I speak at Harvard as it faces its biggest crisis since 1636

Interest in the talk itself

• A few commenters note that, amid the political crisis, the advertised lecture topic (limits of rational perception, computability vs. knowability) sounds especially compelling and will be streamed and recorded.

Harvard’s wealth, endowment, and “war chest”

• Some argue Harvard is effectively a $50B fund with a university attached; losing federal research money won’t threaten its survival, only bloated administration.
• Others push back: endowment money is less flexible than it looks (legal restrictions, donor intent), and assuming it can easily be redeployed for political battles is misleading.
• There’s debate over whether endowments should ever be tapped for “non-specified” purposes in a systemic crisis.

Is the Trump letter normal conditionality or authoritarian overreach?

• One camp calls the federal letter blatant overreach: government acting as Harvard’s HR department, demanding abolition of DEI while mandating “viewpoint diversity,” auditing admissions and hiring, and conditioning existing grants on new ideological terms.
• They describe this as contract-breaking, executive blackmail, and part of a pattern of refusing to honor commitments.
• Others insist taxpayers are not obligated to fund Harvard “no matter what,” and see the conditions as a legitimate response to perceived ideological capture or “communist/socialist rhetoric.”

Should public money fund private universities at all?

• A substantial subthread argues that private universities should not receive federal research funding or enjoy tax exemption, especially given their real-estate wealth.
• Counterarguments: US research has long depended on private universities; excluding them would harm scientific progress and is a poor, non-merit-based allocation of funds.
• Some take this further, suggesting ending most public payments to private entities; critics call that unworkable and “hilariously silly.”

Antisemitism, Israel, and pretexts

• Many agree the crackdown is not really about antisemitism but about seizing ideological control of elite institutions; antisemitism is seen as a convenient pretext.
• Others contend elite universities historically have antisemitism problems and have failed to protect Jewish students; they see genuine issues but also an overcorrection.
• A dissenting view argues that US campuses, especially Harvard, are among the least antisemitic places and that conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism helped legitimize today’s assault on academia.

DEI, academic freedom, and hypocrisy

• Some commenters emphasize prior illiberal trends within academia: DEI loyalty oaths, ideological hiring filters, suppression of disfavored research topics, and poor free-speech records; they view universities as reaping what they sowed.
• Others maintain that whatever internal problems exist, government-compelled speech codes and hiring mandates in the opposite direction are worse, and the real principle should be keeping the state out of ideological governance entirely.

“Burn it down and rebuild” vs. reform

• A long subthread explores the idea (popular in some tech circles) of cutting off federal loans, research funds, and tax exemptions to push existing universities into collapse and then “rebuild” new institutions.
• Critics warn this would cause brain drain, damage US science, and likely yield more ideological, lower-quality schools.
• Some favor more modest structural reforms instead (e.g., changing accreditation, spreading research funding beyond a few rich elites, limiting grant concentration).