Dispensing with US universities

Coming, ready or not

It’s been evident since Trump’s inauguration that the US, as we knew it, is over. I’ve been looking at some of the US-centred organisations and economic dependencies that will need to be rebuilt. But I hadn’t given much thought to the university sector, where I work, until I got an urgent email asking everyone at the University of Queensland to advise the uni admin if we had any projects involving US funding.

It turns out that Australian participants in such projects had received demands from the US to respond, at short notice, to a questionnaire asking if anything they were doing violated any of the long list of Trump taboos: contacts with China, transgender issues, persecution of Christians and so on.

This is front-page news in Australia today but I couldn’t find anything else about it except for a brief story in the New York Times a week or so ago. Presumably, though, this is happening everywhere.

Taken in the broader context of the Trump dictatorship, this means the end of international research collaboration involving the US. That will be a huge blow to global research of all kinds. Faced with this prospect, I would have expected our response to start with denial, before working through the other stages of grief.

And that’s exactly what we got from our Education Minister Jason Clare, who put out a waffly statement ending with “We look forward to working with US counterparts to demonstrate the benefits of collaborative research to both US and Australia's interests."

But, amazingly, the Group of 8, representing the management of the leading research universities seems to have moved on to acceptance, calling for a turn to Europe saying “Australia must double down on getting a seat at the table to access the world’s largest research fund, Horizon Europe,”

Research funding is only the first stage in the story. As Trump closes off travel from much of the world, holding major conferences in the US will become intellectually indefensible, if not physically impossible. In my own field of economics, the central role in the job market played by American meetings will need to end. The central role of US journals will last a bit longer, but can’t be tolerated indefinitely.

In the longer term. Trump is setting out to destroy US universities as centres of intellectual inquiry. That will take a while, and the US will continue to be central in many fields of research for some time to come. But the axe is already falling on the humanities, biomedical research and climate science among other fields. Work in these topics will have to move elsewhere, as will researchers who value their independence.

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