A university president makes a case against cowardice • Hacker News Board

Re: A university president makes a case against cowardice

#71

Post by alephnerd » Thu, Apr 03, 2025, 2:02 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #57

alephnerd wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if they hire the right alumni lobbyists - major reason why you don't hear about Dartmouth in the news [0] despite a similarly active student activism scene. Most other private universities could have easily managed the relationship, but a mix of inertia and vindictiveness from certain alumni (eg. Ackman) messed it up. Mind you, Dartmouth is also kind of unique in that their alumni relations team actually TRY to m…

Dartmouth is smaller and has, historically, had a stronger and more intense ongoing alumni connection in various ways than is probably the norm with the Ivies in general.

> Dartmouth is smaller

Yale and Dartmouth are similar in student body size, yet Yale has been hit by investigations [0] while Dartmouth has been spared.

[0] - https://www.ed.gov/about/news/press-release/office-civil-rig...

Re: A university president makes a case against cowardice

#72

Post by ghaff » Thu, Apr 03, 2025, 2:05 PM UTC

alephnerd wrote: post #71

ghaff wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dartmouth is smaller and has, historically, had a stronger and more intense ongoing alumni connection in various ways than is probably the norm with the Ivies in general.

> Dartmouth is smaller Yale and Dartmouth are similar in student body size, yet Yale has been hit by investigations [0] while Dartmouth has been spared. [0] - https://www.ed.gov/about/news/press-release/office-civil-rig...

Fair enough. Yale has more/bigger grad schools--though Dartmouth has tended to expand in that respect (though it doesn't have a law school).

Re: A university president makes a case against cowardice

#73

Post by kamarg » Thu, Apr 03, 2025, 2:05 PM UTC

techright75 wrote: post #33

acc_297 wrote: post #9

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Those giant university endowments are partially used to allow those who couldn't afford it but otherwise have shown they have what the university is looking for in students to attend for significantly/entirely reduced costs. Meanwhile, the most visible billionaires are using their money to try to buy elections so they can dismantle the government for personal gain while oftentimes employing people with such low wages that they depend on the government to be able to afford such luxuries as eating three meals a day. It's pretty easy to see why the large parts of the public find one acceptable and the other less acceptable.

Re: A university president makes a case against cowardice

#74

Post by throw4847285 » Thu, Apr 03, 2025, 2:06 PM UTC

geertj wrote: post #46

throw4847285 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Freedom of speech necessarily implies that a group of people might team up and loudly announce that the people they don't agree with are incorrect and immoral and should be ignored or even ostracized. That's the price of freedom of speech, and it's a fair price. Being annoyed, inconvenienced, or even negatively impacted by the speech acts of others is by design. To throw that out is to make a calculation that without…

> they don't agree with are incorrect and immoral and should be ignored or even ostracized You have that right. But doing this is not always wise. Labeling people as immoral and ostracizing them, especially on 50/50 issues, is one of the reason why the American political system is so radicalized at the moment.

That's a question of tactics, though. Moral outrage can be extremely effective, and it can also be counterproductive. And striking the right balance has been a challenge in American politics as long as American politics have existed.

In his Second Inaugural, Lincoln threads the needle in a way that is frankly unachievable for even most skilled politicians. "Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God and each invokes His aid against the other" seems like an acknowledgement of moral nuance, but he follows it up with, "It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces but let us judge not that we be not judged."

Speaking to a nation in which a part of it is in open revolt over the right to keep other humans as slaves is certainly an extreme case. But it isn't categorically different from any other political struggle. People are going to accuse one another of being immoral. It's the human condition. A legal system that protects this behavior is the bedrock of democracy. It doesn't matter how annoying you find the people doing the judging.

Re: A university president makes a case against cowardice

#75

Post by somenameforme » Thu, Apr 03, 2025, 2:07 PM UTC

rimunroe wrote: post #29

MSFT_Edging wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He is making a stink about Covid vaccine requirements during a period where hospitals were overflowing and bodies were being stacked in refrigerated trailers.

Vaccines were a miracle. The state medical examiner converted one nearby university’s arena to a temporary morgue at one point in 2020. It’s mind boggling that people were and still are in denial about how bad it got before large parts of the population started getting vaccinated

Look at the timeline of literally any plague, as they all follow a very similar pattern. For instance here [1] is the one for the Spanish Flu. There are a number of peaks and valleys that gradually recess to noise as viruses tend to evolve to less virulent forms while people also simultaneously develop broader immunity. This makes observational data highly unreliable for determining the efficacy of a vaccine during a plague.

The same is true of mortality/severity rates by vaccination status in hospitals. People who opt in to a vaccine are generally going to be more inclined to seek hospital treatment than those who opt out of such. So if somebody unvaccinated went to the hospital for COVID it would naturally be, on average, a much more severe case than a vaccinated person going to the hospital, with worse overall outcomes. And so you skew the results when looking at hospital data.

These biases and trends are facts most people may not be aware of, but big pharma certainly is.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu#/media/File:1918_s...

Re: A university president makes a case against cowardice

#76

Post by Thorrez » Thu, Apr 03, 2025, 2:07 PM UTC

rincebrain wrote: post #6

JKCalhoun wrote: post #3

Wild that he is some kind of exception. Rolling over, folding is not the university culture I remember.

There wasn't, historically, the level of enormous potential negative consequences legally and practically if the universities talked back. Universities, like many institutions, have also become more like large incumbent businesses than previously - e.g. perpetuating their own existence over having strong core values.

Biden was considering withholding federal funds from schools over their vaccine policies[1], and tried to withhold federal funds from schools based on how they treat transgender students[2], but that was blocked by a judge. Obama did a similar thing regarding transgender students[3].

Things like this are why Hillsdale College rejects all federal funds. So they can do what they want without threat of the government revoking funding[4].

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/biden-vaccines-delta...

[2] https://www.texastribune.org/2024/06/12/texas-title-ix-lgbtq...

[3] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/05/13/477896804...

[4] https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/07/the-co...

Re: A university president makes a case against cowardice

#77

Post by krapp » Thu, Apr 03, 2025, 2:08 PM UTC

drooby wrote: post #69

sequoia wrote: post #49

A lot of Americans support these attacks on universities. Why do people harbour this much animosity towards these institutions? Is there anything they could have done differently in the past decade or two to have broader sympathy now, or is people's ambivalence towards elite universities 100% irrational?

I think it's actually extremely simple.. because the herd mentality is extremely simple. Intellectuals think it's complex because intellectuals love complexity.. This is what happened.. The right witnessed riots over the past decade. These riots were in response to police brutality and perceived racism. The ideas behind anti-racism spawned a perceived new ideology - "wokism". This frightened the right. Intellectuals…

Nothing about this is new - the right has harbored a particular hatred for "academics" and "intellectuals" since at least the anti-war and civil rights movements of the 1960s. Today's fear of "wokism" is just the prior generation's fear of "cultural marxism" with a new coat of paint.

But this kind of political talk is against the guidelines. Good hackers don't care about any of this. So Javascript is getting crazy, huh?

Re: A university president makes a case against cowardice

#78

Post by n4r9 » Thu, Apr 03, 2025, 2:15 PM UTC

PathOfEclipse wrote: post #52

alabastervlog wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The data do not support what you suggest being a widespread problem. There's a popular story about it being a big problem, but when people start trotting out examples most of them fall apart on closer examination, which is weird if lots of solid examples exist (why pick so many that are, at best a stretch if not simply wrong, if this is a widespread trend and not just a couple actual events that were maybe not great?…

I like how you claim data doesn't support this being a problem but at the same time can't be bothered to cite any data. I'll do it for you: https://5666503.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/5666503... "Alarming proportions of students self-censor, report worry or discomfort about expressing their ideas in a variety of contexts, find controversial ideas hard to discuss, show intolerance for controversial speakers,…

> Jay Bhattacharya, who in hindsight was far more correct on everything COVID-related than the CDC was

Bhattacharya who signed the Great Barrington Delaration, advocating for herd immunity and "focused protection" for the elderly? Just imagine how much larger the death toll would have been.

This page has a good list of concerns about Bhattacharya, including how the study mentioned in your link was flawed and one of the co-authors went on to admit the results were wrong: https://www.zmescience.com/medicine/jay-bhattacharya-has-a-h...

Re: A university president makes a case against cowardice

#79

Post by ty6853 » Thu, Apr 03, 2025, 2:15 PM UTC

sequoia wrote: post #49

A lot of Americans support these attacks on universities. Why do people harbour this much animosity towards these institutions? Is there anything they could have done differently in the past decade or two to have broader sympathy now, or is people's ambivalence towards elite universities 100% irrational?

Most people don't care about university protests. They're largely a means to get laid while achieving nothing and at worst destroying their own university. As long as they don't spill out into the surrounding town any outrage is essentially theater.

Re: A university president makes a case against cowardice

#80

Post by rimunroe » Thu, Apr 03, 2025, 2:16 PM UTC

ty6853 wrote: post #67

rimunroe wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vaccines were a miracle. The state medical examiner converted one nearby university’s arena to a temporary morgue at one point in 2020. It’s mind boggling that people were and still are in denial about how bad it got before large parts of the population started getting vaccinated

Are we living in the same world? I had a child born about that time which was one of the few ways to actually get into a hospital. When I went in the fucking place was barren. A bunch of medical professionals shaking in their shoes waiting for something that never came. I knew then and there I knew i was being sold a lie and the news was carefully orchestrating snippets of misrepresented footage. And then went about…

> I knew then and there I knew i was being sold a lie and the news was carefully orchestrating snippets of misrepresented footage. And then went about my business as normal.

It’s extremely poor reasoning to rely on your individual anecdotal experience of your hospital visit to conclude that there is a global conspiracy on a massive scale. Was all the footage of overflowing hospitals and makeshift morgues fabricated?

Fwiw, I went to a Boston hospital in April or May of 2020 to get tested for a Covid exposure and they kept non-covid patients quite separate. They relocated entire offices to different buildings to avoid cross-exposure. They don’t want to put Covid patients near people giving birth or their infants for obvious reasons. Also our emergency department had a million signs up telling people who had certain respiratory symptoms to go to a different location (which I went to and was indeed much busier).

…But I didn’t base my belief on the things I was hearing from literally every source on that experience. I did it because that many people simply can’t coordinate a lie on that scale that convincingly. Skepticism is good, but respectfully and in my opinion, believing it was all a hoax requires a great deal of arrogance and gullibility.