Lamenting the disintegration of elite USA universities

Elite universities in the USA have nurtured and enhanced my whole academic life. In 1983, I moved to the USA as an international student, commenced a Ph.D. at Princeton, and then worked at Northwestern and Ohio State. After I returned to Australia in 1994, I visited the USA every year for several weeks for conferences, collaborations, and university visits. Much of my research was shaped by ideas I got from those trips. This blog started through the influence of I2CAM, a wonderful institution funded by the NSF. My movement into chemical physics was facilitated by attending workshops at the Telluride Science Center. I deeply appreciate my colleagues (and their institutions) for their stimulation, support, interest, encouragement, and hospitality. 

My trips to the USA only ended with COVID-19, retirement, family health issues, and my new general aversion to international travel. Currently I would be too scared to travel to the USA, based on what I read in the Travel Section of The Sydney Morning Herald.

Most importantly, what I have learned and done has been built largely on intellectual foundations laid by people in these elite universities.  Other parts of the world have played a role too, but my focus here is the USA due to current political events leading to the impending disintegration of these universities.

I readily acknowledge that these universities have flaws and need reform. On this blog, I occasionally discussed issues, such as the obsession with money, metrics, management, and marketing. Teaching undergraduates and robust scholarship has sometimes become subsidiary. I have critiqued some of the flaky science published in luxury journals by groups from these universities.

Nevertheless, if something is broken you do not fix it by smashing it. Consider a beautiful ancient vase with a large crack. You do not restore the vase by smashing it and hiring your teenage cousin to make a new one.

Reading about what is happening raises multiple questions. What is really happening? Why is it happening? How significant is it? What might it lead to? How should individuals and institutions respond? 

Today when I was on the UQ campus it was serene and the challenges my colleagues are facing, as formidable and important as they are, seem trifling compared to what I imagine is happening on Ivy campuses right now. In passing, I mention that Australia is not completely immune to what is happening in the USA. Universities here that receive some research grant funding from the USA government have had it paused or cancelled.

I can't imagine what it would be like to be an international student at Princeton right now.

On the one hand, I do not feel qualified to comment on what is happening as I am so distant. On the other hand, I do want to try and express some solidarity with and appreciation of institutions and colleagues that have blessed me and the world. I make a few general observations. This is my advice, for what it is worth, to my younger self.

Protect your mental health. You and your colleagues and your institutional are encountering an existential crisis, perhaps like none encountered before. Don't live in denial. But also don't let this consume you and destroy you as a person or a community. Limit your intake of news and how much you think about it and discuss it. Practise the basics: exercise; eat, drink, and sleep well; get help sooner than later; limit screen time; rest.

Expect the unexpected. Expect more surprises, pain, uncertainty, instability, intra-institutional conflict, and disappointments. 

Get the big picture. This is about a lot more than federal funding for universities. There are broader issues about what a university is actually for. What do you want to preserve and protect? What are you willing to compromise on? Beyond the university, many significant issues are at stake concerning politics, democracy, economics, pluralism, culture, and the law. This is an opportunity, albeit a scary one, to think about and learn about these issues.

Make the effort to have conversations across the divides. Try to  have civil and respectful discussions with people with different perspectives on how individuals and institutions should respond to the current situation. Talk to colleagues in the humanities and social sciences. Talk to those with different political perspectives, both inside and outside the university.

Read widely. History is instructive but not determinative. I recommend two very short books that I think are relevant and helpful.

On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder.

The Power of the Powerless, by Vaclav Havel, first published in 1978 in the context of living in communist totalitarian Czechoslovakia. I have a Penguin Vintage edition which includes a beautiful introduction by Timothy Snyder, written in 2018, for a 40th Anniversary edition. 

I thank Charles Ringma for bringing both books to my attention.

What do you think? I would love to hear from people in US universities who are living through this.

An authoritarian government takes over universities: one case history

Adventures of a Bystander, by Peter Drucker, contains the following account. Drucker was a faculty member at Frankfurt University in 1933.

“[S]everal weeks after the Nazis had come to power, was the first Nazi-led faculty meeting at the University. Frankfurt was the first university the Nazis tackled, precisely because it was the most self-confidently liberal of major German universities, with a faculty that prided itself on its allegiance to scholarship, freedom of conscience, and democracy. The Nazis knew that control of Frankfurt University would mean control of German academia altogether. So did everyone at the University. 

Above all, Frankfurt had a science faculty distinguished both by its scholarship and by its liberal convictions; and outstanding among the Frankfurt scientists was a biochemist of Nobel Prize caliber and impeccable liberal credentials. When the appointment of a Nazi commissar for Frankfurt was announced around February 25 of that year and when not only every teacher but also every graduate assistant at the University was summoned to a faculty meeting to hear his new master, everybody knew that a trial of strength was at hand. … 

The new Nazi commissar wasted no time on the amenities…. [He] pointed his finger at one department chairman after another and said: ‘You either do what I tell you or we’ll put you into a concentration camp.’ 

There was dead silence when he finished; everybody waited for the distinguished biochemist. The great liberal got up, cleared his throat, and said: ‘Very interesting, Mr. Commissar, and in some respects very illuminating. But one point I didn’t get too clearly. Will there be more money for research in physiology?’ The meeting broke up shortly thereafter with the commissar assuring the scholars that indeed there would be plenty of money for ‘racially pure science’.”

I became aware of this chilling story through Peter Woit's blog who got it from a blog post by Adam Przeworski