Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Misbehaving children need to dealt with too, within the bounds of what is allowed by law. Otherwise, what, you want a loophole for them to get away with all of the above? Heckling is not against the law last I checked.
At first, I thought it was a protected form of speech. TIL, I was wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heckler%27s_veto
Regarding the Compact
171–180 of 203 posts
Re: Regarding the Compact
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
At first, I thought it was a protected form of speech. TIL, I was wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heckler%27s_veto
Your link does not back up your claim that heckling is illegal. In none of the cases mentioned in that article is heckling found to be illegal.
https://nefac.org/is-heckling-a-speaker-a-crime/
https://www.aclumich.org/en/cases/hecklers-veto
https://stanfordmag.org/contents/the-first-amendment-does-no....
Re: Regarding the Compact
#173This seems like a reasonable response by MIT. I’m struggling to understand where the core disagreement lies though. Would someone who is opposed to this “compact” care to explain their view? I’m not interested in baseless name-calling (“fascist” etc) but I am interested in cogent reasoning. I didn’t read the compact itself, but I did read the wikipedia article about it, and it seems to be a very positive set of crite…
> In matters of bathroom, locker-room, and sports segregation, universities will define sex categories based on reproductive and biological criteria. In other words, trans people can't use the bathrooms matching their gender identity. > Calls for ideological diversity, not just at the campus level, "but within every field, department, school, and teaching unit." In other words, every academic department is susceptibl…
I think trans people who "pass" can do whatever they want, and in practice it won't be an issue. I do support actual sex segregation in any area of life women will have no chance without it (like sports). The bathrooms thing is stupid, I agree.
> In other words, every academic department is susceptible to ideological litmus tests defined by the state. If Trump's white house feels like your Computer Science department has too many Democrats in it, you fix that problem or you lose your funding.
Every academic department already has really strong ideological litmus tests. It got way less intense with Trump's election, but it's still there. It's not subtle. You can be really good at what you do, but if you're religious or conservative you have no hope of getting a job in tons of fields. Sociology, for instance. It has nothing to do with how good you are at what you do, it's overt political testing. It was (in the case of many University of California schools, like Berkeley) actually the first line in hiring decisions.
> In other words, another ideological litmus test, only in this case the consequence is that foreign students can be thrown out at will.
I think this is reasonable if there's an objective standard. "Doesn't support listed terrorist organizations" is a reasonable standard. The standard should be written in.
> In other words, tenured faculty lose their right to free speech. "...in their capacity as university representatives...". So no, nobody loses his or her right to free speech. It's just that when you're acting as the mouthpiece of the University, you shouldn't be political if you want federal $. And I wholeheartedly support this. University presidents being political was a fucking disaster (see Reif at MIT).
Re: Regarding the Compact
#174I am affiliated and have been affiliated with several top universities, including the two in Cambridge, MA. I'm an academic. I say that because this stuff directly affects my career prospects. The Compact itself can be found here: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/1... It's short, I ask that you read it before commenting. It's too bad MIT has taken this stance. I think the Compact is overall…
> obviously reasonable, good-faith effort to improve universities in the United States I really find HN to be a truly surreal place at this time.
Re: Regarding the Compact
#175I am affiliated and have been affiliated with several top universities, including the two in Cambridge, MA. I'm an academic. I say that because this stuff directly affects my career prospects. The Compact itself can be found here: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/1... It's short, I ask that you read it before commenting. It's too bad MIT has taken this stance. I think the Compact is overall…
It's a power grab that makes the university effectively subordinate to the federal government. The most important part is the end: if the university violates the agreement, they not only lose funding, they also have to give back what they received the previous year. Such a clawback would be devastating, much worse than merely denying funding going forward. And who determines whether there's a violation? The Departmen…
Trump is an attempt by the voters (most of whom do not share the ideology) to undo the power grab.
Re: Regarding the Compact
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
> MIT is taking (lots of) money from federal government. The People of the United States are getting some of their research business done by MIT, yes. MIT competes for that business. It is not a gift, subsidy or favor to MIT. Of course grants and contracts have terms. I hope the government can come to terms with MIT because I want the best researchers doing our work.
I wish this was better understood more broadly. Grants aren't no-strings-attached gifts—far from it; they are contracts. When a researcher at a university gets a grant, that's the federal government hiring that researcher and their team to complete a specific research project. The research team has a particular research question that the federal government has deemed important enough that U.S. tax payers would benefi…
1. https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/FESTIVUS-REP...
Re: Regarding the Compact
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
People that go to elite undergrads think the rest of us are a lower inferior caste. I don’t know how that’s even something you can deny. You’ve clearly expended a lot of effort to segregate yourself from the likes of people like me or people that go to SJSU because we don’t have “merit” or “potential”
This is not a productive point to make in this thread.
Re: Regarding the Compact
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wish this was better understood more broadly. Grants aren't no-strings-attached gifts—far from it; they are contracts. When a researcher at a university gets a grant, that's the federal government hiring that researcher and their team to complete a specific research project. The research team has a particular research question that the federal government has deemed important enough that U.S. tax payers would benefi…
So there's some department in the US government, which plans all the important research such as children looking at Facebook food ads or whether lonely rats crave cocaine more than happy rats [1] and the scientists compete for these? And it's not the scientists writing these up themselves and then asking government to finance the proposed research? 1. https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/FESTIVUS-REP...
The NSF, DARPA, DOE, NASA, etc etc have research program offices that set priorities. For example let’s have a DARPA program that pushes new stealth materials, or an NSF program on quantum computing (possibly partly motivated by another three-letter agency). The program managers understand the state of the art AND what the government (as the agent of the People) could really use Real Soon Now, or down the road for big bets. They write a Call for Proposals that describes what they’d like to see.
Researchers watch out for CFPs they might be able to contribute to, and propose a project where their work could help. Sometimes the fit is easy, and sometimes the researcher will modulate their work to fit better, because they want support from somewhere.
The proposals compete for a share of the targeted pot of money.
This is how the government influences basic research, while still giving researchers the opportunity to propose novel stuff the government hasn’t thought of.
It’s the system that built the Internet and CRISPR, RNA vaccines and the laser, microelectronics and IVF.
Re: Regarding the Compact
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
The simplest living beings have some idea of self and other, and life and death, and so understand, even implicitly, what it means to be killed and dying. So a primal impulse to fight back kicks in whenever something feels mortally threatened. Bacteria might not be able to communicate that they don’t like being killed, but I don’t think their view of it changes despite that lack of ability to communicate. More comple…
Only one paragraph was about the Middle East, where "Western" morality is on full display, mostly to show that there is no one true goodness anywhere. You seem to be using a definition of morality that's a lot narrower than what we generally call moral and morality: https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/englis... I don't think your examples show morality at work, but I already realised we disagree on…
Re: Regarding the Compact
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I went to an elite school and have friends that make much less even than $150k. They're doing so by choice to do PhDs or go into public service. They (as in, the ones in quantitative majors and many even outside of it) _also_ had the choice to make several multiples of what I made by working at Jane Street or HRT or Citadel or now OpenAI and Anthropic. I didn't have the choice. Nobody is selecting me for anything,…
I'm just trying to shatter the illusion. Stop wrecking your mental health because you can't hang with the IMO kids. Many of these people are, unsurprisingly, very insular unless you want to talk about math and TC all day. Sounds really fun. The red pill is to be happy you're already making a fuckton of money for typing shit into a computer and make some friends in pottery class
Maybe that's true. I'm sympathetic to the fact that these people aren't even interesting enough to be around. But then I see articles like this [0] sympathizing (?) with elite students that don't end up going into public service while still canonizing them and then I fall back into depression
[0] https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/09/elite-ivy-leagu...