Watch Me Destroy or Degrade My Country's Tertiary Education System

[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

Watch Me Destroy or Degrade  My Country's Tertiary Education System

        Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju 

I woke up this morning in pain. In pain beceause of what some people are doing to what belongs to them, not to me, but which is ultimately our common patrimony as human beings, as citizens of the Earth, participants in human history.

The Republican and particularly Donald Trump administration's  ongoing efforts at humiliating and gutting US higher education is a global tragedy.

A walking nightmare. The destruction of one of the greatest engines of development in history, one of the most successful partnerships of academia and industry, of academia and civil society, a "workshop of the world", as one history of US higher education put it, where the world gathered to learn and further concentrate in the US or take back to other countries the fruits of such knowledge.

The environments in which such intercultural and multi-disciplinary learning have thrived are few in history, the closest example known to me being the period of the Moorish domination of Spain but the contradictions of such cultural flowering in the midst of conquest of Spain eventually led to the unraveling of that project as the Moors were driven from Spain after long dominance and the Jews, major participants in that cultural efflorescence, were expelled from the country.

The international, multicultural and multi-disciplinary convergence represented by US academia is unique in history.

The conditions have never before existed to enable such a convergence.

The US, flush from the victory of the Second World War, was the only major combatant in that war on whose soil the war was not fought.

Europe was possibly exhausted after the savage conflict. US funds, through the Marshall Plan, proved strategic in the rebuilding of Europe. 

Germany, once the academic powerhouse of the West, never fully recovered from the Nazi onslaught. 

The country that had defined the landscape of early twentieth century science, the inspirational centre of Western philosophy after the ancient Greek achievement, the only other country enjoying such distinction in Western history after Greece, has not been able to return to the strategic force generated by the line from Martin  Heidegger to the 18th and 19th century philosophical masters.

Leadership of Western intellectual culture now blossomed in the US, to which the world flocked in search of  freedom of living and access to resources and growing institutions.

The US has not been able to replicate the German philosophical achievement nor have they been able to actualize their own version of the constellation of accomplishment of German science up till the emergence of Nazism, but across the spectrum representing a more evenly distributed network of achievement in various fields and a scientific and technological ecosystem conjuncting academia, society and industry, the US has been unrivalled in history. 

Now, some Americans are expressing deep resentment of their own higher education system, as represented by the strategies and language of the Republican party representatives and particularly the Trump administration and what seem to be the significant number of Americans who identify with their views.

Some wealthy and influential Americans, particularly pro-Israel Jews, have lined up to attack these institutions for not providing wholesale support to Israel in its years long occupation of Palestine and ongoing genocide against the Palestinians, for allowing demonstrations against Israel, as these people seek to victimize the students taking part in such protests, an initiative wholeheartedly embarked upon by the Trump administration in a sweeping assault creating the kind of environment through which Nazism thrived in 1930s Germany and of which the Jews were the most negatively impacted European population.

Now the cycle has turned and a similar situation is being generated in the US in the name of Jewish protections in the frame of an  outrage of historic proportions being carried out against a largely defenseless people by descendants and relatives of the survivors of the anti-Jewish Holocaust and their direct genetic affiliates. 

A Holocaust will not occur in the US but the Trump administration is working closely in the fascist mould, with US higher education,  foreign students and immigrants, primary ecologies of growth in US economy and social life the primary targets.

Various European countries are trying to lure away US researchers some of whom have left. Asia and Europe will benefit from the ongoing brutal  demarketing of US academia. 

But those gains are likely to constitute a net loss for the world.

No other country has been able to develop the correlation between economy and society, academia and industry that the US built after WWII and its unlikely any other country will.

The growing super-power China, does not have the political liberalism that was central to the US achievement, a political freedom and flexibility being destroyed by the Republican party and particularly by the Trump administration.

Does China have the convergence of economic concentration- venture capital and government support-with creative ingenuity that has been strategic to the companies defining the emerging information economy being US companies- Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Space X, Open AI, Nividia and more?

I read much resentment against US universities  centred on the universities having become centres of something called "wokeness" and efforts to compel these institutions  to assume a more traditionalist culture.

If academia were to be traditionalist, then something has gone wrong. Academia should be an environment for exploring new ways of seeing and doing things. Ideally, they should be avant garde environments.

I can't fathom why a group of people cannot understand that the academic system and democratic freedoms they are destroying are core to the greatness of their nation, outcomes of why the Pilgrim Fathers fled Europe for what was them known as the New World, where freedom of religion and of speech would become particularly strategic.

Yes, all this was helped by the dehumanizations of slavery using imported Black people and was ultimately built on the colonization of the country of the Native Americans,, their segregation and distancing from public life after greatly reducing their numbers and downgrading their quality of life, great injustices and inhumanities that continue to reverberate.

Has nemesis caught up at last? The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade was one of the most horrendous of human activities and worked severely against Africa. 

The descendants of those slaves, however, are strategic to the global impact of the US though the journey ahead is still quite some distance. 

The Native Americans,however,  can't be described as able to adequately find their place in US society. Better informed people can address these issues better.

The US is entering a phase of provincialism, of insularity, of anti -democratic dominance.

The world is being cheated of a singular achievement of human civilization by some narrow minded people.

The only constant is change, it is said.

"You were built for the future. We must wait for the future to rebuild you"- Ali Mazrui on Makere University, Uganda.

[Toyin Falola]

Does China have the convergence of economic concentration- venture capital and government support-with creative ingenuity that has been strategic to the companies defining the emerging information economy being US companies- Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Space X, Open AI, Nividia, and more?

 

Falola: Yes, China has, but it is channeled through the state. The Chinese state acts as a venture capitalist. This represents a different model.

 

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[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

Thanks.

Does that not imply access to funds is tied to adherence to political orthodoxy,the kind of totalitarian model Trump is developing?

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[Toyin Falola]

Does that not imply access to funds is tied to adherence to political orthodoxy,the kind of totalitarian model Trump is developing?

 

 

It means the state funds projects that benefit both the state and its citizens. It is the model that has given China its global network and power. Private capital is ultimately connected to the public. Obasanjo wanted to try this model but corruption terminated it.

 

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[Dr. Oohay]

Perhaps, the nucleus of an ever “accelerating “enterprise” lies NEITHER with a purely “private” enterprise nor a purely “public” enterprise; perhaps, it most probably lies at the delicate intersection of both as long as its multiple multiplex leader or leaders live by the proverbial characteristics of COURAGE and HONESTY. Picture such economic nucleus as the ever-moving center of the acrobatic dancer (an “egwugu” kind). 

Oohay

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