Tag: Harvard

How could it have come to this?

I’m focusing here on Trump’s Heritage-Foundation-inspired attack on universities and where it might take us. Mindful always of where it might lead in the UK.

They are portrayed as bastions of privilege and wokeism. Deny funding is the Trump approach, until they cave in. But if 80% of academics are left-of-centre, how can a 180-degree turn be effected, one which is focused on wokeism broadly defined and freedom of speech reversed? The aim is to disallow issues of gender and race and promote attitudes to family and sex from a bygone era, applying a crude pseudo-Christian justification. In effect a forced conversion and a meek acceptance of a new power and ideas structure. In that context some research programmes may be retained. But who is to decide what is worthy and unworthy? What programmes would lose out? Or lose their essential continuity?

More than that, could America’s lead in research and its implementation survive under a different regime, denied the self-belief that drives it? Turn academia into a state-sponsored Chinese-style mega bureaucracy? But that requires state funding, which will never be forthcoming under Trump.

Columbia University caved in to Trump’s financial threats. Harvard is holding out and taking the Trump administration to court. Harvard have to hold. They all do. 400 university presidents recently signed up to a statement condemning ‘unprecedented government overreach and interference’.

Higher education is characterised as an elite activity. That gives opponents an opening. Elites which self-perpetuate down generations invite attack. How can endowments continue to be encouraged without conveying privilege on the donors?  If that was an issue easily sidelined it needs to be front of stage now. More broadly, how can access be widened?

But privilege, in truth, isn’t what it’s about for Trump. In the same way it isn’t for Orban as Hungary’s far-wing populist trailblazer. It is about the transfer of power to a moneyed rather than academic elite. To a power which dictates to academia not only what it should study but what academics should believe.

The Trump/Heritage approach is, like Brexit, window-dressed to appeal to a socially-conservative population which can easily be manipulated into believing that woke and privilege are somehow two sides of the same coin. Remove one and you remove the other. The reality is that privilege would remain but find a different home, in Silicon Valley and indeed, should tariffs allow, a Wall Street resurgence. The old blue-collar regions will remain as outcast as before. New AI and Silicon-charged inspired investment will go elsewhere, and not to the benighted rust belt.

China is not an example to follow. They have made an extraordinary success of state-directed capitalism, and they have instilled a sense of urgency into elite workforces with remarkable skill and commitment levels, but at a cost in terms of freedom no free society should ever contemplate.

It could be argued that Trump and Orban populism is only Chinese-style autocracy dressed up for a post-liberal post-democratic dispensation. Liberal societies die when illiberal parties win over electorates, innocent of what they might be about to lose, and then pull up the drawbridge behind them.

I’m trained as an historian, a field currently open to all ideas and persuasions. Let governments control academia and history and all its kindred subjects within the humanities could be twisted into the tame service of the powers that be.

What money can’t buy

‘Everything has a price.’ How far do we take that maxim? The American experience is a warning to us innocent Europeans.

Consider Harvard professor and Reith lecturer Michael Sandel’s book, What Money Can’t Buy, where he explores how everything (almost) is monetised in today’s world, and especially so in the USA. How far should markets invade ‘family life, friendship, sex, procreation, health, education, nature, art, citizenship, sports, and the way we contend with the prospect of death’?

Take, for example (American examples, but a warning to the rest of us) buying insurance on other people’s lives, so that you profit when they die, or advertising in schools, directly to children, burgers and sweets, and more, heedless of health risks. Money rules, so that if you’re poor you miss out – no level-playing field.

We devalue what we monetise, we devalue education, devalue sport, when ‘sky boxes’ (high-priced seats at stadiums) separate the affluent from the ordinary supporter (once rich and poor pitched into together in baseball crowds), devalue public service when police cars carry ads, and the fire service put ads on fire hydrants …

‘In 1983, US companies spent $100 million advertising to children. In 2005′ they spent $16.8 billion.’ Education in Sandel’s mind, and mine, is to encourage critical reflection, advertising is to recruit consumers. Two radically different functions, which we keep rigorously apart in the UK. Though advertising creeps in in many other places, many other ways

The USA is a warning regarding where ‘market triumphalism’, as Sandel calls it, can take us, at a time ‘when public discourse has been largely empty of moral and spiritual substance’. That’s a subject in itself.

And value spreads right up the chain. In the UK as in the USA. We monetise elections – he who pays the most dominates the news and bludgeons opinion. Many would limit government action and expenditure because it functions to interfere with a pure economic process – there is no sentimentality here. The only compassion lies in economic value: as the most efficient system it’s the most compassionate.

Ultimately I wonder if we’ve might we put a value on God. We put a high value on self, and all the possessions that define our identity, and the next step would be a God who we identify with our self and aspirations. The American Bible Belt already goes a long way in that direction.

Remember indulgences, paying to offset the wages of sin, and building chantry chapels and paying for others to pray for your soul.

Everything, but everything, can be priced.