Silicon Valley is Wrong about Federal University Funding
Note that this article was heavily self censored. The original draft called out several people in the tech industry by name, and linked to tweets and essays to back up the overarching criticism. The final draft does not. Chilling effects are real, but it's difficult to call attention to them. This is my weak attempt to point out the impacts of censorship without incurring more risk.
About two months ago, the Trump administration decided to cut billions of dollars in university funding. This broadside was part of a larger war against the higher education system, a war that thus far includes attempts at enforcing government sponsored ideological curriculum and increased police and ICE "enforcement" against university students. For some reason, many of Silicon Valley's most committed libertarians are very excited about this. This is odd to me. I would think that the government using its awesome power to tear down otherwise free institutions would be met with horror and disgust, just on principle alone.
After a lot of heated conversations with some of my more entrepreneurial minded friends, and after reading quite a few bizarre tweets, texts, and blog posts from the MAGA wing of Silicon Valley, I've come to the realization that many in the Valley seem to fundamentally misunderstand the US university system. Mostly, this is because we are all hyper focused on an extremely small part of it. Everyone spends the vast majority of time talking about undergrad admissions, and the vast majority of that time is in turn spent talking about approximately 10 schools with a total undergraduate population of less than 75k students. There are ~20M undergrads, so we're talking about .3% of the total undergrad population, only .2% of the total US population aged 18-24, and .02% of the total US population.
