Academia: What They Are About To Take From You

Thursday's Child Has Far to Go

In the early blueprints for the society-wide coup d’etat that is now unfolding out of Washington, there was a stage after the initial seizure of the state that calls for “landing ninjas on the roof” of important civic and communicative institutions—journalism, social media, and academia.

Journalism turns out to have been the easy target, mostly, and not just because newspapers are owned by billionaires who are underwriting the seizure of power. It’s also because journalists and editors at the top newspapers have been trained to accommodate and flatter power while occasionally cosplaying at autonomy. So we didn’t get an ISN moment where the bad guys had to actually move figurative or real troops into the building to seize the biggest publications. The owners and the editors welcomed the dictator and his minions and offered to caper and prance around his throneroom as ordered.

Still, even if the big outlets have caved without a fight, independently minded investigative journalists have squished out the sides and found plenty of other outlets. Go read Wired and look at ProPublica. Heck, read the Philadelphia Inquirer, which I think has shown a real streak of independence. Elon Musk doesn’t yet have a big enough Hitler Youth to close down or monitor every publication in America, and even when they get more tools, his goons will be a long way from being able to keep it all under control.

Social media, on the other hand, may be easy to seize ownership over—I notice that Substack’s obsequious owners are already cozying up to Musk—but maybe not so easy to control without spending a lot of money on human monitors, which is very nearly a blasphemy to the people who own the platforms. You make it too hard to talk freely on a social media platform, folks are just going to be peeling away from that platform, and none of them have a way to keep everybody there.

And academia? Well, I have my hopes that we’ll be the hardest target of all. But I’m not going to write in public about how or why I think that might be the case. Not yet, not the least because I’m hoping that people with more power and more centrality might first gum up the works inside the battle for the government itself.

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One thing that I do think is worth saying right now, however, to everyone who might hear it, is that whatever you think of universities, professors, scientists, college students, you need to understand that both the Maga and Musk wings of Trumpism are aiming to take all of that away from you. You, your children and your children’s children. They are not hoping to land commandoes on the roof to take it away from us. They do not have replacement scientists, professors, libraries, labs, ready to substitute in after they fire or imprison everybody who works at universities now. They have nothing.

Science requires both basic research that has no immediate or direct application and it requires free and open communication about research and research outcomes. American companies that have made use of scientific discoveries have not done so through having highly secretive research and development departments that do all the basic research required and all of the work needed to shape a final product or application. They have small research and development wings that draw upon—and sometimes outright steal—science created in universities, science funded in the public interest, science that requires a free society to flourish.

They are going to take that from you. They are going to take the work on fusion, they are going to shut the telescopes, they are going to close out microbiology, they are going to board up neuroscience. They think they will have enough juice squeezed from the fruits of two centuries of science to get them where they want to go, but they won’t. They have no idea how to go from seizing to making, and that’s because you can’t. Science in authoritarian nations depends largely on feeding off of science being done elsewhere. The authoritarian state can command a narrow project to launch satellites or make a better AI than Sam Altman, but not sustain the entire enterprise of research across a hundred specialized fields.

They are going to take history. They are going to take art. They are going to take medicine and psychology. They are going to take economics. They are going to take architecture. They are going to take museums. They’re going to take the kind of sports that are for everybody to play and watch. And they’re not going to give any of it back.

They are taking that from you, all of you. They are going to take a public school system open to all citizens and residents. They are going to take the special education teachers from children with disabilities. They are going to make women sit in the back of the room, get off the playing field, take mandatory home economics. They are going to take learning to write, to do math, to understand politics, and replace all of that with a thin veneer of phony patriotism and calls to obedience from a set of underqualified flunkies and sycophants who will struggle with turning on a light switch, let alone teaching anything meaningful.

Everything right now connects, too. You take the university out of the picture, then you’re taking a lot of health care with it. All the data we take for granted—to know how life is in this nation, to know whether the economy is growing or shrinking, to know what is working and what is failing—is already being taken away as I write. To take the university out is to destroy the last safe repository of all that information.

They are planning to take libraries and archives out of service. Zoos, parks, monuments. Rights of public access to beaches, lakes, rivers. They want to close Wikipedia and have Google censor searches. They don’t want you to be able to look at property lines and deeds, file FOIA requests, be allowed to speak up in public meetings of the zoning boards.

Some of what they take from you they don’t even plan to take, but they are tugging on strings that will unravel the lives of almost everyone. Read the plans they have for seizure of power and you see quickly that they have no idea about what to do with power after they have it except to continue negating everything that might not go along with their will. Their ideal college is Hillsdale, but America doesn’t need a thousand Hillsdales. Even Hillsdale knows that, I think. They don’t have a vision of hospitals, of labs, of concert halls or museums that they’d rather see. They aren’t ready to run the labs and do the science. That is not in the blueprints.

Entering college students need to understand: everything you were planning to do in the four years ahead of you, they want to take it from you. Students pursuing graduate degrees? They want to cancel what you’re doing. Teenagers and their parents? They have nothing in mind for you ahead. Adults who are looking for a career path, for some roadmap to advancement, to an affordable house and a good-enough life? That is being dropped into a deep dark well right now.

The things you like to do on weekends: the museums, the parks, the free concerts, the beaches? The food you eat, the medicine you need, the money in the bank that you think is secure? It’s going to be contaminated either by design or carelessness, threatened because the ninjas on the roof only know how to seize the building. They don’t know how to do anything else.

So you’d better hope that this gets stopped before it goes much further—but you had also better wake up if you’ve been asleep. Your entire life is being put on top of a big pile of wood, and there’s a 19-year old Canadian who goes by the moniker “Big Balls” toting over a canister of gasoline to soak the fuel.