To the editor: John Stewart on “The Daily Show” often juxtaposes news clips of North Korea’s Dictator Kim Jong Un and his advisers with scenes of Trump and his subservient Cabinet to illustrate the terrifying similarities. Indeed the comparisons are almost congruent right down to groveling and fawning including laughter at Trump’s bad jokes.
What is clear is that the key requirement in Trump’s orbit is not competence but personal loyalty to Trump. Indeed as pointed out by Michael Roth, the Jewish president of Wesleyan University, on Amanpour & Company, Trump’s “antisemitic” attacks on premier research universities (of which the University of Alaska Fairbanks is an example) has nothing to do with antisemitism, but rather is a demand for universities to swear an oath of loyalty to Trump’s ideology, which would destroy them. But thankfully universities, notably including Harvard, are finally standing their ground.
While Trump activists like Chris Rufo looking to defame elite universities have viewed Columbia’s travail with disdain: (“It’s almost unbelievable how weak, feckless and pathetic these folks have been.”); now that universities have decided to fight back with formidable lawyers citing Supreme Court academic freedom decisions, Trump may well rue the day he elected to bully academia.
An important point is that these questionably legal presidential executive orders are not principled “conservatism.” Dartmouth College, where I was an engineering professor for about 12 years, was the conservative William Buckley’s favorite campus. While providing arguably the best undergraduate education in the Ivy League in science and engineering, Dartmouth College requires all undergraduates to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. This is a strength, not a weakness. The fact is that without free debate arrival at the “truth” either in science or politics is impossible. If universities allow the Trump administration to dictate whom they can hire, what students they admit and which research results are acceptable they will no longer be universities. But this is precisely what the administration is demanding.
With the Republican-controlled Congress afraid to challenge Trump, academia’s fight to prevent a Trump takeover may be the only hope for the survival of U.S. democracy over the next year.
