Links and Commentary 3/21/25

Welcome to Scholastic Alchemy! I’m James and I write mostly about education. I find it fascinating and at the same time maddening. Scholastic Alchemy is my attempt to make sense of and explain the perpetual oddities around education, as well as to share my thoughts on related topics. On Wednesdays I post a long-ish dive into a topic of my choosing. On Fridays I post some links I’ve encountered that week and some commentary about what I’m sharing. Scholastic Alchemy will remain free for the foreseeable future but if you like my work and want to support me, please consider a paid subscription. If you have objections to Substack as a platform, I maintain a parallel version using BeeHiiv and you can subscribe there.

Columbia University’s Troubles

You’d expect me to have some affinity for Columbia University since I earned my doctorate there but, if anything, my experiences there drove me away from wanting anything to do with academia. During my time there, I found a system hell-bent on exploiting younger doctoral students, insulated from practical concerns, and focused mostly on advancing oneself. Despite the high-minded rhetoric around a community of scholars, I felt that my professors and the processes by which one earns tenure and builds a career were deeply individualistic. I recall watching a meeting about updating our doctoral program that included representatives of several departments at Columbia University in which they explained that teachers are not engaged in knowledge production. That is, they do not come to know or learn anything new about the world. What’s more, they felt this was the case with education research more generally. People studying education could not produce new knowledge. They were simply regurgitating the knowledge produced by real scholars in real departments. They questioned the need for schools of education, such as Teachers College, the largest college of education in the country, to even grant doctorates. Needless to say, it was discouraging.

After reading that, you might expect me not to care much that the Trump administration is planning to withhold about $400 million in federal grants, student loans, and other funding from Columbia University. That is not the case. While the stated reason is that CU doesn’t do enough to combat antisemitism, it seems clear that the real goal is to damage universities as institutions. They’ve cut hundreds of millions for Johns Hopkins, prompting mass layoffs. They are threatening the University of Pennsylvania’s funding over their policy toward transgender people. In all of these cases, the funding cuts are, to put it mildly, insane. What does the medical research at New York Presbyterian Columbia University Medical School have to do with the school’s policy toward antisemitism? Why cut cancer research? Why request academic programs such as African American Studies to be “placed in receivership or eliminated”? The purpose in all these cases has nothing to do with improving the university system. It is, instead, an attempt to eliminate the massive role universities play in research, athletics, teaching, foreign aid, or anything else that could threaten the president’s power or his administration’s ideology. Despite all my misgivings, universities need to be largely independent from political control. Nobody should dictate what can be studies, what research can take place, and certainly the government should not use unrelated grants and funding to pursue a political agenda.

What I find most concerning is that Columbia University is not planning to fight the administration in court. They are not suing to protect themselves.

What do we get for our Money?

The National Institutes of Health are in the process of reviewing every grant and making cancellations based on whether or not the research is politically aligned with the interests of the Trump administration. These cancellations are causing chaos as researchers, even those in the middle of an already approved grant, are finding their funding pulled. It’s worth taking some time to think about what exactly the US taxpayer is getting from the NIH.

People around the world will notice the absence of American contributions to scientific research. Indeed, it seems as though the world will have a hard time scaling up to replace all the lost research simply because the USA contributes so much. As public policy professor Don Moynihan puts it:

Much like what we see in attacks on universities, the cuts to NIH grants appear to have little to do with the stated reason, efficiency, and more to do with the desire to end publicly funded medical research more generally. After all, ending grants when some (or even all) of the money has already been disbursed is incredibly wasteful. While the post is about the NIH, I also want to point out that almost all of the grants are made to researchers at universities. These attacks are related, not independent.

What’s the point of ending medical research? I have no idea. I do not know why it is meaningful to make Americans sicker and do not see how that accomplishes goals for the president. I can only conclude that nobody in the administration cares one way or the other.

Segregationists

Sometimes I wonder if writing about segregation is counterproductive. There’s a risk that readers discount my thinking because I am following something of a trite, well-worn pattern for those on the left: calling someone opponents racist. Calling someone racist is, these days, going to shut down a conversation. It’s something you say that can make people who disagree with you stop listening to you at all. It may turn off less informed or less invested readers who assume you have an ax to grind. One reason I spent time on Wednesday’s posts looking at left-oriented perspectives that seem, if not approving of school segregation, then at least nostalgic for it, is because it’s important to recognize trends are multifaceted and complex.

That said, it really does seem like our country is currently being led by segregationists.

What does DEI have to do with Marines raising the flag at Iwo Jima?

The Trump administration has also removed requirements that government contractors do not discriminate on the basis of race and no longer explicitly prohibit segregated facilities.

Oh, sure, it’s totally symbolic. After all, there are still state and local laws prohibiting discrimination. I’m sure no states would begin scaling their laws back.

Meanwhile, the new HUD secretary has cut the fair housing rules around not discriminating based on race.

And there’s the cuts to the Department of Education to talk about, with enforcement of civil rights laws, including currently active discrimination cases, seemingly in limbo.

At some point, if there are multiple efforts across multiple agencies all working at the direction of the administration, you have to assume this is intentional. This is an administration that wants segregation. We should not be surprised if some degree of segregation returns to public life as these initiatives are copied at the state and local levels.

Kids are “lab rats” for Google’s AI testing

Google was working on a chatbot called Character AI. Kids interacted with these chatbots. Google’s Character AI may have contributed to one 14 year old killing herself.

And this from the New York Times directly quotes logs from the chatbot “Danny”:

We know we’re never getting gun control but maybe we can get some guardrails for these LLMs before it’s too late?

What do young adults use AI tools for?

Open AI’s internal research brings us this amazing chart about what young adults use AI tools for.

Do note that something like 16-18% of them use AI tools for relationship advice, more than use them for computer programming.

Thanks for reading!