourage more additions.  Once it gets too long, I'll start a new thread.  (Note:  you can just copy and paste the URL for the book, you don't need to format it.)

Since I am only catching a few of these open access books, I hope this thread will capture a wider range of the book-length work that is now available for free.

In Memoriam: David Keyt (1930-2025)

Professor Keyt, a longtime member of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he was emeritus, died January 31.  He was well-known for his work on ancient moral and political philosophy.  Comments are open for remembrances from those who knew Professor Keyt or for those who wish to comment on the significance of his work.

Speech of the new Oxford Chancellor

An excerpt (mostly blather, but this was apt):

We do not need to agree on everything, indeed we should not. I am pleased to say we do not need a foreign policy: we are not a country. Nor do we need a view on every daily occurrence: we are not a newspaper. The concern of a university is that opinions are reached on the basis of truth, reason and knowledge, which in turn requires thinking and speaking with freedom.  

(Thanks to Oliver Marshall for the pointer.)

Here's the little fascist sycophant who cooked up the idea of slashing NIH research funding...

...and he's got other "ideas":

To scare universities straight, [Education Sectetary] McMahon should start by taking a prize scalp. She should simply destroy Columbia University.

Columbia was, perhaps, the worst offender in indulging the pro-Hamas campus radicals. The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights should initiate a compliance review of every single decision Columbia made. To do that, OCR would need the identities of every single foreign student who supported the protests, actions the Trump administration could deem material support of a terrorist organization. Border czar Tom Homan could then revoke every single one of the foreign protesting students’ visas.

If Columbia doesn’t cooperate, McMahon could cut off its research grant funding.

If they do cooperate, she’ll surely find the evidence necessary to cut off its Title IV funding. That would mean that Columbia would become ineligible to receive federal research grants and subsidized student loans, which would jeopardize nearly half of its revenue....

And while the Trump administration is looking into Columbia, the Justice Department should thoroughly explore indicting former Columbia President Lee Bollinger for fraud if he, through commission or omission, played a role in Columbia’s submission of inaccurate data to US News and World Report. Bollinger submitted the data to boost Columbia’s rank in the report. Once the true data were reported, Colubmia’s rank fell from second to 18th.

College presidents regard Bollinger as perhaps the greatest college leader of the 21^st century. He should be regarded as the worst. Perhaps the college presidents could learn a valuable lesson from the sight of him in an orange jumpsuit.

In Memoriam: Tom Beauchamp (1939-2025)

Emeritus in philosophy at Georgetown University, where he spent his academic career, Professor Beauchamp was especially well-known for his work in bioethics and on Hume.  Comments are open for remembrances from those who knew Professor Beauchamp or for those who would like to comment on the significance of his work.

Another canary in the coal mine: University of Pittsburgh suspends PhD admissions across all departments...

...due to the "financial uncertainty" created by the threat to NIH funding (Pittsburgh, recall, is a major recipient of NIH funding).  The suspension applies across all departments, according to the linked article, not just programs in the medical sciences.  Is this happening elsewhere?

(Thanks to Ruchira Paul for the pointer.)

The war on public health begins

The imbecile leading the Department of Health & Human Services has ordered the CDC to stop advertising flu shots (flu shots!!!), in favor of encouraging "informed consent" to vaccines.

Can academic freedom survive the AAUP?

It's a good question, asked by my colleague Tom Ginsburg, discussing the latest stupidity to emanate from the clueless academics populating the AAUP's Committee A (Professor Ginsburg discusses the earlier stupidity as well, as I did as well).   If academic freedom surviveds over the next decades it will be because of the organizations actually committed to it, like the Academic Freedom Alliance and FIRE--and the lawyers they help fund.

Simone Weil's vision for a post-fascist Europe

A curious work, I was not familiar with it.

(Thanks to Robert McGarvey for the pointer.)

The sociologist Randall Collins on Elon Musk's personality and management style and its relevance to the present

Interesting read.

(Thanks to Howard Berman for the pointer.)

Canary in the coal mine: UC San Diego suspends *all* faculty and staff hiring "for the indefinite future"

On the earlier thread about whether those with job offers should accept quickly, Professor Sam Elgin at UC San Diego just posted the following:  "My university - UC San Diego - has just announced a complete freeze on all faculty and staff hiring for the indefinite future. Our Executive Vice Chancellor cited financial uncertainty arising from potential federal funding cuts, which could account for a 10% budget shortfall for the campus."

This is extremely ominous. 

An insightful list of ways in which people "go along" with authoritarians...

...from M. Gessen, who has written frequently about Putin and the phenomenon of "anticipatory obedience" there:

In my experience, most of the time, when people or institutions cede power voluntarily, they are acting not so much out of fear but rather on a set of apparently reasonable arguments. These arguments tend to fall into one or more of five categories.

First, the responsibility-for-others argument. In 2004, I assigned and edited an article by a man who had protested Putin’s handling of a hostage crisis at a school in which more than 300 people had died. I was fiddling with the headline when one of the people in charge materialized next to my desk. If you publish that, he warned me, the entire staff of the publishing house might lose their jobs. To the best of my knowledge, the Kremlin had never threatened or even criticized the publishing house for editorial content. (The man in question now says he never tried to stop me.).... My boss...was asking me to weigh the value of one article against the livelihoods of hundreds of people. The article wasn’t published.

 

"British Philosophy Fortnight," 17th-31st March 2025

Philosopher Simon Kirchin, Director of the British Philosophy Association, shared the following:

This is to announce that the British Philosophical Association, along with other individuals and organisations, has been busy organizing the first ever British Philosophy Fortnight to take place this year.  The aim is to celebrate all that is positive in the world of UK philosophy - education and learning, research and policy impact, ideas and arguments.  We want to show how much philosophy changes lives and improves society.

We are organizing two launch events on Thursday 20th March - one in Parliament (morning) and one in Senate House, University of London (afternoon) - where we will have a line-up of guest speakers and specially invited guests.  There will also be a student competition, some newly commissioned videos and school materials for everyone to view and use, and a range of events up and down the UK.  

A lecture on empiricism by Bas van Fraassen...

...from 1990 at Calvin College.

The real threat to Canada? America is falling apart

Probably right.

(Thanks to Charles Bakker for the pointer.)

Plato, Hobbes and Mill on inequality

Political theorist David Lay Williams comments.

In Memoriam: David Miller (1942-2024)

Professor Miller, a longtime member of the philosophy faculty at the University of Warwick, was a well-known defender of Karl Popper's philosophy of science and epistemology, and also wrote widely in mathematical logic.  He died in November 2024. The Warwick memorial notice is here.  Comments are open for remembrances from those who knew Dr. Miller or those who would like to comment on the significance of his work.

(Thanks to Jeffrey Ketland for the pointer.)

DOE Office of Civil Rights issues "Dear Colleague" letter regarding race-conscious programs of any kind

CHE reports:

OCR’s letter offers an expansive interpretation of the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, which banned the consideration of an applicant’s racial status. Though the so-called SFFA decision pertained only to admissions evaluations, Trainor wrote that the ruling “applies more broadly,” prohibiting institutions from considering race in “hiring, promotion, compensation, financial aid, scholarships, prizes, administrative support, discipline, housing, graduation ceremonies, and all other aspects of student, academic, and campus life.”

The SFFA decision did not hold what the OCR letter says, but it is almost certain that the current Supreme Court would agree with this blanket prohibition on the consideration of race.  And that's probably the bet that the Trump Administration is taking:  namely, that universities will comply because they anticipate that in a legal challenge, SCOTUS will side with Trump.

Racial preferences, as we have noted many times before, are deeply unpopular with the vast majority of Americans, including racial minorities (and putting aside their questionable legality).  The academy is one of the few institutions, along with portions of the media, still strongly committed to "diversity."  (Corporate America talks the "diversity" talk because it's cheap to do so and no threat to the plutocracy; now that it may be illegal, I suspect them to abandon the sinking diversity ship quickly.)  I, for one, will not be sorry to see the end of "diversity blather" in higher education, although I will be sorry it comes at the cost of actual affirmative action for the victims of American apartheid.  Of the battles higher education will need to fight right now with the Trump-lodytes, this is not the one that universities have any chance of winning, either before the courts or in the court of public opinion.

(Parts of the letter overreach the paragraph above, and suggest that it could be unlawful to teach about racial disparities.  Any attempt to try to prevent expression of the viewpoint that racial disparities are real and deleterious in America would meet with successful First Amendment challenges.)

Richard Marshall interviews Michael Rescorla...

...at 3:16 AM.

The new McCarthyism: not directed at communists, but pro-Palestinian activists

This is charming:  identifying people to be deported.

Blog readership, a periodic update

Since I began taking summer blogging hiatuses, blog traffic has stabilized at a new norm of roughly 3.1 million unique visits per year (3.2 million last year, as it happens).  (Page views are higher, but unique visits are a more accurate measure of readership, since page views can be artificially inflated by blog design.)  That's an average of about 260,000 visits per month, but the monthly total is lower during the summer hiatus months and higher during the academic year in the Northern Hemisphere. Thanks, as always, for reading.

In defiance of Trump's persecution of transgender people...

...Michigan's largest healthcare provider resumes treating them.

Should job seekers accept offers quickly given the threats to the universities?

A colleague elsewhere expressed the view on FB that they should, and that may be right.  When universities face financial uncertainty, they do try reduce future costs, of which salaries for faculty are usually the most important.  It is not crazy that job offers will disappear in the face of the Trump war on the universities.  I would be interested to hear either from job seekers or faculty about the problems they have confronted on this score.  Please use a valid email address, but job seekers, in particular, may post anonymously.  The email address will not appear.

Please post your comment only once, they may take awhile to appear.

Of all the awful nominees Trump has put forward...

...I still think the ignorant Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. may be the most dangerous.  And he is now Secretary of Health & Human Services.  Why is this so dangerous?  As the NYT notes, he has spent years trafficking in junk science:

As the nation’s health secretary, Mr. Kennedy “would have wide powers to advance his favored research studies, publications, or scientific data,” according to Lawrence O. Gostin, a public health law expert at Georgetown University. Mr. Kennedy’s critics fear that the public will have neither the time nor the training to sort through a war that seems to pit one study against another, and that the result will be a rapid decline in confidence in vaccines.

“The Mawson paper [on vaccines and autism] epitomizes Kennedy’s consistent inability to distinguish junk science from reliable information,” said Dr. John P. Moore, professor of microbiology and immunology at Weill Cornell Medical College, who said that study and some of the others Mr. Kennedy has cited in the past are published by “fringe journals.”

Whether this buffoon destroys public health in America will now turn on whether Senator Cassidy, the cowardly MD from Louisiana, actually exercises oversight.  State health departments, at least in the civilized states, will now have to take the lead.  

There is no bottom to dumb: Elon Musk edition

Ross Hyman, a computer scientist here at UChicago, writes:

I have not seen this mentioned anywhere, probably because it is impossible to keep up with all the wrong things that Elon Musk has been saying

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1888022189984858476

But when Elon says “Can you believe that universities with tens of billions in endowments were siphoning off 60% of research award money for “overhead”?”, this is conflating the indirect rate with the percentage of the award.

The simplest way to show that these are different is to consider the extreme case of a university with a 100% indirect rate. That would mean that for each dollar that the NIH is awarding to a PI for direct costs, their university is receiving one dollar in indirect costs so the percentage of the award going to indirect costs is 50% not 100%.

For the 60% rate that Elon refers to, for every dollar to the PI’s direct costs, 60 cents goes to indirect costs. So, the percentage of the award going to indirect costs is 60/160 = 37.5%

Some of the indirect cost goes to a University’s Research Computing Center, which provides computing services to the grantee as well as all researchers on campus with or without grant awards. If Research Computing Centers were not funded by indirect costs, then researchers would need to pay for computing time out of their grants and computing time would not be available to people who are working on projects without grant money, which is necessary to develop successful pilots to get grant money, and would deprive the world of a lot of interesting research.

America's future under Trump: "competitive authoritarianism"

This seems a plausible assessment:

U.S. democracy will likely break down during the second Trump administration, in the sense that it will cease to meet standard criteria for liberal democracy: full adult suffrage, free and fair elections, and broad protection of civil liberties.

The breakdown of democracy in the United States will not give rise to a classic dictatorship in which elections are a sham and the opposition is locked up, exiled, or killed. Even in a worst-case scenario, Trump will not be able to rewrite the Constitution or overturn the constitutional order. He will be constrained by independent judges, federalism, the country’s professionalized military, and high barriers to constitutional reform. There will be elections in 2028, and Republicans could lose them.

But authoritarianism does not require the destruction of the constitutional order. What lies ahead is not fascist or single-party dictatorship but competitive authoritarianism—a system in which parties compete in elections but the incumbent’s abuse of power tilts the playing field against the opposition. Most autocracies that have emerged since the end of the Cold War fall into this category, including Alberto Fujimori’s Peru, Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela, and contemporary El Salvador, Hungary, India, Tunisia, and Turkey. Under competitive authoritarianism, the formal architecture of democracy, including multiparty elections, remains intact. Opposition forces are legal and aboveground, and they contest seriously for power. Elections are often fiercely contested battles in which incumbents have to sweat it out. And once in a while, incumbents lose, as they did in Malaysia in 2018 and in Poland in 2023. But the system is not democratic, because incumbents rig the game by deploying the machinery of government to attack opponents and co-opt critics. Competition is real but unfair.

Competitive authoritarianism will transform political life in the United States. As Trump’s early flurry of dubiously constitutional executive orders made clear, the cost of public opposition will rise considerably: Democratic Party donors may be targeted by the IRS; businesses that fund civil rights groups may face heightened tax and legal scrutiny or find their ventures stymied by regulators. Critical media outlets will likely confront costly defamation suits or other legal actions as well as retaliatory policies against their parent companies. Americans will still be able to oppose the government, but opposition will be harder and riskier, leading many elites and citizens to decide that the fight is not worth it. A failure to resist, however, could pave the way for authoritarian entrenchment—with grave and enduring consequences for global democracy.

(Thanks to Craig Duncan for the pointer.)

Kansas bill would effectively eliminate tenure...

...since it eliminates the ongoing property interest in the position (which is what triggers due process provisions) and eliminate the need to show "good cause" for termination.  (Bizarrely the CHE article repeats the proponent's propaganda that the bill does not eliminate tenure:  that's exactly what it does.)

(Thanks to Gregory Mayer for the pointer.)

LSU law professor Ken Levy sues university over his removal from classroom

MOVING TO FRONT AGAIN (ORIGINALLY POSTED JANUARY 30) --MORE UPDATES

Story here.  (A "go fund me" campaign for his legal fees has been started here.)  "Fuck Landry" and "fuck Trump" are admirable sentiments, but it's not clear they fall within the scope of his academic freedom as a teacher (it would depend on the nuances of the context of what he was teaching that day).  They are certainly not protected by his general free speech rights (he would be protected had he stood on a street corner saying that).  Faculty have less freedom of expression in the classroom than they do outside it.  Still, the absence of any notice or opportunity to defend against the allegations is a serious procedural failing by LSU, quite apart from the substantive merits (which, as I said, require more detail about context to evaluate).  Just to be clear:  even if he had no right to say what he did in the classroom, this is not even close to a firing offense, no matter how much the lawless Landry would like that.

UPDATE:  A state court has already issued a temporary restraining order on LSU, ordering that Professor Levy be returned to the classroom.  From the account here, it now seems clear that the comments at issue were a case of mentioning rather than using "fuck the governor" and humor.  Thank goodness for courts still committed to the rule of law.

2/5/25 UPDATE:   An appeal court has overruled the lower court's decision that Professor Levy must be returned to the classroom.  If Professor Levy prevails on the merits, his continuing absence from the classroom will then figure in an assessment of damages he is due for the university's action.

2/12/25 UPDATE:  Another judge has now ordered LSU to return Professor Levy to the classroom.  The decision to suspend him was made by the University President!

 

Trump's brazen lawlessness

Presidents sometimes "push the envelope" on their powers, but that is not what Trump has been doing:  normal Presidents "push the envelope" where the law is not settled or ambiguous.  Trump is just a brazen lawbreaker.   Here's one account by a law professor from more than a week ago!  The list has gotten longer since.  Almost all of these are not close cases.  As I remarked the other day, Trump is the proverbial "Holmesian Bad Man," who recognizes neither legal nor moral obligations:  the only relevant question concerns a cost-benefit analysis about whether it "pays off" to violate those supposed obligations.    

Leading research universities and their member organizations are among those who have sued over the illegal cuts to NIH funding

Here's the complaint:  Download NIH funding complaint.   As Gabe Mendlow points out to me, one of the lead lawyers on this case is a conservative legal stalwart, Paul Clement, a good advocate to have especially if this gets to the Supreme Court.

If the cuts to NIH funding go into effect the cost would be extraordinary for some schools with major medical schools

A federal judge has enjoined Trump/Musk's plainly illegal change to NIH support for indirect expenses (we'll see if the lawless Trump complies), but CHE has compiled some data on the likely cost to schools if the reimbursement rate for indirect costs were cut to 15% (these are estimates based on 2024 data), and some of the (rounded) numbers are staggering (especially for schools with large, major research medical schools):

Johns Hopkins University:  $153,000,000

University of Pennsylvania:  $140,000,000

University of California, San Francisco:  $139,000,000

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor:  $130,000,000

University of Pittsburgh:  $121,000,000

Washington University, St. Louis:  $117,000,000

Stanford University:  $114,000,000 (the Stanford Provost has pegged the cost at $160,000,000)

University of Washington, Seattle:  $93,000,000

University of California, Los Angeles:  $70,000,000

University of Texas Southwestern:  $66,000,000

University of Chicago:  $48,000,000

Chicago's medical school is much smaller than at other places, but UChicago is already running at $220,000,000 deficit thanks to its former President Robert Zimmer.  There is no way the school could absorb an extra $48,000,000 in expenses.

The state of Texas is estimated to lose a half billion dollars in federal funding for research if these proposed cuts take effect.  North Carolina would lose nearly $400 million; Ohio $280 million; Florida, $233 million.  I will bet money that every university leader in Texas has been in touch with Senators Cruz and Cornyn about this, and the same for the Republican Senators in other states.  My guess is that Trump will back off, once it becomes clear that Republicans hate this too.

Everything may have a cause, but most things do not happen for a reason

Philosopher Tracy Llanera comments.

Blast from the past: The importance of writing unfavorable tenure reviews

Back in 2012, when it still seemed like tenure had a future!

Here's a direct, and quite plausible, radical take on what's going on with Trump's return to power

Written before he took office, but it is certainly apt given his first few weeks in power.  An excerpt:

The incoming administration will be a government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich. To a degree unprecedented in American history, the oligarchy itself will exercise direct control over the state–from Musk, the world’s richest man and head of the Orwellian “Department of Government Efficiency,” to the assemblage of billionaires that will staff Trump’s cabinet and White House. As of mid-December, the total wealth of this top tier of the Trump administration was estimated at nearly half a trillion dollars.

The character of the new government marks a violent realignment of the state to correspond with the nature of capitalist society itself. The world’s richest individuals and corporations control resources on an unfathomable scale, with a growing number of centibillionaires whose personal wealth exceeds the GDP of the world’s 120 poorest nations. In the United States, the three wealthiest people now collectively control more wealth than the bottom 50 percent of the population combined.

Globally, the top 1 percent now possesses more wealth than the bottom 99 percent. According to the latest summary by Bloomberg News, the world’s 500 richest people “grew vastly richer in 2024,” reaching a new milestone: $10 trillion in total net worth. Bloomberg reports that “Eight tech titans alone gained more than $600 billion this year, 43% of the $1.5 trillion increase among the 500 richest people.”

The re-election of Trump is the culmination of an extended process of political reaction and a harbinger of what is to come....

The incoming administration is planning, from “day one,” to implement a massive assault on democratic rights, focused initially on immigrants and refugees. Among its most extreme proposals is the abolition of birthright citizenship, a cornerstone of the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution, adopted after the Civil War. The targeting of immigrant workers is the spearhead for a broader attack on the democratic and social rights of the entire working class, as the government prepares to enact further tax cuts for the rich and a coordinated assault on every social program won by workers through bitter struggle.

The processes clearly evident in the United States are in fact universal. Across the world, capitalist governments are staggered by massive political crises, confronting popular opposition and increasingly turning to authoritarian measures. 

Excellent statement from the leadership at UW Madison, which explains what "indirect" expenses are very well

Here; an excerpt:

As part of how the government provides funding, and how it has done so for decades, federal agencies like the NIH – most typically through highly competitive grant processes – allocate funding to individual projects and institutions. This funding supports direct expenses like staff salaries, graduate student stipends, and supplies. It also supports indirect costs, which include everything from large, shared scientific equipment, to laboratory and facility construction costs, data infrastructure costs, utilities, the costs of administering grants appropriately and the often-considerable expense of complying with federal rules and regulations surrounding research.

These so-called “indirect costs” aren’t optional expenses. They are both substantial and an absolutely fundamental part of innovative science. As is the case while running your household, you need both money to buy groceries (direct) and the financial resources to keep a working refrigerator and electricity (indirect) to store your milk and eggs.

The latest threat to academic freedom in Texas

Texas is considering removing faculty from the faculty appointments process:

“College professors have increasingly pushed woke agendas,” [Governor] Abbott said. “They have too much influence over who is hired to educate our kids. We need legislation that prohibits professors from having any say over employment decisions.”

Does anyone in the age of AI remember Bildung?

Philosopher Johannes Steizinger comments.