Trump challenge to universities is a threat to history and nature of academic inquiry
By Charles Mitchell
President Donald Trump and red state leaders everywhere are pushing to end public funding of any academic inquiry or program that doesn’t meet with their approval. It’s time to get rid of the radicals, they say, just as previously purge-minded people have said.
Now no one objects to university research that has led to longer-lasting pavements, safer food, better laundry detergent, less erosion, faster jets, exceptional artificial limbs, more meat per cow, improved energy production, durable fabrics, less erosion, sturdier bridges, pills to cure ailments, human organ transplantation, great movies, disease-resistant plants and thousands of additional offerings achieved in whole or in part by the people among us who are paid to ask questions and test ideas.
No. It’s questions such as how to achieve a more open and balanced society that sound like fingers on a chalkboard to our president and his followers. They are willing to throw out all the good to be rid of what they define as bad.
They are absolutely correct that loads of scientific and social research will play out as nonsense. Lots of inquiries are not well-founded and many result in dead ends. But we have penicillin today because 97 years ago Alexander Fleming of the University of London noticed a certain mold was inhibiting bacterial growth. And we have democracy because Thomas Jefferson read the works of professors who reasoned that monarchies were at odds with human nature.
Today, there’s a fundamental misunderstanding of universities. They exist to ask questions. Maybe the confusion relates to the TV universities that promote themselves as online sellers of skills. In exchange for signing up for a grant or student loan, students are promised a “satisfying career” in computers, nursing or business management. A happy life does align with one basic goal of universities – to make the world better – but universities are not businesses, and teaching people how to do jobs is only part of why they exist.
Universities have been around a long time. The first one was in Fez, Morocco, founded in 859 A.D. The heiress who created it believed all existing knowledge should be gathered, preserved and shared. And when thoughtful people were placed into such a setting, a culture of questioning was sure to follow. And questioning, of course, begets controversy. Jefferson, for example, had many naysayers including loyalists who resisted his radical ideas.
“One sometimes finds what one is not looking for,” is what Fleming once said while being hailed as the Father of Bacteriology, hence responsible for saving millions upon millions of lives. Certainty is not part of academic inquiry, and that alone differentiates the world of universities from the world of commerce.
To flourish, universities have adapted through the centuries to operate through something called shared governance. The system has many tenets, but among them is autonomy which empowers established faculty to define and conduct their own projects and research within defined ethical and legal rules. A business could not operate if every employee had this level of freedom, but a university would be doomed if one boss had the power to tell every professor what to think about.
Columbia University in New York, the site of recent anti-Israel protests, agreed to changes to save $400 million in government funding pulled by the Trump administration. Columbia agreed to adopt a new definition of antisemitism, changes in disciplinary procedures and a review of the Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies Department.
Trump’s most recent demands are aimed at Harvard, which existed 140 years before America did. The threat is to eliminate $8.7 billion in multiyear grants. Harvard has told Trump to take a hike. “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,” is how Harvard President Alan Garber responded. Harvard has a $53 billion endowment nest egg from donors and legions of contributors of research money that doesn’t come from the public treasury. That puts the nation’s oldest university in the best position to refuse to compromise its independence.
The point, though, is how backward facing it is to apply any political litmus test to any work being done at any university, public or private. Airing and exchanging ideas has never been a bad idea.
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Charles Mitchell is an associate professor in the School of Journalism and New Media at the University of Mississippi and a member of the Overby Center panel of experts.