17 Dec 2024 | News, United States
In the name of “free speech”, Donald Trump has laid out an authoritarian plan for his new administration to radically defund and gag universities. Now with a Republican Congress, he might just achieve it all and that spells disaster for freedom of thought, critical inquiry and an informed citizenry in the USA.
Trump’s plan is based on the education chapter within the right-wing think tank Heritage Foundation’s 900-page political roadmap Project 2025, a set of policy proposals that lay out a long-term ultra conservative vision. The chapter is written by Lindsey Burke, director of the organisation’s Center for Education for Policy.
First on the list is dismantling the Department of Education, a realistic threat now Republicans have both the House and Senate. Trump has put a wrestling magnate in charge of the department, Linda McMahon. She was formerly head of the US Small Business Administration and is currently chair of the America First Policy Institute, McMahon financed Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden with its notoriously bigoted speakers, according to Forbes. She will play a key role in rolling out plans that will profoundly shift power to reinforce historical social inequities in universities. These could include reversing protections for the LGBTQ+ community, privatising student loans and halting loan forgiveness.
Trump’s radical overhaul includes defunding universities that he considers to be “turning our students into communists and terrorists and sympathisers of many, many different dimensions” by taxing, fining and suing private university endowments (funds or assets donated to universities to provide long-term financial support).
Trump sees Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programmes that such schools have engaged in as “unlawful discrimination” and he is seeking “restitution” through the law. He plans to “pursue federal civil rights cases” and increase the tax against these schools. During his first presidency, Trump signed a new plan that introduced a 1.4% on endowments of private universities with at least 500 students and $100,000 or more in assets for every full-time student.
America’s most prestigious universities, such as Harvard (which rely greatly on federal funds) will be prime targets. Following a wave of pro-Palestine protests – which were already subdued with arrests and brutality – there was conservative backlash. This prepared the ground for the coming lawfare aimed at punishing higher education institutions for wrong-think. For example, according to The Guardian, Steve Scalise, House majority leader, has discussed plans to punish universities that allow pro-Palestine protests by revoking their accreditation.
With the spoils raised by stripping these educational institutions, Trump will fund a new American Academy. While he describes it as “non-political”, Trump’s ideological agenda is clear: “no wokeness or jihadism allowed”. Trump explains that American Academy will “gather an entire universe of the highest quality educational content, covering the full spectrum of human knowledge and skills, and make that material available to every American citizen online for free”.
In what sounds troublingly like generative AI driven education, delivery of “content” will be through “study groups, mentors, industry partnerships, and the latest breakthrough in computing”. There is no mention of professors or teachers.
There is little detail on the curriculum – so what kind of “content” will be considered “human knowledge” worth teaching? Trump’s scientific beliefs raise concerns. For example, he has previously said: “One of the most urgent tasks, not only for our movement, but for our country is to decisively defeat the climate hysteria hoax.”
The role of “industry partners” is left vague but we should be asking whether companies delivering content through “breakthrough” technology could gain access to students’ behavioral data for training AI. Taylor Owen, Beaverbrook chair in media, ethics and communications at McGill University, forewarns of the dismantling of recent AI oversight efforts and an incoming merger of tech and state power where “the interests of select technology companies become indistinguishable from US government policy”.
With Elon Musk leading the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), my fear is that we could see emerging education policy influenced by the view that AI is a neutral tool for “free speech”, which can replace “unnecessary” educators.
Trump’s own past forays into the education sector don’t inspire confidence in his motives. In 2004, he set up “Trump University” as a for-profit initiative and real estate training programme, which claimed to share the secrets to being a successful entrepreneur. It faced several lawsuits, including allegations that Trump University defrauded its students through misleading marketing practices and aggressive sales tactics. Despite the organisation never admitting wrongdoing, Trump settled the lawsuits, paying 6,000 defrauded victims a $25 million settlement in 2016 shortly after being elected president.
American Academy appears to be designed to extract power from the academe and weaken education, rather than strengthen it. It will compete with universities while its free online courses will be “equivalent” to a bachelor’s degree, accredited, and recognised for federal employment – which will itself further degrade government by hollowing out expertise.
Trump sees the accreditation process as his “secret weapon” in his war on universities. In the USA, states have varying control of education, and universities have enjoyed a lot of autonomy. The practice of accreditation involves a “non-governmental, peer evaluation of educational institutions and programmes”.
However, eligibility for federal aid, grants, student loans and other funds that universities depend on is contingent on accreditation. And while the government does not control the process of accreditation itself, the Department of Education has the power to “recognise” accreditors, or withdraw this recognition.
With the new Republican Congress behind him, Trump wants to empower new accreditors with ideological standards such as “defending the American tradition and western civilisation, protecting free speech, eliminating wasteful administrative positions that drive up costs incredibly, [and] removing all Marxist diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucrats”.
Incoming Vice President JD Vance once proclaimed that “professors are the enemy”. This year, Vance introduced The Encampments or Endowments Bill in the US Senate which, if passed, would punish “campus disorder” by making federal funding contingent on universities removing campus protest encampments. Efforts to introduce what Pen America has called “educational gag orders” – laws, policies and bills that restrict teaching and training on certain topics such as racism, gender and American history – in colleges and universities are also “likely to disproportionately affect the free speech rights of students, educators, and trainers who are women, people of color, and LGBTQ+.”
Trump has said he will use executive orders to rescind or rewrite regulations, which could be used to undo stronger Biden-era Title IX protections against sexual harassment in universities and colleges. Executive orders are a powerful presidential tool enabling swift changes to federal policies and priorities without the approval of Congress – but they also have the potential for abuse of power. All this accompanies recent efforts to casualise the employment of professors, and weaken the tenure system, which ensures they cannot be removed easily and protects unpopular research, teaching and speech.
As university endowments are purged and their federal resources become contingent on pleasing ideological gatekeepers, it is hard to imagine brave or rigorous research can survive in the hollowed-out husks that remain. Once universities begin losing students to AI-delivered “free degrees” this will of course accelerate the roll-out of EdTech across the sector, resulting in declining educational standards and heightened surveillance in the name of “efficiency”. And should dissenters rise up, student protests will be stifled or exploited to legitimate further attacks on their institutions.
Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, recently stated that the country “is in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be”.
This “revolution” is not without casualties, however: many of America’s more privileged intellectuals will flee this war to financial stability or intellectual freedom overseas, but minority, dissident and refugee academics will be most vulnerable to harassment, insecurity and displacement. It will polarise inequality in an existing two-tier education system: community colleges and non-elite universities won’t survive.
Universities specialising in specific subjects, such as disinformation, will also continue to be uniquely targeted. In 2022 Trump threatened that “within hours” of his inauguration, he would sign an executive order “banning any federal department or agency from colluding with any organisation, business, or person, to censor, limit, categorise, or impede the lawful speech of American citizens. I will then ban federal money from being used to label domestic speech as ‘mis-’ or ‘dis-information’.
The 2024 Murthy v. Missouri Supreme Court ruling may disrupt these plans somewhat, as it reaffirmed that technology researchers are independent and have First Amendment rights to carry out their work, and communicate it with the public, companies and the government. Yet, while some rights can be defended in the courts, legal battles take time, and great damage can be done in the meantime. Technology and disinformation researchers continue to face relentless political pressure, harassment, obstruction and lawfare.
The USA was once considered one of the world’s strongest defenders of academic freedom and free expression. While this was always a romanticised perception in an unequal system, Trumpism over the past decade has resulted in a significant decline in US academic freedom. Attacks on US higher education have already begun, and the USA has fallen below more than 70 other countries in the Academic Freedom Index Update. Universities are pre-emptively ditching inclusivity practices in anticipation of Trump’s policies – but they must not “obey in advance”, as historian Timothy Snyder would say.
Scholars, students, journalists, businesses and civil society must be united to defend against and communicate this threat to ordinary Americans. Given that the changes could also result in a long-term decline in the US economy, business leaders and economists should condemn these regressive plans. US academia must mobilise itself within and between sectors to defend academic freedom issues, and communicate the importance of human interaction and interpersonal communication in education.
The conservatives’ success here spells disaster for the world. Successful authoritarian capture of academia in such a powerful liberal democracy could inspire right-wing political attacks on education globally. The American moral panic over “critical race theory”, for example, became a political weapon that destabilised education policy development in Australia, and we have also seen the authoritarian takeover of education in Hungary. As Trump’s changes unfurl, the UN and its member states must take the lead in condemning measures which unpick the education system and threaten free expression globally. More broadly, we need an international movement of those who embrace low-tech alternatives and who are willing to disrupt “the machine” in sectors where lives, jobs and critical human knowledge are threatened by technofascism.
11 Dec 2024 | Belarus, News
Last month, Body in Progress, an autobiographical play written and performed by Belarusian poet Hanna Komar, debuted in London at Theatre Deli.
Set against the backdrop of the fraudulent 2020 Belarus elections and the brutal crackdown that followed, Body in Progress tells the story of Komar’s ongoing experience with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after she fled her country and settled in the UK. The play explores how trauma manifests in Komar’s body, leading her to dissociate from the world around her.
“In September 2020, I was jailed for nine days for a peaceful demonstration in Minsk,” Komar told Index. “That experience and a lot of police violence that I witnessed or lived through in 2020 triggered the violence I experienced in my family, and all together it made my body and mind dissociate, in order to keep me sane and functional.”
The play features Komar and the Belarusian actor and movement practitioner Sophie Vallee, who together personify Komar’s experience of dissociation between body and mind. Throughout the performance, they physically come together and become entangled then drift apart, echoing Komar’s inner turmoil and illustrating how she is repeatedly triggered by memories of Belarus. We see her attempt to ground herself in the present by following a daily routine and wandering the streets of London.
Photo by Tania Naiden
In a particularly poignant scene, feeling lonely and isolated in a new city, Komar shares a Facebook post asking friends back in Belarus to name the places in London they’d like to visit. She then visits these locations, including the Tate Modern, tube stations, and the River Thames, updating her friends along the way as a means of rooting herself in London while remaining connected to her home country. However, even the smallest trips sometimes become overwhelming as she is flooded with flashbacks.
“I wanted to convey an embodied experience of trauma, which I did through the descriptions of tiny details of my routine and my walks in London,” she said. “How it makes one’s everyday existence difficult, how simple things become hard work.”
In her play, she refers to the works of Dutch psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk and other mental health professionals, who explain how our brain and nervous system cope with trauma and PTSD, and “how healing is a long-term, complex process,” she said.
Vallee powerfully expresses Komar’s inner trauma through movement, elevating the play into a piece of performance art. This allows the audience to grasp Komar’s intense distress from experiences such as her imprisonment in Belarus.
It is also through Vallee’s movements that the audience witnesses Komar’s journey of healing and self-recovery.
“I was grateful that Sophie agreed to work with this emotionally intense and heavy text. Unlike me, whose character was clear, she represents a number of voices, and it needs professionalism and dedication to present them in the way she does during the performance. I think being Belarusian helps with that,” Komar said.
Given that Body in Progress is Komar’s first play and her acting debut, she delivers an incredibly moving performance that left many in the audience in tears. Through a brilliant display of theatre physicality, Komar embodies the image of a woman in exile – vulnerable yet resilient, traumatised yet determined to rebuild and find a sense of home in a new country.
Hanna Komar starred in the play with Belarusian actor and movement practitioner Sophie Vallee. Photo by Tania Naiden
The play also serves as Komar’s tribute to the fundamental role of women in the historical fight for human rights. Through her perspective, which draws connections between dictatorship and patriarchy, Komar unpacks how a woman’s body can both absorb oppression and foster resistance.
“I use a quote in my play: ‘Kafka was the first to comprehend a body as a battlefield for freedom…’. Our bodies are a site of violence and a site of resistance. Being caring and considerate is a good way to resist violence. Collective care is a good way to resist it too. And I believe that when we gather to experience work like Body in Progress, we give ourselves a chance for collective processing, releasing of and resisting to violence,” said Komar.
Body in Progress showed for two days as part of Voila Festival. Komar plans to eventually take it elsewhere. Ultimately, the play is a powerful tribute to the lasting impact of oppression on the self and a crucial reminder that exile is just the beginning of one’s journey to recovery.
6 Dec 2024 | Georgia, Iran, News, Newsletters, South Korea, United Kingdom
Protests have the power to rally people, express objection to political decisions, and in the most successful cases, elicit change. They are a fundamental form of self expression, and a crucial mechanism of any democracy. This week, we saw South Koreans take to the streets to protest President Yoon Suk Yeol’s shock move to impose martial law, which temporarily placed the military in charge and suspended many civilian rights, including the right to protest.
The move was immediately declared illegal and unconstitutional. The leader of the country’s largest opposition party was able to rally MPs to vote down the declaration in parliament, and ordinary citizens to protest against it, despite the ruling that they couldn’t. Within 24 hours, Yeol’s attempt was toppled and he now faces impeachment charges.
South Korea’s bizarre turn of events shows the potential effectiveness of collective action against authoritarianism. The power of persistent campaigning was also brought to light in Iran this week, when the jailed rapper and activist Toomaj Salehi (a former winner in the arts category of Index’s Freedom of Expression Awards) was released from prison. He had previously been sentenced to death (later overturned) for voicing support for anti-government protests, including the Woman, Life, Freedom movement in 2022. Tireless international protest from campaign groups – jointly led by Index, the Human Rights Foundation and Doughty Street Chambers – undoubtedly put pressure on Iranian authorities to permit his release.
But of course, attempts to congregate against injustice are not always successful, or accepted. In Georgia this week, where we have seen a degradation of democracy under the Georgian Dream party, there was a horrendous crackdown on peaceful protesters.
Since the country’s contested election in October, where the party secured a fourth term, citizens have come out in droves and have been met with state violence, including being physically assaulted, and attacked with water cannon and tear gas. You can read more about the steady decline towards autocracy in Georgia in this piece by Index CEO Jemimah Steinfeld, who visited Tbilisi in October.
This response is just one example of how peaceful protest is being eroded, despite it being protected as a human right under international law. We’re seeing examples of this all over the world. Last month, Clemence Manyukwe reported for Index on how anti-government protesters in Mozambique were injured and even killed following the country’s disputed presidential election.
And even when violence isn’t used, legal mechanisms can be utilised to undermine people’s right to show dissent. On our own shores, the previous government introduced the Public Order Act, which has substantially restricted people’s ability to protest freely, and has made it easier to criminalise protesters by lowering the threshold at which police can arrest them. The result has been hundreds of activists being arrested and prosecuted, including the climate activist Greta Thunberg.
Earlier this year, the High Court found that the former home secretary Suella Braverman had acted unlawfully in introducing this legislation, but the Home Office appealed the ruling. The new Labour government has continued the appeal, which has spurred criticism from human rights organisations. Katy Watts, lawyer at Liberty, said: “For the countless people currently in the over-stretched criminal justice system because of these unlawful regulations, we must see the law quashed and the government respecting our fundamental right to protest.”
Protest movements are not always against governments. Also in the UK this week, we saw a large media workers’ strike from staff at The Guardian and The Observer over the sale of the The Observer to Tortoise Media, an acquisition which has proved controversial.
Whilst the sale of a business does not, on its own, represent a risk to free expression, concerns have been raised over whether there are safeguards in place to protect the newspaper’s editorial independence, as one of the few remaining liberal news outlets in the UK. There have also been concerns over the ability of company staff to speak out publicly against the deal without fear of punishment or recrimination, with some employees reporting being warned against voicing their opinions freely.
Index was one of many signatories of a letter addressed to The Scott Trust – which owns the Guardian Media Group – and Tortoise raising concerns about the risks to free expression from the mechanisms of the sale. Despite the 48-hour strike, the sale went ahead this morning, indicating that protest is not always an effective mechanism for change.
But whilst it may not always result in the desired outcome, it sends a message – whether to governments or private businesses – about individuals’ rights to express their disapproval or outrage. The ability to do so without fear of criminal reprisal or violence is a fundamental right and must be protected at all costs.
6 Dec 2024 | Iran, News, Volume 53.03 Autumn 2024
Iran, a country that in its distant past played a significant role in the development of knowledge and laid the foundations upon which modern science now stands, has experienced a tremendous urge for scientific rebirth over the past century.
But Iranian scientists are facing a government that considers itself the manifestation of God’s will on Earth, that has no qualms about intimidation and oppression, and whose daily rhetoric revolves around the word “enemy”.
It wants its ideological model to be seen as the path to success and is terrified of criticism, quickly making everything from nuclear energy and the space industry to vaccination and public medical services into a security issue.
It may be no surprise that Iran’s nuclear programme is now securitised, and that the Supreme National Security Council demands silence or compliance from science and media institutions. The tool of national security has now become a pressure point in Iran for any thought that does not align with the government’s ideology.
I have covered science and technology news in Iran for more than 10 years. Although I’ve dealt with issues that were considered red lines on multiple occasions, the only time my colleagues and I received a death threat was when I published a story about the importance of blood transfusion and rejected the unscientific and dangerous practice of hijamat (cupping therapy – a form of Islamic traditional medicine). But that incident is in no way comparable to the deadly consequences of censorship that occurred during the Covid-19 pandemic.
When the pandemic was claiming lives, the supreme leader of the Islamic Republic, Ali Khamenei, banned the entry of vaccines from the USA and the UK into Iran. This was a decision that cost many lives.
The reaction of domestic media to this decision was silence under censorship, and when foreign media reacted they were accused of being agents of the enemy.
“You won’t find even one media outlet asking what the consequences of the leader’s decision were in this regard,” said one doctor and medical science activist, who asked to remain anonymous.
“Even Dr [Masoud] Pezeshkian, who is himself a physician, at that time – before his presidential election – when asked about the vaccine, said we didn’t want to import vaccines from certain countries based on our policy, although he was surely aware of the effects of this decision.”
While Iranian-made vaccines had not yet received their controversial approval, and parts of the Food and Drug Agency in the Ministry of Health were trying to enforce minimal oversight, the Ministry of Intelligence accused three scientists and managers of co-operating with the enemy and obstructing the approval of the vaccine.
It requested that the judiciary prosecute them.
Correspondence showing this was revealed only in a set of documents published by a hacker group called Ali’s Justice after it gained access to Iran’s judiciary.
In this correspondence, it was mentioned that, due to the matter’s sensitivity, the case should be investigated without informing the public or arresting the individuals. A few days later, the Barakat vaccine was approved in Iran.
Pressuring individuals active in scientific fields has a long history in Iran.
After the protests following the 2009 presidential election results, known as the Green Movement, several professors who supported them were expelled from universities. There were similar incidents after the events of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement.
In late January 2018, the intelligence agency of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps arrested several environmental activists involved in a project to save the endangered Asiatic cheetah. The Tehran prosecutor accused them of espionage.
But a panel including ministers of justice and lawyers announced that they had found no evidence of espionage. Even the Ministry of Intelligence stated that it had no evidence to support the charges.
One of those arrested was conservationist Kavous Seyed-Emami, a Canadian citizen. Two weeks after his arrest, prison authorities informed his family that he had killed himself.
However, his family believe that his death was due to physical injuries resulting from torture in prison, and signs of beating were visible on his body.
Another detainee was forced to confess on state television, and others served their sentences in full. Finally, after enduring six years of imprisonment without any evidence of the reasons for their arrest, the remaining detainees were released in April as part of a pardon.
Blocking the flow of information
One of the methods researchers used during the pandemic to estimate the actual mortality rate from Covid-19 and expose the discrepancies in official statistics was to refer to the monthly birth and death statistics published by the National Organisation for Civil Registration.
Mahan Ghafari, a virology specialist at the University of Oxford who followed this issue, told Index how, after the reports were published, the organisation restricted and stopped publishing this data. Eventually, access to the organisation’s website was blocked for those outside Iran.
Another part of this pressure involves halting international collaborations. Ghafari recalls how, after a paper was published with an Israeli co-author, the Iranian regime accused all the scientific findings of being a plan against Iran by Israel.
Scientists working on Iran-related issues from outside the country face the risk of harassment. Even their travel to Iran and visiting their families is affected, so many prefer to stay silent.
In the wave of arrests of environmental activists, Kaveh Madani, who at the time was the deputy for education and research at the Department of Environment, was also arrested. He repeatedly spoke about security interrogations and the review of his communications by security agencies.
Although the official reason for his arrest was not announced, his explicit warnings about Iran’s water bankruptcy and the impending water crisis were widely considered to be a driving factor.
Madani later left Iran and was appointed as the director of the UN think-tank on water.
The story of Madani’s arrest is often cited as a cautionary tale. When globally recognised Iranian experts return to help improve the situation in Iran, they not only have to battle the complex bureaucracy of the political structure but also face unaccountable political entities. They risk interrogation, arrest, imprisonment and even death. This situation only exacerbates the self-censorship among Iranian scientists living abroad.
An Iranian-American researcher currently working in cosmology, who asked not to be named, told Index about another aspect of structural censorship and the pressures it creates.
“I would love to do things alongside my professional work that bring science into people’s homes – lectures, talks with the media, sharing my experiences. However, due to the fear of being targeted by political groups inside the country and the limitation on my ability to travel to Iran, I have completely stopped these activities. This fear halted great opportunities that could have been used to promote science and help Iran’s scientific development,” they said.
They also pointed out how Iranian scientists outside the country faced dual pressures. While the security environment and censorship prevent them from criticising a scientific project in Iran, they are deprived of many research opportunities elsewhere because of their Iranian background.
Their funding is sometimes denied if they have dual nationality, and they face more difficulties in advancing in the scientific community of their host country.
Powerful but chaotic censorship
When protests over the killing of Mahsa (Jina) Amini sparked the flames of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement in Iran, students and academic institutions were not spared from the assault. Not only were students attacked and suppressed, professors who raised their voices in support of them were also repressed.
Encieh Erfani, an assistant professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Basic Sciences in Iran, resigned in 2022 in protest against the regime’s treatment of students and is now continuing her scientific activities outside the country. She told Index about the wider issues.
“The problem here is that the censorship structure has red lines that you know exist and, from experience, you know you should not even come close to them,” she said.
What Erfani points to is one of the most significant reasons for the intensification of self-censorship in Iran. The fear of unknowingly crossing red lines leads to conservatism in the scientific community – a community that can grow only by pushing existing boundaries.
Kiarash Aramesh, director of the Pennsylvania Western University’s James F Drane Bioethics Institute, which focuses on biomedical sciences and the humane treatment of patients, agrees. He recently published a book on pseudoscience in medicine in Iran.
“As long as you don’t oppose the principles of Islamic traditional medicine, you can publish your articles. But the scientific institution in Iran is so influenced by politics that even within the scientific community there will be opposition to you,” he said.
Beyond slowing down the process of scientific development, censorship in Iran is creating a corrupt environment from which anti-scientific and pseudoscientific trends emerge and thrive.
“When there is corruption in society, there is also corruption within the scientific community. Contrary to popular belief that scientists are always pure and honest people, they, too, are subject to this corruption. Under the conditions of a totalitarian regime, in the absence of transparency and freedom of criticism, even scientists may engage in unethical behaviours and participate in corruption for personal gain. Just as we have seen in history, this story repeats itself,” Erfani said.
Censorship in science in Iran is a many-faced monster that, on the one hand, forces scientists within the country into conservatism and, on the other hand, tries to ideologise the structure of science through threats and intimidation.
It has discouraged and prevented many Iranian scientists abroad from participating in scientific discourse and contributing to its development in Iran. It restricts international collaboration between Iranian and non-Iranian scientists and it creates a dark space for the growth of corruption – a situation exacerbated by the repression and threats against science media and free scientific journalism.
