Such books will no longer be published if universities are not free.
And if freedom begins to disappear, even those who believe themselves safely conformist are not safe...
That depends on which are the ways in which they are not free.
Government influence is categorically worse because of its very nature, but I'm trying to think of a more consequential influence in the US than the leftist hegemony in universities and coming up with nothing.
monasteries were financialy independent. when the "government changed" and the new rulers had no use for the church, all of them were raided and plundered.
it's very dangerous to have resources and not be politically positioned. you become a target more than a fortress. it's the one thing preppers don't get.
universities are facing the same problem as monasteries faced. they are huge bags of money already. excluding the UCs they are already rich and take government money more for the associations than the actual money.
It's not the case that the government is necessarily run by authoritarians cracking down on speech they disapprove of at colleges by threatening to withhold other funding. This is a novel development.
We can surely go back to funding schools without such strings attached.
The first does a lot of relative low mark-up contract work requested by governmental agencies. Governments and all of us would like to see cancer and Alzheimer disease cured.
The request for “bids” (aka grant applications) from NIH, DoD (now DoW) and NSF is what has greatly expanded research-focused universities and msde the USA the greatest source if cutting-edge science since WW2 (now relative success is shifting rapidly to China).
The recipients of these small but numerous contract to big medical schools usually are totally agnostic about politics—at least at work.
Turns out even autocratic-leaning politicians and the public are almost universally interested in learning how to live a long healthy life.
In contrast, the humanities are not a bread winners for universities. These faculty are ultimately paid by tuition or red or blue state support. These much more socially saavy and interested faculty mainly teach, and if they are lucky, have some modest time to think, read, and write. They are not beholding to government funds. They can speak truth to power.
So if a university like Columbia is brought to heel by the administration it is mainly due to the addiction of university administrators for the relative modest overhead they receive for NIH compared to that any corporation would accept for the same work.
And the ultimate source and cause of that addiction of administrators now willing to bend the knee to retain their federal funding overheads is the hard and intense work of their research scientists.
> The reason today’s Dean of Humanities wants to send students to other universities to learn subjects that she would like to cancel, or use ChatGPT to teach subjects tomorrow that humans teach today, is to drive the “marginal cost” of teaching students from 20 percent of their tuition down to 10 percent. Future applicants should know that the University plans a further expansion from around 7,400 students to 9,000 ... and has simultaneously announced an intent to hold the number of research faculty constant. Perhaps we can drive the cost of educating students below 10 percent? Perhaps that is what the president and provost and dean of humanities mean when they say that we need to position ourselves as leaders in the field.
https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-crisis-of-the-univers...
It would be nice to read something more in-depth about university finances. Can humanities courses be funded by tuition alone or not?
The University of Chicago is a very prestigious institution due to its historical reputation, but the administration in recent years seems to have both ruined its future with terrible financial decisions, even before the pressures of Trump.
i think an important question is "who is this "all of us" you speak of and who made you god to pronounce it"
you are making an arbitrary distinction because vibes, because it's a cause you care about. it's irrelevant. if you take money for Alzheimer's research, you owe the government one (because that money is extracted from the people in a way you could never have done yourself). if you take money from, say a 501c3, it's a completed transaction of services.
It is true that if you are accepting money from Coca Cola, it will limit your ability to do work that goes against the interests of Coca Cola. To be independent, just stop accepting money from them.
But it only works because Coca Cola can't do much against an independent group. Of course, you need to be careful, which typically means hiring a good lawyer, but you should be fine. And the reason you should be fine is because the government is there to protect you, at least to some extent.
But you can't be independent from your government, unlike Coca Cola, they can raid your house and put your in jail if you do things they don't want you to do, and they have no one to answer to but themselves. Government censorship doesn't depend on whether you are getting paid or not.
how far do you want to take your strawman?
But government hired goons (aka the police) are the law. In free countries, their role is limited to things like making sure that you won't be bothered by Coca Cola goons, but in less free countries, they are going to hit you for saying things the government doesn't want you to say.