he warlords who sacked rome did not intend to doom Western Europe to centuries of ignorance. It was not a foreseeable consequence of their actions. The same cannot be said of the sweeping attack on human knowledge and progress that the Trump administration is now undertaking—a deliberate destruction of education, science, and history, conducted with a fanaticism that recalls the Dark Ages that followed Rome’s fall.
Every week brings fresh examples. The administration is threatening colleges and universities with the loss of federal funding if they do not submit to its demands, or even if they do. The engines of American scientific inquiry and ingenuity, such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, are under sustained attack. Historical institutions such as the Smithsonian and artistic ones like the Kennedy Center are being converted into homes for MAGA ideology rather than historical fact and free expression. Libraries are losing funding, government-employed scientists are being dismissed from their jobs, educators are being cowed into silence, and researchers are being warned not to broach forbidden subjects. Entire databases of public-health information collected over decades are at risk of vanishing. Any facts that contradict the gospel of Trumpism are treated as heretical.
These various initiatives and policy changes are often regarded as discrete problems, but they comprise a unified assault. The Trump administration has launched a comprehensive attack on knowledge itself, a war against culture, history, and science. If this assault is successful, it will undermine Americans’ ability to comprehend the world around us. Like the inquisitors of old, who persecuted Galileo for daring to notice that the sun did not, in fact, revolve around the Earth, they believe that truth-seeking imperils their hold on power.
By destroying knowledge, Trumpists seek to make the country more amenable to their political domination, and to prevent meaningful democratic checks on their behavior. Their victory, though, would do much more than that. It would annihilate some of the most effective systems for aggregating, accumulating, and applying human knowledge that have ever existed. Without those systems, America could find itself plunged into a new Dark Age.
Perhaps the most prominent targets of the attack on knowledge have been America’s institutions of higher education. Elite colleges and universities have lost billions of dollars in federal funding. Cornell has had more than $1 billion frozen, Princeton had $210 million suspended, and Northwestern lost access to nearly $800 million. In some cases, the freezes weren’t connected to specific demands; the funding was simply revoked outright. Johns Hopkins University is reeling from losing $800 million in grants, which will force the top recipient of federal research dollars to “plan layoffs and cancel health projects, from breast-feeding support efforts in Baltimore to mosquito-net programs in Mozambique,” The Wall Street Journalreported.
In some cases, the administration has made specific demands that institutionsadhere to Trumpist ideology in what they teach and whom they hire, or face a loss of funding. Some schools are fighting back—Harvard, for example, is suing to retain its independence. “No government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” Harvard’s president said in a statement.
RECOMMENDED READING
The Trump administration’s purge of forbidden texts and ideas at West Point offers a glimpse of what its ideal university might look like. At the military academy, TheNew York Times reported, leadership “initiated a schoolwide push to remove any readings that focused on race, gender or the darker moments of American history.” A professor who “leads a course on genocide was instructed not to mention atrocities committed against Native Americans, according to several academy officials. The English department purged works by well-known Black authors, such as Toni Morrison, James Baldwin and Ta-Nehisi Coates.”
Some institutions have tried to appease the administration. Columbia University, which agreed to Trump’s orders in an effort to retain $400 million in federal funding, discovered the hard way that deals with the president aren’t worth the sweat from the handshake. After Columbia acceded to Trump’s demands, the administration reportedly began considering new ones, including potentially requiring the school to submit to a judicially enforced consent decree that would prolong the government’s control over the institution.
The money these institutions have lost (or could still lose) is not merely symbolic. Federal grants fund research, scholarship, and archival work on college campuses. Without this money—unless schools raise the funds from other sources—labs and departments will close. The right-wing activist Chris Rufo recently told The New York Times that in addition to using funding to force universities to teach or adhere to conservative dogma, he would like to “reduce the size of the sector itself.” Students will have fewer opportunities. Research in many fields will be put on indefinite pause. America will make fewer scientific breakthroughs.
No comments:
Post a Comment