Today! ”Are Progressives to Blame for Trump’s Attack on Universities?”

With Sasha Mudd and Alexis Papazoglou

Tuesday Webinar: 11am PT/2pm ET/7pm UK/8pm CET
”Are Progressives to Blame for Trump’s Attack on Universities?”

Sasha Mudd in conversation with Alexis Papazoglou

On June 4, Donald Trump issued a 6 month ban on foreign students entering the US who seek to study at Harvard University, citing national security concerns. That ban came after a court had already blocked the decision of the Department of Homeland Security to stop issuing visas to foreign students who were admitted at Harvard University. Harvard is not the only university under attack by the Trump administration – many have had their federal funding axed or bullied into submission, like Columbia University. This attack on universities seems in line with common authoritarian tactics that seek to undermine a country’s institutions of knowledge production, or at the very least submit them to the political will of those in power. It is also a violation of the republican conception of freedom that the United States was founded on, opposed to the arbitrary rule of the leader/King, espousing instead the power-constraining rule of law. But are universities also partly responsible for ending up in this situation?

Richard Rorty was already warning in the 1990s of the resentment that some voters would soon feel towards “post-modernist professors” and college graduates who were “dictating manners” to the rest of society. Did universities allow political ideology to contaminate their project of open inquiry in the pursuit of knowledge and truth? Did academia become too focused on which canonical figures had to be “cancelled”? And are university professors too removed from the rest of society to be able to understand and engage with the ideas that go beyond their ideological comfort zone?

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