Harvard’s refusal to obey Trump shows on the road forward

Harvard was founded in 1636, a full 140 years before the United States. It is the world’s richest educational institution, with funded donations of SEK 500 billion, and one of the world’s very best universities.

When now Donald Trump And his administration carries out an open war against US higher education, thus few have as much opportunities as Harvard to fight against. However, after almost as in -house Columbia at the end of March, Trump laid down in the hope of avoiding hijacked appropriations, many, however, did not dare hope.

Columbia has so far not received anything for its submission, Trump still holds large parts of their state funding. But Harvard actually chose to stand up for themselves and for the academic freedom that is the basis for all higher education and research.

Before the president’s demand that the university should, among other things, review the views of all employees and students and ensure that each faculty contained a « diversity of perspective » was easily replied: no. What Trump desires is illegal. « No government – no matter what party is in power – can decide what private universities can teach, which they can adopt and employ or what areas they can study and consolidate, » as Harvard’s principal expressed it.

There is also extensive work in progress to deport foreign students and researchers solely because of expressed opinions that the president dislikes

And what does Even a variety of perspectives in the academy? Should the geological institutions have as many climate deniers as serious researchers? Should medical education weigh up medical science with as many vaccine skeptics? Where the latter leads is already clearly visible in how Republican-controlled states prohibit doctors to advise parents from vaccinating their children and how health minister Robert F Kennedy recommends vitamin A before the vaccine in the midst of an ongoing measles epidemic.

Trump has responded by stopping SEK 20 billion to the school’s research and threatened to withdraw Harvard’s status as a tax -exempt foundation. At the same time, financing of climate research is stopped at Princeton and a large number of universities have received requirements lists similar to that directed at Columbia and Harvard. Extensive work is also underway to deport foreign students and researchers solely because of expressed opinions that the president dislikes.

The administration states that it wants to stop the anti -Semitism that was noticed in the major student demonstrations last fall against the war in Gaza. And it was painfully clear in its quarters. But as Princeton’s principal, who himself is a Jew, wrote in The Atlantic So even so awful phenomena must be handled according to the rules that exist. At present, no investigation has been made of the problem, and several of the requirements that Trump places have nothing to do with anti -Semitism.

It is even built into the very process of moving away from home and starting to plug in and begins to look at the older generation with new, sometimes excessively critical eyes

Because, just as one can suspect in an administration where several employees themselves expressed and spread gross anti -Semitism, the rethink about Jewish students is just a fig leaf over Trump’s actual ambitions.

He and his circle Hate the elite university. They see the academy as an extreme left -handed that causes young people to turn away from traditional American values.

To some extent it is true. It is even built into the process of moving away from home and starting to plug in and starts to look at the older generation with new, sometimes excessively critical eyes. In addition, there are certainly some left -wing cuckoo at American universities.

But here is also what is the very core task of the higher education: to convey knowledge. Ministry of Education For example, recently claimed that many schools « indoctrinated their students with the false notion that the United States is based on systematic and structural racism ». And slavery was certainly institutional rather than structural racism, as was state policy that, as late as the 1960s, actively denied blacks to educate and just as actively tried to prevent them from voting. But you have to have a very distinctive view of history if you see it as a « false performance ». The problem, however, is that large parts of the white United States, Trump’s core voters, think this is so. Then of course it becomes difficult if the children learn about the shame stains that the nation still has not processed.

Even more important to Trump is perhaps that the universities are strong independent institutions that politics traditionally did not have direct power over. For a democracy, such vital, precisely to guarantee both pluralism and stability. A free society consists of different spheres, with different inherent logic. The division of power prescribed by the US Constitution has cooked with the rotten of the Republican Party, but also non -political institutions can counteract an authoritarian rule. Trump wants to stop that.

That is why Harvard’s refusal to obey is so important. Already noticed how Other educational institutions Now dares stood up in the back and scientists from all over the United States Apply. One can hope that fashion also infects on the law firms that are now constantly being attacked by the president for representing people and processes that he dislikes. Unless lawyers are able to stand up for the law, who should do it?

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