Ricardo Pascoe Pierce
The Trump administration’s assault on higher education in the United States is alarming. It accuses universities that it particularly hates of being anti-Semitic, promoting racial discrimination, encouraging diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, and, as a final aggravating factor, promoting pro-Palestinian policies. Based on these criticisms, the US government withdrew $2.65 billion in funding from Harvard, $400 million from Columbia, $1 billion from Cornell, $210 million from Princeton, and many other higher education institutions.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem accused Harvard University of being “in the service of the Chinese Communist Party.” This was due to the presence of Chinese students enrolled in various degree programs offered by the university. The Trump administration then instructed Harvard to cancel the enrollment of all its international students immediately. The university appealed the government’s decision to the appropriate courts, and a temporary suspension of the decision has been granted until the case’s merits are known.
The White House education authority explained that a shake-up in US higher education was necessary because institutions were devoting too much effort and financial resources to implementing “diversity, equity, and equality policies.” It defined its object of hatred. But instead of addressing its ideological obsession, it moved on to destroying educational institutions as a whole.
The president of Princeton University said, “We will comply with the law, but we will not sacrifice the values of academic freedom for budgetary convenience.”
Constitutional lawyer Stephen Vladeck said, “When the government financially punishes an institution for not thinking like it does, we are dealing with an act of structural censorship.”
If cuts to funding for research in science, medicine, and engineering continue, along with long-term research on, for example, the origin and cure of Alzheimer’s disease, quantum physics, and psychoanalysis, the damage will be widespread. There is no explanation for Trump’s logic except for his contempt for freedom of thought.
With these “austerity” policies, the United States risks losing its place as the world’s leading generator of science and technology, even ahead of China in many areas of knowledge.
What is aberrant is that, because of the ideological obsessions that drive Trump and his officials, especially their rejection of diversity, equity, and equality in higher education institutions, they are destroying the generation of science, technology, and knowledge. They threaten to destroy what makes the United States the world’s leading power: its primacy in generating knowledge.
Universities are already preparing their plans to resist this unexpected government assault on freedom, intelligence, and knowledge. The inevitable conclusion is that political regimes that aspire to some form of totalitarianism are determined to control, direct, and subordinate knowledge to their imperatives of power.
Hitler based his domination of the German population on the cancellation of all educational programs that included “inferior races,” specifically Jews. His anti-Semitic campaign began in the classroom. And it ended as we all know. There is always an object of hatred.
During his six years in office, Andrés Manuel López Obrador was determined to tame knowledge in Mexico. He persecuted all academics, professors, and researchers who did not share his views, accusing them of being “neoliberals,” the equivalent of being Jewish in Hitler’s Germany. He destroyed world-renowned institutions such as CIDE, subordinating their curricula to a short-sighted “anti-neoliberal” mandate. He used the National Council for Science and Technology (CONACYT) as an instrument of repression and budgetary control to favor the regime’s favorites. He invented the “new Mexican school” to exalt his government’s programs and figures, and especially himself, through new and mediocre free and mandatory textbooks. His object of hatred is “neoliberalism.”
Trump’s assault, we now discover, is nothing new. It follows the script of every would-be dictator. It is up to those who inhabit classrooms and research laboratories, readers and thinkers, to identify the object of the current ruler’s hatred and resist the attack on their freedom of thought.
@rpascoep
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