PATRICK LAWRENCE: Trump’s War on the Future Has a Past

Last autumn, well into the Trump regime’s full-frontal attacks on American universities — their programs, their course curricula, their faculty, their students, their funding — Linda McMahon, issued a “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.”

But of course. Trump’s education secretary has to her credit an excellent record as a professional wrestling executive. Who better to lead American institutions of higher learning to new horizons, cutting-edge research and scholarly achievement—to “excellence”?

Never mind all the pabulum in which McMahon indulged when unveiling this document, which The Washington Examiner made available in PdF form when her department issued it last October. Her “compact” effectively codifies the Trump regime’s full-frontal attack on academic freedom.

If this is grave enough in its own right, I read it in a larger frame. The Trump–McMahon assault on higher education in America is best understood as one front in a broader war the Trump regime wages to prevent the arrival of a different kind of future.

Universities, along with the best writers and artists, make part of a given society’s exploratory front edge, where advances are made and futures that improve on the past open out. The regime’s project is to blunt this edge, if not destroy it.

So does the McMahon document concern all of us. Let us consider it as, let’s say, interested parties and then give it some historical context. Hasn’t the United States stood against the future consistently since the 1945 victories and its pursuit of global hegemony? Doesn’t this account for its long, nearly uninterrupted record of failure in matters of state?

There are a number of knick-knacks in McMahon’s “compact.” Testing is to be standardized, tuitions frozen for five years. It prohibits affirmative-action programs. (And if you ask me there is a case for this, but that is another conversation.)

As you would expect, however, the guts of the compact are unmistakably ideological: Universities will have to teach “conservative ideas.” (And if this is not affirmative action please use the comment thread to explain why it isn’t.)

There will be no “purposely punishing them,” these conservative ideas and those advancing them, and there are to be curbs on what professors can profess — this latter a direct assault on their First Amendment rights.

In short, this is President Trump’s plan to impose federal authority on the operations of U.S. universities — beyond belief in itself. In effect, Trump wants to do to higher education what he proposed to do to Greenland — take it over, make it his, his, his.

And the Justice Department will be authorized to enforce the “compact.” Federal funding for research and other university functions is to continue for those institutions that sign the document, withheld from those that don’t.

Very Trumpian, this last: Do this or we hit you such that your knees will buckle.

“A renewed commitment to the time-honored principles that helped make American universities great”: This was MacMahon’s schtick when, last autumn, she sent the compact to nine universities as a sort of soft launch. They had three weeks to respond.

“[T]he Justice Department will be authorized to enforce the ‘compact.’ Federal funding for research and other university functions is to continue for those institutions that sign the document, withheld from those that don’t.”

Seven of them, including Brown, M.I.T., Dartmouth and the University of Virginia, wasted little time rejecting it. (To my chagrin, Vanderbilt was one of the two universities that proved faint of heart. My alma mater didn’t sign McMahon’s document but agreed to provide “feedback,” which, putting the kindest face on it, can be read as a sort of abstention vote.)

The Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education bombed when it was first issued. After the initial group said “No, and no thanks for it,” Trump and McMahon opened it to other colleges and universities and made for themselves a second failure. That is the good news: The leading American universities first approached found their spines and told Linda McMahon to stay off campus.

Now the bad. This regime does not take flops and rejections as indications it should desist or do anything differently. The Trump White House seems to think failures and rejections mean only that it should persist more coercively, more undemocratically — and it doesn’t get more American than this, does it?

We are beginning to see signs, this is to say, that a revised version of the original document, known in some quarters as “Compact 2.0,” is in the offing.

It is early days, but the new version of the McMahon document is likely to be worse than the first. All colleges and universities will be invited — not quite the word but I will leave it — to sign on. The ideological imperatives will be more rigorous. Faculty hiring will be more closely policed. The DoJ will be authorized to enforce the compact more forcefully and punitively.

In a “Fact Sheet” published Jan. 13, the America First Policy Institute, a think (stretching the term) tank run by a gathering of middling bureaucrats who served during Trump’s first term, explained that the McMahon project “outlines the federal government’s priorities and expectations for higher education in return for the more than $200 billion that taxpayers invest in America’s colleges and universities.”

You cannot be surprised by any of this. Never mind academic freedom or the bedrock principle of scholarly independence, which has endured since the Italians and the English founded the world’s first universities (Bologna in 1088, Oxford in 1096). You will cooperate as we destroy the tradition that defines you—a tradition of learning and intellectual exploration that has endured for a thousand years — or we will starve you: Does it get any more Trumpian?

The Trump–McMahon offensive is critical enough as an offensive against higher learning in the United States. Just as a matter of keeping the books properly, Chinese universities have just overtaken America’s as measured by the output of their scholarly research.

Leiden University, which issues annual rankings, now puts seven Chinese universities in the world’s top 10. Zhejiang University in Hangzhou is the new No. 1, displacing Harvard, which drops to No. 3 and is the only U.S. university remaining in the top 10.

There are a lot of ways to explain this. Having lectured at various universities and colleges over the years, I have to put corporatization, bloated administrative ranks, and grade inflation — the latter insidious, destructive of all intellectual discipline — high on any list.

But the Trump regime’s reductions in federal funding for research are without question taking a measurable toll all by themselves. Its incessant harassment of faculty, notably but not only foreign scholars, has already done a lot of damage. Who wants to lecture at an institution that caves to the Trump–McMahon takeover-in-progress?

O.K., history’s wheel keeps turning. But in the interest of understanding our moment as best we can, I read the regime’s war against higher learning for its broader implications.

Context is my point: This is a war against not only professors, students and researchers but against each of us. As Trump and his education secretary go about pointing American universities in another direction — backwards — this is what they have in mind for the nation. Universities are theaters in a much larger conflict.

A white America, a Christian America, a hyper-capitalist America, an undemocratic America that purports to be democratic but isn’t, a sharply class-stratified America that gets along by pretending it is classless: This is the project.

Borrowing a phrase from John Ralston Saul, whose The Unconscious Civilization (Free Press, 1997) has been an important book to me over the years, we can call this a Great Leap Backward — even if, as we rummage around back there, we find that the America the Trump regime proposes to confine the nation within never existed.

“A white America, a Christian America, a hyper-capitalist America, an undemocratic America that purports to be democratic but isn’t, a sharply class-stratified America that gets along by pretending it is classless: This is the project.”

At the root of this undertaking — among much else, of course — is a kind of collective nostalgia. And as I have long thought, nostalgia is a form of depression, an inability to accept the present for what it is along with a profound fear of the future.

The nostalgist is very typically a professed advocate of progress — the advance of the human cause as I mean this term — but cannot bear living with it. Making the past a prison is the alternative.

Trump did not invent this longing — this compulsion, indeed — among America’s purported leaders and the policy cliques that serve them. No, locating Trump in the long arc of American history since the 1945 victories, he proves once again merely the id of those who rule the nation they are supposed to govern.

Decline and failure are more or less certain outcomes to the extent colleges and universities are forced to accept the Trump–McMahon program. This is what comes of corrupting the present and sabotaging the future in the cause of an indefinitely prolonged past.

My mind went somewhat afield as I considered this reality. What has been the fundamental posture of those running America these past eight decades, I wondered. What do we make of America when we consider the long durée — the enduring patterns beneath the distracting surface of events?

And so:

When the Reich and the Japanese Empire fell the “independence era” began. The charismatic Sukarno fought Indonesia free of the Dutch two days after the Japanese surrender. Then came India and Pakistan, Burma, Libya, Ghana, etc. Nineteen sixty was “the year of Africa,” when 17 colonies won independence from the British and the French. Depending on how you count, the independence era brought 80 to 100 new nations into being.

The independence era announced a new future, maybe unprecedented in human history. To what did these nations aspire? The scholars may object to the simplicity of my conclusion, but in my read they all hoped for one or another variety of social democracy. This was simply in the air the world’s people breathed during those remarkable years.

The immediate postwar years fundamentally reshaped the American leadership’s posture toward time and history: This is my thesis. Think of all the coups and assassinations with which the United States greeted this period.

Think of Patrice Lumumba, for instance. The Congo gained independence from Belgium on June 30 of the year of Africa (1960). Six months later Lumumba, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s first prime minister, was assassinated deep in the Congolese jungle. Belgian mercenaries pulled the triggers, but this was simply the C.I.A.’s wet work, as they say.

In this, a single event, we read the United States’ response to the future as it was arriving after 1945. A new era had begun, and the United States stood utterly opposed to it. Well before Lumumba’s murder, the essential posture of the United States was reactionary.

Lumumba was a social democrat, not a communist. And here I will make a point I have wanted to put into print for many years. If there is one thing Washington has feared in the postwar decades more than communism, it is a working social democracy. It sets too inspiring an example for others — including Americans, I have recently come to think.

This, my large frame, is how I read the Trump–McMahon attack on higher education in America. It is of a piece with what the United States has been since its post–1945 emergence as a global power. That this history is strewn with failures lies beyond all dispute. What else will come of a foolish effort to stop time itself?

To be condemned to an eternal present is grim enough a fate. To be forced into an eternal past — unending and imaginary — is many magnitudes worse.

Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon.  Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored. 

TO MY READERS. Independent publications and those who write for them reach a moment that is difficult and full of promise all at once. On one hand, we assume ever greater responsibilities in the face of mainstream media’s mounting derelictions. On the other, we have found no sustaining revenue model and so must turn directly to our readers for support. I am committed to independent journalism for the duration: I see no other future for American media. But the path grows steeper, and as it does I need your help. This grows urgent now. In  recognition of the commitment to independent journalism, please subscribe to The Floutist, or via my Patreon account.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.