Looking at US Universities from Africa: Marvelling at Self Destruction by the Owners of a Culture

[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

                     Abstract

A reflection on the current crisis undergone by US universities under the Trump Presidency, as seen by an admirer of that academic culture from outside the US.

Any necessary  corrections to statements of fact in the essay, particularly about Western and US academic history, will be appreciated.

"The President has gone to Washington to see Mr. Taft" a quote in James Hershberg's biography of  Harvard President James Conant,  indicating the prestige of the Harvard Presidency at the time of US President Howard Taft, prestige suggested by the use of the title "President " to refer to the President of the university, while the President of the nation in which the university is, is referred to simply by his own name, without any reference to his national leadership.

How does one respond when something glorious is being destroyed and one is powerless to stop it?

I have tried,   at various times,  to study at Ivy League US universities without success, having salivated endlessly over their stellar faculty and awesome resources.

Even when one is unable to have something or to belong to an association of people, one can admire it from afar as one of humanity's more remarkable achievements, inspiring hope in human potential.

That has been my relationship with much of the Western academy, represented in this essay, by US academia.

The city on a hill, the successors to the German university as the powerhouse of theoretical thought from the 18th to the 20th century until that essence was degraded by Hitler, seems to be suffering a negative reshaping similar to what happened to German universities during the Nazi regime, when they lost their position as the undisputed leaders in Western theoretical thinking, ideational maps of the structure and dynamism of the world and the universe, from the humanities to the sciences.

The Western tradition has not recovered from that blow, with the tradition of high flown, richly overarching yet concrete theoretical thought of the profoundest seminal force coming to an end with the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, whose moral authority was tragically crippled by his relationship with Nazism under conditions similar to what is unfolding in the US thought not as dire.

Subsequent Western theory, including that from the highly influential, richly speculative and visionary French thinkers, took off from the bases provided by Heidegger and his German predecessors, from Hegel to Kant and beyond, scions of a system breeding great thinkers who yet exceeded the confines of the institutional structures that enabled them.

The US has long replaced Germany as the centre of Western higher education and research culture, but the heights Germany reached in theoretical thought in the humanities between the 18th and the 20th centuries is yet to be replicated by the US or any other Western country, to the best of my knowledge.

Germany was also at the centre of creating the modern scientific world view that complements the classical mechanics which Newton consummated in the 17th century.

I am not aware of any fundamental reshaping of the understanding of the physical universe after the emergency of atomic theory,  relativity and quantum theory represented by that magical period.

The US is at the centre of the Information Age, space exploration and more, including pioneering aircraft and modern  rocketry,  but those are applied sciences, which are enabled by and can be understood only in relation to the more fundamental world picture building that the Germans excelled in, complemented by the British, the French and other Europeans.

By Germans I mean people working in German institutions and are therefore assimilated into the cultures of those places, people who were culturally German even if they also had other identities or fled the Nazis into exile, as Einstein was a Jew and he and Schrodinger, one of the founders of quantum mechanics, fled Germany, a flight by a good no of scientists and scholars from Germany central to the empowerment of US universities with the fertilization created by new talent.

So, here we are again. Another great concentration of some of the most powerful thinkers on the planet is being dispersed or threatened with humiliation or being browbeaten.

How?

By withdrawal of money and by scapegoating of students.

The culture of unfettered quest for knowledge, in the midst of freedom of choice whether or not to align with   political powers, or which to align with,  a vision  at the core of education as an ultimate good, is a precarious culture. Never fully safe from the powers that be.

Am I being made to understand that the Harvard of John Harvard, who enabled the university by donating land and library to found it, upon which the university began with one teacher in one classroom and one library, if I recall correctly, to the behemoth it is today, with a multi-library network and buildings by some of the world's most illustrious architects, gathering some of the best scholars from across the world in almost all fields of academic enquiry, the Harvard of Charles William Elliot, the visionary Harvard President who created modern Harvard as a research university employing insights gained from travels in Europe, setting a standard deeply impacting other US universities, the Harvard of William James, pioneering philosopher of religion, of Henry Louis Gates Jr and his remarkable African-American Studies program, of Biodun Jeyifo and Abiola Irele, who consummated their scholar careers in African letters at that university, has become a place in which struggles in far away Palestine have become tools to compel ideological obedience to US policy in favour of one of the most inhumane acts of occupation and asymmetric warfare in history, resulting in genocide, a fate that has befallen US higher education generally?

Am I to understand that the world and discipline shaping scientific and technological cultures of US universities are at risk from the US government?

That the amazing work US humanities academics are doing across the world is in danger?

Is the US, in general , and its universities, in particular, being desold as THE place to go to expand one's mind and embrace possibilities difficult to find or impossible to discover elsewhere?