I'm in Europe. It's not even close to being worse than the US on that front. Places like the Fraunhofer Institute and the Max Planck Institute are perpetually well-funded, and are largely unaffected by politics. Good places to do research.
As a German government funded scientist, is it safe to criticise Israel or use the 'G' word for what Israel is doing? Or would they do the same thing they did to Helen Fares?
In any case, penalties would apply to the perpetrators themselves, as individuals. I've never heard of a case where the institution itself would suffer from a significant funding cut, to say nothing of a very sudden funding collapse.
> but free speech is much more sacred in the United States than in Germany.
In the abstract. In actual practice, it's not clear, and you could even build quite a strong case for the opposite view. "Cancellation" over mere words has been commonplace for over ten years, and is much more common to the US than to Europe. And as for laws... What just happened to Tao and UCLA has, to the best of my knowledge, never taken place in Europe in recent decades.
>Fraunhofer Institute and the Max Planck Institute are perpetually well-funded, and are largely unaffected by politics
Oh, so I can freely go up against the German government's policies and have my career in academia unaffected and keep my government funding?
I lived in Germany and don't remember people or organisations ever being able to break government rules with no consequences (unless they had high friends in politics).
In this case, the analogy should be "Go work in German academia *where the students* criticize the FOREIGN government of Israel."
AFAICT, no German academic institutions have lost funding as a result of the student's protests. Those protests were stopped, police action etc., but no funding change to the academic institutions.
Sorry I don't buy it. Which examples are there of academics going against the government policies and still keeping their jobs and funds?
I lived in Germany and the moment you don't do what the government says you get the full shaft. Nobody let's you rebel against the government with no consequences, not in US, not in Germany, not in UK, nowhere.
People painting Germany like a bastion of free speech are coping hard. Only if you consider free speech doing and saying only what the government says.
It's hard to prove a negative. Can you show us an example of anything like what's happening at UCLA (collective punishment of an entire institution) or an example of an individual professor being harshly penalized or sanctioned for expressing personal political opinions?
Don't spin this around, what I asked you is not a negative.
People here argued that the US is fascist because in academia you can't get away with breaking governments rules getting you defunded and pointing at Germany for being superior in this regard.
So then I asked for proof that in other countries you can get away in academia with breaking the government's rules and not get defunded. It really is that simple.
That's not what people have complained about. People complained about that in the US a government rule seems to be "don't criticize the government".
What about Christian Drosten who criticized a lot of the Corona decisions, Jan Boehmermann who is very critical but still employed by state-financed TV. Fridays for Future?
> Jan Boehmermann who is very critical but still employed by state-financed TV.
What did he criticize? Did he ever criticize all the crimes due to illegal migrants? Of course not because that's not allowed by the state.
He is just a government mouthpiece acting like a jester to give people the illusion that the government allows criticism, but he's not a proper critic of the government, as those are banned.
It's hard to prove what you're asking because it's intrinsically not newsworthy -- whereas the reverse is. Surely if it's so bad in Germany, you should be able to dig up an example or two?
Generally, I do agree that in most if not all places, if you get government funding, you can't go against government policy.
However, in this case, it's quite hard to argue that Terrence Tao had anything to do with antisemitism or anything against Trump's policies. Actually I don't think Terrence Tao did anything that Trump cared about. This isn't really a free speech issue, it's more like some fundamental instability in the US, and maybe the US government is running out on money and trying to cut down on research expenditure using excuses.
