The mission of a research university is to discover and create knowledge and impart knowledge to its students. As teachers, we work in partnership with our students to build a culture of excellence. Our job as professors is to transform possibility and opportunity into reality in terms of creating knowledge and giving our students the tools and confidence to take our insights further.
Our students not only explore the world but also imagine the world as it could be. They see the world with fresh vision, and they think about how they can broaden our understanding of our diverse world. Their active and creative minds do not parrot the thinking of others.
If we teach our students by example to listen carefully and respectfully to the ideas of others and to appreciate the views of those who may be from different cultures and socio-economic backgrounds, we will have done even more as teachers and mentors. Teaching students how to respectfully partake in the give-and-take of informed discussion is to create citizens who sustain democracy and contribute to our communities.
We are living in a time when intimidation is rife, fear is endemic and some educational, political and media leaders have been cowed into silence and succumbed to threats.
We must address the crisis and peril that universities face from an authoritarian regime that threatens the independence of our major universities. We need to be fully aware of President Trump’s war on universities, which often wears the mask of concern for antisemitism, but is really an attempt to muffle academic freedom and free speech, control university admissions, ignore the interests of minorities, substitute magical thinking for science and oversee hiring and curricula.
We need to be attentive to the continuing aggressive takeover of American universities by a cynical administration serving its own interests as part of its larger program of transforming our democracy into an authoritarian state. In the latter, the president, acting more like an emperor, defies courts and Congress, ignores the Constitution and weaponizes the Department of Justice and the FBI to suppress dissent. In one flagrant example, the Trump administration, without respecting habeas corpus — a fundamental right guaranteed in Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution that allows the accused to challenge the legality of detention before a court — deports international students who have met legal requirements to study in America.
Universities are abandoning Diversity, Equity and Inclusion policies, rethinking admission policies now that affirmative action has been declared illegal by the Supreme Court and inviting speakers on the far right. Grants are rewritten, courses changed and professors are censoring themselves.
Amidst all of this, we cannot be bystanders. We must stress that our unrestricted research finds cures for disease, creates healthier choices, saves and enriches lives and enables us to understand our physical environment. Because of the spirit of inquiry and search for truth in every field, American research universities have been the envy of much of the world.
We need to learn why so many people believe untruths about our universities, including the pernicious lie that our focus is on indoctrinating students. Universities need to seek public support by communicating better what we do and why we do it in our research and teaching missions.
What would resistance to those who want to dismantle the ideals and values of a university look like? I propose the following 11 suggestions for faculty, students and administrators:
1) Encourage free speech in class.
2) Insist on evidence in discussion, including why we seem to be bombing citizens of other countries daily and why the government is taking our country to war.
3) Call out those who substitute name-calling for reasoned and articulate argument.
4) Respect others whose views might not align with yours.
5) Realize that when we learn to listen and respond to evidence-based views, we are creating the groundwork for democracy.
6) Understand how democracy works, including the role of Congress and the judicial system.
7) Be cognizant of rights guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights.
8) Learn enough about American history to know how and why these are exceptional times when the rule of law is being challenged.
9) Read and listen to the most reliable news sources. Unfortunately, Jeff Bezos has ravaged the Washington Post and CNN, like CBS, will soon be under the umbrella of Larry Ellison and his son, David Ellison, who are supporters of this authoritarian regime. We are unable to trust any major sources other than The New York Times and MSNBC.
10) Value diversity. I taught a seminar last semester with students whose families originate in Sudan, Lebanon, China, the U.K., Bangladesh and Pakistan, and the Pakistani student was great friends with a Jewish-American. It brought me great joy to see this group become a strong, vital, functioning community of inquiry.
11) Take part in peaceful protests that insist on the integrity and independence of universities as well as on democracy as our chosen form of government.
In the current authoritarian environment, we must engage in protecting the spirit of intellectual inquiry. We must remember and live by the words of the American poet Wallace Stevens in “The Well Dressed Man With A Beard”: “It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.” It is up to our future leaders — and many of our students today will become those leaders — to be sure that the United States of America prevails as a country in which minds are free to think and learn.
Daniel R. Schwarz is Frederic J. Whiton Professor of English and Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow at Cornell University where he has been a faculty member for 58 years.
