by Mindy Clegg
Many scholars of the hard sciences have recently descended into an understandable panic over the anti-intellectual actions of the current destructive regime in the White House. The Trump administration has begun to dismantle the federal funding system that benefited academia since the Cold War. Many critics see this as an unprecedented and aggressive intervention by the state into academia in order to curtail academic freedom, a standard expectation of the modern university system. The establishment of facts about the world via testable and repeatable hypothesis helped shape western society for centuries now.
Over the course of the 20th century, scientific research incubated in academia became a key driver of many changes (good and bad) in our society. Academia became the linchpin of a network of public-private partnerships that led to these improvements, especially during the Cold War. Without university-level research it seems unlikely that we’d have our regime of vaccinations that has saved millions of lives. Nor would we have the modern computing industry. From the point of view of many academic scientists, it took only a single, massively destructive administration to send the whole network into a death spiral. How could the work of building a system of knowledge over 150 or so years come tumbling down over a handful of years? The reality is that the process of undermining the academy is not just a byproduct of the Trump era. It did not begin with this current attack on science. Rather, the center and far right have long targeted the the humanities and social (or soft) sciences.
In recent years, education has been shifting towards centering STEM fields which stands for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Sometimes this includes the social sciences and humanities but that’s hotly debated. The term gained traction in 1990s. Placing STEM at the center of education became a rallying cry among those wanting to keep a university education inline with a changing economy after the Cold War. Put differently, they sought to refocus sciences to better serve the needs of capital in the neoliberal economy. By that time, the computing industry was growing and computer science departments were expanding to accommodate the need. Other fields such as engineering and other technologies got a boost as well.
Meanwhile, the humanities and soft sciences also changed. A diverse group of students demanded the establishment of departments that reflected their own experiences in their world. Their protests gave rise to African American studies, Gender studies, and Queer studies programs among other new fields of study. But some conservatives felt alienated as people of color, women, and queer people became more represented in the faculty. At the same time, critical turns such as post-modernism and post-colonial studies ushered in a wave of more dense and difficult works that appeared less accessible to the general public. It became easier for those forces already hostile to diversification of the academy to paint these fields as elitist and out of touch with “real” Americans (whatever that means). During this time, public universities were still growing across both the sciences and humanities. But neoliberalism began to change the the objectives of the university to focus more centrally on future job prospects rather than on intellectual inquiry or general research for the betterment of society. Still, at that point, most people outside of a radical fringe on the right were not seeking the destruction of entire fields of study. In fact, most outside of the academy were not necessarily aware of these new fields in the 1990s. But today we are seeing respected, pioneering scholars under attack as well as the fields that they pioneered. What changed?
First, 2008 saw an economic crisis. The collapse of the housing market due to speculating on subprime mortgages hurt many working class communities. This meant fewer people could afford to go to even a community college. In some cases, people in working class communities put themselves or their families into debt to get a college education. On top of that, the burden of supporting our public universities fell more to state governments feeling the impact from the general economic malaise. Corporate interests rushed into to fill the economic gap in the sciences. Fields like computing, engineering, and chemistry were seen as critical to job creation, especially in the face of the ongoing economic tailspin. Not so much for the humanities and soft sciences. These were not seen as being directly practical in the same way that they had been during the Cold War, where area studies were in high demand. Meanwhile, in the realm of politics, the political right had been creeping ever further right since the 1970s. Modern organizations like the far right Turning Point USA grew our of a longer movement on the far right fringe, who bemoaned America’s increasing diversity and ever expanding democracy. In the 1970s, organizations like the Moral Majority and the Heritage Foundation (which included members sympathetic to the far right John Birch Society) sought to bring together dispirit groups on the far right, especially the Christian right and the racist right. They married it with an anti-intellectualism masquerading as “common sense” and “populism.” Their first victory was the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. However, the white and Christian supremacy were much more covert and still considered fringe. But they grew in influence on the centrist right who struggled to reach voters of color and women. But the hard right eventually found an effective avatar in Donald Trump after the administration of our first Black president Barack Obama. A public showman, Trump married performantive and real supremacist cruelty with that anti-intellectual impulse that attracted far right voters who had previously sat elections out. Brand and party loyalty did the rest. They ran on greater right wing control of academics (from K-12 to elite colleges) and a return to domination of these institutions by elite white men.
But pressure on the humanities also came from some of our own colleagues in other fields. Some in the hard sciences bought into the idea that their fields produced real knowledge, but they saw the liberal art, humanities, and the social sciences, as maybe something that’s nice to have, but not critical to the production of human knowledge. As such, they might support eliminating phd degrees as a cost-saving measure across the university system. In a recent video essay, youtuber Shaun wrote a critical analysis of a recently released book by some high profile figures in the sciences called The War on Science edited by Lawrence Krauss (feel free to look it up, but I decline to provide a link, given the harmful attacks being made in the work, especially against vulnerable communities like trans people—see the video for details). The title would indicate a vigorous defense of the scientific worldview and academia in general. However, Shaun highlights how the real object of ire are other academic fields of study, not the people attacking the academy:
One example he highlights is the Sokal affair, which astrophysicist and youtuber Dr. Fatima has also discussed:
Both above videos describe this hoax and how it represented an internalized attack on academia. Briefly, a physics professor by the Alan Sokal sent a bullshit paper to a journal called Social Text which catered to cultural studies (not physics, Sokal’s actual field). He claimed it was intended to test the “intellectual rigor” of the journal to see if they would reject or accept a paper of obvious bullshit. It was published in 1996 as part of the journal’s “Science Wars” issue. They asked Sokal for revision and resubmission, but they eventually published the paper in good faith. It was an interdisciplinary “gotcha” meant to make those whose work sought to examine important issues such as bias in the development of science and academia since the 19th century look foolish. Given the very real problems caused by systemic racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and other forms of bigotry, figuring out how to correct for bias within various scientific fields, and the history of those bigotries, seems an important and necessary project. It’s a bit of a head-scratcher that anyone would object to that.
This attack has come from within the humanities, too. Modernist (some of whom are historical materialists) and post-modernists tend to not agree on what is important to study and institutionalize. Some materialists have attacked identity politics and the fields associated with them such as Black or Africana studies, gender studies, Latinx studies, and among others. Many a materialist and/or Marxist roll their eyes at the esoteric postmodern turn in philosophy that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s and the shift to understanding that “truth” can often be precarious. Figures like Foucault, who once said he wanted to “get rid of Marxism,” are imagined to be in complete rejection of Marxist materialism. That view seems to be highly flattened. Yet, some materialists insists that identity politics, itself often grounded in economic structures as they relate to specific groups material experiences, merely ignore the “real” for something “made up.” We all would do good to remember that Marx was not a prophet but a social and historical theorist who rested his analysis on the identity of class. His works were not some variety of gospel, undisputed truth, but an argument about history, economics, and humanity. I suspect he expected others to agree, disagree, and debate his findings. Same with Foucault. Both followed along a tradition of dialectical debate—not a final answer, but an ongoing refining of our understanding of reality. If you are viewing Marx’s or Foucault’s (or any other scholar’s work… looking at you, Zizek fanbois) work as immutable truth rather than a discussion on the truth or truths, you have missed the point. This is for several reasons. For one, philosophers of the past did not give us a totally accurate description of reality. Rather, they looked at the evidence available to them and formulated an argument about reality based on that evidence. They also understood that others would agree, disagree, and expand on their insights. But some assume their favorite scholar was a grand final arbiter of reality and that the read is merely a passive consumer of those insights rather than active participant in the discussion. This is why we should save academia from this ongoing right wing attack. Colleges and universities are places where people can both learn how to think as well as gain needed skills to forge a successful life. It is one set of institutions in American life (although hardly the only one) where new thinkers can develop new ideas about humanity that might lead to a better tomorrow. Of course, I’d guess that most reading this would agree with me on that and would love to see the university system, not only saved, but improved and a place for all of us to learn and thrive.
I want to end with this thought: No one human will save us. No perfect Marxist avatar or post-modern bearded philosopher is going to ramble just the correct words to magically fix our reality. Rather we must spend our lives making change to the best of our ability and hope that those who come after pick up the torch. In a recent discussion between neoliberal Ezra Klein and writer Ta-Nahisi Coates, that very notion comes up:
Klein is white, wealthy, socially powerful, and an advocate for the centrist, neoliberal abundance movement. He seems utterly perplexed by Coates’ historically-grounded argument about the length of time it takes for making real change. Coates’ advocates for a view which rejects an end of history view. Rather, he views the world as an ongoing struggle of incremental improvement that connects people the past, present, and future in that ongoing struggle which we can all participate if we so choose. That is why we need the humanities, because it offers us evidence of possibilities for humanity, both good and bad. Even if Klein misses that larger point and believes we only need to think with the immediate events around us, we can take up Coates’ call to think historically and be active stewards of the present and future. If the humanities are under attack in part due to (real and perceived) failures, then we should be attentive to legitimate criticism. But we must make a strong defense of why these fields of study matter. Far too many people in these fields prefer to speak on the terms of neoliberalism, that these will make you a better candidate for a job. But maybe we just should make the argument that understanding history, society, and culture will make you a better, more thoughtful, and empathtic human being. That might make you a better citizen and employee as a byproduct, but you should not be shaped for the needs of the market only. I see no reason not to highlight that very important point and in fact, make it the central tent pole in an argument to save the humanities. One would hope that scholars who joined the right wing on their anti-intellectual attacks will shift their thinking and rally around our institutions and work to defend them.
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