Leaders are using appeals to nostalgia, nationalism to attack higher education

> I don’t really get why anybody would want to rule over an uneducated populace. What’s the long term plan? Modern industry is high tech. Modern war is high tech. Even modern propaganda is high tech!

I think that, for exactly this reason, it makes it easier to have a caste system, with a small educated elite that can exert essentially unchecked control over a populace that is too uneducated to master any of the levers of resistance.

That's among people who think it through. I also think that there are plenty of leaders who don't think it through, and just let expert opinion against them, or whatever other factor, guide them into destruction without any real consideration of what comes after.

I wouldn't assume there is a long term plan...

>I don’t really get why anybody would want to rule over an uneducated populace.

I would guess (I am not in that cohort) that they would claim that their argument is that they are not arguing for an uneducated populace, but arguing against a "mis-educated" or "indoctrinated" populace.

>What’s the long term plan?

My guess here would be that the long term plan is to return to a "nicer" before-time that doesn't include things they don't like but does include things like helpful new technologies.

I have found that people can rationalize nearly anything if they are allowed to define the constraints of their argument.

Control. Uneducated people are easier to control and manipulate.

No, it's also banning and in some cases arresting foreign STEM students, and making billions of dollars of cuts to scientific and medical research.

Yeah - one can simply feel it, where these people are coming from. I can't imagine anyone would be missing anything if they never published a single thing. I am exhausted of this type of journalism and activism.

> Some of the Trump administration's actions in this area are misguided, but I am enjoying watching them challenge some of the left's sacred cows.

That's a weird way to phrase "using governmental power to coerce speech from universities". What happened to freedom of speech?

So you'd accept losing billions of dollars of cancer research a year so you can own the libs. Lovely.

It's reasonable to criticize the excesses of academics. But let's be really clear about what's happening. The vast majority of federal funding for research goes to medical science and the hard sciences. Relatively little goes to the social sciences. The vast majority of the foreign students and researchers are going into STEM fields. So when the Trump administration makes huge cuts to research funding (something like a 40% cut at NIH and even bigger at NASA) there is a huge, huge impact on scientific and medical research that has absolutely nothing to do with any of the topics that you listed. Same with the arrests and threats to foreign students. The tenured left-wing social science professors will be fine. The young Chinese computer scientist will probably just stay in China and China will get the benefit of their work. The young American neuroscientist will just not have a career in the sciences because funding isn't available and so instead of working on curing brain cancer, they'll be working on data analysis for a marketing company.

Cutting research on ovarian cancer because you don't like the fact that the researchers used terms like "women's health" is stupid. Cutting brain cancer research because you don't like the fact that some completely unrelated people at universities are "woke" is even more stupid.

You don't like something that Noel Ignatiev said? OK, fair enough. But do you really want to kill the careers of young apolitical cancer researchers because you don't like something that a guy who died in 2019 said 20+ years ago?

> n the US, over a third of conservative academics and PhD students have been threatened with disciplinary action for their views

Hmm, what views do you think those might be? Do you think they're views on whether or not the capital gains tax should go up or down by 1%? Or maybe they're... other.. views.

I miss when I believed that conservatism meant making slow but effective changes to society. It was a simpler life.

On a slightly related note, someone linked this article a little while ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Braden

Let me quote from it:

> In 1954, directly confronting the practice of rigid racial segregation of residential neighborhoods, the Bradens assisted an African-American couple, Andrew and Charlotte Wade, who wanted to buy a suburban home but had been unable to do so due to housing discrimination

[...]

> White segregationists immediately lashed out – initially by throwing rocks through the windows of the house, burning a cross in front of it, and firing gunshots into the home – and then bombed the house (setting off explosives under the bedroom of the Wades' young daughter while the home was occupied), driving the Wades out and destroying the home. As a result of their actions, Carl Braden was charged with sedition. Although housing discrimination was illegal, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling specifically on a case in Louisville, Buchanan v. Warley, in 1917, charges were brought against Braden for hatching a communist plot to stir up a race war.

This was in NINTEEN FIFTY FOUR. Like, yes, that is now 70 years ago, but all of our recent presidents and a significant number of politicans are older than that. They were literally alive and party of the society that allowed these things to happen.

I'm pretty sure everyone agrees that things are in fact better now, we've improved on a lot of things, but that really isn't some kind of excuse to pretend that none of these awful things happened OR that they aren't still affecting us right now.

It's not the only thing by any means, but just imagine the difference it makes when your grand parents bought a cheap home in a nice neighborhood that you're now inheriting in 2025 and is worth millions, compared to the black people denied that opportunity, and had to rent this entire time.

(Could every white person buy a nice home in 1950 and leave it to their grandchildren? Obviously not. Were they denied this chance specifically because of their skin color? No.)

> There is no contradiction between patriotism, nationalism and science or progress.

In the abstract, no, I don't believe there is a conflict between nationalism and science. However, nationalism and populism can lead to belief systems and policies that are absolutely in conflict with science. For instance, when nationalism means "our universities should only be for our people", that is directly in conflict with science. Most famously, Hitler purged Jews from German universities, after which David Hilbert said "there is no mathematics at Gottingen". The Trump administration is trying to prevent universities from recruiting foreign students and researchers, and even arresting researchers who advocate for ideas they disagree with. Fundamentally this is incompatible with science. Limiting who can do the research to a small percentage of the world's population, and intimidating and persecuting researchers who express unfavored opinions does not produce good science.

Look, in theory you're fine. In practice, the nationalists are dismantling the scientific research required to study climate change (which is happening, because, you know, carbon heating the atmosphere is basic physics). They are claiming that tax cuts and austerity improve the economy, which is not only counter to economics but has been proven wrong over 50 years. And don't get me started on pollution, healthcare, and sexuality. All of these may be studied but are being actively defunded, because they are perceived as leftist for some reason. Without getting moralistic, I can tell you that my children's future is getting worse every day because of this science denialism. As Yogi Berra once said "In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is."