How the world has changed...or I was just a lucky sheltered kid. Graduating engineering in Saskatchewan in 2002 without a protest in sight or a confrontation over politics. I was there for education and a future career so maybe I had my blinders on or it was a time of peace.
I do agree campuses should be less political but I'm not sure you can call that ship back to port once it's sailed.
And then if you still want to insist that both sides are equally at fault and there's no differences fundamentally between how conservatives and liberals behave since Trump took over the Republican party then I guess you are free to hold on to those delusions. Or that the excesses of wokeism justify the authoritarian crackdown across our federal government, The firings of tens of thousands of people in our sciences and medicine and the destruction of social safety nets , plus the cyber criminals working for Musk stealing data and shipping it to Russian accounts overseas (see NPR story on the National Labor relations board data theft and hacking) than of course you should continue to hold those views.Apparently, your views are non-falsifiable by any contrary evidence.
By the way these attacks on the universities were never about anti-Semitism, particularly from a president who has met with and/or glorified neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers. And his leading donor and destroyer of federal agencies, Musk, gives Nazi salutes and along with his vice president gave support to the far-right German party that believes that the Holocaust has been overplayed and wasn't so bad after all-- and a top advisor named Gorka is affiliated with neo-Nazi European organizations.
So attacking wokeism and attacking anti-Semitism is just a rhetorical con job that you apparently have fallen for and many others have done so:
It's worth realizing that exclusion of "minorities" - women, people of color - has been the historic norm.
This really shouldn't be a "fairness" exercise based on so-called conservative values. IMO, those exist solely for the benefit of white males - and that's always been the case in Western Europe. Therefore, the term "conservative."
How many people have been harmed by foolish white males showing off to other white males (promotion, you know), rather than doing their jobs to the best of their abilities?
This is brilliant! What a fantastic way to present your argument. A 2022 survey of Harvard faculty found over 80% identifying as liberal or very liberal, with only 1% identifying as conservative. That is the case with most Ivy League and other universities. I would like the federal government to stop giving money to these schools. Why is America funding the rich to educate the rich? Harvard has a $53.2 billion endowment--the largest of any academic institution globally. Why should a plumber in Texas let’s say, be subsidizing “diversity consultants” or even research labs to an institution that admits fewer than 2,000 freshmen a year, most of whom come from very wealthy families? Good idea not to get into transgender medicine. You don't want to break the academic internet! Great post!
While I appreciate the point you're trying to make, it unfortunately boils down to: "Universities are teaching things that are objectively correct, and the President wants to make them stop doing that." The dividing line is, which version of reality does each individual reader believe to be objectively correct? Any reasonably intelligent person would obviously believe (the conservative version / the liberal version) and therefore it would be anti-science to think (the liberal version / the conservative version) should be promoted.
I *know* which version is actually true. The other side are a bunch of superstitious nutballs.
I don't follow your point and I don't know which side you think is telling the truth so maybe you could be a little clearer about that, please. The The overwhelming evidence is that Trump administration and MAGA followers are anti-science, anti-vaccine deniers of climate change and now they're cutting billions and biomedical research across the federal government and universities.
Liberals did not speak up enough in a loud enough manner and media outlets did not over the extremes of wokeism, But I can't imagine any liberal government cutting off tens of billions in funding for biomedical research because let's hypothetically assume a pro-conservative campus was for bombing Iran with nuclear weapons.
It's eminently clear you don't follow the point, and the fact that you're asking what side I'm on is merely further evidence that you're out of your league.
While I admit it's amusing watching you flounder around, let me answer your question with another question: How would you feel if you didn't eat breakfast this morning?
In "Nature Human Behavior" April 14 reports on a study of 7,800 Americans view on 35 different fields of science by political leaning. Political conservatives are generally hostile to all science fields including those that enhance economic growth. Medical science is as disparaged as much as climate or social science.
I'd like another option on voting - I lean libertarian, not right or left, and I'd like the option that the government stop funding higher ed. Then institutions can do what they want on their own dime. If, however, universities want federal $ (student loans, research $, etc.), they can't be too surprised when those come with strings.
This essay from Dr. Prasad reads like a studious effort to condemn illiberalism and policy failures of the past in the service of failing to name, to describe, or to render honest judgment on illiberalism (and worse) of the present.
As written, this fanciful thought experiment nudges a certain kind of Prasad-friendly reader to erroneously conclude that anything making them a tad uncomfortable in the PRESENT is negligibly different from something-or-another in the PAST, or at least the COVID-era past.
In other words, they might think, putting it crudely, “Same shit’s flying, just from a different direction, and maybe that’s a GOOD thing”. And that would be a mistake.
I will criticize further, but before I do that, it might be that we share a few square centimeters of common ground, to wit:
A powerful push to mandate ideological loyalty or intellectual homogeneity among physicians or among scholars, is wrong.
For example, for Department chairs to chide or implicitly threaten faculty because their research findings were uncomfortable-in-the-moment was wrong when it happened, even if the same chairs later apologized, as one of Dr. Prasad’s linked articles reported.
I would say government’s demand that social media companies suppress arguments against vaccines (or against aspects of vaccine policy) was wrong - despite intention I just as good- and should still be seen as wrong today.
But come on.... this piece not only misses the mark, but it encourages every single reader to “miss the mark” too.
Right at the top, the essay’s use of the word “pressuring” in the first poll question (“How do you feel about Trump admin pressuring universities & medical centers?”) applies *very much the wrong word* the soft-headed euphemism, in favor of calling things what they are. Euphemisms are helpful when we’re having tea with our mother-in-law, not for policy.
Here’s a fresh example: current and future NIH funding is terminated, as of last Thursday night for 5 universities:
Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Northwestern, and Brown (this according to an NIH internal email reported in the Brown Daily Herald on April 18). People are stopping studies and scientific staff are being fired.
Real people label those actions “pressure” in the same way that shooting out the tires of a moving car "pressures” the driver to stop driving. It's Hannah Arendt who described how "clichés and stock phrases" protect us from reality.
Which is to say, we don't call it “pressure”. We call it “shooting out the tires” or “reckless endangerment”, at least for awhile, until defenders of the shooter are blogging about it later. But the word "pressure" shields us from reality."
Instead of taking us through a fanciful exercise in (to my eyes) moral equivalence, it would be a more courageous use of this blog space for a fearless writer to tell us exactly what they think, now, about:
a) Shutting off NIH research funding at entire universities (Brown, Northwestern, Harvard, Cornell, and Columbia )
b) Shutting off funding for research on cancer, neurological diseases, because of animus toward universities or because the research abstracts somehow include the word “justice" or "sex difference" or "inclusion" or, "gender" or "Black".
c) Communicating to NIH staff that they should not even tell universities IF funding has been terminated, even as they do it they do it
d) Demanding that the President’s chosen auditors be given authority to review hire-and-fire decisions within a university to enforce “viewpoint balance” to the satisfaction of the administration's political leadership.
e) Sending letters of inquiry to medical journals to scare them into changing their editorial policies
f) Having the President call for an end to the nonprofit status of entire universities
g) Creating lists of prohibited words and communicating them to grants officers and grant recipients, ranging from words like “diversity” to “justice” to “vaccination” (and yes I’ve seen those lists)
Again, to be fair, it is always appropriate to look directly at the contested or frankly wrong moments of our past and challenge them, and learn from them. I hope Dr. Prasad has done so in one or more prior essays, journal articles, or blog posts.
But this essay- the one here- seems “not apply the same principles” to the present. And now I'll stipulate, straight-up. Doing that is hard and it can make any one of us uncomfortable and fearful. I know that.
And further, I don’t want to be uncharitable . It may be that I missed another essay from Dr. Prasad, the one where he names the tangible, destructive, uniquely illiberal actions of the present, in 2025, as they are happening. And if I missed it, my thoughts on the current one might change a bit, so I would just ask if he could link to it in a revised version of this Sensible Medicine post so we can learn what he actually thinks.
Plus the author attempting to use masking as an assumption that no masks were never needed for children is just completely wrong. See: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36351262/
Have you ever heard of the phrase or concept of false equivalence? Your entire comment and essay is based on such false equivalences that a professor some years ago losing his job or being harassed because he didn't use the correct pronouns is just as bad if not worse than billions of biomedical research cuts and threats to take over universities are coming from the Trump administration.
Go read the Harvard university's latest lawsuit against the Trump administration and if you side with the Trump administration on what is going on then something is seriously askew with your ethics and assessment of the current situation.
Now I KNOW you've completely missed the point. "What *I* believe is always objective correct, what those other guys believe is unethical, immoral, and anti-science."
I never said if were for or against what Trump is doing. Yet you AUTOMATICALLY decide that if I'm not WITH you, then I'm AGAINST you. The childish rant really seals the deal.
It's called a thought experiment, son. Go to the back of the class and try again.
What an excellent thought experiment, so many good points! I should hope that this would open people’s eyes to the exaggeration and misleading reporting by much of legacy media, but unfortunately not everyone values intellectual honesty over staying “right.”
Universities became even more "safe" as spaces at the end of 2015. I felt it at that time... like they were a refuge from the first T administration. Now looking back perhaps if they hadn't started that weird backslide into politics, we wouldn't be in this position of needing a correction so badly that an administration has to force it through the withholding of dollars. I go on reporter sometimes to the studies/grants that were canceled... a study section needs to be quite siloed to fund some of those projects. I feel for the good projects that maybe got canceled but many asked questions that can't really be answered. "Does the study need to be done?" "Will it help anyone" I think there needs to be much more scrutiny especially for animal work ... IACUCs cannot be trusted to do this job.
You lost me when you had “conservatives” forcing students to take Ivermectin. The difference isn’t between choice of medication, it’s between mandates or no mandates.
No, it isn't. You're creating an artificial strawman in order to get the survey results you desire. The opposite of mandating medications is NOT to mandate other medications. The opposite is to NOT MANDATE any medications.
Some counterfactuals are worth exploring and others make no sense, like saying suppose the astronomers of the eighteenth century believed the sun went around the earth. While it is certainly true that any institution can become fossilized and require tribalistic adherence to the origin myths and current dogma, at least science has the hope of self reflection and correction, even if requiring the passing on of the current loudest adherents. I believe non-religious universities have a strong liberal (in its older non political meaning) bent, as they profess an interest in exploration of multiple points of view. It's the same reason journalists also seem liberal, as they are trying to provide a balanced view of the world. But, as our ancient ancestors risked ostracism and thus death, for not believing the tribal stories, we all tend to fall in line if we want to remain a member of a group with which we identify. Particularly true in times of stress. And the current "leaders" are anything but conservative, acting in truly radical fashion.
And going back to an earlier post, I object strenuously to your profane description of hospital administrators. Just as the current administration characterization of federal workers is profoundly hurtful to those who really are trying to work for the public, those administrators are mostly doing their best to give us a place to work. Is it distorted by the profit motive, of course. The amount of medical care that could theoretically be demanded is effectively infinite compared with supply, so some rationing is needed. In the regular world, that is mostly done through prices. Not possible in health care! Current system is deeply flawed, but any system will leave lots of individuals disappointed if not outright angry.
Palestine was a place, not a race. The Jews who lived in Palestine were Jews, and the Arabs who lived in Palestine were Arabs. Before the piece of land was named Palestine by the Romans, 2000 years ago, it was called 'Israel ' for 1,000 years.
How the world has changed...or I was just a lucky sheltered kid. Graduating engineering in Saskatchewan in 2002 without a protest in sight or a confrontation over politics. I was there for education and a future career so maybe I had my blinders on or it was a time of peace.
I do agree campuses should be less political but I'm not sure you can call that ship back to port once it's sailed.
https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/april-21-2025?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=16j45
Read this everyday and read the Trump Tryanny tracker every day
https://trumptyrannytracker.substack.com/
And then if you still want to insist that both sides are equally at fault and there's no differences fundamentally between how conservatives and liberals behave since Trump took over the Republican party then I guess you are free to hold on to those delusions. Or that the excesses of wokeism justify the authoritarian crackdown across our federal government, The firings of tens of thousands of people in our sciences and medicine and the destruction of social safety nets , plus the cyber criminals working for Musk stealing data and shipping it to Russian accounts overseas (see NPR story on the National Labor relations board data theft and hacking) than of course you should continue to hold those views.Apparently, your views are non-falsifiable by any contrary evidence.
By the way these attacks on the universities were never about anti-Semitism, particularly from a president who has met with and/or glorified neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers. And his leading donor and destroyer of federal agencies, Musk, gives Nazi salutes and along with his vice president gave support to the far-right German party that believes that the Holocaust has been overplayed and wasn't so bad after all-- and a top advisor named Gorka is affiliated with neo-Nazi European organizations.
So attacking wokeism and attacking anti-Semitism is just a rhetorical con job that you apparently have fallen for and many others have done so:
https://www.thehandbasket.co/p/it-was-never-about-antisemitism
You're hilarious.
It's worth realizing that exclusion of "minorities" - women, people of color - has been the historic norm.
This really shouldn't be a "fairness" exercise based on so-called conservative values. IMO, those exist solely for the benefit of white males - and that's always been the case in Western Europe. Therefore, the term "conservative."
How many people have been harmed by foolish white males showing off to other white males (promotion, you know), rather than doing their jobs to the best of their abilities?
I’m sorry but your comment is simply sexist and misandrist.
So how does it feel, to have the tables turned? Enjoy your discomfiture.
This is brilliant! What a fantastic way to present your argument. A 2022 survey of Harvard faculty found over 80% identifying as liberal or very liberal, with only 1% identifying as conservative. That is the case with most Ivy League and other universities. I would like the federal government to stop giving money to these schools. Why is America funding the rich to educate the rich? Harvard has a $53.2 billion endowment--the largest of any academic institution globally. Why should a plumber in Texas let’s say, be subsidizing “diversity consultants” or even research labs to an institution that admits fewer than 2,000 freshmen a year, most of whom come from very wealthy families? Good idea not to get into transgender medicine. You don't want to break the academic internet! Great post!
While I appreciate the point you're trying to make, it unfortunately boils down to: "Universities are teaching things that are objectively correct, and the President wants to make them stop doing that." The dividing line is, which version of reality does each individual reader believe to be objectively correct? Any reasonably intelligent person would obviously believe (the conservative version / the liberal version) and therefore it would be anti-science to think (the liberal version / the conservative version) should be promoted.
I *know* which version is actually true. The other side are a bunch of superstitious nutballs.
I don't follow your point and I don't know which side you think is telling the truth so maybe you could be a little clearer about that, please. The The overwhelming evidence is that Trump administration and MAGA followers are anti-science, anti-vaccine deniers of climate change and now they're cutting billions and biomedical research across the federal government and universities.
Liberals did not speak up enough in a loud enough manner and media outlets did not over the extremes of wokeism, But I can't imagine any liberal government cutting off tens of billions in funding for biomedical research because let's hypothetically assume a pro-conservative campus was for bombing Iran with nuclear weapons.
It's eminently clear you don't follow the point, and the fact that you're asking what side I'm on is merely further evidence that you're out of your league.
While I admit it's amusing watching you flounder around, let me answer your question with another question: How would you feel if you didn't eat breakfast this morning?
In "Nature Human Behavior" April 14 reports on a study of 7,800 Americans view on 35 different fields of science by political leaning. Political conservatives are generally hostile to all science fields including those that enhance economic growth. Medical science is as disparaged as much as climate or social science.
I'd like another option on voting - I lean libertarian, not right or left, and I'd like the option that the government stop funding higher ed. Then institutions can do what they want on their own dime. If, however, universities want federal $ (student loans, research $, etc.), they can't be too surprised when those come with strings.
This essay from Dr. Prasad reads like a studious effort to condemn illiberalism and policy failures of the past in the service of failing to name, to describe, or to render honest judgment on illiberalism (and worse) of the present.
As written, this fanciful thought experiment nudges a certain kind of Prasad-friendly reader to erroneously conclude that anything making them a tad uncomfortable in the PRESENT is negligibly different from something-or-another in the PAST, or at least the COVID-era past.
In other words, they might think, putting it crudely, “Same shit’s flying, just from a different direction, and maybe that’s a GOOD thing”. And that would be a mistake.
I will criticize further, but before I do that, it might be that we share a few square centimeters of common ground, to wit:
A powerful push to mandate ideological loyalty or intellectual homogeneity among physicians or among scholars, is wrong.
For example, for Department chairs to chide or implicitly threaten faculty because their research findings were uncomfortable-in-the-moment was wrong when it happened, even if the same chairs later apologized, as one of Dr. Prasad’s linked articles reported.
I would say government’s demand that social media companies suppress arguments against vaccines (or against aspects of vaccine policy) was wrong - despite intention I just as good- and should still be seen as wrong today.
But come on.... this piece not only misses the mark, but it encourages every single reader to “miss the mark” too.
Right at the top, the essay’s use of the word “pressuring” in the first poll question (“How do you feel about Trump admin pressuring universities & medical centers?”) applies *very much the wrong word* the soft-headed euphemism, in favor of calling things what they are. Euphemisms are helpful when we’re having tea with our mother-in-law, not for policy.
Here’s a fresh example: current and future NIH funding is terminated, as of last Thursday night for 5 universities:
Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Northwestern, and Brown (this according to an NIH internal email reported in the Brown Daily Herald on April 18). People are stopping studies and scientific staff are being fired.
Real people label those actions “pressure” in the same way that shooting out the tires of a moving car "pressures” the driver to stop driving. It's Hannah Arendt who described how "clichés and stock phrases" protect us from reality.
Which is to say, we don't call it “pressure”. We call it “shooting out the tires” or “reckless endangerment”, at least for awhile, until defenders of the shooter are blogging about it later. But the word "pressure" shields us from reality."
Instead of taking us through a fanciful exercise in (to my eyes) moral equivalence, it would be a more courageous use of this blog space for a fearless writer to tell us exactly what they think, now, about:
a) Shutting off NIH research funding at entire universities (Brown, Northwestern, Harvard, Cornell, and Columbia )
b) Shutting off funding for research on cancer, neurological diseases, because of animus toward universities or because the research abstracts somehow include the word “justice" or "sex difference" or "inclusion" or, "gender" or "Black".
c) Communicating to NIH staff that they should not even tell universities IF funding has been terminated, even as they do it they do it
d) Demanding that the President’s chosen auditors be given authority to review hire-and-fire decisions within a university to enforce “viewpoint balance” to the satisfaction of the administration's political leadership.
e) Sending letters of inquiry to medical journals to scare them into changing their editorial policies
f) Having the President call for an end to the nonprofit status of entire universities
g) Creating lists of prohibited words and communicating them to grants officers and grant recipients, ranging from words like “diversity” to “justice” to “vaccination” (and yes I’ve seen those lists)
Again, to be fair, it is always appropriate to look directly at the contested or frankly wrong moments of our past and challenge them, and learn from them. I hope Dr. Prasad has done so in one or more prior essays, journal articles, or blog posts.
But this essay- the one here- seems “not apply the same principles” to the present. And now I'll stipulate, straight-up. Doing that is hard and it can make any one of us uncomfortable and fearful. I know that.
And further, I don’t want to be uncharitable . It may be that I missed another essay from Dr. Prasad, the one where he names the tangible, destructive, uniquely illiberal actions of the present, in 2025, as they are happening. And if I missed it, my thoughts on the current one might change a bit, so I would just ask if he could link to it in a revised version of this Sensible Medicine post so we can learn what he actually thinks.
Plus the author attempting to use masking as an assumption that no masks were never needed for children is just completely wrong. See: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36351262/
I see you've completely missed the point.
Have you ever heard of the phrase or concept of false equivalence? Your entire comment and essay is based on such false equivalences that a professor some years ago losing his job or being harassed because he didn't use the correct pronouns is just as bad if not worse than billions of biomedical research cuts and threats to take over universities are coming from the Trump administration.
Go read the Harvard university's latest lawsuit against the Trump administration and if you side with the Trump administration on what is going on then something is seriously askew with your ethics and assessment of the current situation.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/21/us/harvard-lawsuit-trump-administration.html?smid=nytcore-android-share
Do you think this is justified because wokeism ran amok in some elite liberal universities?
Now I KNOW you've completely missed the point. "What *I* believe is always objective correct, what those other guys believe is unethical, immoral, and anti-science."
I never said if were for or against what Trump is doing. Yet you AUTOMATICALLY decide that if I'm not WITH you, then I'm AGAINST you. The childish rant really seals the deal.
It's called a thought experiment, son. Go to the back of the class and try again.
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/what-is-the-web-link-and-title-DlWavpRBTkiHuDWZEiocKg
What an excellent thought experiment, so many good points! I should hope that this would open people’s eyes to the exaggeration and misleading reporting by much of legacy media, but unfortunately not everyone values intellectual honesty over staying “right.”
Brilliant
Universities became even more "safe" as spaces at the end of 2015. I felt it at that time... like they were a refuge from the first T administration. Now looking back perhaps if they hadn't started that weird backslide into politics, we wouldn't be in this position of needing a correction so badly that an administration has to force it through the withholding of dollars. I go on reporter sometimes to the studies/grants that were canceled... a study section needs to be quite siloed to fund some of those projects. I feel for the good projects that maybe got canceled but many asked questions that can't really be answered. "Does the study need to be done?" "Will it help anyone" I think there needs to be much more scrutiny especially for animal work ... IACUCs cannot be trusted to do this job.
You lost me when you had “conservatives” forcing students to take Ivermectin. The difference isn’t between choice of medication, it’s between mandates or no mandates.
Isn't it though... mandating ivermectin or mandating the covid vaccine as a preventative strategy. Seems appropriate as an analogy.
No, it isn't. You're creating an artificial strawman in order to get the survey results you desire. The opposite of mandating medications is NOT to mandate other medications. The opposite is to NOT MANDATE any medications.
Some counterfactuals are worth exploring and others make no sense, like saying suppose the astronomers of the eighteenth century believed the sun went around the earth. While it is certainly true that any institution can become fossilized and require tribalistic adherence to the origin myths and current dogma, at least science has the hope of self reflection and correction, even if requiring the passing on of the current loudest adherents. I believe non-religious universities have a strong liberal (in its older non political meaning) bent, as they profess an interest in exploration of multiple points of view. It's the same reason journalists also seem liberal, as they are trying to provide a balanced view of the world. But, as our ancient ancestors risked ostracism and thus death, for not believing the tribal stories, we all tend to fall in line if we want to remain a member of a group with which we identify. Particularly true in times of stress. And the current "leaders" are anything but conservative, acting in truly radical fashion.
And going back to an earlier post, I object strenuously to your profane description of hospital administrators. Just as the current administration characterization of federal workers is profoundly hurtful to those who really are trying to work for the public, those administrators are mostly doing their best to give us a place to work. Is it distorted by the profit motive, of course. The amount of medical care that could theoretically be demanded is effectively infinite compared with supply, so some rationing is needed. In the regular world, that is mostly done through prices. Not possible in health care! Current system is deeply flawed, but any system will leave lots of individuals disappointed if not outright angry.
Barry Skeist, MD
Palestine was a place, not a race. The Jews who lived in Palestine were Jews, and the Arabs who lived in Palestine were Arabs. Before the piece of land was named Palestine by the Romans, 2000 years ago, it was called 'Israel ' for 1,000 years.
I don’t think tax payer dollars should support private universities. Nor should they been in the business of student loans.