The Trump Administration tells Harvard it can no longer enroll foreign students

Many people are saying that she's all antisemitic n stuff.

 

I wouldn’t go so far as to say this is the core liberal principle, but there is a relationship with progressivism. Here’s Woodrow Wilson, the father of the progressives:

“The more power is divided the more irresponsible it becomes. Power must instead be concentrated, and the notion that negotiations between factions would best serve the public or is the purpose of politics comes to seem backward and naïve when one party represents special interests and the other represents the national interest.”​

 

Some quotes from Robert M. LaFollette, Sr., Republican Senator from Wisconsin and the real father of the Progressive Movement:

• The basic principle of this government is the will of the people. A system was devised by its founders which seemed to insure the means of ascertaining that will and of enacting it into legislation and supporting it through the administration of the law. This was to be accomplished by electing men to make, and men to execute the laws, who, would represent in the laws so made and executed the will of the people. This was the establishment of a representative government, where every man had equal voice, equal rights, and equal responsibilities. Have we such a government today? Or is this country fast coming to be dominated by forces that threaten the true principle of representative government?
  • “The Danger Threatening Representative Government” Speech (1897) [1]

• Since the birth of the Republic, indeed almost within the last generation, a new and powerful factor has taken its place in our business, financial and political world and is there exercising a tremendous influence. The existence of the corporation, as we have it with us today, was never dreamed of by the fathers… The corporation of today has invaded every department of business, and it’s powerful but invisible hand is felt in almost all activities of life. The effect of this change upon the American people is radical and rapid. The individual is fast disappearing as a business factor and in his stead is this new device, the modern corporation.

• The ill-gotten surplus capital acquired by exploiting the resources and the people of our country begets the imperialism which hunts down and exploits the natural resources and the people of foreign countries, erects huge armaments for the protection of its investments, breeds international strife in the markets of the world, and inevitably leads to war.
  • 1924. As quoted in Rothschild, Matthew. “Fighting Bob La Follette: Visionary American Leftist.” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era10, no. 3 (2011): 362–68. Fighting Bob La Follette: Visionary American Leftist | The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era | Cambridge Core

 

Good, Americans are dumb, fat and entitled. Only way to solve that long term is extreme pain.

 

This is what the MAGA Party and the head dope fail to understand. They are steering research and development overseas all to “own the libs” while changing the government to autocratic rule. In other words, they are deporting high wage jobs and careers outside the US in order to bring in low wage jobs back! So stupid.

 

Nice. Wonder how well Harvard monitors the actions of its faculty and staff.

Former Harvard morgue manager pleads guilty to trafficking body parts from donated cadavers

 

At one time the same Trump who is now doing his best to discourage foreign students from attending US universities proposed fast tracking them to green cards so that they could remain in the US permanently.
Trump Says He Would Give Green Cards to All Foreign College Students at Graduation
Donald J. Trump said he would push for a program that would automatically give green cards to all foreign college students in America after they graduate, a reversal from restrictions he enacted as president on immigration by high-skilled workers and students to the United States.

Appearing with the host David Sacks, a Silicon Valley investor who backs the former president’s 2024 campaign, on a podcast that aired Thursday afternoon, Mr. Trump had repeated his frequent criticism of high levels of immigration as an “invasion of our country.” But he was then pressed by Jason Calacanis, another investor who hosts the podcast, to “promise us you will give us more ability to import the best and brightest around the world to America.”

“I do promise, but I happen to agree,” Mr. Trump said, adding “what I will do is — you graduate from a college, I think you should get automatically, as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country, and that includes junior colleges.”

The reality is that the US benefits from foreign students who decide to remain in the US although I'm not sure about the Canadian/South African guy who came to the US to attend Stanford. Interestingly he was technically an illegal for a while since he remained in the US after he dropped out of college and his student visa became invalid.

This is just one example why the US should be welcoming rather than discouraging foreign students.
A Decade-Long Search for a Battery That Can End the Gasoline Era
On a frigid day in early January, as she worked in her office in the Boston suburb of Billerica, Mass., Siyu Huang received a two-word text message.

“Spinning wheels,” it said. Attached was a short video clip showing a car on rollers in an indoor testing center. To the untrained eye there was nothing remarkable in the video. The car could have been getting its emissions tested at a Connecticut auto repair shop (except it had no tailpipe). But to Ms. Huang, the chief executive of Factorial Energy, the video was a milestone in a quest that had already occupied a decade of her life.

Ms. Huang, her husband, Alex Yu, and their employees at Factorial had been working on a new kind of electric vehicle battery, known as solid state, that could turn the auto industry on its head in a few years — if a daunting number of technical challenges could be overcome.

For Ms. Huang and her company, the battery had the potential to change the way consumers think about electric vehicles, give the United States and Europe a leg up on China, and help save the planet.

Factorial is one of dozens of companies trying to invent batteries that can charge faster, go farther, and make electric cars cheaper and more convenient than gasoline vehicles. Transportation is the biggest source of man-made greenhouse gases, and electric vehicles could be a potent weapon against climate change and urban air pollution.

 

Fair.

 

Thanks VA. This seems closer to the core of liberal ideology to me. Still, it is probably FDR who pushes furthest toward these goals, and he did it via the federal government. And he also tried to pack the courts. Again, I don’t think federal power is the goal of progressivism, but I do think it’s a central part of the means.

 

Trump is closer to being a right-wing fascist than a liberal democrat. He is primarily an opportunist with little in the way of personal principles. Trump gave up on being a democrat very early in his political career. He flipped to republican during the GWB era, when he realized that pretending to be religious would, by itself, get him 25-30% of the vote. (GWB went through the 2000 election claiming to support "family values" to point a finger at Clinton and Monica Lewinsky.) Remarkably, republicans were willing to support a supposedly religious rapist. He could secure another 10-15% of the vote by demonizing brown people, especially immigrants. Remarkably, republicans were willing to support a racist. There was another 5-10% of the vote available for pretending to be a competent businessman who understood economics (even though he didn't). Remarkably, republicans were willing to support a bankruptcy king and tax cheat.

 

Culture war > class war = power

 

Trump will say whatever it is he thinks you want to hear just to get your vote. He won’t exactly do what you want, but he’ll do just enough to make you feel like he’s on your side.

He is charismatic and has the personality to genuinely get under the Liberals’ skin and I think that is why the MAGA’s like him., whether they are willing to admit it or not. I kinda fell for it in 2016 thinking he had business savvy and that formula may have been just what the country needed at the time, however come to find out all he had in his bag of tricks was his trolling capability, which now is getting kinda tired.

 

That's why I didn't think the voucher system would work. Surely the government would make sure the teachers are actually teachers, testing would have to be on the same playing field as testing for public schools and oh yeah, they would have to account for all funds. Nahhhhh!.

 

Using MAGA "math", European + Female = Gay/Woke.

 

Well, that's it then!!!!! Ban all the Belgians!!! That'll save us!!!

MAGA: Always good for a laugh.

 

Ah, but there's a hitch. Saudis love signing checks, so "these brown people good". . . . 9-11 aside alll.

 

I'm curious, what do you disagree with here? In retrospect, wouldn't it have been smarter not to give corporations so much power? The key to effective capitalism is vibrant competition, not consolidation of wealth and power into a few hands. And corporations, by their very nature, are collectivist, anti-competitive and, ironically, anti-capitalist in many ways.

P.S. Guys like Theil (who funded much of this) are openly anti-competition and pro-monopoly. Is that where you stand?

 

Um, no. My and Theil’s worldviews probably have 0% overlap. Actually, here I was just trying to describe the world, rather than making any kind of value judgement.

But since you asked, I think our best way forward must be grounded in classical liberalism, where no benefits or punishments are arbitrary or based on viewpoints or identities. And I absolutely think corporations are not interested in this kind of fairness. As Adam Smith once noted, “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”

Meanwhile, Madison is probably my guiding light as far as how governance should operate. He wisely cautioned that we can’t rely on a great leader to save us from despotism. “It is in vain to say that enlightened statesmen will be able to adjust these clashing interests and render them all subservient to the public good. Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm. Nor, in many cases, can such an adjustment be made at all without taking into view indirect and remote considerations, which will rarely prevail over the immediate interest which one party may find in disregarding the rights of another or the good of the whole.

 

Sorry. It was an honest question, not a critique of your post. I lean toward the pragmatic, but somewhat obsessively.

But back to the Progressive statement in question. That seems like a pragmatic view to me. The idea of a corporation as an "individual" like you and me is what seems radical. An "entity", like another country, seems more accurate.

 

Harvard didn't listen to SCOTUS when told to refrain from engaging in affirmative action on admissions. Doubt they'll listen to the Trump administration unless it costs them too much money.

Black student percentage of Harvard's 2023 freshman class using affirmative action: 14%

Black student percentage of Harvard's 2024 freshman class not using affirmative action (supposedly): 14%

Harvard now claims their 2023 freshmen class was 18% black. That's probably not true (15.3% is possible depending on how you play with the data)

Harvard has become more of a corporation than an elite academic institution. Harvard played a big role in impoverishing the Russian people in the 1990's by conspiring with Russian oligarchs to loot Russia's assets.

Note that MIT listened to SCOTUS in 2023 and (partially) cut back on affirmative action admissions