BY HANK REICHMAN
The headlines tell the tale: “Trump Policies Push 75% of Scientists to Consider Leaving U.S.;” “More than 1,900 scientists write letter in ‘SOS’ over Trump’s attacks on science.” But it’s less a new story than a continuation of an old one, for the Trump regime’s war on science dates back at least to his first term and may even be said to have begun during previous Republican administrations. What is new, however, is the virulence and rampaging randomness of the assault.
Back in 2017, during the first year of Trump’s initial term in office a subcommittee of the AAUP’s Committee A issued an extensive report, “National Security, the Assault on Science, and Academic Freedom.” I chaired both that subcommittee and Committee A at the time. The report documented how the administration had exacerbated two already troubling threats to academic freedom in science. “In the area of international scientific exchange, Chinese or Chinese American scientists have been targeted and charged with espionage. The second area, the field of climate science, has been subjected to vicious attempts to discredit its validity, which have intensified significantly since Donald Trump took office.” The report concluded, “These two trends together threaten not only the academic freedom of scientists but also the ability of American science to maintain its international stature and continue to contribute to the improvement of American lives.”
With respect to international exchange the report noted how
The AAUP has extensively documented and actively opposed government efforts, dating back to at least the early Cold War, to exclude foreign scholars on questionable grounds. In 1952 its annual meeting passed a resolution urging “the removal of legislative and administrative barriers to the visits of foreign students and scholars to this country.” In 2006, the AAUP joined the American Academy of Religion and the PEN American Center in a suit contesting the exclusion of Tariq Ramadan, a scholar who accepted a tenured position at the University of Notre Dame only to have the government revoke his visa, apparently on the basis of what is known as the ideological exclusion provision of the USA PATRIOT Act. The same year Adam Habib, a scholar coming to meet with officers of the Social Science Research Council, Columbia University, the National Institutes of Health, and the World Bank, was intercepted at the airport and denied entry to the United States based on a portion of the USA Patriot Act excluding aliens who have “engaged in a terrorist activity.” The government did not, however, provide any evidence for its determination that Habib had engaged in terrorist activity or define the type of activity in which he had supposedly engaged. The AAUP joined the American Civil Liberties Union in filing suit on behalf of the organizations that had invited Habib to speak in the United States.
Although in each of these cases academic freedom eventually triumphed, Trump’s latest travel bans suggest that soon there will be more than a few cases in which foreign scientists and other scholars are barred from entry, if not summarily expelled. Last week Secretary of State Little Marco Rubio announced that over 300 student visas had already been revoked. Entry denials and deportations of scholars are on the rise and even simple tourists are detained.
The report went on to note that “a more general outlook that associates scientific work with subversion” was not new to the Trump administration: “The opening months of the George W. Bush administration were also marked by hostility to science.” During both administrations, however, not many scientists spoke out. Our AAUP report cited an important report from the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, and several individual scientists were quite outspoken, even courageous, including climate scientist Michael Mann and physicist Xiaoxing Xi, both members of our subcommittee, the latter also a victim of the government’s anti-Chinese witch hunt discussed in the report. (The fourth member of the subcommittee was Joan W. Scott.) A representative of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine was only willing to consult with the subcommittee and asked not to be formally named because the academies did not wish to be associated with what could be construed as a partisan stance.
Given this background it is important, and perhaps encouraging, that members of the aforementioned Academies initiated the recent open letter, now signed by nearly 2,000 scientists, warning Americans about the “danger” of the new Trump regime’s war on science. Here is the full text of that letter:
TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE
We all rely on science. Science gave us the smartphones in our pockets, the navigation systems in our cars, and life-saving medical care. We count on engineers when we drive across bridges and fly in airplanes. Businesses and farmers rely on science and engineering for product innovation, technological advances, and weather forecasting. Science helps humanity protect the planet and keeps pollutants and toxins out of our air, water, and food.
For over 80 years, wise investments by the US government have built up the nation’s research enterprise, making it the envy of the world. Astoundingly, the Trump administration is destabilizing this enterprise by gutting funding for research, firing thousands of scientists, removing public access to scientific data, and pressuring researchers to alter or abandon their work on ideological grounds.
The undersigned are elected members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, representing some of the nation’s top scientists, engineers, and medical researchers. We are speaking out as individuals. We see real danger in this moment. We hold diverse political beliefs, but we are united as researchers in wanting to protect independent scientific inquiry. We are sending this SOS to sound a clear warning: the nation’s scientific enterprise is being decimated.
The administration is slashing funding for scientific agencies, terminating grants to scientists, defunding their laboratories, and hampering international scientific collaboration. The funding cuts are forcing institutions to pause research (including studies of new disease treatments), dismiss faculty, and stop enrolling graduate students—the pipeline for the next generation’s scientists.
The administration’s current investigations of more than 50 universities send a chilling message. Columbia University was recently notified that its federal funding would be withheld unless it adopted disciplinary policies and disabled an academic department targeted by the administration. Destabilizing dozens of universities will endanger higher education—and the research those institutions conduct.
The quest for truth—the mission of science—requires that scientists freely explore new questions and report their findings honestly, independent of special interests. The administration is engaging in censorship, destroying this independence. It is using executive orders and financial threats to manipulate which studies are funded or published, how results are reported, and which data and research findings the public can access. The administration is blocking research on topics it finds objectionable, such as climate change, or that yields results it does not like, on topics ranging from vaccine safety to economic trends.
A climate of fear has descended on the research community. Researchers, afraid of losing their funding or job security, are removing their names from publications, abandoning studies, and rewriting grant proposals and papers to remove scientifically accurate terms (such as “climate change”) that agencies are flagging as objectionable. Although some in the scientific community have protested vocally, most researchers, universities, research institutions, and professional organizations have kept silent to avoid antagonizing the administration and jeopardizing their funding.
If our country’s research enterprise is dismantled, we will lose our scientific edge. Other countries will lead the development of novel disease treatments, clean energy sources, and the new technologies of the future. Their populations will be healthier, and their economies will surpass us in business, defense, intelligence gathering, and monitoring our planet’s health. The damage to our nation’s scientific enterprise could take decades to reverse.
We call on the administration to cease its wholesale assault on U.S. science, and we urge the public to join this call. Share this statement with others, contact your representatives in Congress, and help your community understand what is at risk. The voice of science must not be silenced. We all benefit from science, and we all stand to lose if the nation’s research enterprise is destroyed.
The views expressed here are our own and not those of the National Academies or our home institutions.
Richard N. Aslin, PhD
Senior Scientist
Yale School of MedicinePaula Braveman, MD, MPH
Professor Emeritus of Family and Community Medicine
Founding Director, Center for Health Equity
University of California, San FranciscoAna V. Diez Roux, MD, PhD, MPH
Distinguished University Professor of Epidemiology
Director of the Drexel Urban Health Collaborative
Dean Emerita Dornsife School of Public Health
Drexel UniversityMarthe Gold, MD, MPH
Senior Research Scholar
New York Academy of Medicine
Professor Emerita, CUNY School of MedicineKathleen Mullan Harris, PhD
James E. Haar Distinguished Professor of Sociology
University of North Carolina at Chapel HillBarbara Landau, PhD
Dick and Lydia Todd Professor
Department of Cognitive Science
Johns Hopkins UniversityCharles F. Manski, PhD
Board of Trustees Professor in Economics
Department of Economics and Institute for Policy Research
Northwestern UniversityDouglas S. Massey, PhD
Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs Emeritus
Princeton UniversityLynn Nadel, PhD
Regents Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Cognitive Science
University of ArizonaBenjamin David Santer, PhD
Climate scientist
Formerly at Lawrence Livermore National LaboratoryKevin Struhl, PhD
David Wesley Gaiser Professor
Dept. Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology
Harvard Medical SchoolRay Weymann, PhD
Carnegie Institution for ScienceSteven H. Woolf, MD, MPH
Professor of Family Medicine and Population Health
Director Emeritus, Center on Society and Health
Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine
I have included only the initial signatories. The remaining names can be found, in alphabetical order, with the entire statement here.
In 1976, the National Academy of Science (engineering and medicine had not yet been brought under a common umbrella) endorsed another statement about the rights of scientists. It was addressed, however, to other countries, principally the Soviet Union. Committee A’s 2017 report quoted that statement’s enunciation of principles, acknowledging the sad irony that they now seem “equally relevant to contemporary American science”:
That the search for knowledge and understanding of the physical universe and of the living things that inhabit it should be conducted under conditions of intellectual freedom, without religious, political, or ideological restriction.
That all discoveries and ideas should be disseminated and may be challenged without such restriction.
That freedom of inquiry and dissemination of ideas require that those so engaged be free to search where their inquiry leads, free to travel and free to publish their findings without political censorship and without fear of retribution in consequence of unpopularity of their conclusions. Those who challenge existing theory must be protected from retaliatory reactions.
That freedom of inquiry and expression is fostered by personal freedom of those who inquire and challenge, seek and discover.
That the preservation and extension of personal freedom are dependent on all of us, individually and collectively, supporting and working for application of the principles enunciated in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and upholding a universal belief in the worth and dignity of each human being.
The 2017 report endorsed these principles and concluded by elaborating a series of additional recommendations. Although the report did not foresee the extensive revocations of research grants to both institutions and individuals and the efforts to limit and privatize much government research that are emerging as hallmarks of the second Trump war on science and which may call for new and bolder actions, these recommendations remain relevant and pressing today:
this report also recommends that
1. scientists resist efforts by government agencies to unduly restrict or discredit scientific research on grounds of national security and speak out against the politicization of science;
2. colleges and universities—through faculty committees, contracts and grants personnel, public relations officers, and others—vigorously defend colleagues in science and continue to support international collaborations;
3. the various scientific associations remain vigilant and outspoken about violations of scientific academic freedom;
4. scholarly organizations explore ways to provide legal and financial assistance to scientists whose academic freedom is under assault;
5. scientists and government employees report abuses of science, blowing the whistle with the aid of concerned organizations when they witness such abuses; and
6. news outlets report more extensively and accurately on scientific issues and hold the government accountable for attacks on science.
Contributing editor Hank Reichman is professor emeritus of history at California State University, East Bay; former AAUP vice-president and chair of the AAUP Foundation; and from 2012-2021 Chair of AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. His book, The Future of Academic Freedom, based in part on posts to this blog, was published in 2019. His Understanding Academic Freedom was published in October, 2021; a second edition came out this month.
