NSF has suspended Terry Tao's grant

Scope of the NSF Action

• Commenters clarify this is not a routine “rejection” but suspension of an already-awarded NSF grant, as part of roughly 300 UCLA grants paused after a DOJ Title VI finding about a “hostile educational environment for Jewish and Israeli students.”
• Some see this as a broad hit on UCLA rather than anything specific to Tao, and expect many more NSF/NIH grants at UCLA to be affected.
• There is debate on terminology: suspension vs cancellation, and whether this is temporary leverage pending a settlement or a de facto cut.

Civil Rights vs. Political Retaliation

• One camp treats the DOJ finding and funding suspension as normal civil-rights enforcement: if UCLA violated Title VI / Equal Protection, federal money can legitimately be conditioned.
• Another camp calls it “mafia-style extortion” and collective punishment: punishing uninvolved researchers to force institutional capitulation, with no due process.
• Several argue “antisemitism” is being used as a pretext to suppress pro‑Palestinian or anti‑Israel speech; others insist that harassment and exclusion of Jewish students (e.g., blocking access, threats) go beyond protected speech and trigger legal duties.
• There is disagreement on campus facts: some describe fenced encampments with critical but non‑antisemitic slogans; others cite videos and reports of Jewish students being blocked or targeted.

Free Speech, Universities, and the First Amendment

• Long subthread over whether public universities may restrict protests and what “hostile environment” means under US law.
• Some argue UCLA was pressured both to suppress protests (violating students’ First Amendment rights) and now to punish them for not suppressing hard enough.
• Others analogize to civil‑rights‑era failures to protect Black students, arguing universities do have duties to intervene when protests become discriminatory or violent.

Impact on Science, Math, and Talent Flows

• Many see this as part of a broader, chaotic year for US STEM: defunding, politicized oversight, and “Cultural Revolution”‑style ideological enforcement.
• Fears of lasting damage to US scientific soft power, with remarks that “destroying is easier than building” and that this could drive a second major brain drain to Europe or elsewhere.
• Mathematicians are seen as relatively mobile intellectually, but non‑US systems often lack comparable funding; some European institutions report rising interest from US applicants.

Broader Geopolitics and Culture War Context

• Extensive discussion connects the grants decision to US polarization over Israel/Palestine, shifting public opinion (especially among younger generations), and the power of pro‑Israel lobbies and evangelical support.
• Multiple commenters warn that once this funding‑as‑punishment precedent exists, future administrations could weaponize it in the opposite direction (e.g., against pro‑Israel schools).
• Others generalize this as another step in US drift toward authoritarian, anti‑science, and religio‑ideological governance, with historical analogies to China’s Cultural Revolution and the decline of prior “enlightened” societies.