A Kashmiri friend of mine, tentative and hesitant, in and during the orientation week at an American university recalls and reminisces about his experience fondly. My friend’s first culture shock was professor’s dress-who was wearing a T and shorts. The professor was orientating international students to academic standards and pedagogic themes of the university.
More shocking were the American academic’s remarks and answers to questions that South Asian students posed. When the students asked how to get good grades and what answers they expected, the professor replied that, ‘there was no such thing as the right or wrong answer’. After some student murmured that, ‘this was mad’, the professor said, ‘well, show us how mad you are. That’s what will give you great grades.’
Shell shocked at this response; a hushed silence fell over the auditorium. While My friend says that he realized the profound import of the professor’s remark years later, this is what is, what defines and what is the beauty of the American university system.
I say this vicariously and wistfully because I was unable to be part of the American academy; while I studied in a mid-rung Australian university – somewhat okayish and a few notches above than its European (or more accurately Scandinavian) counterpart - insular, parochial, narrow in outlook and defined by a stultifying ideological outlook (with due respect to the geniuses and luminaries Marx and Gramsci, in the schemata of the Scandinavian academy, any other ‘truth’ other than the one articulated by these two was subjective with the only objective ‘truth’ being that of either - which I found suffocating and stifling), and then British universities (which to me occupied the notch between the Australian and the European unis). I may have made it to Harvard but for my youthful aversion to ‘elitism’. In short, I deprived myself of a robust education at an Ivy League American university.
But IF The Economist newspaper is to be believed, Donald Trump is ‘set to destroy the American university system’ - by withholding of grants and other allied pressures. In the melee of this, the top managers of American unis are buckling and caving in, according to The Economist. While the London based newspapers refer to some failings of American unis – mainly wokeism, hostility to conservatives and their ideas, cancel culture and so on, it calls attention to how the American university has been the ‘magnet’ for international researchers, students etc and how this has benefited America.
(The Economist despite its very liberal nature always justifies its line of argument in a crudely utilitarian calculus- distastefully so). The prosaic reality is that the draw for most international students appears to have been chasing the so-called American Dream. The American university was the vehicle and instrument for this. The rest- path breaking research and so on – was more in the nature of a ‘spillover’ and an ‘externality’ (positive).
Dynamism of American Universities
However, if The Economist’s assessment holds then Donald Trump is wading into dangerous territory. While I am not romanticizing the American academy, but based on comparators and experiences thereof, it is indeed the best in the world. And, shorn of accretions the intellectual vigour, dynamism of American universities is what, among other things, makes America great.
By choking the American university, Donald Trump may be ‘closing the American mind’. In the final analysis, any nation or society is great, noble and dynamic because of the value and import it attaches to intellect or opening the vistas of the mind.
If the American university is stultified, America may become a very impoverished place. This is not to suggest that the academy in America is flawless; by all means then Donald Trump - the insurgent that he is- must disrupt the insalubrious aspects of the American university. But he must NOT dismantle it.
As Donald Trump goes on a self-imposed 90 day pause on tariffs and as financial markets absorb its implications and nations across the world adjust, the 47th president of the United States must also hit the pause button re his country’s university system. To repeat, it is the best in the world. This excellence must not be sacrificed at an altar. There must be, must be some Modus Vivendi wherein the best of the American academy can be salvaged and the worst jettisoned.
Finding this middle ground is the American president’s challenge. Wholesale dismantling is the easy way out. And Let Trump figure it out and let a million flowers bloom! Let the American academy be what it is best for: a battleground of ideas, the magnet for the best and the brightest and an arena for demonstrating madness at its eloquent best!
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