Rahul Bhatia

These days, disbelief is my usual reaction on waking up and reading the news from America. The attack on universities in particular is extraordinary, even though I understand it from the perspective of diffusing the sound of discontent over Palestine, and of turning institutions into vassals. Outside university there are the economic considerations that regulate the morals of working people, the levers and guillotines of upcoming payments and insecure work, the dues seen and unseen, that constant whisper in ears to consider the fallout of a hastily expressed opinion, and think of the many ways a revelation may be used. But what could unruly university students possibly fear when there are no jobs to be lost, no real price to be paid for an opinion in a place where opinions are the fuel of understanding. Taking it away is the price of it: The abrupt end to the classroom, the confiscation of access to what a university offers, along with the debates and disagreements and the granting of the freedom their mind was assured; the idea of the university itself, where inside is freedom, outside is the prison.

I think, on occasion, that this is not the United States, this is how the Middle East would approach ideas—with fear, suspicion, and the intent to discipline wildness. But I remember that this is wrong: in October 2001, at an airport in Oklahoma, I’m asked in a small room by two men from law enforcement, “How do you know about Al-Qaeda?” When I tell them that I read, that college students talk about things, that—naively, I say—there is nothing wrong in it, they are contemptuous. “You people live in a bubble,” one says. When I wake up and read the news now, I see that men with minds like theirs are inside universities. There is no bubble. And I imagine that to survive here now is the adopt the Middle East rules that migrants from the subcontinent imagine keep them safe: head down, keep working, make money, rise quietly. The problems of speech, propriety, and genocide are the concerns of other people, people who have accumulated enough to forget fear, people who cannot be asked to “self-deport.”

Authoritarianism sucks the air out of a vibrant culture. It makes smaller the numbers who consider themselves entirely safe, and makes larger the cost of expression. It goes unnoticed that the burgeoning market for nostalgia is at the cost of market for modernity. It erodes trust, and corrodes ties that hold things together. Jason Stanley, the Yale professor who left for the University of Toronto, told the Financial Times, “I believe in the values of academic freedom and defending democratic institutions, not the idea that the proper response to authoritarians is to hide and hope you’re not next.”

Momodou Taal, a doctoral candidate at Cornell who participated in protests and filed a suit to stop the deportation of protestors, chose to leave the country because “given what we have seen across the United States, I have lost faith that a favourable ruling from the courts would guarantee my personal safety and ability to express my beliefs.”

So there’s some kind of flight from America. The FT story talks about it, and there’s this column by Ed Luce. “American scientists are looking for jobs abroad,” he writes. “Trump has presented the world with a giant poaching opportunity.” This is what I’ve been in disbelief about every morning—the idea of job cuts and research funding drying up, and of this country’s giant talent pool looking for a new home. And then, to put this whole post in context, for a moment, I entertain the idea that India might welcome them, and make surprising progress in some field or the other. But we’ve had silence in this regard, no evidence of any thought given to the opportunity. It’s fitting, given the well-established governmental antipathy to expertise of any kind, but still dismaying. I studied the RSS for a few years, and wrote about their dedication to obfuscation. Now, with them at the center of political life, the country is unable to use this moment to invite talent, because it’s at war with what they have to offer. They fear the meandering that brings independence. Explorations must be officially approved.

What a time to choose ignorance.