I’ve just returned from a tour of British universities with our 16-year-old twins. The boys can’t wait to finish school and start their degrees, and I’m psyched for them. I grew up around universities. My dad has been an academic for over 60 years. My sister is one too. I’m with Nils Gilman, former associate chancellor of Berkeley, who writes: “No other institution ever invented has been anywhere near as good at educating a broad population to a high level of technical competency, nor at creating the conditions for the discovery of new facts about and conceptions of the world, nor at maintaining the knowledge already created.” The UK has the advantage over the US in possessing a government that mostly recognises this.
Yet universities are in crisis internationally, far beyond Donald Trump. Perhaps no other existing institution is less in sympathy with our times. In fact, that’s largely why Trump is attacking them.
Universities are built on the implicit claim that there’s a hierarchy of knowledge. At the top are people who spend lifetimes gathering expertise, achieving accreditations such as PhDs and professorships, and testing their findings in writings reviewed by their peers. What accredited academics think about climate change or racism simply has more validity than random people’s views. That privilege of knowledge always offends, but particularly in an era when every ignoramus can broadcast on social media. When the US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, urges parents to “do your own research” on vaccines, he is denying the basic principle of academia. Rightwing populists consistently take this position. I wonder why academics are “biased” against them.