How Do We Know that Universities Are Worth Defending?
In this relatively short week-ending column, I return once again today to the doom loop destroying US higher education. Rather than analyzing yet another "deal" that yet another hapless university administrator has announced while smiling wanly for the cameras, however, it recently occurred to me that it might be a good idea to step back and ask a fundamental question: Does this truly matter, or is it merely what I happen to care about?
After all, it is always possible for people to become convinced that everyone else also cares about something that is in fact quite unimportant or at least niche. When my nephews were tweeners, for example, they could go on and on (and on and on and on) about Star Trek weaponry in excruciating detail. Plenty of their peers -- and even more overgrown former tweeners -- cared passionately about those things as well. I am not on any social media, but I hear that people spend hours discussing TikTok dance videos. Even in the days of old-fashioned TV, some people lived and died with unreal reality shows, whereas I memorized and analyzed every episode of "The X-Files" (until the terrible final few seasons). None of that in fact matters, even though the people who care are free to believe with every fiber of their beings that nothing could be more important.
Having spent my entire adult life teaching in colleges and universities, perhaps I am now focusing too much on my little part of the universe. So is this simply a situation in which I have lost all sense of proportion? Fair question. Honest answer: Hell no.
The American right's reactionary attack on higher education -- which includes its attacks on expertise, science, and skeptical inquiry -- has been going on for decades (more than a century, in fact), which itself tells us quite a bit about how ephemeral this issue is not. Even when Rush Limbaugh's radio show in the 1990's was pushing lies about "the four corners of deceit" -- academia and science, along with the two other groups of people who take academics and science seriously (government and media) -- academia had been a punching bag for literally centuries across all societies. Was Socrates the first person to be killed by the state for saying things that powerful people did not want to hear? Possibly, but it seems more than likely that he was the only one who was famous enough to remember.
The current regime in Washington is thus late to the game in bashing intellectuals, but they are making for it in pure intensity. Whereas it used to be common for a few outrage entrepreneurs to make up things like "the political correctness epidemic" and then talk about it as if it were the end of the world, they mostly left the system intact. Now, however, we have seen these guys turn their most intense fantasies into reality, with the creation of "civic education centers" being only the most devious, because they actually mimic the form -- with no substance -- of academic inquiry. The rest of the attacks on universities are anything but subtle.
We can thus infer that academia matters because of how desperately those people want to destroy it. They would not be spending so much time and effort, to say nothing of marshaling the awesome resources and power of government, to attack colleges and universities if they did not truly care about ending the system as it has long existed.
It is worth remembering that a lot of the things that Donald Trump uses to enrage and motivate his base are passing fancies, like annexing Greenland or making Canada the 51st state. I am not saying that he will not succeed at some point in doing those or other crazy things, but we know that those are "sometime things" in Trump's world.
Even the attempt to use the Justice Department and other law enforcement arms of the federal government in unprecedented ways -- indicting Trump's enemies and canceling Secret Service protection for Democrats and Trump's critics -- can be haphazard. To be clear, that part of the agenda is much more dangerous than yet another round of vile personal attacks on, say, Rosie O'Donnell, but those specific examples are not evidence of a commitment to anything other than pettiness.
Dictatorship requires the end of the rule of law, making the larger battles key to the ultimate fight for human self-determination. And that means that what is being done more broadly to the US legal system truly is existential. Nevertheless, the clown show around trying to indict James Comey, Letitia James, and John Bolton is small-bore stuff -- although I again readily acknowledge that this is part of a larger agenda to force people to bend to the leader's will -- which is bad for the people involved but not a systematic and relentless attack on foundational norms.
Instead, we can readily figure out what Trump and his people care about by watching what they do every day. They truly care about making non-White non-Christians' lives hell. When a lunatic shoots two people and the response is to punish not "merely" everyone from that lunatic's country of birth but everyone from every "third-world country," the regime's priorities are not difficult to read. When environmental laws and projects of every type are systematically destroyed just cuz, we know that this was something beyond pandering during an election.
In addition, we should be clear that sustained, all-out attacks on certain parts of society cannot possibly be explained as "briar patch" misdirections. The administration has been spending ungodly amounts of resources trying to turn universities into handmaidens of the state, and it would not be doing that if this were not of the highest importance to them.
Why make this point here? Again, it seems worth teasing out when we can read people's intentions from their actions versus when we are too far into the narrative to notice that some passing battle is not as important as it might seem in the moment.
In addition, I realized that in all of my writing about the assault on higher education by current Republican politicians and their predecessors, I have generally left the "Why does this matter?" question either unasked/unanswered or have simply made the positive case for universities' importance to the economy and future prosperity. That is why I frequently talk about how Republican politicians are destroying one of our most valuable public assets. I have often emphasized Florida as a test case and cautionary tale, but I always get around to saying in one way or another that higher education matters because of its affirmative benefits to society.
All of that being true, however, does not mean that we should ignore the other obvious reason that we can be sure that universities matter. How do we know they matter? Because the Trumpists tell us, every day and in every way, that they think universities matter.
- Neil H. Buchanan