Intelligence Bound By US Policy

Once upon a time, in an America far, far away, being intelligent was a good thing. Parents wanted their kids to go to college, to get advanced degrees, and to explore new things, new ideas, and new paths toward the future. University attendance grew by leaps and bounds. New courses of study were added. Universities sought out scientists and academics from all over the world to offer students the best possible education. Ph.Ds were being handed out left and right.

In the past few weeks, though, scientists and academics have had a run-in with an authoritarian administration that is too stupid to understand the value these people bring with them. Some are being blocked from entry to the US. Others are being questioned about whether their research aligns with White House priorities. Universities are under threat of losing their funding for a host of reasons. One analysis shows that the attack on academics and intelligence could negatively effect the United States for at least a generation. We will lose our edge and our advantage in terms of research and academic advancement.

The evidence against the White House is piling up. The French government said on Wednesday, March 19, that a French researcher had been denied entry to the United States and sent back to France because he had expressed a “personal opinion” on US research policy.

Badar Khan Suri, a fellow at Georgetown, says he is being punished because of the suspected views of his wife, a U.S. citizen with Palestinian heritage.

 The Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) is warning that the Trump administration is undermining the integrity and independence of academic research conducted in Canada.

Both Britain and Germany have updated their travel advisories to the US, warning that American authorities are looking for any excuse to detain, mistreat, and expel anyone who is not a US citizen.

In the rush to ‘secure the nation’s borders,’ the US has done less to target illegal immigration activity and primarily targeted long-standing programs that give travelers legal ways to enter the U.S. As academics and researchers frequently travel out of the country to participate in conferences, they seem to be taking the brunt of a culture war they didn’t know they were fighting.

“I have not experienced, across 46 years of higher education, a period where there’s been this much distance” between the agendas of university leaders and Washington, said Robert J. Jones, the chancellor of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. If the president realizes his ambitions, many American universities — public and private, in conservative states and liberal ones — could be hollowed out, imperiling the backbone of the nation’s research endeavors.

Universities are laying off workers, imposing hiring freezes, shutting down laboratories, and facing federal investigations. After the administration sent Columbia a list of demands and canceled $400 million in grants and contracts, university leaders across the country fear how the government might wield its financial might to influence curriculums, staffing, and admissions.

Ideologies are under fire. Just yesterday, the administration ‘paused’ $175 million in funding to the University of Pennsylvania because it has trans athletes. We already know how transphobic the president is. We can only guess that he tried taking a ‘beautiful woman’ home one night and discovered she had a penis larger than his. Now, he’s using his unchecked power to ruin lives and remove opportunities.

President Punk is taking clear aim at the cultures and missions of major nonprofit universities. His tactics, university officials and researchers believe, could throw American higher education toward an earlier time — closer to when, as Dr. Nemat Shafik, recently resigned president of Columbia University put it, universities “were kept separate from the world around them.”

The National Academy of Sciences has long acknowledged that universities were “the core strength” of the American research and development apparatus. Universities also assumed part of the United States’ soft-power strategy, working on foreign aid projects that spanned the globe.

“No one can assume, for example, that biochemistry is going to have a sustained future of generous funding,” said John Thelin, a professor emeritus at the University of Kentucky and a former president of the Association for the Study of Higher Education. He could think of no president, provost, or medical school dean who had, in recent years, appeared particularly nervous about an evaporation of funding. These days, it is hard to find a president, provost, or medical school dean who is not anxious.

Asked whether he feared a wholesale remaking of the American university, Dr. Jones replied that he did not like to use the word “fear.” But, he added, “it is a concern — I can’t say that it is not one of those things that a lot of us are concerned about.”

What may be most concerning is that thought now seems to be targeted over what a person is actually doing. Having personal opinions that are in opposition to the White House’s agenda is uncharted territory and is casting a wide net of fear. Scientists and researchers are scrubbing their social media pages, being cautious about what they say in any public setting, even if it might appear that the environment is friendly to their views.

Is this latest move highly illegal? Oh, hell yeah. Is anyone standing up to the administration about this? No one that we’ve been able to find who’s willing to go on the record. The fear is palpable. Some even insinuate that their lives could be on the line.

Once upon a time, the US celebrated academic and scientific achievement. Now, it’s a liability.