Science Badly Needs Defending Right Now. It Doesn’t Need Your Belief.
Science requires public money to succeed at scale and is undertaken
primarily for the public good. Sure, private companies also do scientific
research, but not at the scale that the federal government funds it, and if a
private company does something important for society—as Moderna did when it developed
Covid vaccines—it’s federal government subsidies that make it possible. This
system assumes rightly that science benefits all of us. Anyone could need a
cure for cancer someday, desire to live in a thriving natural environment, or feel
curious about what’s going on in outer space. That sense of the public interest
is anathema to this White House, which sees little value in the public sector.
Trump’s worldview is like Margaret Thatcher’s—the U.K. prime minister famously
said, “There is no such thing as society”—but his individualism is more extreme because there is no subject more interesting to him, no interest group more
pressing, than himself. What good is science to Trump personally?
The right also hates science because it requires cooperation
across borders. To most effectively advance knowledge and research, individuals
from different countries must put their heads together, co-author studies,
accept each other’s postdoctoral students, visit, immigrate, speak. This sort
of exchange makes no sense to MAGA. The assumption of the Trump White House is
that people from other countries have nothing to offer us and are, in fact,
dangerous to our national security.
There’s a third, more complicated ideological pillar to
Trump’s attack on science, and this is anti-elitism. Some science—though
hardly the majority—takes place at Ivy League institutions like Harvard. This
White House hates such places, not, as it claims, because of “antisemitism”—MAGA
doesn’t mind antisemitism and bigotry in other contexts—but because the
anti-elitism of attacking the Ivy League always plays well. Selective
admissions breed resentment, since most people can’t get in. Worse, the Ivies
are overwhelmingly dominated by the rich, as extensive studies by The New
York Times, Thomas Piketty, and others have found. While the research done
by Ivy League scholars is a critical public good, it is also a scandal that institutions
more exclusive than most country clubs are allowed to enjoy tax-exempt status
and government funding. Those of us to the left of Trump need to welcome a more
honest conversation about these institutions. Should they even enjoy nonprofit
status? To keep their public funding and tax exemptions, should they have to do
more public service? Serve more low-income students, turn their real estate
holdings into affordable housing, institute open admissions? Or should they
simply be nationalized and run as public institutions?
But as usual, the Ivy League is a distraction. Most
universities aren’t highly selective, many are already public, and most
bring substantial economic benefits to their communities. Scientific
research is essential to the prosperity of many American cities and towns,
where the university is the main employer. College-centered
towns are some of the fastest-growing in the United States, and in many
places higher education has replaced manufacturing as
the industry that brings jobs, money, and vitality. You
might say that before this year, science was making America great again.
