This Yale professor is so wrong about how to stand up to Trump

Yale professor Evan Morris argues that it’s time to “unyoke the sciences from the humanities,” by which he means that faculties of science should split off from the humanities and form science-only universities to avoid the wrath of Donald Trump.

Scientists at Columbia and Harvard lost grants because Trump falsely accused their administrators of indulging antisemitism on the part of their students.

It was a flimsy pretext to bring the Ivy League to heel, but instead of blaming Trump, Morris incongruously blames humanities professors.

“The humanities are going down and taking the rest of us — grant-funded scientists who focus on medical research or the physical sciences — with them,” he laments.

Morris’ take is shockingly naive.

Trump is at war with all independent sources of knowledge, from unbiased government statisticians to the free press. Any expert who can tell Trump he’s wrong about climate change, vaccines, public health, or sex differences is a direct threat to his power.

Science, therefore, is squarely in his crosshairs.

Let’s review a small part of what Trump has already done.

Trump’s racist crackdown on international students is an existential threat to American science. International grad students do much of the day-to-day work of science in this country. Foreign students are also a major source of revenue for their universities because they pay full tuition. For years, universities have recruited international students to offset dwindling state funding. An all-science university would suffer just as much, if not more than, a regular university from a collapse of international student enrollment because STEM programs draw more students from overseas.

To make matters worse, Trump is trying to cap indirect research funding for the medical and physical sciences. The cap is a direct threat to grant-getting research scientists. This is the money that keeps the lights on in their labs.

It gets worse.

Trump’s handpicked acting US Attorney for Washington, D.C., even tried to launch a frivolous criminal prosecution of green energy grantees. He admitted he had no probable cause to show that any of these people had committed crimes, but he still wanted to claw the grant money out of their bank accounts for the crime of working on green energy. The effort fizzled, but this fiasco should serve as a warning. Trump and his allies aren’t done trying to prosecute scientists for inconvenient truths.

Morris wants to ditch the social scientists, but they warned us that populists like Trump demonize intellectuals and experts of all stripes, scientists included.

Any scientist who’s doing work on epidemiology, vaccines, climate, evolution, or sex differences could find themselves in conflict with the White House and its MAGA allies.

And it’s not just scientists in controversial fields who are at risk. International collaboration is the lifeblood of science but congressional Republicans are already trying to label collaborations with Chinese scientists as a national security threat.

What about theoretical mathematicians? Surely that’s apolitical.

There’s still no escape.

If your work has no obvious applications to weapons, artificial intelligence, or crypto, MAGA will label you a decadent parasite and demand that your job be eliminated to pay for tax cuts.

We don’t need to guess how they feel. Vice president JD Vance once gave a talk entitled “The Universities are the Enemy.”

“So much of what we want to do in this movement and in this country, I think, are fundamentally dependent on going through a set of very hostile institutions, specifically the universities, which control the knowledge in our society, which control what we call truth and what we call falsity, that provides research that gives credibility to some of the most ridiculous ideas that exist in our country,” Vance told his audience.

“If any of us want to do the things that we want to do for our country, and for the people who live in it, we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.”

Universities are a threat to the MAGA agenda because they produce knowledge that contradicts Trump’s lies.

Splitting science from the arts and humanities will shortchange students without protecting the sciences.