https://www.falter.at/zeitung/20250401/forscher-zwischen-flucht-und-abschiebung

Hostility to science under Trump: Researcher between flight and deportation

The new authoritarianism in the USA is directed not least against the universities – and they are failing to protect their teachers and students for the time being.

by Tessa Szyszkowitz

FALTER 14/2025, 01.04.2025

This editorial was originally printed in German in the Austrian weekly Falter.

Timothy Snyder throws in the towel. Marci Shore, his wife, too. The two have so far researched and taught at the liberal US university Yale and at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. They leave their homeland, the USA, and move to Canada to the Munk School for Global Affairs. Shore and Snyder are researching totalitarianism in the 20th century: "Studying history doesn't mean you know what's happening," says Shore, "but what could happen. I am aware of the threatening dimensions of post-truth."

America, 2025: Trump has only been in office for ten weeks. He withdraws funding from the universities if they do not follow his guidelines on what should be taught. The US president has foreign students arrested, imprisoned and deported if he does not like what they say.

He exerts pressure on courts that do not follow his ideas of law and order. He does not rule out a third term in office, although this is prohibited by the constitution. He wants to expel hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants, even if the families are integrated.

No wonder that one name appears in every conversation at American universities: Joseph McCarthy. From 1950 to 1954, the Republican senator staged a witch hunt against communists and homosexuals – or whoever he thought they were. Academics lost their jobs because they rejected McCarthy's reactionary, paranoid view of the world.

Today, Donald Trump wants to determine what the law is in his country. In 2025, what McCarthy called "communists" simply includes all critical voices, and in addition to gays, trans people will also be persecuted. Trump has signed an executive order that now requires biological sex to be declared at birth. Even if this attribution is no longer true. There are cases where trans people have to apply for a passport where their original gender does not match their current gender. If it does not, they could be stopped at the border.

The British artists of the punk group UK Subs, a French scientist, the Canadian singer Jasmine Mooney and the German tourist Lucas Sielaff have been denied entry – none of the people who have been detained for up to 19 days have received an explanation for their rejection.

Foreign students have to fear Trump's purges at the universities the most. Rümeysa Öztürk, a 30-year-old Fulbright student from Turkey with a valid visa, was arrested on the street in Boston last Tuesday by masked men. A year ago, she and others had called in the college newspaper of the University of Tufts that the "genocide of the Palestinians" should be described as such and that the university should divest itself of investments related to Israeli companies.

One might not agree with this view. But deporting a student because of her opinion is illegal. Not only her lawyers say this, but also the US authorities are blocking the deportation of Öztürk and other detainees.

Adam Grant of the University of Pennsylvania calls the fact that there is so little resistance to this bizarre government "learned helplessness". Because all the protests against Trump I seemed to be of no use, under Trump II critics might prefer to go into exile.

Just like Timothy Snyder. Yale University had not defended the historian when Vice President JD Vance described it as an "embarrassment" in January that the historian was allowed to teach there at all. Snyder had criticized the appointment of Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense. The professor was right in his criticism: Hegseth and Vance are unsuitable for their offices, as Signal-Gate showed last week. In a chat group, Hegseth, Vance and a few other Trump confidants chatted about the US's plans to attack Yemen – and mistakenly included a journalist in the chat.

America, the land of freedom of speech, has ended up in the hands of politicians who establish their own law and order. During her recent visit to Yale, Marci Shore was tormented by the question: "What would I do if immigration came and arrested one of my students? Shout? Make a video? Tear off their masks, stop them? Would I even be brave enough if I were confronted with physical violence?"

Trump is aggressively restructuring the US

Donald Trump throws tariffs like hand grenades around him globally and says he "doesn't care" about the consequences for the networked US industry. He is "angry" with Putin because peace in Ukraine is not working. And he is flirting with breaking the constitution in order to become president for the third time.

This article was published on 01.04.2025 in FALTER 14/2025