The greatness and power of the United States in the postwar years wasn’t just built on the wealth that came from its people coming together to create the industrial backbone of a war machine (as American high school students have learned in social studies class for the last half-century): It also was built on the scientific outpouring of ideas and inventions that flowed out of America’s universities.
Between the end of World War II and the year 2000, Americans invented the transistor, the microchip, the personal computer, the internet, the computer mouse and digital camera, the polio vaccine, the M.R.I., the nuclear-generated electric plant, the solar-energy cell, Teflon and credit cards and the microwave, and sent men to the Moon.
We were able to do these things because our universities’ coffers were injected with federal dollars for research — and that funding, in turn, attracted the best scientists in the world. And it was a Republican president who originated this astonishingly fruitful partnership between higher education and the federal government: Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander of the invasion of Europe.
Our current president, who calls himself a Republican, is doing all in his power to destroy the greatness of American universities. He and his Department of Education have unleashed a relentless attack over the last nine months, overturning the previously nonpartisan apportioning of federal grants for research and just this week officially encouraging all universities in the U.S. to agree to a “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” that threatens to withdraw the benevolence of the government unless they sign away their academic and administrative freedom. This “compact” is a legal contract that says that they must conform to ideological guidelines, in regard to things like diversity initiatives and transgender rights. Further, if anyone employed by the university should “belittle Conservatives,” funding will be withdrawn.
It never goes well for a nation when its leaders start punishing professors and colleges if the college fails to conform to ideological standards or someone at the institution starts cracking jokes at the dear leader’s expense. We don’t have any history professors on the staff of The Star but we can thank our good college educations for our ability to list a few depressing examples from centuries past that our current anti-intellectual, anti-university dynamic echoes: the medieval Italian authorities’ persecution of “heretics” like Galileo; Napoleon’s imperial university system, in which inspectors reported professors to the government if they were insufficiently obedient; Iran after the 1979 revolution, when leftist professors and students were expelled from campuses; Francoist Spain, and North Korea in the present day, etc.
As of press time, the universities of the United States were holding fast and refusing to sign this deal with the devil.
Dwight Eisenhower, the hero of Normandy, who led tanks across Europe in defense of freedom, is looking down in disgust.