EDITORIAL: THE FASCIST ASSAULT ON KNOWLEDGE INSTITUTIONS IN THE US INCLUDES GESTAPO-STYLE RAIDS
Vinod Mubayi
All fascist and proto-fascist regimes begin with an attack on knowledge and on the institutions whose raison d’etre is to develop, nurture, and advance knowledge. The Trump administration’s assault on leading US universities and, in particular, their students and faculty who happen to oppose US government policies and use the rights granted under the First Amendment to express their views falls squarely in this tradition. The U.S. government, both under Biden and more so under Trump, is the main supporter of Israel and the supplier of most of its bombs and other military hardware.
It is deeply complicit in the Israeli military’s wanton killing, labeled as genocide by Amnesty International and other human rights groups, of Palestinian civilians, many of them women and children, in Gaza. Any criticism of Israeli state policies or its barbaric actions in Gaza and the West Bank is characterized by the U.S. government as “antisemitism” as if critiquing the policies and actions of the government of the state of Israel is tantamount to discriminating against the religion of Judaism or its adherents. In the Biden era, repression of pro-Palestine views at universities was carried out through local police actions such as the use of New York city police to clear student occupation of a campus building and an encampment at Columbia University about a year ago.
Under Trump this repression has reached fascistic levels. In raids reminiscent of Nazi Germany, masked and hooded ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents resembling the Gestapo jump out of unmarked cars in broad daylight to arrest non-citizen students who may have expressed support for Palestine and transport them to a jail thousands of miles away from their campus in preparation for their deportation. These fascistic assaults have targeted non-citizens who are in the U.S. legally, either permanent residents with a green card or holding F, J or H visas. Under the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment, anyone in the country has a right to free speech, but non-citizens are more vulnerable to the threat of deportation under two obscure laws, one dating back to 1798 dealing with countries with whom the U.S. is at war and the other passed in 1952 during the anti-communist hysteria of the McCarthy era which provides that migrants in the U.S. may be removed if the Secretary of State believes their presence will have serious negative consequences for U.S. foreign policy. Marco Rubio has reportedly bragged that under the latter law he has ‘canceled’ the visas of 300 students. It is clear that the arrests and abductions of students, like Mahmoud Khalil at Columbia and Rumeysa Ozturk at Tufts University, is meant to instill fear both among the university community and more broadly of expressing any public opposition to what Israel or the U.S. is doing. Moreover, in the minds of the MAGA cult followers, the public arrests of non-citizen students can be easily linked to the anti-immigrant rhetoric of Trump to cleanse America of millions of unwanted “aliens”.
Of course, the Trump Administration’s targeting of universities and colleges is broader than just arresting, expelling and deporting students. At Columbia, the administration canceled $400 million of grants and contracts to different scientific departments for research unless Columbia acceded to its demands that Sheldon Pollock, Professor Emeritus of South Asian Studies at Columbia termed a “ransom note.” Writing in the Guardian newspaper on March 19, Prof. Pollock said “Like a mob boss, the government threatens to cut off two of the university’s fingers: academic freedom and faculty governance.” As a precondition for even discussing the restoration of the canceled funds, the Trump administration made an extraordinary demand, unprecedented in the annals of academic governance, that Columbia put one particular academic department, Middle East, South Asian and African studies, Mesaas, into “receivership.” Pollock, who was once chaired Mesaas, characterized this demand as an “unparalleled attempt to seize control over people and ideas in a US university.” In his view, this department was singled out “because its faculty have not voiced steadfast support for the state of Israel in their scholarship…Mesaas professors ask hard but entirely legitimate questions about Israel – and our government wants to ban that.”
The Columbia administration led by its board of trustees caved in entirely to this bullying in a manner that Pollock and Appadurai, professor emeritus at NYU, in another jointly written article termed this cave in as “cravenly” surrendering to the Trump administration demands. The question that arises of course after this abject surrender is who leads the university that has academic freedom as one of its core values. Professor Katherine Franke, who lost her position at Columbia University’s law school after 25 years on the faculty for defending Columbia students’ right to protest in favor of a ceasefire in the Israeli military assault on Gaza and for Columbia University to divest from Israel, surmised that the reason for Columbia’s easy capitulation is that “the boards of trustees are no longer made up of people who are involved in education, committed to the educational mission, in some way professionally or otherwise…Instead, they are hedge fund managers, venture capitalists, corporate lawyers, and in our [i.e., Columbia’s] case, arms manufacturers as well.”
Pollock and Appadurai state that “American universities, in their recent dealings with the federal government – and with their own trustees – have repeatedly shown themselves incapable of preserving the core values of academic freedom and shared governance. This failure has been widely noted, but unasked is who bears responsibility. Who precisely decides to surrender those values, whether at private institutions like Columbia, Harvard or the University of Pennsylvania, or at public ones like the University of North Carolina or the University of Minnesota The ultimate decision-maker at colleges and universities is the board of trustees. And these boards, as the explosive events of the past year demonstrate, have serious problems, both in how they are constituted and how they lead.” They go on to ask how can
“people be entrusted with running a university when they have no lived experience with or understanding of its core functions and aims What qualifications do such trustees bring to their office beside the capacity and expectation to donate And what do those qualifications, which pertain to private profit, have to do with the concerns of scholars and scientists and doctors, which pertain to the public good Universities are replicating the plutocratic domination of the Trump administration. Is it any wonder, then, that Columbia’s trustees are prepared to ignore the foundational values that constitute a university – academic freedom and shared governance – in order to reach an accommodation with the federal government”
While Columbia has been kind of Ground Zero for the Trump administration’s attacks on academia due to its location in the global media capital, and the fact that New York City is also home to the nation’s largest Jewish population, the same assaults are also taking place at other schools. A cut of $175 million was imposed on the University of Pennsylvania, almost $9 billion in federal grants and contracts to Harvard University and its affiliate institutions such as medical teaching hospitals, and the suspension of dozens of grants to Princeton University. Brown University has recently been reported to be hit with a cancellation of more than $500 million in federal funds again on the same vague charge of “antisemitism.” Of course, the loss of funding would set back the US role and leadership in scientific, medical and technological research.
This label of antisemitism is nothing but a cover for the much more serious charge of genocide that a great majority of the U.S. ruling elite, the executive, the legislators, and the majority of the corporate business class, are unwilling to confront. The main international human rights organizations, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have issued reports claiming without any equivocation that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. A recent US Senate resolution, sponsored by Senator Bernie Sanders, to stop all arms sales to Israel since they violated US laws failed to pass. Only 15 Senators, all Democrats, voted for the resolution while 82 voted against. The absurdity of the antisemitism label is vividly shown by the fact that many of the protestors against the genocide being carried out by Israel are Jews themselves, including the groups Jewish Voice for Peace and Not in Our Name, and many Jewish students and faculty. In a recent article, the progressive magazine Jewish Currents reported that noncitizen faculty are worried about being targeted for studying and teaching subjects related to histories of “colonization and decolonization – even if their work is not about Palestine.” The magazine also reported that a First Amendment lawsuit recently filed by the American Association of University Professors “listed many such examples of its noncitizen members self-censoring on social media, canceling plans to attend academic conferences abroad, withdrawing from organizing with public-facing forums, and not attending protests out of “fear that their lawful advocacy will lead to arrest and deportation.” The Trump administration’s policies, the suit argued, are “terrorizing students and faculty,” an observation confirmed by campus affiliates who spoke to Jewish Currents about being afraid to be in their classes, offices, and on-campus homes because ICE could come looking for them there.”
In addition to the assaults on academia, Trump and his cohorts that he has empowered are busy trashing parts of the government that deal with regulatory policy, health sciences and environmental protection. Thus, the fields of knowledge within the Federal Government that Trump and his cohorts are attacking range from environmental and health sciences to social issues and economics. The focus of the attacks is knowledge professionals, typically government scientists and related technical staff who analyze and present to the public any set of facts, analyses or arguments that can call into question Trump’s policies or hamper and hinder his or his cronies’ business interests and wealth. As is typical of authoritarian regimes, repressive and punitive measures that ignore constitutional niceties like freedom of speech and include massive firing of government employees have been adopted to intimidate and create a climate of fear to silence any dissent and opposing views.
Trump and his followers have frequently trashed the well-established science of climate change. During his campaign, Trump was notorious for his slogan “Drill, baby drill” that called for removing all barriers to fossil fuel production within the United States and its offshore waters when the harmful effects of carbon emissions on the climate and global warming have been conclusively established. To demonstrate that the Trump appointees and his empowered pal Elon Musk and his associates mean business, hundreds of weather forecasters and other federal NOAA employees on probationary status were fired a few weeks ago. These included meteorologists who do crucial local forecasts in the national weather service offices. Since NOAA’s observations, expertise, and models play a vital role in global climate forecasts, many foreign governments such as India are worried about developments at NOAA that could impact climate science. NOAA provides data and models that support weather-climate monitoring, forecasting and disaster preparedness worldwide. Especially important for countries in South Asia, monsoon forecasts, cyclone tracking, and climate projections rely on NOAA’s models.
EPA plans to eliminate its scientific research arm, by removing over a thousand chemists, biologists, toxicologists and other scientists. In their plans to shrink the federal government, the newly appointed EPA administrator has stated to wants to reduce his agency’s budget by 65 percent. Undoubtedly, this drastic reduction will have a very negative impact on environmental regulation to provide clean water, monitor air quality and clean up toxic chemicals. As reported by the New York Times, the E.P.A.’s plan calls for dissolving the agency’s largest department, the Office of Research and Development, and purging up to 75 percent of the people who work there. This office provides “the independent research that undergirds virtually all of the agency’s environmental policies, from analyzing the risks of “forever chemicals” in drinking water to determining the best way to reduce fine particle pollution in the atmosphere”. Eliminating this office would clearly undercut the regulation of polluting industries.
Changes are also affecting the working of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundations, the agencies responsible for making and managing budgetary allocations for scientific research in many fields. The newly appointed chief of the Health and Human Services Department that oversees NIH is a crank who does not believe in vaccines. It is reported that NIH officials have warned researchers not to mention mRNA vaccines in their grant applications, as this Nobel-prizewinning technology has been the subject of conspiracy theories that have gained traction among the Trump administration and its supporters.
The politics and thinking behind the assault on science can be traced to a project of the conservative Heritage Foundation called Project 2025, a report calling for the complete reconstruction of the American state that has become a kind of blueprint for the actions of the Trump administration and its coterie of hedge fund investors and other business tycoons with ties to the fossil fuel and chemical industries, real estate and Silicon Valley venture capitalists from where Elon Musk emerged.
Education and learning and science are about critical thinking and subjecting power and dogma to truth by asking questions and challenging accepted narratives. Every authoritarian regime seeks to control what people think via its school curriculum and book bans, by controlling who teaches and what they teach. The authoritarian leaders of the world: Donald Trump, Victor Orban, Narendra Modi, Recep Erdogan, Vladimir Putin and others hate intellectuals who dissent and ask challenging questions that expose the bankruptcy of the leaders and their policies.
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