With Vance on this, Harvard is unironically doomed.

As an initial note, the gov't should be following the law and isn't. This is wrong. Harvard deserves due process like everyone else. But at some point, it will get due process and it will be utterly screwed. A thread:

1. Vance is right about the reproducibility crisis. This crisis is made possible by the academic dysfunction that comes from groupthink. Anyone who's been in academia knows you can't afford to contradict the powerful, because it will end your career. That can be powerful personalities, or it can be those who can wield political power via DEI or harassment claims. The result's the same-knowledge creation is broken. Progress has been massively slowed. Diseases go uncured, useless or harmful "treatments" get promoted, etc.

As a result, you, personally, know someone who has been injured or died because someone in academia got pissy. More to the point, because Harvard is such a big player, you know someone who died because someone at Harvard got pissy and nobody in charge over there gave enough of a crap to fix the environment despite decades of warnings.

Is the existence of such an environment at Harvard a perfectly legitimate reason to refuse to provide future research grants? You bet it is! Not only is it legitimate, it's arguably morally required. 1/ 2. Vance is right that colleges most certainly do engage in the grossest kind of unlawful race discrimination. Not just in admissions but in employment. Stories of rejecting white or male candidates simply because they are white or male are legion. This was never legal, and is nevertheless routine beyond your wildest nightmares. It's not even subtle. Very left-leaning faculty members routinely tell me and others at FIRE about it, under promises that we won't name them.

But in academia, it's not secret at all. They will write it in emails, talk about it in meetings, say it on recordings. If the EEOC or DOJ or whoever gets serious about investigating this, Harvard (and, to be fair, nearly any college) is utterly sunk. Colleges rightly figured they could get away with this for the very good reason that they always got away with this. The problem is that they did so much unlawful discrimination that they are basically sitting on huge amounts of blackmail evidence that can be used to destroy them by denying them funding. Again, the admin is ignoring due process and doing this the wrong way. But if they do it the right way, Harvard is going to be totally doomed.

As a note, the "everyone lies" system is particularly hard on people on the autism spectrum, who have a very tough time accepting the idea that a written rule can say one thing and the actual rule in practice means the opposite. I was in private practice for just a couple years and this happened to multiple of my clients who were on the spectrum. I would explain to them that yes, the college said one thing, but it actually meant the opposite in practice, and that everyone around them knew this. They could not accept this. I found that frustrating to deal with, but eventually realized that I can't blame them for not being willing to accept an unacceptable situation. 2/

With @ColumbiaU on its 3rd president in 7 months, trustees, faculty, and staff need to realize that they are on course to bankrupt and destroy the college. This can be avoided, but it needs dramatic action now. A thread. First: am I exaggerating? Columbia is sitting on a $15 billion endowment. They can afford a $400m hit, once or twice maybe, but an asset fire sale is going to kill value. How long can it stay solvent (able to pay bills as they come due)?
endowment.giving.columbia.edu/endowment-perf…