Eisgruber Pretends (But Arguments Work Better When They're True)

The single thing that keeps turning legitimate, “I’ll hear you out” criticism of Donald Trump into garbage whining that makes me roll my eyes is the refusal to see obvious context. Over and over again, people do the DO YOU SEE WHAT TRUMP IS DOING NOW maneuver in isolation, shoving aside a bunch of crushingly obvious scaffolding that structures and precedes his choices. It’s the Big Bang theory of politics: Nothing ever happened, but then OH MY GOD TRUMP. There is silence and darkness, but then from the eternal nothing blossometh inexplicably and magically that which is cruel and orange. And the world gasps, or something.

So.

On NPR this week — the broadcast version of The Atlantic, the place for utterly conventional thought from people who are always wrong — a deeply concerned interviewer sat down with the president of Princeton University, Christopher Eisgruber, to talk about the vicious monster Trump’s anti-intellectual assault on the modern research university. The discussion became quaint immediately, as Eisgruber spooled out a depiction of the university as a great citadel of knowledge, a castle of wisdom where disinterested experts fearlessly seek out only the purest expressions of truth, striving selflessly as servants to the people:

EISGRUBER: Yeah. So Asma, I think there are two aspects of the threats that universities are facing right now that lead me to the conclusion that you just described. One is that this compact between the government and universities where the government has, ever since World War II, asked universities to perform research on behalf of the American people that the government funds - it's been really important to America's preeminence in science and engineering. It has made the country stronger, and it has made our universities the best in the world…And if the government starts using the clout it gets from the funding it provides to sciences and engineering to invade that academic freedom, it will compromise things that are fundamental to the excellence of American universities and that are really integral to the pursuit of knowledge and the strength of our society…

With regard to Princeton and with regard to other universities, as I said earlier, the reason that we have been able to be leaders on research that benefits the American people and makes this country stronger, more secure and healthier is because of this extraordinary partnership that the United States have developed over time between its government and its universities.

So, you see, on our most important campuses, all the professors wake up every day with the same urgent thoughts: How can we make America better and stronger? How can we serve this great nation? And then they boldly go forth in the quest for the very purest truth, utterly blind to mere politics!

Meanwhile, flyer for a research talk on a campus I toured last week, with some wisps of hair in the shot because I took the picture across a tour group:

You can buy the USC Professor Karen Tongson’s book Normporn in hardcover directly from the publisher, NYU Press, for just $89.00. Description:

Revisiting soothing network dramedies like Parenthood, Gilmore Girls, This Is Us, and their late-80s precursor, thirtysomething, Normporn mines the nuanced pleasures and attraction-repulsion queer viewers experience watching liberal family-centric shows. Karen Tongson reflects on how queer cultural observers work through repeated declarations of a “new normal” and flash lifestyle trends like “normcore,” even as the absurdity, aberrance, and violence of our culture intensifies…

Normporn asks, what are queers to do—what is anyone to do, really—when we are forced to confront the fact of our own normalcy, and our own privilege, inherited or attained?

1. The president of Princeton University discusses the way “we have been able to be leaders on research that benefits the American people and makes this country stronger, more secure and healthier.” We grapple with the deepest questions of the age, sir, and yet you dare to threaten the funding for truth itself! Yes, the very quest for that which is true and pure!

2. Actual research: How lesbians feel about Dawson’s Creek.

Universities have been hollowed out, are being hollowed out, and have been politicized. You can’t set foot on a campus and not see the centrality of left-focused activism to academic culture. Which is fine, to a point, and everybody gets to believe what they want to believe, although part two of that argument is that no one has a right to other people’s money. But for crying out loud, don’t pretend that academia is an open culture engaged in a disinterested pursuit of truth, and don’t pretend that suddenly — suddenly, for the first time ever! — Donald Trump is politicizing the modern American university. The modern American university is politicized. We know. It’s kind of not that hard to figure out.

Alongside that politicization, I’ve been writing for years about the way federal funding points academia to the left. Screenshot showing a sample list of posts here:

The federal science agencies aggressively and relentlessly fund left-oriented “scientific research.” See, for example, this post that references NIH funding in support of research to facilitate pediatric gender transition surgeries. We sever the genitals of children, you horrible orange fascist, but I guess you don’t care about funding truth.

A perfectly fair discussion about the use of federal funding to shape academic culture and steer academic research instantly becomes stupid when a university president pretends that Donald Trump invented the forced marriage of politics and academia. Ditto for a depiction of the university as a pure-hearted citadel for the quest of truth when scientists on university campuses will just tell you themselves that funding incentives distort research objectives, academia is locked in a struggle with corporatization and student satisfaction on the consumer model, and academic science is struggling with research quality:

The contemporary American university is not a disinterested citadel of truth. No one really thinks that it is. Argue about Trump’s funding threats. That’s fine. Do it honestly. Start with where we are, not with the culture Christopher Eisgruber pretends we have. Trump appears in the later chapters of the story, not in the opening scene.