President Dwight Eisenhower's warning about the relationship between government funding and higher education was prescient, and it is being ignored today.
He foresaw the domination of the “nation’s scholars” and worried that government grant funding could lead to an unholy alignment of our academic elite with the government. This concern has become a reality: throughout the country, professors on college campuses have been recruited to develop tools for monitoring and restricting discourse, betraying the values of free speech.
For example, the University of Wisconsin has been awarded a $5 million grant by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop a system that can detect and “strategically correct” what the government perceives as misinformation relating to COVID, elections, and vaccines. This new grant adds to the previous $7.5 million grant awarded by the NSF to ten universities to develop anti-misinformation tools as part of the “Trust & Authenticity in Communication Systems” initiative.
This is nothing more than a backdoor attempt to revive the Biden administration’s Disinformation Governance Board with the intent to “intervene” on social media platforms, and incorporate these tools into “local, national, and international newsrooms.”