Z. The resistance in the spirit ends. If the researchers are no longer daring to ask any question, fear has long captured. In search of knowledge or truth, there was a day. This is not so far in the United States, there is still resistance. But now he begins to tremble at some universities.
Researchers who are afraid to lose their financing or work already remove their names from publications, refusing to study or write them down “to remove scientifically correct terms (such as” climate change “), because the authorities classify them as unreasonable.” This is how he describes an open letter, which signed 190 scientists at the end of March.
Harvard University understood how serious the situation was, and therefore made the US government with a definite statement about the war on Monday. On the other hand, that the government suspended two billion dollars, the university filed a lawsuit on Monday. In a letter to the Harvard community, the University President Alan Garber clearly made in advance against Trump’s demands: “No government, regardless of which side has the authorities to dictate, that private universities can teach and hire, as well as what areas of study and research they can continue.”
In the second time, US President Trump released one anti -scientific measure after another. He deleted or suspended research projects that do not comply with government ideological issues because they contained “illegal discriminatory” measures for diversity or with a pretext of combating anti -Semitism. This threatens to be invented by improper use for the use of authoritarian measures, while discrimination on the experience of Jews is no longer considered.
Trump’s attack is not only one on a scientific business, but also, as a Yale professor of English literature, Megan O’Rurka in New York Times writes “An attack on conditions that allow you to freely think.” The attack on universities is designed to intimidate opposition entities, as well as all those who could become.
New red fear
The image of the enemy of universities is by no means new. Donald Trump is among other conservatives in the United States who tried to present universities as elitist centers of ideological processing. At least in Red Panic, “red fear” in the middle of the 20th century, when the freedom of science was already strictly limited, writes O’RURK in his essay. At that time, anti -communist forces followed the political left.
Colombia and Harvard are currently the first attacked universities to open the voltage area for other universities: to surrender or fight. One day after the government lawsuit, 224 University Director signed a general statement in which they condemn the Trump government attempt to achieve control over universities. But so far, much more researchers tried to evade and leave the field in order not to become the next goal of the government.
If duck mice prevails, it may no longer need a punitive hammer to establish other thinking. Anyone who adapts more and more in advance obedience to learn the thinking and the rules of the other. The difference is to go a step with ideology, run in parallel, or have you already risen in accordance with? – Then it is outdated.
Anyone who adapts in advance, obedience, already assimilates the thinking of another
For universities that go along this path, this can “mean the beginning of their academic independence”, warns Ivert Vod, a professor at the University of Arizona, in the essay in early April and recalls parallels to the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. She writes that that which gave the Hitler team for free academic institutions of Jews and political opponents was “the zeal of many academic leaders to fulfill, justify and normalize a new order”.
According to some, thanks to self -esteem, some can already be tested at universities. Teachers such as students are asking to remove their pronouns from their postal signatures, design applications were adjusted or adapted to unwanted words, training programs and websites were looking for “ideological disorders”.
The Government of Raup-Snemmersatt
Now almost 100 days since Trump’s inauguration showed that those who participate in the transaction with Trump will not get rid of. The caterpillar crispy costume, which is the Trump government, expects that some are enough for his little finger, and, therefore, not only requires the whole hand, but also the hand and head.
Silence does not protect. So resistance. He can not only end in court. Because Trump should not get the right to court in order to be able to claim that he won. It is enough if he strengthens the faith of the right -wing conservatives and continues to spread that universities only harm the country and unjustifiably too many funds. Enough if he has the support of the population. Support for university education in the country is already at a low level, the crown and more and more expensive schools have only strengthened this.
In addition to the courtroom, universities should now strengthen their role as a place for social disputes. Universities should put their teaching position in the foreground and again give access to their lectures much more people. And therefore, they protect their students from an increasingly repressive state.
