On April 11, Harvard received a letter from the Trump administration with a series of demands, ordering them to cancel diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, allow in an external auditor to vet the political views of staff and students, and to bar any students found to be “hostile to the American values and institutions inscribed in the US Constitution and Declaration of Independence.” The question then, is if “American values” are considered to be the same as Trumpian values. What about freedom of speech?
Harvard refused. Other universities lined up to support them.
Since then, Trump has moved to cancel Harvard’s federal contracts, ban foreign students and threatened to cancel the university’s tax-exempt status. A temporary order has paused the foreign student ban, but a chill has gone through all future and current Ivy League students.
Many Australians are scratching their heads at what seems like, at its heart, a further muffling of any potential critics, along with the media, the courts, various experts and veteran bureaucrats.
“It doesn’t have to be this way.” Yurong “Luanna” Jiang addresses classmates at a Harvard graduation ceremony on Thursday.Credit: AP
Why wouldn’t you want the best minds in the world working on your problems?
Cramping – let alone ideologically controlling – higher research simply undercuts potential economic growth and leadership, productivity, innovation, scientific advances, and a free contest of ideas essential in any pluralistic democracy. Harvard has seeded breakthroughs in health, artificial intelligence, astronomy, and epidemiology, and educated the thinkers and dreamers who have shaped the way we see the world.
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Harvard has educated eight presidents, Republican and Democrat, as well as Bill Gates, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Mark Zuckerberg, T. S. Eliot, Helen Keller, Robert Oppenheimer, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Margaret Atwood, Michael Bloomberg and Ben Shapiro.
Australians who have studied there have gone on to be cabinet ministers, premiers, silks, magazine editors, authors, economists, corporate leaders, a president of the World Bank.
We cannot be naive about how this might affect us. America is also our most significant research partner, especially in STEM. Last year, Australian research partnerships with the US drew almost $400 million in biomedical and clinical science funding.
Ten Australian universities have already had US federal funding for research cut off, following Trump’s declaration in March that support must go only to researchers who promote “American influence, trust, and reputation”. Numerous Australian academics across a range of disciplines have cancelled trips to academic conferences in the US.
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Here, the problem is not contempt for universities – in the main we do not, thankfully, have the same culture wars – but an erosion of quality and lack of funding. Overall, we spend significantly less than other countries on R&D. The OECD average is 2.7 per cent of GDP – we spend 1.7 per cent. It’s not enough. Academics report being stretched, with months regularly wasted crafting research proposals that are routinely rejected, fighting for a narrow pool of funds. Morale is low. Have we too forgotten this is our future? That these are the minds we rely on to cure cancer, combat climate change, forge new ways to solve problems?
As the US grows more insular and antagonistic towards creative, diverse global research, we should be throwing open our doors and inviting the brightest minds into our labs, libraries and lecture halls, and creating a climate in which they, and we, can flourish. And we can’t flourish if we treat the curious, clever and hungry with suspicion.
This week, Chinese graduate Yurong “Luanna” Jiang, who studied international development, spoke at the Harvard graduations. She said she grew up believing that the “world was becoming a small village” and that she could become part of the generation that would “end hunger and poverty for humankind.” At Harvard, surrounded by students from countries around the world, “global challenges suddenly felt personal”.
But now, she said: “We’re starting to believe those who think differently, vote differently or pray differently – whether they are across the ocean or sitting right next to us – are not just wrong: we mistakenly see them as evil,” she said. “But it doesn’t have to be this way.”
Julia Baird is a regular columnist and former fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Centre for Press and Public Policy at the Kennedy School, Harvard
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