What does NRC think | Harvard keeps his back on, but Trumps Cultural War endangers academic freedom

The American University of Harvard keeps its back on – supported by an amount of more than 50 billion dollars in the bank account. That is apparently the equity needed to be able to ignore the threats of the Trump government next to you.

The private university of Cambridge, Massachusetts, had received an ultimatum from Washington: she had to scrap all its diversity policy, reduce control of « activist » teachers, give access to the admission of new students, refusing foreign students who are « hostile to American values », sensitive departments of the facilitism. Otherwise the government would cancel its nine billion dollars in contracts with Harvard.

Last Monday Harvard chairman Alan M. Garber announced in a statement that he did not agree with the requirements of Trump. They would affect the independence of his university. « No government – of whatever political color – should dictate what private universities can teach, » said Garber.

He is quite right in that. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) showed similar militant sounds, but other universities – including the no less important Columbia University from New York – bows for the pressure from the White House. They apparently couldn’t miss the money. Trump responded to Harvard’s decision by freezing two billion dollars And threaten with an unfavorable tax regime.

Trump’s attack at the universities is part of a cultural war against the ‘elite’ hurt him and his supporters. Earlier he replaced the leadership of the Kennedy Center of the Performing Arts – He made himself chairman – and he dedicated the museums of the Smithsonian that in their exhibitions In particular, attention had to be paid to ‘American greatness’. For black pages from history – think of slavery – would then not be a place.

Even the archive system did not escape Trumps. The archivist of the United States, the head of the American National Archive, has been fired and is replaced by Interim by Marco Rubio, the Minister of Foreign Affairs. This has gave Trump a grip on the decision which government documents are and cannot be stored – and therefore on what can be investigated later, by lawyers or historians, about his reign.

The fact that universities have dropped stitches in the field of facilitating the freedom of expression of more conservative teachers and students is now also recognized by themselves. Also expressions of anti -Semitism were not always tackled energetically. However, this does not justify what the Trump government is doing now.

The reproach that there would be no hard enough action against anti -Semitism has since become a stick to hit the universities. The academic freedom is at stake due to the performance of Trump. Politicians with authoritarian tendencies must have little of institutions in the field of knowledge and arts, and that does not seem different to this president. Hopefully the example of Harvard will be followed, because in a free society, scientists and artists must be able to do their work unhindered by the state.

To share

Mail the editors