Un peu plus de sperme sur moi ce soir ne fera vraiment pas une grande différence

https://litix.fr/jeu-de-societe

#NSFW #boire #fête #grossein #jeudesociété #public #seins

The Quiet Throat-Cutting of the American University

Syracuse University announced the other day that it will phase out 93 of its approximately 460 academic programs. The administration framed the decision as strategic alignment, calling it a portfolio review driven by student demand and institutional focus. Provost Lois Agnew insisted the move was “not a cost-cutting exercise.” Taken at face value, some of these cuts are routine catalog maintenance. Fifty-five of the ninety-three programs had zero students enrolled. Twenty-eight were advanced certificate supplements to graduate degrees. The provost herself noted that Syracuse offered more than double the roughly 200 programs typical of peer institutions, and a university trimming a bloated catalog to concentrate faculty resources is doing ordinary academic management. Reasonable people can call that housekeeping.

The housekeeping argument collapses, however, when you examine which programs with actual students were targeted. The nine flagship cuts announced in late March struck Classical Civilization, Classics, Digital Humanities, Fine Arts, German, Latino-Latin American Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, Modern Jewish Studies, and Russian. Those are not random low-performers. That list reads like a table of contents for any serious attempt to understand Western civilization, global politics, and the moral architecture of the modern world. The zero-enrollment programs provide administrative cover for the cuts that carry ideological weight, and the 93 number does the rhetorical work of making nine consequential eliminations look like a rounding error.

Syracuse is a private university charging $66,580 per year in tuition, and it answers to its board, not to a state legislature. Its budget decisions are not driven by state appropriations in the way that a land-grant institution’s are. But Syracuse matters here because the pattern of what gets cut, and the institutional logic used to justify the cutting, is identical to what is happening at public universities that depend on taxpayer funding. When private and public institutions, operating under different financial pressures and different governance structures, independently arrive at the same conclusion about which disciplines to sacrifice, the question shifts from institutional management to cultural consensus. No single institution’s decision to trim its catalog would warrant concern. What warrants concern is that Syracuse, West Virginia, Nebraska, The New School, Miami of Ohio, Montclair State, Boston University, and Brown are all cutting the same kinds of programs at the same time, and the pattern always lands on the disciplines that teach people how to think, how to read difficult texts, how to argue, and how to question power.

The trail of cuts extends across the country. West Virginia University eliminated 32 majors in 2023, with humanities departments absorbing the worst damage. Boston University suspended doctoral admissions in the humanities and social sciences. The New School in New York, an institution founded in 1919 as a haven for intellectual rigor, is gutting Eugene Lang College and The New School for Social Research, cutting or pausing 23 majors and 16 minors. Miami University of Ohio put 18 humanities programs on the block. Montclair State University in New Jersey tried to dissolve its entire College of Humanities and Social Sciences before international pressure forced a partial retreat. Brown University and other Ivy League institutions canceled doctoral programs in the humanities for the 2026-27 academic year after federal funding dried up. Texas A&M eliminated its women’s and gender studies program to comply with a policy from the university system’s board of regents.

The numbers behind these decisions are stark but not mysterious, and they did not begin in 2025. Between 2012 and 2022, undergraduate degrees awarded in the humanities fell 24 percent nationwide, according to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The percentage of bachelor’s degrees conferred in the humanities dropped from 16.8 percent in the 2010-11 academic year to 12.8 percent in 2020-21, per the National Center for Education Statistics. Fewer than ten percent of college graduates in 2020 earned a humanities degree. That decline spanned the Obama and Biden administrations. It was driven by the aftershocks of the 2008 financial crisis, by the explosion in student debt that made families desperate for vocational certainty, by bipartisan STEM-focused messaging from politicians of both parties, and by a culture that increasingly equated the worth of a degree with its starting salary. These are the statistics administrators cite when they announce cuts. Enrollment is down. Students are voting with their feet. The market has spoken.

The honest version of this argument acknowledges that the slow erosion of humanities enrollment has multiple causes, some of them economic and cultural rather than political. But honesty also requires recognizing the difference between a chronic illness and a directed killing. What has happened since January 2025 is categorically different from the gradual enrollment decline of the previous decade. The current political environment has transformed a slow erosion into an accelerated demolition, and the tools of that demolition are identifiable, funded, and coordinated.

What the administrators fail to mention is that the market, already weakened, has been deliberately broken.

Consider what has happened at the federal level. In April 2025, the Department of Government Efficiency terminated more than 1,400 open grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, totaling an estimated $175 million in undisbursed funds. State humanities councils, which receive nearly half of NEH’s federal appropriation, lost their operating grants overnight. The Connecticut Humanities council lost $1.5 million of its $4 million budget in a single notification. Pennsylvania Humanities saw over 60 percent of its budget evaporate. In May 2025, the Trump administration’s budget proposal called for the complete elimination of the NEH, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services. A federal judge in August 2025 ruled the grant terminations “unlawful,” but by that point, staff had been laid off, programs had been canceled, and community institutions had already absorbed the damage.

The NEH grant cancellations did not empty a German class at Syracuse the following semester. That is not how the mechanism works. Federal humanities funding sustains the research infrastructure, graduate fellowships, and faculty positions that keep programs viable across years and decades. When you eliminate doctoral funding at the federal level, fewer graduate students enter the pipeline. Fewer graduate students means fewer qualified faculty five and ten years from now. Fewer faculty means fewer course offerings, which means lower enrollment, which means administrators can point to low enrollment as evidence that the program should be cut. The causation is real, but it operates on a generational timeline, and the people making the cuts understand this perfectly. They are planting a fire and waiting for the forest to burn.

Ideological targeting is explicit in the mechanism. Updated NEH guidance announced that grants related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, environmental justice, and “gender ideology” had been canceled as inconsistent with agency priorities. The administration did not cut the NEH because it cost too much. At $207 million annually, the NEH’s entire budget is a sum the FY2026 defense appropriation of $838.7 billion could fund 4,600 times over. DOD’s total FY2026 topline reached $961.6 billion, with the president calling for $1.5 trillion in defense spending for FY2027. The NEH was cut because it funded the kind of inquiry that produces conclusions the administration finds politically inconvenient. The fiscal argument is a costume worn by an ideological project.

In Nebraska, Governor Jim Pillen recommended cutting $14.3 million from the University of Nebraska’s $700 million state appropriation, even as the university tracked $178 million in lost federal research funding. Pillen, who received a campaign endorsement from President Trump and explicitly credited the president’s philosophy of “running government like a business,” proposed $500 million in total state budget reductions while simultaneously championing income tax cuts that had already created a $471 million budget shortfall. He called on the legislature to remove diversity, equity, and inclusion programs from the university system, claiming this would align higher education with “Nebraska values.” The logic is circular: cut taxes, create a deficit, blame the deficit on spending, and then use the manufactured crisis to strip from public universities the programs that most threaten political orthodoxy.

Syracuse, despite being private, faces a version of the same pressure. Its international student enrollment dropped from 12 percent of the incoming class in 2023 to 5 percent recently, costing millions in full-tuition revenue. The erosion of international enrollment is itself a consequence of federal immigration policy, visa restrictions, and the broader signal that the United States is no longer a welcoming destination for foreign students. When the government makes it harder for international students to study here, universities lose revenue, and then those same universities are told to cut programs because they can no longer afford them.

Meanwhile, public money flows toward private and religious schools through a separate but philosophically parallel channel. The Educational Choice for Children Act, signed into law as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in July 2025, created the first national school voucher program. Starting in 2027, individuals can receive dollar-for-dollar tax credits of up to $5,000 for donations to scholarship-granting organizations that fund private and religious school tuition. The program’s annual volume cap is $5 billion. The voucher money does not come from the same line item as NEH grants or state university appropriations. These are different fiscal streams. But they express the same governing philosophy: that public education, whether K-12 or higher, is an expense to be minimized rather than an investment to be protected, and that taxpayer dollars are better spent subsidizing private alternatives than sustaining the public institutions that serve everyone. Arizona’s voucher program alone cost the state $872 million in fiscal year 2025, and an audit found roughly 20 percent of those funds went to unauthorized purchases including personal electronics and luxury items. At least 45 percent of the students receiving aid in Arizona were never enrolled in public schools to begin with, meaning the state was paying for private education that families were already financing on their own. By the 2026-27 school year, approximately half of all American students will be eligible for some form of publicly funded private school voucher, according to FutureEd at Georgetown University.

The architecture of the current acceleration is methodical, and it operates on top of the pre-existing enrollment decline like an accelerant poured on a smoldering fire. Cut federal support for humanities research and programming. Manufacture state budget crises through aggressive tax cuts. Restrict international enrollment through hostile immigration policy. Redirect the philosophical commitment to public education toward private and religious alternatives through voucher programs. Then point to declining enrollment in humanities programs as evidence that the market no longer values them. Long-term erosion had multiple causes, some of them organic. Current demolition does not. Programs are being starved, and then their emaciation is cited as proof that they were never worth feeding.

When a university cuts Classical Civilization, German, Russian, Middle Eastern Studies, and Modern Jewish Studies, what vanishes is the institutional capacity to produce citizens who can read primary sources in the languages of the civilizations that shaped, and continue to shape, global affairs. A country that cannot educate its own people in the languages and histories of the Middle East, Russia, and East Asia is a country that will be governed by people who do not understand the forces acting upon it. That outcome has been engineered.

The humanities teach what cannot be automated: the capacity to hold contradictory ideas in tension, to read between the lines of political rhetoric, to recognize when a historical pattern is repeating, to distinguish between information and understanding. These are capacities that make populations difficult to govern through propaganda, because citizens who can parse a sentence can also parse a lie. The defunding of the humanities is, at its operational core, a campaign against the capacity for dissent.

The Syracuse provost wrote that the review aimed to create “a portfolio that is more focused, more distinctive and more aligned with student demand.” Matthew Huber, who co-chairs the university’s Academic Affairs Committee, described the announcement as ominous and “pretty intent on cutting things.” A faculty census showed Syracuse lost 44 professors between 2024 and 2025, most of them non-tenured. When you eliminate the programs that train people to question institutional authority, and then you eliminate the faculty who teach those programs, what remains is an institution that no longer has the internal capacity to question its own decisions.

The public universities built this country’s intellectual infrastructure. The Morrill Land-Grant Acts of 1862 and 1890 created the system of state universities that democratized higher education by making it available to people who were not born into wealth. Those institutions produced the engineers, scientists, teachers, doctors, lawyers, writers, and civic leaders who built the twentieth century’s most consequential democracy. The current project to defund, privatize, and politically capture those institutions is an attack on the social contract that made mass education a public good rather than a private privilege.

The country finds $838 billion for defense spending, $175 billion in defense reconciliation funding, and a proposed $1.5 trillion military topline for FY2027. Another $5 billion in annual tax credits awaits the wealthy who wish to subsidize religious school tuition. Funds materialize for border walls and deportation infrastructure and surveillance systems and weapons platforms that will be obsolete before they are deployed. What cannot be located is $207 million for the National Endowment for the Humanities, or adequate funding for the University of Nebraska, or a reason to keep Classical Civilization alive at Syracuse. The money was always there. The only question was what kind of citizen it would be spent to produce.

A nation that will not educate its own people is a nation preparing to be ruled, and a population that cannot read its own history is a population that will repeat the worst of it without recognition.

Quand Nagui met Charles Alloncle en PLS.

#nagui #charlesalloncle #commissionenquete #audiovisuel #francais #public

California requires AI vendors working with the state to implement safety and privacy guardrails. Companies must adopt standards preventing misuse and protecting user rights. 🤖

🔗 https://www.cnet.com/tech/newsom-signs-executive-order-requiring-ai-companies-to-provide-safety-privacy-guardrails/

#TechNews #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #Privacy #Safety #Government #Public #Politics #GovTech #FOSS #Transparency #UserControl #Regulation #DataProtection #EthicalAI #Policy #OpenStandards #DigitalRights #California #US #USA