President Trump’s assault on liberal ideals in the world’s greatest institutions of learning reveals a vacuous anti-intellectual conservatism. His strategy speaks to his MAGA supporters culturally and politically in pushing back against what he calls the “radical” or “woke” left. In doing so, he threatens the academic freedoms underpinning the strengths of liberal arts, science and intellectual achievement in America.
It is important for me to state upfront that I have built a career defending markets and innovation, and providing evidence against discriminatory preferences rooted in beliefs that benefit one cultural group over the greater good of many.
The birth of the modern world lies in a simple idea: Virtue is acquired and not bestowed as fortune to people of rank. This was not easy for conservative people of rank to digest, and fierce battles were fought along the way against institutions supporting colonialism, aristocracy, patriarchy, sexism and homophobia.
Acquisition of virtue underscores Machiavelli’s advice to a prince in the 15th century questioning class privilege. The notion of virtue was once only available to conservative white men who were propertied and often aristocratic. Being of leisure, they were at liberty to think with a free mind. This was the foundation of the liberal arts in the 17th century.
Concerted struggle brought new groups to universities — men from middle and working classes in the 19th century, women in the early 20th century and minorities in the late 20th. However, it was their virtue that elevated the ranks of American academics and their students, leading to great scientific discoveries and human achievement.
At the mundane level, their struggles were difficult. Women and minorities in academia faced —and continue to face — sexism, homophobia and racism. Court records on these issues laid out page to page would extend from Maine to California and beyond. For any one case someone might find of a minority being favored, one can find a hundred others who faced discrimination.
Many of them were immigrants. Over one-third of the Nobel laureates in economics, chemistry, medicine and physics are immigrants to the U.S. There are nearly 400,000 immigrant professors in the country. American tech leadership, whether in Silicon Valley or in its engineering schools, rests on the hard work (dare I say, Protestant ethic) of immigrants.
Given the rampant discrimination that immigrants, women and minorities have faced in higher education, Trump’s claim that white Christians are being discriminated against is laughable, manipulative and political. In equating liberal arts with “radical communism” and other such nonsense, Trump pulls off a masterful deceit. But his lies will never make American great again.
Most knowledge is built on principles of science and refinements based on successive waves of evidence. But science is neither easy nor linear in its progress. Galileo, Newton and Darwin debunked extant religious beliefs about the centricity of the Earth and human beings. But the path was convoluted. For example, Darwin’s ideas also encouraged beliefs about women and racial minorities being inferior. These ideas eventually lost out, but we kept the best of Darwin.
Science is and will always be biased, but its ideas win through evidence and debate, not sanctions or prohibitions on free speech. Trump would have cut off Darwin’s science funding, deported Newton and put Galileo on trial for heresy. Paranoid politicians like Trump cannot recognize that science is not about who votes in elections.
The Western world has survived such political assaults in the past. Most of us now believe that the Earth is relatively round and that homo sapiens are descended from apes.
Since Socrates, ideas have won through the strength of their innovation and debate, to make us see things we had not seen before, or to make the world a better place.
Trump, who claims to be supporting abstract ideals such as merit, brings a poisoned chalice to the nation’s thinkers. He sanctions us with punitive measures, cuts off our funding, drowns us in lawsuits and floods the academy with his meddlesome government coercions.
Debating ideas using evidence or upholding free speech are not Trump’s strengths. Bullying and suing people for money are.
Trump’s actions are those that the world of knowledge has fought from the time of Socrates to that of McCarthyism. One of my German colleagues often tells me that the mistake we make is in assuming that Nazis were dumb.
It breaks a professor’s heart to see intellectually gifted people such as Ted Cruz (Princeton, Harvard Law School) JD Vance (Ohio State, Yale Law School) or Josh Hawley (Stanford, Yale Law School) lay aside their intellectual capital for the illiberal purposes of undermining our knowledge producers.
Liberal arts, science and ideas in general will always threaten those in power. The Trump administration’s legal mumbo-jumbo — about Title VI and antisemitism investigations that it employs to shut down knowledge production — has been rightly called out as a war on liberalism, but it is more fundamentally a war on intellectual pursuit.
Regulating our universities into safe spaces for MAGA-type conservatism will not make American academia great again. Punishing the gifted to make the vindictive better off is not the same as robbing the rich to pay the poor, as it leaves everyone worse off.
This Western liberalism-loving libertarian professor provides the following grades to Trump: A+ for serving hemlock, F- for virtue.
J.P. Singh is Distinguished University Professor at Schar School of Policy and Government, George Mason University, and Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow with the Robert Bosch Academy (Berlin).
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