Saikat Majumdar 
When does science become ideology? And when does ideology become science? The answer, it seems, depends on who’s in power.
On February 28, a number of universities in the US received letters from the National Institute of Health that stated that the NIH, the major federal sponsor of health science research was, with immediate effect, terminating research about LGBTQ+ population. All of them carried the following statement: “Research programs based on gender identity are often unscientific, have little identifiable return on investment, and do nothing to enhance the health of many Americans. Many such studies ignore, rather than seriously examine, biological realities. It is the policy of NIH not to prioritize these research programs.”
The measure is clearly part of what the Trump administration has called “gender ideology extremism.” Most of the letters specified “transgender issues” as a reason for cancellation, which is perfectly in keeping with this administration’s statement that it does not acknowledge any identity beyond the binary of male and female. Only that binary is science, and everything else is ideology. It is safe to assume that any identity based on anything other than heterosexual desire is, likewise understood as ideology – particularly as part of “gender ideology extremism”, for which it has begun a nationwide witch-hunt across school, colleges, universities, research institutes and corporate workplaces.
The fatal mixture of science and ideology is something with which the modern world has been familiar at great cost. While here in India we remain cowed down – the pun is unavoidable – by newly-manufactured claims of the so-called Vedic sciences, for Europe, the epidemic of enthusiasm about eugenics, driven by scientists such as Francis Galton and Charles Davenport, found its nightmarish climax in Nazi Germany. But the Trump administration’s decision to defund research programmes on the ground that they are driven by ideology, not science, reminds me of the early reaction of the right wing to the science of planetary degradation. Writing in the early years of this century, the philosopher Bruno Latour had pointed to the argument doing the rounds in certain US Republican circles – that global warming is simply a social construct and not an objective reality. Recent claims of the dismissal of scientific research as ideology has now brought the wheel full circle.
The critique of scientific certitudes as social or ideological constructs has been the historical provenance of the left, led by humanists and social scientists. The central and most obvious project of this critique has been that of the scientific reason of the European Enlightenment, and its suppression of minoritised and marginalised identities and realities. In calling global warming a social construct, the right deployed a traditional left critique to its own purpose. It must have caught the left off-guard, who might as well have responded with: “Hey, we’re the ones who talk about ideology and social constructs and question the (straight white male) certainty of science – how dare you turn the tables on us?” The accusation of ideological construction against what is established as objective scientific reality – the degradation of the planet – is a classic example of the way in which the populist right has mastered traditional left critical methodologies to deploy them to its own end. And going by the utterances of Trump, climate change might as well still be a left-liberal fiction. Naturally, so is any research on transgender issues.
Science becomes ideology, and ideology, science, depending on who is in power and controls the funds.
But we know by now that the power of the populist right comes from, obviously, the people. Trump’s programme of attack on research and education – this is so hard to admit – echoes and perhaps magnifies the erosion of trust in them that is now undeniably widespread among the American people. In other words, it cannot be dismissed as a product of Trump’s fevered imagination. Indeed, the drivers of the onslaught know very well that its real authority comes from the popular disenchantment with higher education. While hundreds of international students and researchers, including many from India, become confused and frustrated by the abrupt shrinkage and termination of graduate and research programmes in the US, these closures draw support from a larger American loss of faith in higher education across the entire political spectrum.
Republican governments, including those in several US states, have long starved funding for public higher education. While this is a recognisable right practice, Trump’s more recently announced plan to tax private universities with large endowments echoes the left critique of elite higher-ed and ironically brings the wheel full circle. What we now have is the full mirror of the phenomenon of the American people’s declining faith in higher education.
For the vast majority of Americans excluded from the socio-economic benefits of the neo-liberal, globalised order, higher education just doesn’t seem worth the hefty price any more – not for social mobility, not for getting jobs. Added to the injury is the insult they feel they have received from the cosmopolitan elites of the neo-liberal order – that they are unemployed because they are unqualified and uneducated – read, plain dumb. We know that Donald Trump has done a brilliant job at exploiting this anger and resentment, and it is one of history’s greatest ironies that along with a tiny oligarchy of billionaire crony-capitalists, he has been able to successfully stage this performance of anti-elitism. Manner, emotion and affect have yet again proved more powerful than actual economic and material realities.
The widespread phenomenon of mistrust in colleges and universities include this elitism, but it also includes much more – from practical ones like astronomical tuition to ideological ones such as the perceived ‘wokeness’ of universities.
To any astute observer, this mistrust is no longer limited to either the right or the left; it captures disenchantment from the entire political spectrum. While the strongest backlash against the woke or liberal order, aggravated into the bloodbath of the anti-Israel protests, has come from the right, the left has been vocal against the corporatization of the university, its appointment of endless high-salaried VPs and other corporate-style managers that have in turn bumped up college costs, usually at the cost of a proportionate adjunctification of faculty. From the latter perspective, Trump’s decision to tax endowments of wealthy private universities that have so far enjoyed non-profit status echoes a leftist measure. Indeed, anyone who is familiar with the way the leading Ivy League colleges have multiplied their endowments in the last few decades through the sophisticated nexus between their alumni network, boards of trustees, and Wall Street (most famously illustrated by the wealth-management of Yale’s legendary endowment manager David Swensen), may have trouble negotiating it with the non-profit status of these endowments.
No observer of higher education in the United States can deny that upward social mobility – that great American dream – has been poorly served by the established network of wealthy private universities. Elite private universities have always prided themselves of being exclusive rather than inclusive, with their goal of combining socially inclusivity with intellectual exclusivity historically muddied.
I saw this directly during the years I taught at Stanford, whose need-blind funding, well-meaning as it was, only addressed a fraction of the obstacles a student from a non-elite background. To get into a school like Stanford, you don’t just need scholarships – you also need a certain kind of K-12 education that prepares you to think in a certain way. Scholarship money addresses a crucial financial lacuna, but without the right primary and secondary education, can you even get there? And how many people can actually make it there?
It is well-known that the great burden of upward social mobility, the fulfilment of working class, minoritized, and immigrant dreams are carried out on a real scale by the vast network of community colleges and second and third tier state universities across the US.
It is indeed a strange moment for America that the most unlikely coalition of left and right peeves has shaped its now-widespread mistrust in higher education. For state schools, the tags grow heftier with eroding support from federal and state governments – something that is certain to accelerate as the federal government dismantles the Department of Education. This deepens a vicious cycle where low government support and high tuition increasingly catalyse each other. The net result is that the faith in an overpriced college education continue to drop, and this where the populist right embodied by Trump finds favourable political weather for its own dismissal of the needs of higher education, particularly of its inclusive versions.
Trends in popular belief and behaviour, once it achieves a certain momentum, tend to inspire significant counter-trends. We need to hope that this will somehow eventually happen in the face of the daily-dwindling American faith in education and research. Till that happens – and at this point we have no idea how it might – we have to reconcile ourselves with the closing of the American mind. And to the giant locks on its research labs.
Saikat Majumdar’s most recent book is The Amateur: Self-Making and the Humanities in the Postcolony.