There’s a strong culture war aspect to defund colleges, because you’re essentially funding the opposition if you’re a conservative and you’re paying the salaries of the extremely liberal college professors. Then people say obnoxious, arrogant things like “well reality has a liberal bent” and other platitudes to explain away why conservatives voices have been systematically excluded from college campuses over decades.
[0] Specifically, please. Two semesters of English, which is pretty standard, doesn't count unless few other options.
I have cried myself hoarse on HN trying to make this simple point - but except for Cornell, every Ivy League is ordinary in engineering and the hard sciences.
Harvard is a biomedical behemoth, especially once you include the affiliated hospitals (MGH, Brigham and Women's, Dana Farber, Beth Israel Deaconess, etc) and research institutes (Broad, Roland). Harvard proper and MGH each receive about a half billion dollars a year in NIH funding. These are usually listed separately in those "league tables", but the whole system must bring in nearly $2B/year (out of a total NIH extramural budget of ~$28B).
The other Ivies aren't as big (though not much else is), but all of them have well-regarded medical schools (except for Princeton) and biomedical research programs. Yale, Havard, and Princeton have pretty credible chemistry programs too. Princeton also has the Institute for Advanced Study, which has hosted a crazy number of Nobel/Fields/Wolf/Cole prize winners; it's formally independent but...right there.
It may be debatable how much this matters for undergrad teaching--is it better to have a world-renowned expert or someone invested in teaching?--but for anything involving research (including undergrads), they are definitely way up there.
(No argument that JHU, Stanford, and other places (CMU, UMich, NYU, etc, depending on field) also have intensive research too).
NIH funding data from here: https://report.nih.gov/award/index.cfm
As just one, powerful example: Go visit the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis sometime, at the Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. They have life-changing exhibits about the Jim Crow system; about the civil rights era — which I remember from childhood; and especially about slavery. I was fighting back not just tears but sobs. Twenty years ago I scoffed at the idea of reparations for African Americans; now I'm very much open to the idea because of the corrosive compound-interest effect of what was done to their ancestors. To be sure, neither I nor my forebears kept people enslaved, AFAIK — in fact, one of my ancestors was crippled in the Union Army, according to family lore — but all we whites are still benefiting from what was done to the A-As. (Yeah, yeah, I know, other minorities were treated badly too, including some of my recent ancestors; none, none, were treated as badly as enslaved Africans and their descendants.)
That's just one example. I could go on ....
(Personally, I had no use for the ideologues either but managed to avoid them by simply not taking any of their classes; foreign language courses are a great way of filling humanities requirements with something actually useful.)