Universities are the focus of the attacks and they're fighting with themselves

Why Come Together has become Another Brick in the Wall

As I travel to universities around the country, most of the students and faculty want to hear a talk about everything that is going on in the US at the interface between the scientific community and the Trump administration. Most of the time, I’d rather talk about autism or something specific in research, but it’s important to get information out to folks, and I do have access to a lot of information given my role at Science in research, news, and commentary, not to mention hanging around while the AAAS is talking about its own initiatives.

Much ink has been spilled (including by me) in the last 18 months over how “trust in science” can be improved. The truth is that there is no problem with trust in science - it’s at 77 percent in the US, which is roughly where it was before the Trump administration. Would getting it to 87% be good? Sure, but it wouldn’t change anything. Because what has changed in the last few years isn’t trust in science, it’s that trust in higher education has cratered, now with 70% of America thinking universities are going in the wrong direction and only 38% having confidence. Working on trust in science and not trust in universities is like optimizing a chemical mechanism by failing to work on the rate-determining step. Until trust in universities is restored, university science will continue to be used as the lever to inflict pain, and doing so will be popular with 62% of Americans.

Funding individual scientists would do to university science what NIL (name, image, likeness) has done to college athletics.

Yesterday, the Office of Science and Technology Policy issued a report calling for more research funding to move outside universities, leaving no doubt about the problem. Among other things the report calls for funding individual scientists rather than the institutions, making them into free agents who could take their money on demand. This would do to university science what NIL (name, image, likeness) has done to college athletics.

As university scientists see their grants canceled, their graduate programs cut, and their foreign collaborations nixed, they all want to know what they can do. I try to tell them that just figuring out how to keep their science going is its own act of resistance. But many want more. Because their institutions are mostly trying to stay out of the glare of the administration, they’re not getting a lot of guidance at home. That is leaving a vacuum that could do long-term damage to university science in America and fail to build a broad enough coalition to fight back.

The clear vision of Colette Delawalla

One voice that has effectively stepped into this void is Colette Delawalla (profiled here in The Guardian), Founder and CEO of Stand Up for Science, which calls itself a “political activism organization.” While there are some things I disagree with in their rhetoric and actions, I’m grateful that SUFS is on the scene giving the legions of scientists wanting to take aggressive action a place to go. They’re also, as Tim Snyder told me, “moving the center of the conversation,” and that is particularly important in building a strong coalition to protect science as I will explain.

Here’s my recent conversation with Delawalla on the Science Podcast channel (go subscribe while you’re there):

Note: this was recorded before the period for comments on the OMB uniform guidance closed, and a number of universities made comments on the last day.

At the beginning of our conversation, Delawalla makes the case for why SUFS exists and how to get involved. Then we get into discussing some of the places where we agree and disagree.

The vision for SUFS is unapologetically activist and political. The remedies are action and protest — and rallying scientists to aggressively call out the anti-democratic actions of the administration that are circumventing scientific expertise and eliminating important lines of research based on arbitrary criteria (among other things).

Two of our disagreements

The most public disagreement I have had with Delawalla was over a column I wrote making the point that I use frequently on the road: continuing to do science is its own act of resistance. Delawalla agrees with that, but doesn’t find it sufficient. She feels every scientist who has tenure and is a citizen should be actively engaged in political action, namely partisan action against Trump. It’s our duty as scientists, she asserts, to protest in this environment. I don’t agree with it because I agree with Tim Snyder when he told me, “people are […] temperamentally different. And you can't expect everyone's going to react politically in the same way.” So, I think shaming scientists into participating is likely to cause more division. Better to support those who want to get involved and the organizations that are helping them. My goal is to get the activists and the establishment closer together, not farther apart.

Still, as Snyder also said, everyone should be doing something, and there have to be some troublemakers. And those of us who can should have the backs of the troublemakers, especially since they’re often doing much of the work of resistance for everyone else. I agree with both of those points. Delawalla wants to push it further, and she said so on Bluesky and on a Substack. I posted her critical Substack on my LinkedIn page and suggested people read it if they want to engage in the full conversation. Since then, we’ve had a good back and forth with each other about these things, and I think (hope) that comes through in the podcast.

Another place where we disagree is about the practice of SUFS to refer to the American moment as “fascist.” I’m not a historian so I’m very hesitant to use language like that, and at least for the moment, there are court rulings that are holding back some of the administration’s actions and there have been elections that the administration has lost where the winners were certified, so I’m more hopeful that we’re not there (at least not yet). But - as she does on other things - Delawalla makes a clear case for why she disagrees with me.

I don’t see anyone in the establishment getting on board with an organization that talks about fascism. Even Michael Roth, who is the most outspoken president for resistance, tends to stop at “authoritarian,” and most others are afraid even to say “anti-democratic.” Still, the presidents need to realize that voices like Delawalla’s are getting a lot of traction on their campus, and if it’s not already the case, it may soon be the case that SUFS and its siblings have more local influence than the presidents do, so ignoring the movement is not a winning strategy.

Building a coalition

I’m out today with a column about the need for the scientific establishment to make its case in a way that broadens the coalition. While there are some outspoken presidents who have put forth their ideas on how to address some of the ideological conflicts, many of these measures have alienated other university presidents and their own faculties, so while these efforts may make strategic sense for their institutions externally, they don’t appear to be growing the coalition within the local enterprise. And while there are questions about ideological conflict and free speech, they are no more important than questions about undergraduate access and affordability, which was called out specifically in a recent report about Yale. I talked with Beverly Gage who co-chaired the group that wrote the Yale report here.

The first step in building the coalition is to get away from the idea that it’s a zero-sum game as to whether university scientists are on the side of the activists or the administrators. As long as it’s either-or, the people attacking universities are getting what they want: the universities are fighting a two-front war. That means that administrators shouldn’t write off — or worse try to squelch — entities like SUFS and the Union of Concerned Scientists or politically active faculty members like Michael Mann and Peter Hotez. These voices are getting more and more traction, and their followings are building. Conversely, the political activists should be open to ideas from their presidents not about how to best appease the Trump administration but how a consilient vision can allow the campus to work together. Right now, that vision is not being articulated, so it’s hard to blame the activists for not engaging. ('You don’t get to be woke anymore, get with the program’ is not a consilient vision.) The activists should also be open to hearing from folks who think the current situation is just fine; here I talked to Pri Narang who is a conservative scientist who is a fan of what the administration is doing, and I think our colleagues are perfectly capable of deciding whether they agree with her views. Also, here’s Roger Pielke’s case against any kind of partisan advocacy.

It’s easy for university administrators to say, “well, there’s always 10% of the faculty that will never be on board with anything.” That is true, and I’ve said it myself, but I always worked hard on winning over the persuadable portion - and that group often included many folks in science departments. (Whenever I was worried about losing a vote, I used to say “well, I guess it’s time to go whip the votes in chemistry and biology.”) The problem now is that the 10% who will always be in opposition is growing, and that group is attracting a lot of scientists who were previously on the sidelines. If it gets big enough, it will be hard to ever put the pieces back together.

A year ago, I wrote a piece about this that was titled “Come together, right now,” making the case that everyone should be united in fighting the attempts to undermine science. It was widely circulated but didn’t inspire much action. If I wrote one now, it would have to be called “Another Brick in the Wall.” (Sorry if you’re in the wrong demographic to get that, but it means the campuses and the presidents are isolating each other.) I sympathize with the administrators: I have been there in these roles and know how hard this is. It’s much harder now than anything I ever faced. But it’s time to start working the phones and pull the campuses together. The divide and conquer strategy being used by the Trump administration is working and it’s not sustainable.

As Pink says in “Hey You”: together we stand, divided we fall (we fall, we fall, we fall…).