On June 4, Donald Trump issued a 6 month ban on foreign students entering the US who seek to study at Harvard University, citing national security concerns. That ban came after a court had already blocked the decision of the Department of Homeland Security to stop issuing visas to foreign students who were admitted at Harvard University. Harvard is not the only university under attack by the Trump administration – many have had their federal funding axed or bullied into submission, like Columbia University. This attack on universities seems in line with common authoritarian tactics that seek to undermine a country’s institutions of knowledge production, or at the very least submit them to the political will of those in power. 

But are universities also partly responsible for ending up in this situation? Richard Rorty was already warning in the 1990s of the resentment that some voters would soon feel towards “post-modernist professors” and college graduates who were “dictating manners” to the rest of society. Did universities allow political ideology to contaminate their project of open inquiry in the pursuit of knowledge and truth? Did academia become too focussed on which canonical figures had to be “cancelled”?  And are university professors too removed from the rest of society to be able to understand and engage with the ideas that go beyond their ideological comfort zone?

Sasha Mudd is a philosopher, writer, and columnist who examines the moral dilemmas at the core of today’s most pressing social challenges. Drawing on 18th- and 19th-century thought, she brings fresh perspectives to issues such as AI, climate change, immigration, and the erosion of democratic norms. She is an Associate Professor at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, a visiting professor at the University of Southampton, and the Philosopher-at-Large for Prospect Magazine, where she writes a monthly column.

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