Carl T. Bergstrom on Nostr: 2. Nor is there any way we will be able to continue teaching our students with the ...

2. Nor is there any way we will be able to continue teaching our students with the individualized attention and care that has been a hallmark of our department for decades.

Every day brings new deliberations about how to handle catastrophic cuts and make the best of a terrible situation.

My colleagues are afraid. Our work is scrutinized for forbidden words like "gender" and "climate". The pipeline of talent has been cut off. We can no longer train graduate students and postdocs. These are individual dreams crushed, causing collective damage that will take generations to undo.

In short, we feel under attack. 



I think daily about Russell Vought's plan for bureaucrats.

“When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down…We want to put them in trauma.”

And Chris Rufo’s plan for universities: "A medium- or long-term goal of mine is to figure out how to adjust the formula of finances from the federal government to the universities in a way that puts them in an existential terror."

This is the reality of being an academic in the United States today.

But Vought and Rufo are missing something.

We aren't cowards.

And we know we are not the enemies of the American people either, much as these ideologues might like to claim that.