[FRIAM] Inside Trump’s Pressure Campaign on Universities - The New York Times

Fri Apr 18 16:06:17 EDT 2025

I’m with Cody, not just on the government memo, but also on some part of what journalists do here.

Here was the subtitle:
“The opaque process, part of a strategy by conservatives to realign the liberal tilt of elite universities, has upended higher education."

The photographer Steve McCurry used a nice expression in one of his National Geo compilation books about things he photographed in India, in which part of what people could do by way of housing is “painted-over rot”.  That comes to mind for the writing style above.

The term “liberal tilt” is a perfect term for making thought impossible by refusing to call things by operational terms.

The goal of autocrats, and especially of totalitarian autocrats, as we have discussed, is to eliminate the role of truth as a referee over contestents in a society.  That’s the core here.  By “ideology” they want placed, they mean a they want a sufficient membership of a power-motivated defense of corruption and the end of the main aims of rule of law, that the more complicated organization needed to stop that exploit becomes infeasible through constant sabotage.  

There is a different thing under the header “liberal tilt”, which is nothing like the former, and that is the tendency for mobbing behavior to get out of hand, and for reformist groups to refuse to police their own back toward good-faith and constructive behavior, because they worry that allowing internal dissent will threaten their fragile gains.  (Or for some, because they are part of the mob, and like any people, a fraction of them won’t turn down power if they find it is available to them.)  The pattern of authoritarian lying presents this latter problem as the main aim, though of course it is merely an entry point of convenience for them (like “antisemitism”, which has near-nothing to do with real antisemitism in most of its uses).

I guess there’s nothing new to say about it, that Eric Blair didn’t already say, and yet I feel unsatisfied that there is something not-clear, or not-articulated, in the things that go together, though.  It is about the nature of doublespeak, to go back to Cody.  The authoritarians on one hand lie, claiming they are acting to correct an actual annoyance (in which they don’t have that much interest, as it is useful to them, sort of like Hamas was useful to Netanyahu for a decade), as if the lie were good cover for the actual purpose, which is fascist capture.  On the other hand, though, they gloat over open breaking of laws, taunting “what are you going to do about it; we prepared a mob that will back us up, do you have a mob to prevent it?” (that’s the sort of CC translation I would like to see an LLM give on youtube for essentially everything Karoline Leavitt says), which only functions when everybody hearing the lie knows it is a lie already.  

It feels to me like a second-order mechanism.  We normally cast the purpose of lying as deception.  But here I think that’s not it.  The intended purpose for the lie is only achieved when the lie is understood to be a lie by all involved.  Yet the form of lying is retained.  What’s the model of human “comprehension” and motivation in which the fine structure of this would have been correctly predicted from our picture of how things work?

Eric

> On Apr 19, 2025, at 3:29 AM, Stephen Guerin <stephen.guerin at simtable.com> wrote:
> 
> Gift link below (Cody, which is an interesting authorization pattern for partial licensing of content and code. Eg clipboard scenario links)
> 
> Inside Trump’s Pressure Campaign on Universities https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/14/us/politics/trump-pressure-universities.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Ak8.du6b.i8iKUf0iLNom&smid=nytcore-android-share
> 
> ____________________________________________
> CEO Founder, Simtable.com
> stephen.guerin at simtable.com 
> 
> Harvard Visualization Research and Teaching Lab
> stephenguerin at fas.harvard.edu
> 
> mobile: (505)577-5828
> 
> On Fri, Apr 18, 2025, 11:40 AM cody dooderson <d00d3rs0n at gmail.com> wrote:
> I don't have access to that article, but I did read the letter from the White House to Harvard. I found it to be a sickening use of doublespeak. For instance, It demands for a critical mass of approved "ideologically diverse faculty", and then in the next paragraphs demands the removal of all DEI programs and policies. Presumably "Ideologically diverse" means "MAGA republicans" and "DEI" means "people who are not white men". 
> 
> 
> Here is a link to it: https://www.harvard.edu/research-funding/wp-content/uploads/sites/16/2025/04/Letter-Sent-to-Harvard-2025-04-11.pdf .
> 
> _ Cody Smith _
> d00d3rs0n at gmail.com
> 
> 
> On Mon, Apr 14, 2025 at 11:19 AM Tom Johnson <jtjohnson555 at gmail.com> wrote:
> https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/14/us/politics/trump-pressure-universities.html
> 
> =======================
> Tom Johnson
> Inst. for Analytic Journalism
> Santa Fe, New Mexico
> 505-577-6482
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