This appeared last week:
Trump’s war on Harvard is un-American
The
trigger-happy firing range that is the present administration has put America’s
universities squarely in the crosshairs.
The Trump
administration told Harvard on Friday it can no longer enrol international
students. Bloomberg
Simon
Schama
May 23, 2025
– 3.51pm
So many
enemies: spineless judges, moaners about due process; fake news merchants; the
Fed; Canadians (nasty); Europeans, same (except for Italy and Hungary);
environmental hoaxers; regulators of shower pressure; cancer-causing windmills;
tariff-haters; Venezuelans; the Cheneys. But the worst of the lot? Not even
close. Professors! Radical left lunatics, or those soft on them, which
is the same thing. Let’s see how they like it when the money tap turns off.
The
trigger-happy firing range that is the Trump administration has put America’s universities
squarely in the crosshairs. The more liberal the faculty, the heavier the
hit: billions in federal grants stripped from Harvard, hundreds of millions
from other Ivy Leaguers. [On Friday, the
administration told Harvard it can no longer enroll international students.]
The purported
reason for going full Mr Potter on America’s great universities is antisemitism. Has
the harassment and abuse of Jewish students been a serious problem, especially
since October 7? Yes. Have anti-Zionist chants crossed a line into outright
Jew-hatred? Absolutely. Are colleges doing something about it? Yes; grade of
B+.
But does
kneecapping science departments by choking off their research funding persuade
River-to-Sea chanters to pipe down? Hardly. Coming to the aid of campus Jews
was always a pretext. Forgive us if we doubt that presenting the subjection of
higher education’s independence to an ideological purge, labelled “defence of
the Jews”, will work as an antidote to antisemitism.
Connoisseurs
of oxymorons might enjoy the imposition, on pain of financial strangulation, of
“viewpoint diversity” on colleges deemed to have undergone “ideological
capture”.
But anyone
doubting that the “existential terror” described by Christopher Rufo, the
zealot of the campaign against universities, as his goal has been the main
point all along need only look at the closing speech of the National
Conservatism Conference in November 2021, delivered by JD Vance. He was then
campaigning, bankrolled to the tune of $US15 million ($23 million) by his
former boss Peter Thiel, for an Ohio Senate seat.
Among the
Republican audience, there might have been some inconveniently recalling Vance’s withering attack
on the political and moral credentials of one Donald Trump. What could be
better, then, by way of demonstrating his true conversion, than descanting on
America’s “fundamentally corrupt” universities, institutions so irredeemably
rotten that Vance had concluded it was necessary to abandon one of the
cherished truisms of the American dream: a four-year college education.
“Ladies and
gentlemen,” he warned, “we are giving our children over to our enemies, and
it’s time we stop doing it.” All that happened in the grove of academe, Vance
went on, was that students would “learn to hate their country and acquire a lot
of debt in the process”.
His
peroration, to which, he said, he had given much thought, would feature, for
his mic drop, a pearl of wisdom from “the great prophet and statesman” Richard
Milhous Nixon.
Speaking in
December 1972 to Henry Kissinger (the most professorial member of his cabinet
and sometime member of the Harvard faculty), Nixon had mused that “the
professors are the enemy” – words Vance had clearly taken to heart. Their evil
twin was, of course, the press. But Nixon returned to his mantra. “The
professors are the enemy. Write that on a blackboard 100 times and never forget
it.”
Which,
evidently, Vance has not. But pinning the ills of America on a free press and a
college education would have surprised the Founding Fathers, whose Declaration
of Independence Trump will be commemorating next year, its 250th anniversary.
“Washington’s
first address to Congress declared that ‘knowledge is in every country the
surest basis of public happiness’.”
As the
Founders saw it, the great driver of freedom was knowledge. Two decades before
independence, the lawyer and essayist William Livingston insisted in a journal
called The Independent Reflector that “knowledge among a people makes
them free, enterprising and dauntless; but ignorance enslaves, emasculates and
depresses them”.
Whatever difference
arose between Washington, John Adams and Jefferson following independence, it
was a shared truism of the governing class that the very existence of the US as
a free republic was conditional on a well-informed citizenry.
Washington,
whose first annual address to Congress in 1790 declared that “knowledge is in
every country the surest basis of public happiness”, envisioned a national
university in the capital that would rise above party factions in the ennobling
pursuit of truth; though neither college nor partisan peace would be realised
during his lifetime.
In 1779,
Thomas Jefferson (who would make sure that his role as “Father of the
University of Virginia” would be inscribed on his tombstone) championed a Bill
for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge. Its purpose would be to
“illuminate ... the minds of the people at large” – excluding, of course, women
and the enslaved – “and more especially to give them knowledge of those
facts ... [that] they may be enabled to know ambition under all its shapes”.
The 1780
Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, primarily drafted by Adams,
committed itself to “The Encouragement of Literature” so that “Harvard-College
in Cambridge” would be the institution through which the diffusion of “wisdom
and knowledge” ensured the health of the body politic.
As Richard D
Brown’s important history The Strength of a People: The Idea of an Informed
Citizenry in America, 1650-1870, points out, all of America’s first four
presidents (including James Madison) assumed that the security of the republic
depended on the “equation of virtue and knowledge”.
A century
later, Calvin Coolidge might assert that “the chief business of the American
people is business”, but a rich stream of ideas flowing from the learned
optimism of the Founders, through the creation of land-grant colleges and the
“brain trust” administrations of Franklin Roosevelt, assumed that professors
were not the “enemy” but a resource that was indispensable for the good of the
nation. The true enemy of American democracy was not professors, but ignorance.
This was
by no means a universal view. For all his pride in the University of
Virginia, Jefferson, who dedicated himself to a “crusade against ignorance”,
lamented all the baseless slanders that came his way in the cacophony of
politics. “So many falsehoods have been propagated,” he wrote, “that nothing is
now believed and ... for want of intelligence they may rely on, [the people]
are become lethargic and insensible.”
It would not
be the last time that the defenders of empirically confirmed truth would find
themselves on the back foot. One of the great books of American history, the
Columbia history professor Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in
American Life, published in 1963, shortly after the Red Scare, chronicles
the populist equation of highbrow with un-American. Hofstadter warns that,
however tempting, the denigration of intellect ought not to be reduced to
“eggheads and fatheads”.
For all the
high-minded nostrums of the Founders, America’s sense of its calling in the
world was at least as much shaped by Christian evangelism as Enlightenment
reasoning. The sovereignty of the feeling heart would have its way over the
reflecting mind.
Ralph Waldo
Emerson could inspire the Phi Beta Kappa class at Harvard in 1837 by holding up
“the true scholar” as “the only true master” who would “resist the vulgar
prosperity that retrogrades ever to barbarism”.
But beyond
Harvard Yard, multitudes would heed Billy Sunday, the early 20th-century
revivalist preacher, when he warned that “thousands of college graduates are
going as fast as they can straight to hell. If I had a million dollars I’d give
$999,999 to the church and $1 to education ... When the word of God says one
thing and scholarship says another, scholarship can go to hell.”
“The demand
for lockstep obedience is exactly why autocracies of knowledge always end up
damaged by their intellectual self-harm.”
As the US
flexed its military muscle and flowered economically, two more foes of
excessive cerebration joined the fray. When, in 1828, Andrew Jackson soundly
defeated the incumbent president John Quincy Adams, the son of the second
president and himself a passionate believer in the federal government’s role in
creating and funding scientific institutions, the Jacksonites attributed their
victory to their hero being a man of action rather than a man of learning.
The choice,
they said, was between “John Quincy Adams, who can write” and “Andrew Jackson,
who can fight”.
Half a
century later, in the gilded age of the robber barons, the enfeebling
intellectual, all brain and no backbone, alienated from the instinctual life of
regular folk, ignorant of practical business, and milquetoast in their
patriotism, became a dependable attack line.
The great
exception to being classified one way or the other was Theodore Roosevelt,
overlooked by Donald Trump in favour of his peculiar fixation with William
McKinley. But then Roosevelt saw his trust busting as a natural projection of
the rough-riding man of action.
Brain trusts
came into their own again when Teddy’s distant cousin Franklin recruited two
Columbia academics – the economist Rexford Tugwell and Raymond Moley, a
professor of law, to the White House. Their influence on presidential
decision-making was pounced on by the Republican foes of the New Deal as
another example of out-of-touch professors imposing alien socialism on the
American people. While FDR was contemptuous of the caricature, it worked well
enough to push Tugwell out of government in 1936.
But even
before Pearl Harbour, the need for scientific knowhow in fighting a likely war
brought the professors back to the White House. In June 1941, and in response
to a proposal by the MIT engineer Vannevar Bush, Roosevelt established the
Office of Scientific Research and Development. Bush was its head, reporting
directly to the president.
The results
of its work – mass production of penicillin for battlefield wounded, proximity
fuses that transformed anti-aircraft fire, and, not least, the Manhattan
Project – made an unarguable case for the partnership between government and
university-based research science.
Though given
only a minor role in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, Bush was famous
enough to feature on the cover of Time magazine. Largely forgotten now
beyond histories of science, he was one of the 20th century’s most remarkable
visionaries, not least for his conviction that peacetime federal governments
had an obligation to fund basic scientific research, liberated from the demands
of commercial profit.
In the summer
of 1945, Bush wrote two essays, both of which pointed to the future. The
shorter piece, As We May Think, published in The Atlantic Monthly,
was devoted to his invention, the “memex” (short for “memory expansion”): a
machine that would transform the capture of information by storing an infinity
of microfilmed documents while providing “associative trails” that
foreshadowed, albeit in analogue, the hyperlinks of the world wide web.
The longer
essay, Science, the Endless Frontier, was in effect a response to FDR,
who in November 1944 had written to Bush that “new frontiers of the mind are
before us” and asked him to think about how the momentum of wartime
breakthroughs could be sustained in peacetime, in particular “the war of science
against disease” and the “discovering and developing scientific talent in
American youth”.
Bush argued
that since colleges were “the wellsprings of knowledge and understanding”, they
should be parties to research contracts with the government that would provide
the necessary stability of funding for sustained experimental work. This would
guarantee the “free play of free intellects working on subjects of their own
choice, in the manner dictated by their curiosity for exploration of the
unknown”.
The National
Science Foundation, created by Congress and signed into law by President Harry
S Truman in May 1950, owed much to Bush’s eloquence and vision – though its
governance was not what he wanted. Instead of a director appointed by a board
dominated by scientists, the head of the agency would be picked by the
president. Nonetheless, Bush’s ambition to bring science from the wings “to the
centre of the stage” had been achieved and, in the decades that followed,
became spectacularly fruitful in world-changing breakthroughs and Nobel prizes.
It is this
partnership of knowledge that is currently suffering brutal collateral
damage from MAGA’s culture wars and the chainsaw massacre of expertise enacted
by DOGE. The continuity of funding that Bush saw as a condition of experimental
freedom has been smashed. The National Institutes of Health has already lost
1200 of its staff, with threats of many more layoffs. Good Friday was not so
good for the more than 400 recipients of grants from the NSF who had their
funding cancelled.
Tellingly,
research projects dealing with disinformation, climate science or anything
attempting to advance science in under-represented groups have been singled out
for punishment. The cuts have been partly based on a Senate report last October
in which, among other conclusions, the term “biodiversity” was misinterpreted
to imply deference to the now taboo DEI.
The crudeness
of these exercises in political conformity is exemplified by the freezing of
invaluable peer-reviewed journals such as Emerging Infectious Diseases, CHEST,
specialising in asthma and pulmonary disease research, and the Morbidity and
Mortality Weekly Report.
A letter sent
by Ed Martin jnr, the interim attorney-general for DC, to the New England
Journal of Medicine, demands answers to six questions, satisfying the
authorities that “alternative views” are accommodated in their pages. But this
is, in effect, DEI for Robert Kennedy jnr’s dubious version of science,
ignoring the strict peer-reviewed standards to which all journals adhere.
The demand
for lockstep obedience to the party line is the purest Sovietism and it is
exactly why autocracies of knowledge always end up damaged by their
intellectual self-harm.
Science is
not the only casualty of the war on knowledge. President Trump has let it be
known that he wants no “negativity” in the Smithsonian Institution’s historical
museums. History must now be mobilised in the service of national
self-congratulation while the tanks roll down the Mall on the military parade
the president is orchestrating for his 79th birthday treat.
But that is
not what my trade’s founders had in mind at all. And one of them, a military
man, Thucydides, wrote his History of the Peloponnesian Wars as an
exercise in Athenian self-criticism, building as he does to the hubris-heavy
catastrophe of the expedition to Syracuse.
In doing so,
he laid down the rules of our professional code of practice. History is neither
an exercise in vain self-glorification, nor is it penitential polemic; rather,
and most simply, the retrieval of evidence in pursuit of the truth.
But though
the Founders would all have read the Greeks, it’s a reasonable bet that the
47th president has passed them by. So instead of reflection on the significance
of 1776, we will be getting a National Garden of American Heroes, some 250
statues that are by definition an entirely dumb personification of history.
Just this
month the National Endowments for the Humanities and for the Arts have both
been informed that 85 per cent of their grants have been cancelled and that
funds supporting countless projects of research and artistic expression across
America would be diverted to the garden to meet the bill, reportedly coming in
at between $100,000 and $200,000 per statue.
Among Trump’s
original pick list, there is one unlikely hero (at least for the president).
Alphabetically sandwiched between Susan B Anthony and Louis Armstrong is Hannah
Arendt, historian, philosopher and author of, among many other things, a
powerful essay on Truth and Politics.
You must hope
that her statue will feature the obligatory cigarette together with an ironic
smile, knowing that she provides a plinth text that Donald Trump is bound to
appreciate.
“Truth,
though powerless and always defeated in a head-on clash with the powers that
be, possesses a strength of its own: whatever those in power may contrive, they
are unable to discover or invent a viable substitute for it. Persuasion and
violence can destroy truth, but they cannot replace it.”
Here is the link:
https://www.afr.com/world/north-america/trump-s-war-on-harvard-is-un-american-20250523-p5m1on
All I can say is that I find it really
terrifying to have the power of the US in the hands of such an ill-suited
individual. He really is a global menace!
David.
