Latest news with #U.C.Berkeley
Scientific American
5 days ago
- Science
- Scientific American
How Teen Mathematician Hannah Cairo Disproved a Major Mathematical Wave Conjecture
When Hannah Cairo was 17 years old, she disproved the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture, a long-standing guess in the field of harmonic analysis about how waves behave on curved surfaces. The conjecture was posed in the 1980s, and mathematicians had been trying to prove it ever since. If the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture turned out to be true, it would illuminate many other significant questions in the field. But after hitting wall after wall trying to prove it, Cairo managed to come up with a counterexample: a circumstance where the waves don't behave as predicted by the conjecture. Therefore, the conjecture can't be true. Cairo got hooked on the problem after being assigned a simpler version of the conjecture to prove as a homework assignment for a class she was taking at the University of California, Berkeley. 'It took me a while to convince [course instructor] Ruixiang Zhang that my proposal was actually correct,' she says. Now, under Zhang's advisement, she has a paper on the preprint server and was invited to present her results at the International Conference on Harmonic Analysis and Partial Differential Equations in El Escorial, Spain. On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. Cairo says she loves talking about her research and giving presentations with colorful and descriptive slides (see examples below). When asked what she studies, Cairo says, in short, 'points, lines and waves.' Born and raised in the Bahamas, Cairo moved to California at the age of 16, where she began to take classes at U.C. Berkeley. Now, at 18 years old, she is on to a Ph.D. program at the University of Maryland to continue her research in Fourier restriction theory. Cairo has faced many difficulties in her journey, but she has found comfort and belonging in the field of mathematics and in the work itself. Scientific American spoke to Cairo about the way harmonic analysis is like dropping stones into a still pond, her transgender identity and the reasons she loves mathematics. [ An edited transcript of the interview follows. ] Beyond 'points, lines, and waves,' how would you explain your field of study, harmonic analysis? Imagine that you're at a pond, and it's a very still pond, and you drop a stone into it. You see these circular waves spreading out. If you drop two stones in the pond, then you might notice this pattern called an interference pattern: instead of looking like circles, they overlap. You get high points, low points. And you get these interesting shapes [where they intersect]. What if you were to use a whole bunch of ripples—then what would you get? In harmonic analysis, you can actually prove that if you drop your stones in the right place in the pond, you can get any shape that you want. My specialty is known as Fourier restriction theory, which is the subdiscipline of harmonic analysis that I work in, where we ask what kind of objects can we build if we're only allowed to use certain kinds of waves. What if we're only allowed to drop the stones in certain parts of the pond? You won't be able to get just any object. In fact, you're only going to be able to get a relatively small family of objects. What the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture says is that the shape of the objects that we get are concentrated along lines. What does it mean to be 'concentrated along lines'? One way to think of the shape of objects is to ask: What is curvature? There are a few different ways you can define it. One possible way is to take a thin, long rectangle and ask how much of your circle can lie in this thin rectangle. What you'll find is that not very much of it can because it bends away, right? On the other hand, if you take something flat like the edge of a square, then you can get a whole side of that square just on one thin tube. So that means that the square is not as 'curved' as a circle. For the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture, we say, consider this object that we're building out of these waves. And we want to say that not very much is going to lie on shapes that do not contain very many lines or thin rectangles. So how did you manage to disprove this conjecture? I looked at these shapes, and one thing that I realized is that the specific kind of waves that are used are concentrated along thick rectangles. This is actually something that is well known. So you end up looking at these waves that are concentrated on rectangles: You take these waves, and they intersect each other, and they make these certain shapes, but here [instead of circle waves] we use rectangle waves. So then we have all of these rectangle waves meeting each other. What I realized is that the shape of where they meet is not quite at the right angle to agree with the direction that these rectangles are pointing in. And so this led me to a rather complicated construction using fractals to arrange these rectangles. The original fractal construction doesn't actually show up in your paper though. What was your final counterexample? What I found out is that if you arrange these waves by taking a high-dimensional hypercube and projecting it down into smaller-dimensional space and then taking only those waves that lie in your region, then this is how you can determine where to put them [to break the conjecture]. What first got you interested in math? I've always been interested in math. I think that, for me, mathematics is an art. In my childhood, I was somewhat lonely. Math was sort of there as a friend almost. I think that art cannot necessarily be a friend in every way that a friend can be, but I think art is like a friend. And so, for as long as I can remember, I've always loved mathematics. Tell me more about how math was a friend to you. I think a lot of people don't think of math as very friendly. There's an analogy that I like to make, which is to another form of art: painting. And I think that if one were to take a class on paint, you could memorize the dates and times at which various forms of paint were developed—and maybe even which paints were used by which painters. And then you can figure out what processes you can use to determine what type of paint it is. I imagine this is useful in art history, but this is not art.... I shouldn't say that. Maybe there is an art to learning about paint. I'm not going to claim that there isn't because I don't study paint. But I think that math is a little bit like that—in school, people learn about [the mathematical version of] paint; they're not learning about painting. Mathematics is comforting to me because it's a way of exploring—to explore ideas and to think about them and to build more ideas out of other ideas. What's comforting about that is that it's independent of the world in some ways. If I'm having a sad day, a happy day, if I move to Maryland (I did just move to Maryland), mathematics is still there, and it is still the same thing. It's also just something that can occupy my mind. You've mentioned to me that you're transgender. How has that affected your journey? I think that it's probably more relevant in my journey as a person than as a mathematician. Being trans has forced me to see things about the world that I maybe otherwise wouldn't have seen. It's made me see the world differently and made me see people differently and made me see myself differently. Fortunately, in the math community, I think that most mathematicians are fine with trans people. I think that it used to be more significant [in my day to day] than it is now. These days it doesn't really make much of a difference. Why have you decided to go on the record now as being trans? Trans visibility is important. People have ideas about who trans people are, and I think that it's best to broaden that. Maybe I'm also hoping that people who think that trans people are 'less' than cisgender people might find themselves questioning that. The other thing is that it's good for trans people to know that they're not alone. I think that part of what helps trans people realize that they're trans is to know that there are more options for who you can be as a trans person. That's important to me. Thank you so much for sharing that. Where is your favorite place to do math? If I'm trying to be productive in writing something down, then I like to be at my desk, and I like to listen to Bach. If I am just trying to think about ideas, then my favorite place to do that is somewhere where I don't have to pay attention to very much else. I could just be sitting down somewhere thinking about stuff, or I could be going for a walk outside. I also like to talk to other people about math, which is another kind of doing math. I really like to give presentations about mathematics. I have these handwritten slides with all these colors and drawings. Luckily, in harmonic analysis, I can give a presentation like this, and then everybody is so happy, and they tell me my slides are cute. What's next for your research? I'm working on a research project with my adviser on Mizohata-Takeuchi and adjacent stuff and about a sort of different thing: the local Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture. The process of learning more about this kind of mathematics is pretty exciting—not just for me learning more about what's out there but for the math community as a whole to try to understand these kinds of things better. [That's] something that I'm excited about.
San Francisco Chronicle
17-06-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
Kaz Kajimura, founder of Bay Area jazz club Yoshi's, dies at 81
Kazuo 'Kaz' Kajimura, the driving force behind one of the Bay Area's most iconic jazz institutions, has died. He passed away Sunday, June 15, according to a family statement, after a battle with Alzheimer's disease. He was 81. Kajimura, a Tokyo native, was a relentless dreamer who helped shape the Bay Area's jazz scene over five decades. A graduate of Waseda University, with advanced degrees from institutions in China, U.C. Berkeley and Stanford, Kajimura arrived in the East Bay with a reporter's eye and an entrepreneur's spirit. In 1972, he co-founded Yoshi's with Yoshie Akiba and Hugh 'Hiro' Hori, launching it as a modest Japanese restaurant near UC Berkeley. But it was Kajimura who expanded the business into one of the country's most revered jazz venues. The club's move to Oakland's Claremont Avenue in 1979 introduced live music, and by 1997, Yoshi's had relocated to its now-renowned Jack London Square location. The 310-seat jazz venue welcomed giants like Chick Corea, Wynton Marsalis and Pharoah Sanders. A brief expansion to San Francisco's Fillmore District began in 2007 but was eventually scaled back in 2014 amid financial strains. 'Kaz invested his whole life and his whole family inheritance to navigate Yoshi's through both different locations, and really tough times,' the family said in a statement. 'Yoshi's Oakland wouldn't exist without him.' Beyond his business ventures, Kajimura was an avid harmonica player, pilot, speedboat racer and scuba diver, with a zest for adventure matched only by his devotion to community and music. 'Yoshi's is like no other place on Earth,' he once said. He also leaves behind a devoted protégé and successor, Hal Campos, whom he called 'his only son.' 'The show must go on,' Kaz would say, according to his family.
New York Times
28-04-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
A Road Map of Trump's Lawless Presidency, According to 35 Legal Scholars
In his first hours back as president, Donald J. Trump did an extraordinary thing: He made a direct assault on the Constitution. He declared that his government would no longer treat U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants or children of lawful, temporary immigrants as citizens, as the 14th Amendment commands. You can draw a straight line from that executive order on birthright citizenship to his administration's revocation of visas, the detention of foreign students, and the wrongful deportation of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Maryland resident, to a Salvadoran prison and the subsequent refusal to try to extricate him in spite of court orders. Mr. Trump is claiming far-reaching but dubious powers, pushing or exceeding legal limits without first bothering to determine if they were permissible, as past presidents generally did. Times Opinion recently reached out to dozens of legal scholars and asked them to identify the most significant unconstitutional or unlawful actions by Mr. Trump and his administration in the first 100 days of his second presidency, and to assess the damage. We also asked them to separate actions that might draw legal challenges but are, in fact, within the powers of the president. And we asked them to connect the dots on where they thought Mr. Trump was heading. We heard back from 35 scholars — a group full of diverse viewpoints and experiences, including liberals like U.C. Berkeley's Erwin Chemerinsky and Harvard's Jody Freeman; the conservatives Adrian Vermeule at Harvard and Michael McConnell, a former federal appeals court judge who directs Stanford's Constitutional Law Center and is a member of the Federalist Society; and the libertarians Ilya Somin at George Mason University and Evan Bernick at Northern Illinois University. Many are among the nation's most cited scholars by their colleagues in law review articles. From all of their responses, we constructed a road map through Mr. Trump's first 100 days of lawlessness, including his defiance of our judiciary and constitutional system; the undermining of First Amendment freedoms and targeting of law firms, universities, the press and other parts of civil society; the impoundment of federal funds authorized by Congress; the erosion of immigrant rights; and the drive to consolidate power. This road map largely draws on the scholars' own words, which serve as bright red warning lights about the future of America: Not all of our legal scholars saw every Trump action the same way, and one saw the problem as lying more with the courts than with the administration. But there was abundant assent that the president is trying to operate without limits, and that the rule of law and especially due process are being profoundly tested and challenged. This guide through the first 100 days is by no means exhaustive, but rather reflects legal issues our 35 scholars highlighted repeatedly or with the gravest concern. Let's start with what many of them flagged first: Ending birthright citizenship. No other issue united our legal scholars, as a group and across ideological lines, more than Mr. Trump's attack on birthright citizenship, which they assessed as flagrantly lawless in nature with little hope of succeeding in the courts. But the fact that the president has taken on this fight speaks to his tenacity in trying to upend long established rights and, in this case, a Supreme Court decision that has stood for 127 years. Federal courts in three states have issued temporary nationwide pauses on Mr. Trump's order. The administration has asked the Supreme Court to modify the reach of those injunctions, which would allow the president's executive order to go into effect in some or even many parts of the country. But this battle is likely to be a mere prelude to one over the constitutionality of the order itself. From there, it's a straight shot to deporting people without due process. The case of Mr. Abrego Garcia has put a klieg light on the Trump administration's contempt for perhaps the most fundamental guarantee of the Bill of Rights: due process under the law. It means the government must provide a person — and that is any individual, not just a United States citizen — with notice and an opportunity for a hearing before stripping him of life, liberty or property. But it is not just the case of Mr. Abrego Garcia that is alarming. He was among 238 migrants declared 'alien enemies' under a rarely used 1798 law that allows the government to quickly deport citizens from an invading nation. In other cases, the Trump administration cited a seldom used provision of a 1952 law to target international students who protested the war in Gaza on the ground that they pose a threat to U.S. foreign policy. By using a broad interpretation of what constitutes a threat, critics say the Trump administration eroded constitutionally protected rights to due process and free speech. The State Department also revoked the visas or student status of over 1,500 international students and recent graduates, generally without providing clear justification. This lack of transparency provided little recourse for students or universities to correct or appeal these decisions. On Friday, the Trump administration, in an apparent about-face, announced that it will restore the legal status of hundreds of students as it works on a new system for assessing and terminating student visas. But officials said those students may yet see their status and their visas discontinued. The lawless attacks also have targeted law firms … In February Mr. Trump began targeting top law firms that he has accused of helping to 'weaponize' the justice system against him by representing clients or causes at odds with his agenda. He has forced them to bow to his demands or see their federal contracts summarily terminated and their lawyers lose security clearances and access to federal buildings that they need to represent their clients. Jenner & Block, one of the firms targeted, has argued in court that the order violates the First Amendment, the Fifth Amendment's due process clause and the Sixth Amendment's right to counsel. 'It goes beyond the president's constitutional power' and 'is authorized by no statute,' the firm said. One federal judge has called a similar effort against another law firm 'a shocking abuse of power.' So far, to avoid reprisals, at least nine firms have promised to provide roughly $1 billion in top-tier pro bono legal advice to causes Mr. Trump embraces. More than a few of these scholars likened this coercive scheme to extortion. And universities … Universities have similarly come under attack. Mr. Trump has threatened to pull billions of dollars in federal funds unless campuses knuckle under to his demands on hiring, admissions and curriculums. Many of the scholars framed these attacks as part of a larger war on civil society and brazen violation of the First Amendment and procedural protections. And The Associated Press. For the last few months, the White House has sharply reduced The Associated Press's access to Mr. Trump because it declined to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, the name that Mr. Trump designated for it. A.P. journalists were excluded from the small, rotating group of journalists who routinely cover events in confined spaces at the White House, including the Oval Office and Air Force One. But recently the White House, on a few occasions, allowed A.P. journalists into such events after a Federal District Court judge in Washington, D.C., ruled that the exclusion violated the First Amendment's free speech clause. Using money as leverage is key to Mr. Trump, even if the Constitution stands in his way. Mr. Trump wasted little time in challenging Congress's constitutional power of the purse to control government spending. On Inauguration Day he signed an executive order freezing foreign aid and funding for energy programs. He has impounded billions of dollars, despite a 1974 law that limits the president's power to withhold those funds and requires him to follow specific steps to delay or rescind funding. He has called that law a 'disaster' that 'is clearly unconstitutional' and 'a blatant violation of the separation of powers.' But in fact, many scholars see the president's actions as a further effort to arrogate power within the White House at the expense of Congress. Deploying tariffs at will is suspect, too. The president's tariffs are facing numerous legal challenges, including a lawsuit contesting levies that Mr. Trump announced on China in February and later expanded. In imposing the tariffs, the administration invoked a 1977 law, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which allows a president to regulate imports if the president declares a national emergency. He argued that tariffs were necessary because U.S. trade deficits have 'led to the hollowing out' of the nation's manufacturing base, undermined supply chains and made the country's 'defense-industrial base' dependent on foreign adversaries. But the 1977 law has never been used before to impose tariffs, and it is unclear whether it authorizes them. Then there's the firings at independent agencies. Independent agencies like the Federal Communications Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission were created by Congress with regulatory authority over their domains. Their leaders are appointed by the president but operate independently from the White House. This arrangement, as the Heritage Foundation argued in its blueprint for a second Trump term, 'makes them constitutionally problematic in light of the Constitution's having vested federal executive power in the president.' And that is why these agencies are now in Mr. Trump's cross hairs as he seeks to extend and strengthen his hold on the bureaucracy. The president has already summarily fired members of several independent commissions without cause before their terms were up, in violation of the law and a 1935 Supreme Court decision. But the judicial winds may be blowing the president's way. Many of these scholars expect the Supreme Court will side with Mr. Trump. Now let's turn to actions within Trump's authority. We asked these scholars to offer examples of significant actions by Mr. Trump that have received legal criticism but were within his writ as president, regardless of whether they agree with what he did. As a starting point, Professor Johnsen at Indiana University noted, 'Presidents possess enormous powers to change policy.' Another scholar, Derek Black at the University of South Carolina, made the argument that legitimate exercises of Mr. Trump's authority may simply be obscured by the sheer breadth and velocity of his effort to impose his will on the government and the country. Not everyone agreed on the particulars, but among the actions some scholars pointed to as being within Mr. Trump's power, or likely to be upheld by the courts, were: All of which brings us to Trump and the courts. More than 200 legal challenges have been filed so far against the administration's actions since Mr. Trump returned to the White House. With the Republican-controlled Congress broadly compliant with the White House agenda, the courts are left as the last fortification against administrative overreach. But will the judiciary, in the end, be up to the task? And will the White House comply with judicial orders? Courts have limited power to actually enforce their orders — judges rely on the executive branch to do that — and some federal judges have complained that the administration has ignored them or slow-walked compliance. In a worrisome comment in February, Vice President JD Vance asserted that 'judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power.' He has made a similar argument in the past. Moreover, the president and his allies have demeaned judges who have ruled against the administration and called for their impeachment. In a striking development on Friday, F.B.I. agents in Milwaukee arrested a state court judge on charges of obstructing immigration agents. All of this has led to concerns about whether court orders will be ignored by the Trump administration or the courts will be undercut by Congress, which controls their budgets and can, under the Constitution, largely dictate which cases federal courts can hear — and can't. Last month the House speaker, Mike Johnson, raised the possibility of eliminating some federal courts. 'We do have the authority over the federal courts, as you know,' Mr. Johnson told reporters. 'We can eliminate an entire district court. We have power of funding over the courts and all these other things.' And finally, we end at … the Big Picture. What do Mr. Trump's lawless actions add up to? And where do they suggest the president is heading? We concluded by asking those questions to our legal scholars, too.
Yahoo
14-04-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Opinion: Asian Students' Test Scores Are Often High. Our Success Is Complicated
Few observers were probably surprised when Asian students outscored other students on test scores released by California state this fall. Statewide, and here in Los Angeles, Asian students who completed California's 2024 assessments showed higher levels of proficiency in reading and math, compared to other racial groups. Asian kids' dominance of California's state tests echoes the results of national exams, where the same, long-standing trend of academic achievement by these students holds true in other cities and states across the country. Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter So, why do Asian kids do so well on those exams? In my experience, the reasons are complicated. I grew up in L.A.'s San Gabriel Valley, where I attended high-performing public schools that enrolled a lot of Asian students like me. We consistently outperformed other schools and student groups across the state. But here's what the high test scores didn't show. Many of us poured countless hours into our studies and extracurriculars. Many of us were also privileged enough to have tutors. Growing up, I had classmates who started their academic after-school programs in elementary school. And although not every family in the neighborhood had a tutor, education was definitely one of the top priorities for the majority in my community. We were in a high-pressure environment, and assimilation meant performing well. In high school, students engaged in afterschool activities, such as sports and academic clubs. Some parents paid tens of thousands on college counselors. All this pressure, however difficult at times, created 'success,' which ultimately meant being accepted to reputable universities. Our graduating class had around 250 students. One of our most notable statistics for college admissions was 26 confirmed acceptances to U.C. Berkeley. However, a highly competitive atmosphere like this can exact psychological and social costs. Many students around me growing up were constantly stressed. It felt like college admissions were the be-all end-all. It shouldn't be that way. My mom and dad immigrated from China, and I am forever grateful for their dedication and sacrifices. One way to show my appreciation and that their efforts weren't wasted was through my academic and professional achievements. It's all part of the American Dream. However, that pressure to succeed can also hold a dark side. A University of Michigan research project called Deconstructing the Model Minorityfound Asian students 'often experience extreme pressure and stress.' We may also feel 'the responsibility and guilt […] for [our] parents' sacrifices.' This is what academic achievement costs for some Asian students, and also probably what it costs some other kids from other ethnic groups. However, not every student has access to the same opportunities as me. And not everyone's experience was like mine. While my school growing up provided structure, support, and community, many other students in L.A. are navigating underfunded schools. And often those students also have less academic support and face greater socio-economic instability. I've worked as a tutor in South Central L.A., so I've seen some of these issues first-hand. I've worked with fourth graders struggling to read. It's not that those students lacked the ability to learn. It's that they've been disadvantaged by systematic issues and other external factors they can't control. But I believe that education is the great equalizer. And I think that we are making progress on fulfilling that potential. Organizations such as Teach for America, Khan Academy, Head Start, and PeerForward are excellent starting points in the ultimate goal of closing the achievement gap. It sounds simple, but it's not. Educators and policymakers everywhere need to ensure every student has an equal opportunity to a quality education. It's a multifaceted issue. That's why our conversation should not center solely on why Asian students score higher than other kids. We should also be talking about how to ensure that all students have all the resources they need to succeed.
Yahoo
12-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump's Assault on Universities Is a Wake-Up Call
The first time Donald Trump threatened to use the power of the presidency to punish a university, I was the target. At UC Berkeley, where I was chancellor, campus police had at the last moment canceled an appearance by Milo Yiannopoulos, the alt-right political pundit who was then a star at Breitbart News, because of a violent attack on the venue by a group of outside left-wing activists who objected to Yiannopoulos's presence. In the end, although these protesters caused significant damage both on campus and to shops and businesses in downtown Berkeley, the police restored peace. Yiannopoulos was safely escorted back to his hotel, where he promptly criticized the university for canceling his speech. But on the morning of February 2, 2017, I awoke to a tweet reading: 'If U.C. Berkeley does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view - NO FEDERAL FUNDS?' I didn't worry much about Trump's threat at the time. I now realize that was a mistake. American universities did not cause the onslaught that the second Trump administration is unleashing upon them. But they would be in a much stronger position today if they had made a proactive case to the public for their own importance—and taken steps to address their very real shortcomings. In the aftermath of the Yiannopoulos episode and Trump's tweet, I worried less about the potential loss of federal funding than about the enormous costs of hiring additional police and converting the campus into a riot zone over and over. Berkeley's commitment to free speech all but guaranteed that more conflict was in store. Yiannopoulos had announced that he would come back, and Ann Coulter soon accepted an invitation to speak at Berkeley as well. For a time, my concerns seemed justified. Berkeley spent millions of dollars to fortify the campus, and pro- and anti-Trump factions continued to clash. Meanwhile, Trump's first administration largely spared higher education. Despite relentless criticism of universities for their putative anti-conservative bias, federal support for scientific research retained bipartisan support. [Rose Horowitch: Colleges have no idea how to comply with Trump's orders] What I failed to appreciate was that the new administration was preparing the ground for a war on the American university—one that it might have carried out had the first Trump White House been better organized. In the context of crises and protests around controversial speakers, along with the growing preoccupation on campuses with offensive speech and so-called microaggressions, Trump and his allies contorted the idea of free speech to build a narrative that the university, rather than the political right, was the chief threat to the First Amendment. State after state introduced legislation, drawing on a template devised by the conservative Goldwater Institute, purportedly to defend free speech but also to enact draconian protocols for disciplining students who engaged in campus protests deemed to prevent others from speaking. (At least 23 states now have statutes in effect conferring some level of authority to state legislatures to monitor free speech on campus, demanding yearly reports, and imposing harsh new rules for student discipline.) Republican politicians began to include denunciations of universities in their talking points; in a 2021 speech, J. D. Vance declared, 'We have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.' Now the war has begun in earnest. Trump's directives to restrict funding for science, especially the mandate to dramatically reduce National Institutes of Health grants for scientific infrastructure, equipment, and lab support—all essential components of university science—will cripple biomedical research across the country. Already, universities are reducing graduate programs and even rescinding informal offers that were made before the spending cuts were announced, and in some cases introducing hiring freezes. If the Trump administration sticks to its decision to cancel $400 million in federal grants to Columbia over the charge of tolerating anti-Semitism, we haven't seen anything yet. Nowhere is the assault on universities more pronounced than in the campaign to eradicate DEI. A recent Department of Education 'Dear Colleague' letter warned that 'using race in decisions pertaining to admissions, hiring, promotion, compensation, financial aid, scholarships, prizes, administrative support, discipline, housing, graduation ceremonies, and all other aspects of student, academic, and campus life' is prohibited. The letter purported to base its guidance on the Supreme Court's 2023 decision striking down affirmative action, but its language went far beyond the Court's ruling. The price of noncompliance: no federal funds. This time, I take the threat seriously. Universities have made two general mistakes in the face of sustained right-wing criticism. First, they have behaved as if their societal value is self-evident. In fact, they need to be far more proactive in communicating the enormous contributions they make to the public good: a campaign not just to defend themselves but to remind the country that our universities are among our most crucial assets. Many of the core elements of the technologies that enable our modern lifestyle—the internet, GPS, new immunological cancer therapies, mRNA vaccines, and medical imaging, to take just a tiny sample—have emerged from academic laboratories. Whether one is concerned about democracy, how scientific research can continue to position the U.S. as a global leader, how to solve global issues such as disease and climate change, or how to maintain a competitive edge with other nations such as China and Russia, we need our universities. [Read: A new kind of crisis for American universities] Second, university administrators have too often assumed that because a great deal of conservative criticism of higher education has been made in bad faith, none of it is valid. The truth is that universities have not always honored their commitments to free speech, academic freedom, and open inquiry as well as they should have, and the decline in public support for universities reflects, at least in part, those failures and shortcomings. Offices of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion named values that for years were largely seen as benign. There was broad agreement that students from underrepresented minorities needed to have the opportunities higher education afforded but required special support to thrive in intense and often hostile academic environments for which they had little preparation or family support. Over the past decade, however, these offices grew in size and influence. With that came legitimate concerns about administrative overreach, bloat, and ineffectiveness. At the same time, the liberal consensus was unraveling. Some faculty and students had indeed rejected the premise of free speech, noting that when power inflected all social relations, there was nothing like a level playing field; universities, they argued, should side with those lacking power and limit the speech of the powerful. Concerns about the ways in which prejudice was expressed in everyday interactions, often through unintentional slights and statements, not only surfaced as priorities for administrators but were converted into speech codes and protocols. A new language of 'harm' was used to prosecute new canon wars, target faculty who offended students in the normal course of teaching, and deploy a new range of techniques to censor, punish, or 'cancel' other members of the university community. All of this came to a head in the protests after the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023. Without any campus consensus about free speech, open inquiry, and civil discourse, an existing political impasse became even more intractable. When, as Berkeley chancellor, I was petitioned by student and faculty groups to cancel invitations to speakers like Yiannopoulos and Coulter, I worried that to do so would be to invite censorship more broadly, and that any abrogation of free-speech rules on campus would soon be used against other political positions. I warned campus constituencies that the principle of free speech would not only protect liberals when national politics shifted—as they already had in the first Trump administration—but also help enshrine the university's larger commitments to open inquiry and academic freedom, serious threats to which had already begun. Now my fear that any curtailment of free-speech principles by universities would be used against universities is coming to pass. The new administration is targeting any use of race in statements or programs promoting diversity and inclusion. This effort goes far beyond admissions and hiring decisions, to the point of threatening institutions over the content of their curriculum, making a mockery of the administration's supposed commitment to free speech. And the attacks on campus protests and DEI are just the opening salvo. [Jonathan Chait: Anti-Semitism is just a pretext] Governor Ron DeSantis has already signed legislation chilling instruction in disciplines including sociology and Middle East history in Florida's public universities. Given the cuts to science funding at the federal level, we may soon see efforts to control the teaching of climate science, or biology, and maybe even evolution once again. The playbook to take 'back' universities includes much more than what we have so far seen. Federal support for scientific research, and for financial aid for students, is part of the postwar social contract that was articulated at a time when America recognized the need for as many of its citizens as possible to receive a university education and for American science to become preeminent. America's universities, and its science, grew to be the best in the world. This is the time to rearticulate and defend the unparalleled value of our research universities. They are the envy of nations around the globe. We attract the best and the brightest to our shores as students, researchers, and teachers. Creating these extraordinary institutions took the better part of a century, but they can be destroyed very quickly. The attack on the university may eventually backfire politically, but not before it does enormous damage. As higher-education leaders resist efforts to undermine and punish universities for their commitment to knowledge, science, and truth, they must also take care to deliver on the promises they make. Only then will the defense stand a chance of succeeding against the current assault. Article originally published at The Atlantic
