The Assault on Knowledge

Vinod Mubayi

All fascist and proto-fascist regimes begin with an attack on knowledge and on the institutions whose stated raison d’etre is to develop, nurture, and advance knowledge. The Trump administration’s assault on leading US universities and, in particular, their students and faculty who happen to oppose US government policies falls squarely in this tradition. In addition, Trump and his cohorts that he has empowered are busy trashing parts of the government that deal with regulatory policy, health sciences and environmental protection. Thus, the areas of knowledge that Trump and his cohorts are attacking range from science to history to social issues, economics, and politics. The focus of the attacks is knowledge professionals, typically college/university faculty and students, government scientists and related technical staff who analyze and present to the public any set of facts, analyses or arguments that can call into question Trump’s policies or hamper and hinder his or his cronies’ business interests and wealth. As is typical of authoritarian regimes, repressive and punitive measures that ignore constitutional niceties like freedom of speech and include massive firing of government employees have been adopted to intimidate and create a climate of fear to silence any dissent and opposing views.

All these measures have been on display in the US in the past eight weeks since Trump was inaugurated on January 20. Three particular areas of concern where the assaults have been particularly fierce can be highlighted. The first one is related to politics, specifically the expression of any pro-Palestine views where criticism of Israeli state policies is dubbed as antisemitism, particularly on university campuses after October 7, 2023. The second is climate change denial where the Trump administration is laying off hundreds of meteorologists and other climate scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the premier US agency for studying climate. The third is the planned emasculation if not elimination of the office of research and development of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the firing of over a thousand environmental scientists, toxicologists, and related personnel responsible for establishing the science underlying enforcement of environmental regulation.

Since the US is the main supporter of Israel and the supplier of most of its bombs and other military hardware it is deeply complicit in the Israeli military’s wanton killing of Palestinian civilians, many of them women and children, in Gaza. This is why criticism of Israel’s barbaric actions is labelled by the US government as “antisemitism,” as if critiquing the policies and actions of the government of the state of Israel is tantamount to discriminating against the religion of Judaism or its adherents. This was true during the Biden Administration, but has gone much further after Trump assumed power. Assaults on free speech, whether of students or faculty, in the context of criticism directed at Israel for its genocide of Palestinians in Gaza have targeted non-citizens in particular for several reasons. They are more vulnerable being subject to the threat of deportation and, in the minds of the MAGA cult followers, can be linked to the anti-immigrant rhetoric of Trump to cleanse America of millions of unwanted “aliens”.

Columbia University in New York has been kind of Ground Zero since November 2023 for the assault on students protesting the slaughter in Palestine. Columbia is located in the global media capital that is also home to the nation’s largest Jewish population and for several decades it has been a centre of conflict between defenders and critics of Israel that was highlighted recently by the blatantly illegal arrest without charges of a graduate student of Palestinian ancestry Mahmoud Khalil who has permanent legal residence in the US as a holder of a green card and is married to an American citizen. The Nation magazine wrote that “what is happening to Khalil has been enabled at every turn by…Columbia University, which has consistently failed to defend basic academic freedom since the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023…with Khalil’s arrest, Columbia has become the Trump administration’s test case for the largest assault on American higher education since the McCarthy era.”

Khalil was taken into custody in Manhattan by Department of Homeland Security agents and then flown to a jail in Louisiana over a thousand miles away, slated for deportation under an obscure 1952 law passed at the height of the anti-communist McCarthy era that allows the government to deport those considered a threat to US foreign policy. While a federal judge has blocked the government from carrying out its threat before a hearing, Khalil’s future is uncertain. Prof. Nadia Abou El-Haj, a long-time tenured professor at Barnard College of Columbia University, states: “Let us be clear: Mahmoud has been abducted and detained for his political speech. It is political speech that some of our colleagues and students, together with Zionist organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish Federations of North America, and Canary Mission, do not like. This is political speech that makes them not just uncomfortable but enraged. Over and over again, they have harnessed that rage to paint pro-Palestinian politics as anti-Semitic, even as providing material support for terrorism, with no evidence to back up the claim.”

Another graduate student at Columbia of Indian origin who held a student visa, Ranjini Srinivasan, and who, somewhat unwittingly, got caught up in the Palestine protests last spring, had her student visa cancelled under vague charges of supporting Hamas. She decided to leave the US on her own accord and take shelter in Canada.

On March 7, the US government cancelled 400 million dollars of funding to Columbia in various scientific departments, and on March 13 it sent to Columbia what the distinguished retired professor of Sanskrit and South Asian studies at Columbia, Prof Sheldon Pollock, termed “a ransom note.” Writing in the Guardian newspaper on March 19, Prof Pollock said, “Like a mob boss, the government threatens to cut off two of the university’s fingers: academic freedom and faculty governance.” As a precondition for even discussing the restoration of the cancelled funds, the Trump administration made an extraordinary demand, unprecedented in the annals of academic governance, that Columbia put one particular academic department, Middle East, South Asian and African studies, Mesaas, into “receivership.” Pollock, who was once chaired Mesaas, characterized this demand as an “unparalleled attempt to seize control over people and ideas in a US university.” In his view, this department was singled out “because its faculty have not voiced steadfast support for the state of Israel in their scholarship…Mesaas professors ask hard but entirely legitimate questions about Israel–and our government wants to ban that.”

The Trump administration gave Columbia until March 20 to accept its demands or else and Columbia meekly capitulated. In a text message, Prof Pollock stated that “Columbia faculty are utterly shocked and profoundly disappointed by the trustees’ capitulation to the extortionate behaviour of the federal government.” He said “This is a shameful day in the history of Columbia,” adding that it would “endanger academic freedom, faculty governance and the excellence of the American university system.”Professor Katherine Franke, who lost her position at Columbia University’s law school after 25 years for defending Columbia students’ right to protest in favor of a ceasefire in the Israeli military assault in Gaza and for Columbia University to divest from Israel, surmised that the reason for Columbia’s easy capitulation is that “the boards of trustees are no longer made up of people who are involved in education, committed to the educational mission, in some way professionally or otherwise…Instead, they are hedge fund managers, venture capitalists, corporate lawyers, and in our case, arms manufacturers as well. And they see that responsibility is to protect only the endowment.” Indeed, two on Columbia’s board of trustees have close business relationships with Israel as well.

And what is true of Columbia applies to other elite academic universities as well as the following examples make clear.

Helyeh Doutaghi, a scholar of international law and geopolitical economy at Yale University, was notified on March 3 about an online report in an obscure AI-powered right-wing Zionist platform called “Jewish Onliner” that falsely accused her of being a “terrorist” since she had criticized Israel’s genocide in Palestine. Rather than defend her, Yale Law School moved within less than 24 hours of learning about the report to place her on leave. Without investigating the source of the allegations first, the nation’s “top law school” accepted them at face value, and shifted the burden of proof from the accuser to the accused, treating her, prima facie, as guilty until proven otherwise.

A couple of weeks ago, the Trump administration deported Brown University assistant professor and surgeon Rasha Alawieh to Lebanon. Alawieh has a valid H-1B visa and has lived in the U.S. since 2018, where she finished her medical certification. Alawieh was traveling back to the U.S. from her home country of Lebanon, where she was visiting family last month, when officials detained her “without any justification,” denying her access to legal counsel at Boston Logan International Airport. The U S District Court in Massachusetts ordered her not to be removed without at least 48 hours’ notice while the judge considered her case — but officials deported her anyway. The only reason cited for Alawieh’s deportation is that she attended a funeral while in Lebanon of someone the US Govt considered “suspicious.”

Meanwhile, on March 17, Dr Badar Khan Suri, an Indian citizen on a J-1 exchange visitor visa who is a postdoctoral fellow in peace and conflict studies at Georgetown University, was arrested by DHS agents and transferred to an ICE facility in Louisiana. His only sin, apparently, is that he is married to an American citizen of Palestinian descent whose father once worked for the government in Gaza.

The common thread in all these stories is the activity of extreme right-wing Jewish organizations in the US, like AIPAC and ADL, who are targeting any expressions of pro-Palestinian speech on university campuses. Their demands are conveyed to the Trump administration, which then acts to deport foreign students who are non-US citizens. Several Jewish organizations, such as Jewish Voice for Peace and Not in Our Name, have strongly opposed the Israeli genocide and their members have been harassed and arrested by the police and suffered expulsion from colleges. However, since they are US citizens, they cannot be arrested by ICE and deported, unlike foreign students.

Apart from academia, scientists in government agencies and funding institutions have become targets of Trump’s cohorts as well.

Trump and his followers have frequently trashed the well-established science of climate change. To demonstrate that they mean business, hundreds of weather forecasters and other federal NOAA employees on probationary status were fired a few weeks ago. These included meteorologists who do crucial local forecasts in the National Weather Service offices. Since NOAA’s observations, expertise, and models play a vital role in global climate forecasts, many foreign governments, such as India, are worried about developments at NOAA. Climate scientist at the Indian Institute for Tropical Meteorology, Roxy Mathew Koll termed the NOAA layoffs as a global crisis that could impact climate science. NOAA provides data and models that support weather-climate monitoring, forecasting and disaster preparedness worldwide. Especially for India, the monsoon forecasts, cyclone tracking, and climate projections rely on NOAA’s models. Trump is also removing all restraints on fossil fuel production that are bound to negatively impact global warming.

EPA plans to eliminate its scientific research arm, by removing over a thousand chemists, biologists, toxicologists and other scientists. In their plans to shrink the federal government, the newly appointed EPA administrator has stated that wants to reduce his agency’s budget by 65 percent. Undoubtedly, this drastic reduction will have a very negative impact on environmental regulation to provide clean water, monitor air quality and clean up toxic chemicals. As reported by the New York Times, the E.P.A.’s plan calls for dissolving the agency’s largest department, the Office of Research and Development, and purging up to 75 percent of the people who work there. This office provides “the independent research that undergirds virtually all of the agency’s environmental policies, from analyzing the risks of 'forever chemicals' in drinking water to determining the best way to reduce fine particle pollution in the atmosphere”. Eliminating this office would clearly undercut the regulation of polluting industries.

Changes are also affecting the working of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation, the agencies responsible for making and managing budgetary allocations for scientific research in many fields. The newly appointed chief of the Health and Human Services Department, which oversees NIH, is a crank who does not believe in vaccines. It is reported that NIH officials have warned researchers not to mention mRNA vaccines in their grant applications, as this Nobel-prizewinning technology has been the subject of conspiracy theories that have gained traction among the Trump administration and its supporters.

The politics behind the assault on science can be traced to a project of the conservative Heritage Foundation called Project 2025, a report calling for the reconstruction of the American state that has become a kind of blueprint for the actions of the Trump administration and its coterie of hedge fund investors and other business tycoons with ties to the fossil fuel and chemical industries, real estate and Silicon Valley venture capitalists from where Elon Musk emerged.

Education and learning and science are about critical thinking and subjecting power and dogma to truth by asking questions and challenging accepted narratives. Every authoritarian regime seeks to control what people think via its school curriculum and book bans, by controlling who teaches and what they teach. The Donald Trumps, Victor Orbans, Narendra Modis, and Recep Tayyip Erdogans of this world hate intellectuals who dissent and ask challenging questions that expose the bankruptcy of the leaders.

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Frontier
Vol 57, No. 43, Apr 20 - 26, 2025