Background: UCLA violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, "by acting with deliberate indifference in creating a hostile educational environment for Jewish and Israeli students."

Outcome: These grants are likely in a temporary holding pattern until ucla settles the issue.

The past year has been utter chaos, madness, and sadness for STEM in the US. I hope that Tao's grad students don't suffer from this too much in the immediate term. In the long term, all science is being harmed greatly, and we are causing a gigantic bubble in the pipeline of the production of scientists, most severely damaging those who are graduating soon.

I continue to find it fascinating that essentially none of the public American elite actually have any values at all. for all the whinging about "free speech" and "free markets" and "freedom from government", approximately everyone has rolled over and is publicly fine with the president ruling like a king - using laws and regulations to enrich and ennoble favoured courtiers, to punish his imaginary enemies and to destroy institutions and relationships with the world that annoy him. this is literally centuries of hard work by hundreds of millions of past Americans being blown up because one rich cunt doesn't like foreigners or loud students or science but does like getting massive bribes and praise.

The country born out of the scientific enlightenment is eagerly devolving back into medieval mindlessness.

It is comparatively easy for a mathematician to relocate, given that, like most scientists, they already have world spanning international networks, and unlike other sciences there is no need for expensive lab equipment. Stuff like LIGO is hard to move around, but there is plenty of places in the world that have a good math library.

Public support for Israel is steadily falling; this poll was published just a couple of days ago https://news.gallup.com/poll/692948/u.s.-back-israel-militar... and other G7 countries are moving to recognise Palestine.

So will the administration's push to use pro-Israel reasons to censure and penalise the universities steadily get out of touch with what the public want and sympathise with?

He should go to China, they'd set an entire research institute just for him.

Damn slacker. Who does he think he is, defrauding the people by being an eminent mathematician who also does massive outreach to folks at the almost hobbyist level.

Would something like this happen if the hostile educational environment was against - say - black people? Or any other ethnic group?

This is the US not shooting itself in the foot or heart anymore, this one is going straight to the brain. Civilizational suicide.

more like: UCLA grants are targeted by NSF and some of them are suspended including Tao's

This is a patently illegal case of collective punishment by ADL/AIPAC lobby. UCLA is a public institution and should be free of political pandering.

Any alleged incidents of anti-semitism should be litigated individually, based on specific facts thereof, and if proven, then appropriate sanctions imposed on the guilty parties, only.

Hopefully Terence will be able to continue his research in France, we would be more than happy to welcome him!

I think it would be better to tie the grant to the researcher and let them move around if they want. This does not better humanity if they are tied up with a place that is in the political crosshairs by the current administration.

Also, DOGE just doing a blanket cut to NSF research grants was horrible.

This single out Tao but it's UCLA that is attacked. Let's see how US academia is going to react.

250K per year fwiw

https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2347850&His...

Related to have a macro view: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44736458

see also: https://www.science.org/content/article/nsf-and-nih-suspend-...

These grants make up about 75-80% of all NSF grants

Hopefully people will now see the benefit of not centralizing basically all of the power and money on Earth in institutions.

It is extremely annoying how it is a natural fact of life that entities tend to agglomerate and acquire each other, when instead the best way to ensure freedom and openness is through federation.

I personally visited the protest site at UCLA while this was happening. It was a huge fenced-off encampment on the main lawn in front of the library. The interior of the encampment was mostly tents, while the boundary of the encampment had signs facing outward for passers-by to read. There were no obstructions or barriers to any buildings, though it would take an extra minute or two to walk around the encampment if you were trying to get to a nearby building. Here are some of the signs I saw:

“We believe that Palestinian rights must be achieved without harm coming to any other group or people”

“My Judaism is not Zionism”

“F** Israel” (without the asterisks)

“Jews Say No To Genocide”

“UC you have blood on your hands”

“Filmmakers for a free Palestine”

“Fund our jobs and education not war and occupation”

“Never again means never again anywhere!”

“Free Palestine” with a drawing of a policeman, gun drawn, facing a soldier on fire; clearly evoking https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-immolation_of_Aaron_Bus...

“Israeli against genocide”

“UCLA funds war”

“Our liberations are tied”

“Life in everything yearns for the death of occupation” (had trouble parsing this one)

“From Palestine to Mexico border walls have got to go”

This one’s cut off but it ends with “…violation of international law not anti-Jewish bigotry”

A sequence of maps of Israeli/Palestinian borders in 1947, 1967, present day. The map legend labels are “Palestinian Land” and “Jewish/Israeli Land”. There is also a text-based “timeline” starting in 1948, focusing mainly on Palestinian deaths and displacements.

I expect most people here are (like me) admirers of Terence Tao, and fans of his work.

But, if UCLA is indeed an institution that routinely violate civil rights law, would we still want our taxes to fund it?

For those objecting to any reduction in federal funding, is this because:

A) You believe UCLA complies with civil rights law (perhaps with small, isolated exceptions that are driven not by policy but by rogue employees), OR

B) You believe there should be enforcement of the law, but it should take a different form, OR

C) Something else?

I live in California, and have some interest in state agencies operating within the law, and for the benefit of all.

UCLA, where Terence Tao works, is part of the University of California system (a state school). Like other UC campuses, UCLA receives substantial federal funding.

There are good reasons to believe that UCLA has, for many years, engaged in racial discrimination in both hiring and admissions. But the issue is whether anyone with legal standing can actually take the school to court and win.

IANAL but my understanding is as follows. If an individual were to sue the school, they would need to be an individual student who had applied and been rejected. But any court case would take years. It is likely that, part way through that process, that individual student would have graduated from another college, and no longer be seeking undergraduate admissions. Thus they would lack standing and the case would be dismissed as moot.

That's why in SFFA vs. Harvard, the plaintiff was a membership organization. As Harvard was continuing to discriminate, there were always new members to join the organization who did individually have standing, even as some of the existing members lost standing.

In any civil suit over admissions policies, UCLA holds two major advantages over individual complainants:

- Vast resources: UCLA has deep pockets with which to pay lawyers.

- High stakes: UCLA has a lot to lose.

But the folks who are injured are recent high school graduates:

- Limited financial means: When you were 18yo, could you have scraped together money to pay lawyers? Most 18yo kids wouldn't even have the money to pay the court filing fee.

- Minimal personal upside: By the time any case progresses, these students have already enrolled elsewhere. Transferring to UCLA mid-degree, even if they win, would be disruptive and often undesirable.

UCLA is currently being sued by a membership organization. In a couple of weeks, they will file their response to this complaint: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cacd.95...

One of the people who initiated the lawsuit is Richard Sander, a professor at UCLA: https://law.ucla.edu/faculty/faculty-profiles/richard-h-sand...

Some folks don't like this: https://dailybruin.com/2025/04/21/ucla-law-students-lead-pro...

The consequences of this Cultural Revolution will be felt for decades.

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The world's greatest living mathematician has fallen victim to the battle against Thoughtcrime.

Care to provide more context? Does Tao's grants never get rejected?

So much for freedom of speech in US Universities. Israel dictates what is forbidden/permitted on US campuses now?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_Tao

Tao won the Fields Medal in 2006 and won the Royal Medal and Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics in 2014, and is a 2006 MacArthur Fellow. Tao has been the author or co-author of over three hundred research papers, and is widely regarded as one of the greatest living mathematicians.