Sad. Unreal. Hopeless. American researchers at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS) are very concerned about the developments of the academic climate in their home country.
“This is unprecedented,” says Mita Choudhury, Professor of History to Vassar College in the state of New York. She currently lives and works in Amsterdam, to work on a book at the NIAS about abuse within the French Catholic Church in the seventeenth century.
Power of the decree
In Choudhury’s research, trauma and victimization are central. Gestuations with these themes have been automatically noticed by an algorithm for several weeks, to be screened by employees of the National Science Foundation (NSF).
Also ongoing academic studies in which words such as ‘diversity’, ‘gender’ and ‘intersectionality’ are also vibrated, are checked by employees of the NSF to see if they are not going against Donald Trump decrees. For example, it is about his decree that there are no more than two genders and the reversal of diversity initiatives.
Many American universities also have to deal with cuts from the federal government. “Of the $ 1.2 billion that our medical school receives for scholarships, 700 million comes from the National Institute of Health,” says Sharon Rose, Professor Linguistics at the University of California, a large university with multiple locations. “Because of the cutbacks, that would be reduced by 300 million.” For the time being, the University of California will no longer accept new researchers.