It almost makes you wonder what actually happened. Just another wild baseless accusation from the right that won’t be followed up or ever discussed again.
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Australian Universities Demand 'Emergency Meeting' After Trump Cancels Their Funding
redstate.com
22 Mar 2025 ~~ By streiff
Australian universities are crying foul after the Trump administration asks questions that put
$386 million in research grants in jeopardy. The bone of contention was a questionnaire sent to Australian grant recipients asking if the
institution had "ties to communist or socialist parties, receive funding from China and it only recognises male and female sexes."
The grants were frozen in January, shortly after President Trump was inaugurated, but were unfrozen at some time thereafter. This new round of questions is the second time the universities were queried, but this time, it
has their attention.
~Snip~
If you are getting money from a foreign government, you sort of lose the right to complain about "foreign interference" when that government clarifies its terms and conditions.
Australia spends about $800 million per year on university-based research; the US contribution is about a third of the total spent on academic research.
The affected universities are demanding an "
emergency meeting" with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.
~Snip~
For the life of me, I really don't understand why it is in our interests to fund research at foreign universities using federal funds. Research funding is a zero-sum affair. Doling out $386 million to Australian universities means that money will not be available for funding opportunities for American scientists or world-class scientists living in other countries who want to come to America. We should've learned the folly of pushing our research dollars into foreign universities where we can't control what goes on with our Wuhan Institute of Virology tragedy.
Commentary:
Why are we funding their research?
It borders on foreign interference to ask for information from those to whom you’re giving hundreds of millions of dollars to? How “entitled” can one be?
Australia and other countries should reject all foreign interference from the US and stop taking our money.
You will probably find that people at the university are funneling some of the grant money back to politicians or organizations run by politicians. Having been involved in college grants, they are how the professors and students are paid. The subject of the grant, in my experience, only got attention when it was time to generate a report. The report invariably supported whatever the grant was supposed to be about although in some cases, if you got past the broadly written summary which could be interpreted multiple ways you’d discover the actual data did not support what the summary seemed to say. So, yeah, fraud.
theconservativetreehouse.com
