The title of this chronicle is a kind of pleonasm, I agree. 51e State, the seaside resort of Gaza, the customs duties imposed on penguins … Each day that passes, it has the impression that the United States of Donald Trump are a little deeper in absurdity.
Posted yesterday at 7:00 a.m.
We have not yet touched the bottom.
On Friday, the White House summoned Harvard University to comply with a long list of requirements, otherwise they were cutting off. Among these requirements: reviewing its hiring process as quickly as possible, since the venerable institution would sorely lack “diversity of points of view”.
Yes, this administration which seeks to impose a greater diversity of points of view at university is the same which purges the libraries of its books; The same, too, which censures full of words, including the word … “diversity”.
This administration demanded from Harvard University that it makes a better selection of its foreign students to eliminate the applications of those who would be “hostile to American values and institutions”.
In other words, it claims a greater diversity of points of view, but in a strict communion of values made in USA. It remains to understand what that means, exactly.
If the requirements of the White House may seem contradictory, it is because they are. If they do not seem to have much to do with the fight against anti-Semitism, it is because the real objective is elsewhere.
Until now, the Trump administration has frozen $ 11 billion in federal funds for seven universities, which it considers nests of leftist intellectuals spreading their wokes follies to all wind.
There is there, the real objective of this unprecedented blackmail: to force universities to carry out an ideological realignment less hostile to the conservatives.
Activist Christopher Rofo, at the origin of the strategy, explained to New York Times that it was nothing more or less to plunge universities into an “existential terror” by asphyxiating them until they submit.
The good news is that Harvard University refused to capitulate. “No government, regardless of the ruling party, should dictate what private universities can teach, which they can admit and hire, and what areas of study and research they can continue,” wrote Harvard University, Alan Garber, in response to the White House.
It should be obvious. In a normal world, such a serious attack on academic freedom, led by the United States government, would have been simply inconceivable. But in the absurd world of Donald Trump, the statement after all weighted by President Garber looks like a start of sedition.
-As if the resistance was organized, finally.
There have certainly been slippages on campuses, on the sidelines of the demonstrations caused by the War of Israel against Hamas in Gaza. Universities must ensure that they offer a security environment to their students. They must take the necessary measures to prevent their Jewish students with harassment. Everyone gets along.
It is also important to protect the academic freedom from any attack – no matter where it comes from. We had this debate in Quebec. We saw teachers on the grill for having tackled delicate subjects or pronounced taboo words in class. The National Assembly saw fit to adopt a law to allow them to teach without doctrinal, ideological or moral constraint.
But the cataclysm which today shakes American universities has nothing to do with our modest debates. Under the pretext of protecting academic freedom, the Trump administration is exactly the opposite.
She suffocates him as in the time of “red fear”, chasing the woke with even more zeal than Senator Joseph McCarthy, in the 1950s, hunted the communist.
She claims to defend freedom of expression, but cancels the visa for students who have had the misfortune to take part in Propalestinian demonstrations …
She removes anti -racist works from the Library of the American Naval Academy, but leaves books to the glory of white supremacy on the shelves …
It freezes billions intended for scientific research to “punish” universities and force them to adopt its vision of the world. And too bad for discoveries and innovation …
“American universities have brought prosperity and security to the country. The attack on the Trump administration against academic freedom puts all this in danger, “warns Christopher Eisgruber, president of the Princeton University, in the magazine The Atlantic.
Like his colleague from Harvard, he made the choice of resistance.
Knowing the ultra-revanchard character of the President of the United States, we must salute the courage of the two men and hope, like Barack Obama, “that other institutions will follow this example”.
Without wanting to minimize their courage, the two presidents may have judged that they had little choice. After all, Columbia University has never seen the color of the 400 million frozen by the White House, even after having broken the spine. Donald Trump wants more. Other concessions. Perhaps it will only be satisfied when the New York institution has fully collapsed.
This is a last Trumpian absurdity: this man who constantly promises to return his grandeur to America continues his work as a undermining to demolish it, a piece at a time.
