He ran against expertise, denounced political correctness, flouted standards of logic and reason, and indulged in conspiracy and innuendo. He valorized the undereducated and claimed that climate change was a hoax cooked up by the Chinese.
For many voters who went to the polls in November, truth was on the ballot. And academe was near-unanimous in its opposition to Donald J. Trump.
Now his victory is seen as a crisis for the academy. “This is the apocalypse,” says Nancy Kanwisher, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “I don’t know anyone who isn’t horrified.” That sense of horror is about more than partisanship. It’s about a belief that Mr. Trump’s election, as the New York University sociologist Eric Klinenberg put it, is “a repudiation of everything universities stand for.”
He won the country’s highest office by eschewing facts and openly doubting scholarly expertise.
If the purpose of scholarship is to employ evidence and argument in the pursuit of truth — “veritas” is right there on the seals of Harvard and Yale — how viable is that pursuit in a culture where falsehoods trump facts? “‘Don’t bother me with facts’ is no longer a punchline,” Kathleen Higgins, a professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, wrote recently in Nature. “It has become a political stance.”
And that stance has unsettled academics. In the days after the election of the 70-year-old Mr. Trump, Ms. Kanwisher felt compelled to do something that she never before thought needed doing: defend the scientific method. She helped organize a statement that has now been signed by more than 500 of her MIT colleagues.
The people who made a mark on higher education — for better or worse.
What’s at stake isn’t the meaning of truth — philosophers have been batting that around for centuries, with no end in sight — but the fate of those institutions, like universities, that have traditionally policed the line between fact and fiction. “This is a crisis of trust,” says Siva Vaidhyanathan, a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia. While anti-intellectualism runs deep in American life, he sees something more insidious underway: a rebellion against the institutions that produce expertise. “Scholars are trusted less than ever,” he says.
This crisis, of course, didn’t begin on November 9, and that fact suggests a way forward. “It’s simply wrong to imagine that Trump’s election somehow changed the status of truth overnight,” cautions the Harvard University historian Jill Lepore, “and in fact it’s a pernicious idea.” More important than Mr. Trump, she adds, “are the deeper and longer origins of this transformation, which can’t be fought against without being understood, and that, after all, is what the academy is for.”
