This is a motley list. I am guessing the criteria for inclusion was an administration staffer (or their offspring) was not able to secure admission.

For anyone confused like me, a definition of motley is “Having elements of great variety or incongruity; heterogeneous.”

I think a lot of the neural connections to the word motley come from the expression “motley crew” which has fairly negative connotations. But the truth of the matter is, this is just a very varied group of schools; some great schools on the list. I won’t say any of the schools are not great, because of course some alum will come along and say “actually we had a great department for some niche computational thing” and I’ll be embarrassed to not have known that.

I meant it in the sense of heterogeneous.

The list includes public & private institutions across a variety of states and size ranges. It singles out particular institutions in state university systems (e.g. University of Texas at Austin but not Texas A&M or University of Texas at El Paso). Half the list is in the northeast, while the midwest and Pacific Northwest are not represented. It's 9 institutions, not 10.

It's just an odd list.

I 100% agree!

That's a very favorable interpretation.

It looks an awful lot like a sampling designed to identify who the "enemies" are.

I was thinking it was a rare display of caution on the part of otherwise careless idiots. (or maybe we just got lucky) They aren't fucking with any of the universities responsible for managing national laboratories.

MIT has Lincoln Lab which, while not a DoE national lab, serves a pretty similar purpose for DoD.

Interesting. I first heard about this from Newsom's statement that any university that signed it would lose California education funds instantly, but the only California university on it is the private USC. Thought for sure that at least UC Berkeley, UCLA, and Stanford would be on it, but I guess not. Maybe they chose USC because it seems to have a bit more of a conservative bent than most California schools.

> Thought for sure that at least UC Berkeley, UCLA, and Stanford would be on it, but I guess not.

UC and Stanford manage national laboratories for the US government. Someone might have realized the crisis that could come from that particular confrontation, and decided to steer clear for the moment.

I didn’t realize UA was here - even UVA and UT as more egalitarian institutions are a weird set to include.

UT is, for better or worse, still in Texas. And Texas has yet to discover a Trump/MAGA initiative it doesn't embrace.