The latest salvo:
NYT (“Leaders of Harvard’s Middle Eastern Studies Center Will Leave“):
Two of the leaders of Harvard University’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, the director and associate director, will be leaving their positions, according to two professors with direct knowledge of the moves.
The department had been under criticism from alumni that it had an anti-Israel bias, and the university more broadly has been under intense pressure from the federal government to address accusations of antisemitism on campus.
The director, Cemal Kafadar, a professor of Turkish studies, and the associate director, Rosie Bsheer, a historian of the Middle East, did not respond to messages seeking comment on Friday.
The news was first reported by The Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper. A spokesman for the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, James Chisholm, declined to comment, saying only that the matter was a personnel matter.
David Cutler, the interim dean of Social Science, announced in an email on Wednesday obtained by The New York Times that Dr. Kafadar would be stepping down from his post at the end of the academic year.
Dr. Cutler did not respond to a message late Friday.
Faculty members who have spoken with both professors say each believe they were forced out of their posts.
Harvard has been under a microscope over its response to accusations of antisemitism on campus. The university has also been under pressure from Republicans to be more welcoming to conservative viewpoints.
On Tuesday, Hopi Hoekstra, the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which houses the Middle East center, sent a letter to all center heads asking what changes they would make in furtherance of intellectual diversity, according to an email obtained by The Times.
Dr. Hoekstra asked that the center heads be prepared to discuss, among other things, the degree to which their programs and seminars met “goals of diversity of and exposure to different ideas, perspectives and topics.” The email also asked the center leaders how they promoted “respectful dialogue across controversial topics” and the changes they would make.
This is a moment of precariousness for international students and scholars who study the Middle East. Last week, under pressure from the Trump administration, Columbia University agreed to a list of demands, including placing its Middle East, South Asian and African Studies department, along with its Center for Palestine Studies, under the review of an administrator.
On Friday evening, Columbia announced that it was replacing its current president for the second time in less than a year, amid controversy over how it had agreed to those demands.
The executive committee of Harvard’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors condemned “the abrupt termination” of the center’s leaders in a statement.
“In the context of recent events, the decision appears to be a shameful attempt to escape punishment from the Trump administration for engaging in academic discussions about topics the president disfavors,” the statement said. “These firings cede the university’s decision-making authority to bullies and bad-faith actors committed to silencing speech with which they disagree.”
Asli Bali, the president of the Middle East Studies Association, said in an interview late Friday that Columbia’s decision to bend to the Trump administration could be a “death knell” for Middle East programs.
“Now their universities are on notice that the government is looking for a settlement that includes abridging the autonomy of centers and departments devoted to the study of the Middle East,” Professor Bali said.
She added: “I’ve never seen anything comparable to this. This is totally unprecedented.”
I’m not enough of an historian of academia to know whether this is truly “unprecedented,” but I certainly don’t remember this kind of thing in the three decades plus that I’ve been paying attention. But we’ve seen a lot of it since the start of the second Trump administration.
While I wholeheartedly agree with Ezra Klein that the Ivies and other universities with massive endowments should show more spine in standing up for academic freedom, I’m at least somewhat sympathetic to their dilemma.
A few days back, Dan Drezner offered several explanation, which he notes are not necessarily excuses.
Speed. While the Trump administration’s actions are not entirely surprising, their rapidity has been shocking — so shocking that some university leaders have seemed overly slow or cautious in response.1 An argument could be made that this is inherent to universities as organizations. In Normal Accidents, Charles Perrow described universities as “loosely coupled” systems in which a catastrophe in one unit would take a while to affect other units. That applies to decision-making as well. As previously noted, university presidents have to contend with the most entitled interest groups in existence. Expecting them to act quickly even in the current crisis is expecting them to exercise muscles that have never been used. Precarity. Remember that an awful lot of university presidents — heck, an awful lot of university administrators, period — are interim at the moment. They lack leadership training. Furthermore, a lot of big university donors are sympathetic to the Trump administration’s actions. The New York Times’ Ginia Bellafante recently observed that, “in the current environment, the grievances of those donors — against diversity initiatives and unruly agitators — stand in precise alignment with the agenda in Washington.” This set of circumstances will often push university leadership towards more risk-averse strategies. In the current moment that means not saying or doing all that much. The logic would be that getting attacked is one thing; getting attacked after speaking out invites recriminations from some stakeholders — especially if the attacks in turn trigger mass layoffs. Collective action. An individual professor can write and publish a statement of protest in a matter of minutes or hours. Even an individual university president can write or say something in relatively short order. Getting an assemblage of faculty to agree to anything requires consultations that can make the Congress of Vienna seem like a simple lunch order. Combine this with the speed of the Trump administration’s actions and you get a bunch of actors that seem to be reacting way too slowly. Recent history. I’ve been writing about the War on College for well over a decade now. The past few years have been particularly trying for universities, and they have not always put their best foot forward in response. Clearly one reason that Trump believes he can eviscerate a key pillar of American influence with minimal consequences is that Republicans have stopped trusting higher education. Unfortunately, university leaders are not bringing a lot of goodwill to the public sphere at the current moment.
He closed, “My hope is that eventually university leaders will soon begin to appreciate the existential threat that the Trump administration represents. But it is going to take some time.”
Writing at Crooked Timber, University of Amsterdam political scientist Eric Schliesser condemned Columbia’s capitulation:
The last sentence of the unsigned letter expresses commitment to the university’s mission, “while preserving our commitment to academic freedom and institutional integrity.” While I am no critic of judicious use of hypocrisy, this passage is also a nice example of what has come to be known as ‘performative contradiction.’ If government officials get to dictate to you that certain departments must be put into receivership, and you then go and promise to rejig the curriculum (for ‘balance’), perhaps you should not claim ‘institutional integrity’ or present yourself as a guardian of ‘academic freedom?’
[…]
Support for medical research has been the one political constant in my adult life. Regular readers know I have been seeing a catastrophe coming for a decade now, but I was truly surprised that NIH funding was the instrument of choice to put the squeeze on the research universities and expose their political vulnerability.
That Columbia University was politically isolated became clear during an interview with Senator Schumer (the minority leader) in the New York Times a week ago. Schumer is also from New York City. He basically said that the University had it coming and should not expect help from him; he only objected to the manner President Trump acted “indiscriminately, without looking at its effect.”
In my view this collapse in social support that made even the rich, private modern research university vulnerable is the effect of quite a few self-incurred wounds I have noted (recall here) and won’t repeat, and, non-trivially and more importantly, the effect of a clever long-term campaign that by appealing to and emphasizing purportedly liberal commitments (freedom of speech, toleration, and anti-discrimination) cleaved the natural coalition supporting universities (as is evident from the Schumer interview). The enemies of liberal society managed to confuse university leadership themselves who have been, by and large, unable to think and speak clearly about the nature of academic freedom and its relationship to a wider political society and who have been inept at political speech. This is no surprise since they have been elevated for their fundraising and managerial skills. The cleavage strategy paid off after October 7.
His co-blogger, University of Queensland economist John Quiggin, sees dire consequences:
Taken in the broader context of the Trump dictatorship, this means the end of international research collaboration involving the US. That will be a huge blow to global research of all kinds. Faced with this prospect, I would have expected our response to start with denial, before working through the other stages of grief.
[…]
Research funding is only the first stage in the story. As Trump closes off travel from much of the world, holding major conferences in the US will become intellectually indefensible, if not physically impossible. In my own field of economics, the central role in the job market played by American meetings will need to end. The central role of US journals will last a bit longer, but can’t be tolerated indefinitely.
In the longer term. Trump is setting out to destroy US universities as centres of intellectual inquiry. That will take a while, and the US will continue to be central in many fields of research for some time to come. But the eagerness of university managers to collaborate with the regime means that time may be short.
The axe is already falling on biomedical research and climate science among other fields. Work in these topics will have to move elsewhere, as will researchers who value their independence. Is such a shift financially and technically feasible, given the resources of what’s left of the free world? On an initial analysis, it’s a task comparable in cost and difficulty to taking responsibility for our own defence.
[…]
Finally, there’s the humanities and social sciences, including economics. These fields have never flourished under dictatorship, as can be seen by comparing China’s near-invisibility in these fields with its leading position in many fields of technological research. They will, inevitably, wither on the vine if Trump’s dictatorship is sustained long enough. But there is a lot of ruin in an academic discipline. We can hope that Trump’s winter will be short relative to the lengthy time-scales of the academic world, and that when it passes, there will be a new spring.
A poll this week (“75% of US scientists who answered Nature poll consider leaving“) seems to show that those scholars are not being alarmist.
The massive changes in US research brought about by the new administration of President Donald Trump are causing many scientists in the country to rethink their lives and careers. More than 1,200 scientists who responded to a Nature poll — three-quarters of the total respondents — are considering leaving the United States following the disruptions prompted by Trump. Europe and Canada were among the top choices for relocation.
The trend was particularly pronounced among early-career researchers. Of the 690 postgraduate researchers who responded, 548 were considering leaving; 255 of 340 PhD students said the same.Trump’s administration has slashed research funding and halted broad swathes of federally funded science, under a government-wide cost-cutting initiative led by billionaire Elon Musk. Tens of thousands of federal employees, including many scientists, have been fired and rehired following a court order, with threats of more mass firings to come. Immigration crackdowns and battles over academic freedom have left researchers reeling as uncertainty and disruption permeate all aspects of the US research enterprise.
Nature asked readers whether these changes were causing them to consider leaving the United States. Responses were solicited earlier this month on the journal’s website, on social media and in the Nature Briefing e-mail newsletter. Roughly 1,650 people completed the survey.
Many respondents were looking to move to countries where they already had collaborators, friends, family or familiarity with the language. “Anywhere that supports science,” wrote one respondent. Some who had moved to the United States for work planned to return to their country of origin.
Sampling methodology quibbles aside, this is certainly concerning. The United States has been the epicenter of scholarship globally for generations. The best students from around the world come here for higher education and the best scholars have disproportionately gravitated here. There’s a reason the United States is home to so many Nobel laurettes, many of whom were not born here.
Schliesser and other critics are certainly right that feckless leadership at so many elite institutions helped put higher ed in the crosshairs. But we’re in danger of losing a fundamental cornerstone of what has made us the world’s leading power for over a century.
