Alexander von Humboldt (1769 – 1859)  — Getty images

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The American Association of University Professors, which I joined a couple of months ago through its Columbia chapter, invited me to be on a panel for a two-hour event entitled “Our Transformed University: Academic Freedom and Shared Governance” on Sep 19, 2025 at Jerome Greene Hall, 435 W. 116 St., New York, NY 10027. There were two panels, one on shared government and one on academic freedom. I belonged to the latter. These were my remarks:

We live in difficult, dangerous times. I’m too old to call them interesting.

Born and raised in Germany, I can no longer recognize the America I chose as my second home in 1975. Not in the wildest imagination, at the time, could I have foreseen the emergence of another totalitarian state here in the US. A state beholden to Russia, of all countries!

Fanatics, whose only qualification is blind loyalty to the leader, have taken over under Trump, with the explicit mission of tearing apart the fabric of our society. My outrage about daily irrational and lawless executive orders from the president and the extraordinary viciousness and cruelty of his regime is mixed with disappointment at the failure of people in prominent positions to stand up, with bewilderment at the normalization of lawlessness by the media, with anger at the complicity, gross opportunism and short-sightedness of business leaders, and with sadness to see the wholesale caving of institutions I have held in high respect.

That much I wanted to say about my feelings as a human being and citizen of this country, confronted with the new reality.

Specifically, as a scientist working at Columbia Medical Center in the biomedical field since 2008, who has benefited from consistent generous funding by NIH and NSF over decades, I’m alarmed by the severe funding cuts, and the elimination of entire programs, such as cancer research and infectious diseases, vital to human health. I’m grieved seeing public health policy in the hands of ideologues, who are about to endanger the health of millions with their decisions. I’m appalled by the perversion of the federal grant-giving process which should be, and has largely been for dcades, free from ideological criteria and political considerations. Instead, the government now intends to, illegally, withhold awards based on criteria that have absolutely nothing to do with the scientific merits of the proposal.

And, talking about programs and initiatives outside of the biomedical field, it is an absolute tragedy that the actions of the Trump regime will have very long-lasting effects on this planet as all efforts to deal with the most pressing problems – global warming, the threat to biodiversity, and pollution of land, the oceans and our atmosphere – are being dismantled.

Because of the focus of this panel, let me say few words about Academic Freedom, its history as a concept. Many universities, whether explicitly or not, have adopted the model of higher education developed by Alexander von Humboldt at the beginning of the 19th century. Academic freedom, understood as the liberty of both students and scholars to pursue knowledge without undue restrictions, is a pivotal concept in that model. Humboldt saw the role of the university, and the education system in general, as to enable students to become autonomous individuals and world citizens by developing their own powers of reasoning in an environment of academic freedom. Other concepts of the model we also recognize as pillars of liberal arts education: (2) unity of research and teaching, (3) fostering of intellectual and personal growth – which goes well beyond vocational training, (4) the aim to achieve an education that is broad-based.

It is clear that the ultimate aim of the Humboldtian model, to foster independent thinking and the ability to reason, is at odds with the aims and ideology of the present regime, which need to keep the uneducated uneducated, without well-developed reasoning powers nor groundedness in factual knowledge. How else to keep the MAGA crowd together, or foster its growth?

The other panel members have addressed the immediate effects of the Faustian bargain that was struck between the leaders of our university, with its distinguished history of over 250 years, and the current regime. These effects are bad enough, but I want to talk about the more serious effects in the years ahead.

In the long term, as is evident from my remarks before, there is a high probability that the autonomy of the university in all its decisions on faculty recruitment and hiring policy will be curtailed, and more and more ideological guidelines will be implemented. The transformation of universities from free autonomous institutions of scholarship, teaching, research under the Alexander von Humboldt model into institutions of government propaganda is in fact the undisguised long-term goal of the current regime. It was spelled out in Project 2025 in so many words, of course avoiding the term “propaganda”, and it was already spelled out quite explicitly in 2021 by then-senator JD Vance.

I conclude by saying, on a slightly more positive note, that fascism — as all totalitarian regimes — is made possible not by decrees and threats of the potentates but by fear, opportunism and a succession of capitulations by their subjects. Each capitulation we can avoid or stop is a gain toward the recovery of a sane world.

I recently found these poignant lines in a poem by a well-known German poet, playwright and political activist:

“… When evil-doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out “stop!”
When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible.
When sufferings become unendurable the cries are no longer heard.
The cries, too, fall like rain in summer.” – Berthold Brecht
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