From regulatory capture through revolving doors and lobbying, to media capture through purchase, and now academic capture through donation, it seems no activity is safe from large concentrations of wealth.
From regulatory capture through revolving doors and lobbying, to media capture through purchase, and now academic capture through donation, it seems no activity is safe from large concentrations of wealth.
Her actual whistleblower declaration contains a lot of the evidence some may be looking for:
https://live-whistleblower-aid.pantheonsite.io/wp-content/up...
To sum up the first few pages after skimming it, Facebook tried to bribe her (well "fund" her research), she refused. Later she had a meeting with the former head of comms at Facebook, who was now on the Dean's council, where he became incredibly angry with her research (page 4, 13). Following this, she got an email from the Dean of the Kennedy school which sounds very much like someone tattled to them and they now want to "review" her research (see page 5, 15). It continues from here.
Colleges and universities are like little countries, rarely answer to anyone and focused on their own insular practices.
It was only in the last few years did I realize the massive endowments many universities have make them ripe targets for bad actors to make their way into administration.
The few very large unis i looked into all made massively more money off investment returns than any operational income. the year i reviewed for the university of texas system showed they could have charged zero tuition that year and still make a profit
there are absolutely kickbacks for people in control of those endowments choosing specific investment options with their many billions of dollars
My partner works at a major U in the US. Top 200ish.
They are solely focused on revenue. Teacher pay rarely raised, but that new upgrade for the stadium at a cool $120m, seems like a great idea.
FFS, her dept went past the paper budget for one semester, about 5 years ago. The resolution? Do without paper until the next semester.
That's what students insane tuition prices bought them. Apathy over education.
Why are they so focused on that? It seems like a great way to drive a school into the ground.
A lot of people are looking for an all controlling force in the country or world
instead, I see a lot of demigods that rule their domain, curating complete autonomy as long as they stay within the confines they finessed
You don't need a formal conspiracy when you have an elite with converging interests.
Anybody working in University IT can attest to this :-)
That's true of a lot of things. You really can't allow a system to police itself. Once you allow that, you've essentially given them carte blanche to run a fiefdom.
I just read that this morning. I'm interested enough in the outcome that I put a calendar reminder 6 months out to check what happened. Doing so made me wonder if there's a service that would email me updates about legal cases like this that I would like to follow.
It's possible that a Google Alert[1] might be enough for your use case, depending on how well the legal cases are covered by Google.
[1] https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/4815696?hl=en
Any non Google alternatives out there?
This social listening company does one: https://alerts.talkwalker.com/alerts/
They might try to call and email you though.
There are services that monitors changes on webpages so you could plug the "official" page where legal/official information about that case lives and wait for a change, maybe it would even work with a search engine results page.
Might be a good addition to archive.org, since they will index and re-index pages from time to time anyway and detect changes.
Who would pay for this?
Random people like you and me wouldn't pay for something they're gonna use twice in their lifetime, and lawyers surely have something like this, possibly integrate with all the other tools they use.
if there's a service
There are plenty of mailing list services that associates of large law firms sign up for. I haven't been around people in that world for a while so I don't know the names, but I'm sure you can find them if you spend time looking.
the age old unspoken donation "coincidence"
this is how many rich people get their kids into Harvard too, the only reason parents got caught up in the varsity blues scandal was that they were too explicit... old money donates the new library and "hopes" for the best
this is how many rich people get their kids into Harvard too
That's the entire point and feature of these elite institutions, to connect wealth with brilliant people. They are the traditional social institutions of innovation and entrepreneurship before incubators like YC were a thing. If you remove the wealth aspects, then the Ivies are no different than any other research state school.
It's a great way to further entrench the influence of the rich into public life.
They’re worse.
Aside from their football programs, none of these other schools have gotten as comfortable with looking the other way for The Greater Good.
Yeah. My sarcasm meter broke itself as I proclaimed:
Harvard, breaking rules for people donating new buildings?! Surely not Harvard.
the only reason parents got caught up in the varsity blues scandal was that they were too explicit
they weren't rich enough to use the route that they used.
Why are so many green users' posts making the front page over the last few days? Something seems weird...
At this moment, green users (sunxfancy, sarahboyce, and anticorporate) have 3 posts on the front page. Last night was a similar story.
Three conspiracy theorists walk into a bar ... it's definitely no coincidence.
Three valid reasons. Person is genuinely new. Person wants to post but not link to original identifiable id. Third someone is posting in official capacity and wants separate work id.
I can't speak to the other green users, but I'm a long time poster who recently created a new account because I decided I didn't want my contributions here tied to my real name anymore, after some real-life concerns about harassment (not from HN, but still trying to play it safer online now).
Harvard isn't about "veritas", it's about $$$.
verita$
The best things in life are free
But you can give them to the birds and bees
I want money.
Omnia vincit pecunia
The surprise to me is that anyone would ever expect companies like X or Facebook to pay more than lip service to the idea of being an open public platform. These are private companies who want to
1) Attract a lot of eyeballs
2) Sell ad space in front of those eyeballs
My paramount object in this struggle is to make a profit
and is not either to save or to destroy free speech.
If I could make a profit without promoting any free speech I would do it,
and if I could save it by promoting all free speech I would do it;
and if I could save it by promoting some free speech and forbidding other
free speech, I would also do that.
[1]http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/greeley...
The problem is that all hosting is done by companies trying to make a profit. When you say host it yourself, likely you mean - Build your own website. A few issues with this line of thinking
- Web hosting companies are attacked for hosting controversial speech all the time (AWS stopped hosting Parler when they were put on blast) - The infrastructure required for hosting large controversial websites can also be made unavailable to controversial sites (e.g CloudFlare dropping KiwiFarms citing its 'hateful user base') - Not to mention some platforms/people are literally de-banked, which apparently is a thing, and forced to use crypto for all expenses and revenue
Americans value freedom of speech, these are American companies. At some point our governing body, which exists to shape society according to our collective wishes, needs to step in and hold the hands of these companies and make them behave in accordance with American values. I don't know the numbers but I would imagine it's a very small amount of America that isn't pro free speech.
I don’t really see how your comment is at all relevant to the topic at hand. The accusation is that Facebook used a donation to Harvard to silence a critic, it has absolutely nothing to do with whether that criticism is published on Facebook or not.
500MM to avoid Harvard scrutiny - not a bad deal on 40MMM quarterly profit. It probably doubles as a tax deduction as well. Free market capitalism at its finest.
Free market means businesses decide the regulations placed on the public, for private gain
wouldn't 40MMM be 40 trillion (40M-million)...?
It's fascinating how we've come to this, where we've let our society be influenced so profoundly by social media platforms and the men who run them. It's bad and I hope we can eventually diffuse the power that's been concentrated in their hands.
But they're not the same, these men. Only one of them really scares me. What scares me about Zuck is observable in his public behavior. He knows EXACTLY what he's doing and saying at all times. That's why when stuff like this comes out, you can be assured it was no coincidence, and you have to face the fact that he doesn't care.
I agree with the sentiment, but don't think "let our society come to this" is the right framing.
This is how the USA has always been run, except in the past the billionaire class created the whole university to shape society. Like JD Rockefeller and the University of Chicago, which continues to have a profound political influence on the entire field of Economics.
It's absolutely pernicious and we normal people do need to fight it every way we can.
Indeed. Honestly, I'm quite sure they were excited to see the power of facebook advertising/misinformation during the 2016 campaign.
Mods: I'm not sure how I managed to grab this URL, but I believe the canonical version is actually https://whistlebloweraid.org/joan-donovan-press-release/
Probably was changed because of:
<link rel="canonical" href="https://live-whistleblower-aid.pantheonsite.io/joan-donovan-...">
Seems to lead to identical content though.
What I'm hearing is that universities coast-to-coast should start "researching" Facebook.
Solid fundraising strategy, to be sure.
Legit ransomware.
Why was Harvard dedicating resources to investigate Facebook in the first place? What kind of academic research was it conducting? "Our hypothesis is that Facebook censored right-wing disinformation campaigns" doesn't have academic value.
how does it not? college isn't just engineering and science
Remember friends, business is war.
no no no capitalism is your friend! click this ad to find out why
The linked blog doesn't actually include any details and is instead just a vitriolic series of paragraphs from what sounds like an angry fired employee.
It's hard to actually believe anything about this without having specific examples of what was done.
The title is pretty farcical given this.
More details in the whistleblower complaint, which is linked from the post. https://live-whistleblower-aid.pantheonsite.io/wp-content/up...
People forget that private universities are for profit businesses.
while technically non-profits, they are absolutely profit focused, as are the people in control of them
Defund academia
No university education would be complete without a practical demonstration of how corruption works. /s
the administration taking more money for their hedge fund can force students out of their right to a free investigation
kick out the administrators, schooling would cost less without them
Decent article on the matter,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/12/04/joan-do...
Universities can create the best extortion racket in the world. "That's a very nice successful company you have there, it'd be a shame if someone hired a bunch of researchers to dig into it and publish findings that made you look bad..."
One: Reward and Punishment Superresponse Tendency
I place this tendency first in my discussion because almost everyone thinks he fully recognizes how important incentives and disincentives are in changing cognition and behavior. But this is not often so. For instance, I think I’ve been in the top five percent of my age cohort almost all my adult life in understanding the power of incentives, and yet I’ve always underestimated that power. Never a year passes but I get some surprise that pushes a little further my appreciation of incentive super-power.
Wow and she is just 18 yo.
Remember students cheating is against our academic integrity policy!
Standard tool of the trade in big cos
The "Facebook Whistleblower" media circus consumed a lot of Oct 2021.
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/10/20/tech-billionaire-ai...
I wonder what the grand total spent was here? "PR expenses"
It makes you wonder how much the Zucherbergs influenced the 2020 election with "Zuckerbucks". They were cleared by the Feds, but then even that investigation becomes suspect with these large sums of money and influence. Conservatives claimed it went towards bolstering voting in largely Democratic regions, or in a biased distribution and application of the funds.
So $500M is a billionaire's "dismiss" button. Interesting.
A tiny window into how Harvard's $35 billion endowment was built. The story of why the ultrarich give generously to a an ultrawealthy institution.
Just a coincidence I’m sure!
This shouldn't be surprising at all. Harvard and other American universities have taken "donations" from foreign countries for years to hire the "correct" professors to push agendas (and raise the next generation of leaders), just look at the amount money flowing from Qatar for example.
Why taking bribes from tech giants is any different?
Veritas indeed.
This isn’t unusual in academia btw. It’s an open secret that economics departments are bought the same way— a generous donation to the department in exchange for the donor hand-picking the department chair.
If you know anything about public policy, Michael Bloomberg's association to Harvard, the Joyce Foundation, and largely anything about behind the scenes at Ivy Leagues at all...
You would know this is typical modus operandi for Harvard.
That's not very rainbow rhythms
It's always good to see how my fellow tech bros act in interviews vs how they truly act.
And it never will be. This is a human problem. No amount of laws and regulations will ever solve it.
what if we had laws that prevented people from obtaining disproportionate amounts of wealth? Seems like it'd be a lot harder to buy a school if being a multi-billionaire is impossible.
This is such a naive viewpoint. Let's say that people are not allowed to have more than 10 million dollars, but corporations are. Then it wouldn't be Zuckerberg's money, it would simply be Facebook's, wielded by Zuckerberg.
I hope you can see the ridiculousness is saying that corporations should be limited in wealth as well, but even if you can't, let's assume they are limited the same. Now it becomes easier to buy them off, because they are comparably smaller.
The only logical solution is to allow both corporations and individuals to accumulate as much wealth as they are able to. Rich people aren't the problem, corrupt people are. Instead of trying to make rich corrupt people less rich, why don't we try to make them less corrupt instead?
Your argument is founded on naivete.
Of course doing something halfway would not accomplish much.
Just who is buying off these corporations if no one has vast wealth?
We should just tax income over $10 million at 90% for both people and corporations. Maybe then we could have an actual healthcare system
Loopholes will be found, wealth will be concentrated in new ways, and then the wealth will be used to revert laws to benefit the wealthy. The laws won't change in the first place since money has captured most political systems as well.
Yes, give up and don't try, on the scale of things you will be dead and forgotten anyways - a failure in every sense of the word regardless of what you do.
That would tip the balance of power to another corrupting influence. Corporations, say. Or professional associations representing highly-educated high earners like doctors or lawyers. Or to politically savvy deca-millionaires who use their money with more focused attention. And that's setting aside the question of how and whether you could prevent the existence of billionaires, which would lead to offshoring and (plausibly at least) dramatic unintended changes in what kinds of social and technological change happens. But either way, coalitions corrupting institutions is not a soluble problem generally. It gets solved with acts of effort and courage like this one, and by discussions like this.
Even if what you say is true, which I do not grant, your implication is akin to "we should not punish criminals, because some other criminals will rise to take their place." It's a defeatist meme that mainly serves to protect the interests of the already-powerful.
Some work is never done, but that is not a reason to give up on it.
And the party is in charge of enforcing those laws right ?
There are some billionaires who are literally asking to be taxed more. Not much success convincing US govt.
Come on. Wealth is literally a creature of "law and regulations," and changes to them can definitely "solve it." That's trivially shown by the through a thought experiment where we imagine legal changes that lead to Zuckerberg having his wealth confiscated and Facebook being placed under the control of some person or entity who is not its ally and is not allowed to profit from it.
I think I need to make extra-clear that my example is an extreme one to clearly disprove your point, not the only regulatory option available or a policy proposal. Don't get distracted by irrelevant details.
Defeatist memes like what you said circulate widely to encourage paralysis, but they're propaganda or its derivatives, not truth.
We shouldn't sit on our hands or whatever but wealth isn't a creation of laws, it's a bit of the inverse. Some laws can remove wealth and some laws are gonna take a lotta of guns and manpower (resources ==wealth) to implement.
Without laws, you have anarchy. Laws create the institutions necessary to have an economy capable of creating wealth.
Without laws you don't have anarchy, you just have rule of strongest. Anarchy can have laws but no authority that enforces them.
Huh? Maybe in the deep, deep past; but definitely not now. Even back then, where there were no states and little social organization, there was still custom within groups that worked like law.
Zuckerberg and Facebook have no army and no means to raise one, despite the wealth they have. They are totally, utterly at the mercy of laws and regulations.
I interpret GP's comment to mean "No amount of reasonable/effective laws and regulations will ever solve it".
Clearly there are plenty of extreme "solutions".
I interpret GP's point being an attempt to provide their insight into human condition, which is an interesting one.
Is graft a necessary condition of human civilization?
What about better redistributing wealth -- you know like corn subsidies
We've tried it multiple times and it's had disastrous consequences every time. But let's do it again!
We also tried not doing it and it had even worse consequences so I don't see what you are trying to say.
The US has one of the highest median household incomes in the world. Please, tell me about the terrible consequences.
Now, tell me more about the fantastic results of
- North Korea
- Soviet Union
- Chinese Communist Party
- Venezuela
- Argentina
- Cuba
- India (under socialism)
What were the disastrous consequences of the 91% income tax rate on the top bracket in the 1950's?
What were the disastrous consequences of
- North Korea
- Soviet Union
- Chinese Communist Party
- Venezuela
- Argentina
- Cuba
- India (under socialism)
I'll stop here.
Perhaps we can rely on a capricious unaligned AGI to run our universities.
Is this an appeal for a different form of governance?
The good old "we have always been that way". If perhaps hard to imagine for you, there are tons of social structures where wealth cannot be used to purchase power (ie where currency buys you some stuff but not labor from other humans). See the recent book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dawn_of_Everything. Very much a perspective changing book.
Well, you can prevent the concentration of wealth in the first place.
Thomas Jefferson wrote, "But the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property....Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise"[0].
0. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-08-02-0...
That’s not the point. Corruption (which is what this is) is NOT binary, it’s a problem that exists on spectrum.
We don’t solve spectrum problems, we reduce and minimize them. Just because they exist to a degree and never are remediated doesn’t mean we shouldn’t seek to minimize them.
Corruption can lead to tax evasion, poor tax administration, and exemptions that disproportionately favor the well-connected and wealthy population groups in society and must be rallied against if we seek civil societies.
We’ll never get rid of it. As you say. But if we don’t act against it these problems will grow like cancer and become insidious, infecting every aspect of society, so it’s deeply important not to embrace an apathetic approach or present them as inevitable.
They are intrinsic, but the level we tolerate — the “degree of corruption” — which I would argue is pretty high in this case, is most certainly counterable and definitely can be reduced.
Universities have been dirty since they embraced price gouging on tuition in the 90's. There is no way what they are providing can be considered fair or reasonable.
(Caveat that the following is US-centric.) I'd love to see the data showing actual price gouging, because the data I've seen has generally suggested that per-student spending hasn't even increased at a pace equivalent to inflation; rather, funding didn't increase with enrolment, leading to students paying for an ever-higher share of their education.
(As for private universities... fine, I'm okay calling it price gouging.)
I used to work in Institutional Research at a state university and at least for state school's tuition tracks pretty closely to the cost of education. In my time working there, our funding from the state was reduced by 30%.
Generally Non-resident tuition is the cost it takes to educate a student. Resident tuition is cheaper because it's subsidized by the state. Every year we would get less and less funding from the state and would have to shift more burden to the student. We implemented furlough days, and cut admin staff compensation to attempt to reduce the tuition burden on students. We still had to raise Tuition faster than inflation in the end.
There is no reason why my adjunct professor spending 45 minutes a week, twice a week for a few months, in some old building, should cost me and 70 other people $3000 each. The tuition problem is one of bloat and greed.
That's nearly a quarter million dollars, of which the professor is probably getting a few thousand. where is the other $200k+ going?
I don't think tuition is the problem (in this case!); it's the endless need for "fundraising". If you need to get huge gifts, inevitably you will be corrupted by the needs/wants of the gift givers.
Harvard has over $50,000,000,000 in assets. It sure doesn't seem like it "needs" to raise another $500,000,000. It's greed through and through.
Huh, and where does that big amount come from? By taking huge donations. Its like saying Apple can sell iPhone for free since they are insanely rich. They are reach because they charge large amount of money for a fucking phone. Money either increases or decreases its not gonna stay at same level.
Politics (as in the game of power) and corruption are human nature. Pushing back against these are equally human nature. The worse it gets the more intense the push back. The push back seems to be at moment taking the shape of voting in far right or trump like politicians accross the world. They won't solve the issue. Therefore the next level of intensity may very well be revolution.
Clarify what do you mean by "revolution", because to me that words means either a coup, civil war, acts of terrorism, or, worse than that, a massacre like China's "cultural revolution".
Any of those I imagine, perhaps all. When things reach boiling point pressure has to be released somehow. And as it stands things are under quite some pressure as of recently.
imho, you're wrong: it may not be "human nature" as much as it is prisoner's dilemma. few, but some, humans are just as inherently averse to corruption as someone may be inherently prone to it. it's a matter of "if I don't take this bribe, someone else will"
It never has been, there may have been an illusion of it only
Your comment sounds defeatist. I hope it doesn't cause others to give up on pushing for change.