In the nearly daily attacks, President Trump and his magazine forced a splash in science and higher education. The government has been busy throwing $1 billion in demand at the University of California, Los Angeles in the past few weeks alone. Axe proven mRNA vaccine research; demanding universities submit expanded gender and race data from student applications, among other shocking explosions. In the attacks of these disturbing developments, it is easy to miss out on the decisive changes in traditional science and academic practice, which is so enormous that it has the potential to overturn our respected American research achievements.
On August 7, Trump issued an executive order saying that more than half a century of peer reviews have revoked standard practices for funding federal science grants. The new rules are approved from experts, depending on the consent of the political puppets, who only approve awards that the president considers acceptable.
When I first introduced the order, I was immediately resembling its undoubtedly authoritative authority to the high political appointments of Soviet Russia and communist China. As if it was decided by the committee, the new rules require officials to fund only those recommendations that raise presidential priorities. Leaving aside, peer review is now just consultation.
I held my breath and suddenly realized that the new order was completely threatening the foundations of democratic research and scholarship practice. As Nobel Prize winner Victor Ambros aptly said, the order constitutes “the shameless, all-Confucian Soviet style of American science, which will make the matter of the world’s outstanding scientific enterprise so far.”
Decades ago, before I entered Advanced ED, I worked for a small publishing company in New York that translated Russian scientific and technical books and journals into English. As the head of translation, I traveled once or twice a year to Moscow and Leningrad (now, now, St. Petersburg) for negotiations with the Soviet publishers to obtain our rights to translate English in English.
One night in the late 1960s, I invited a distinguished physicist to have dinner with me at a Ukrainian restaurant not far from the Moscow hotel. We talked openly about new trends in physics at a bottle of vodka hotel, among other topics. When he shut up for dinner, he lowered his guard and whispered his confidence. Sadly, he told me that he had just received an invitation to give a keynote speech at a scientific conference in England, but that party officials of his agency did not allow him to travel. I still remember the feeling of a deep and disturbing secret reflected in the subsequent silence and obvious uneasiness on the table. Shame overwhelmed him.
During decades of frequent travel between the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communist Party, I have never seen a party official. My daily interactions are with managers, editors, researchers and faculty members who manage science publishing or participate in teaching, research or other routine affairs. Party Secretary is still hiding behind power curtains The Wizard of Oz.
On rare occasions in the 2010s, I worked with Stevens Technology to run several online master’s degrees at the graduation ceremony of a local technical university in Beijing. “The Party Secretary,” he revealed in a quiet tone. Later, I saw the officer at the reception desk, who stood by himself to express his expression because the teachers, students and family were busy in the distance.
One afternoon at that university in Beijing, I squeezed a group of teachers in a corner office. I sat down at the end of the room to give them privacy while they chatted quietly in Mandarin. But I can say that a man in the group was disturbed, his face turned red and his eyes were close to tears. Later, I approached a faculty member in a group, and I married them and asked what bothered his colleagues.
“Oh,” he replied. “He often feels upset when the party secretary opposes what we are doing. He is worried that our joint plan is in danger.”
These personal thoughts are based on my limited encounters with scientists and faculty and do not reveal the full scope of party staff’s control over scientific research. But if you compare the president’s new orders to the authority of the party in Soviet Russia and Communist China, you’ll find that they are all the same script.
The order’s need for approval of political appointments took the decision from the non-political peer review panel. In the Soviet Union and China, compliance with party and loyalty to the regime was supreme, and grant funds were used to promote ideological or state power. Similarly, the president’s orders set up a political party line and pointed out that federal funds cannot be used to support racial preferences, “denial… human sexual binary,” illegal immigration or an initiative that is seen as “anti-American.”
Downgrading peer review is not a small matter. It is the center of modern science, assigned the responsibility to evaluate academic work among experts rather than to assume this responsibility in the fist of authority. Although peer reviews are criticized today for their anonymity and potential bias, among other confusing characteristics, when researchers refere proposals, they still engage in an exciting example of collaborative democracy and maintain the quality and integrity of academic scholarships, i.e., performance against extreme theorists.
All the explosions have damaged American science and higher education since the presidency in January, and the executive order is probably the most destructive. This is not one of Trump’s random shots in research and scholarships, but an attack on democracy itself.
