Image: The White House, via Flickr
History shows how to protect science from Trump’s attacks, write Stephan Lewandowsky and colleagues
US president Donald Trump’s administration has launched unprecedented measures against science and academic freedom. These include withdrawal from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the World Health Organization (WHO), suspensions of research funding and draconian censorship.
Scientists working for the Centers for Disease Control have been instructed to withdraw from papers co-authored with, or funded by, the WHO—even if they have already been accepted for publication. The Lancet has warned of “disappearing climate science”, and staff cuts at agencies responsible for climate and weather forecasting have compromised storm monitoring and disaster preparedness.
As researchers in democracy and democratic backsliding, we recognise these as measures from the autocrat’s playbook. They are aimed at creating a sense of permanent and deepening crisis which, it will be claimed, can only be resolved through dictatorial powers.
Scientists and their allies must rise to the challenge. Although there are limits to what individuals can do, an ecosystem of resilience and resistance is emerging.
Safe havens
An important first step is to catalogue actions and preserve the data and archives being attacked. To one day repair US science, it is crucial to have an inventory of the damage.
These efforts resemble rescue missions from previous dark times in history. In Stalin’s Soviet Union, for example, the biologist Nikolai Vavilov established a seed bank containing more than 380,000 samples, in the hope of preserving plant diversity and preventing future famines.
Christina Pagel at University College London is tracking Trump’s administrative actions and how they are impacting science. Henrik Schönemann is leading an effort at Humboldt University in Berlin to create a cultural archive that preserves data and content from public websites being scrubbed by the Trump administration.
Such large-scale archiving of data and scientific content, on servers that are beyond the Trump administration’s reach, should be a priority for scientists and their allies.
Bear witness
Similarly important is collecting the stories of people who are suffering—including both those who have lost jobs, and those who remain.
Scientists tend to privilege data over individual testimony and anecdotes, yet personal stories send a powerful message and can help others in difficult circumstances. During a recent workshop dedicated to safeguarding scholarship and research in autocracies, which our team organised, we heard from researchers who have lived under authoritarian regimes such as the Soviet Union and East Germany.
A Hungarian colleague, Péter Krekó, told the workshop that the Trump administration has done more to compromise science in six weeks than the Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán has achieved in 15 years, despite his government’s efforts to politicise and “domesticate” science.
Hold on to truth
Two of the most important lessons from people who have lived under autocracy are not to obey in advance and to retain belief in truth. Most of an autocrat’s power is freely given.
No one, for example, forced the owners of the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times to spike the endorsements of Democratic candidate Kamala Harris that their editorial teams wanted to publish. They were acts of pre-emptive obedience to placate a candidate who threatened retribution against his opponents.
Retaining a belief in truth may sound obvious or trivial but it is a fundamental act of democratic resistance and resilience. If nothing can be true, then everything is a spectacle and politics is controlled by whoever can pay for the loudest public voice.
Trump dismisses any criticism as fake news and his allies increasingly question the very existence of facts. Attacks on science are part of this campaign to erode the value of truth.
Institutional imperative
Individual actions, however courageous, can only go so far. For science to survive, institutions must step up.
Some, although not enough, US university leaders have spoken up for academic freedom.
Several overseas institutions have also raised their voices. In France, Aix-Marseille University has set up a programme to welcome scientists who “may feel threatened or hindered” in the United States. The European Federation of Academies of Science and Humanities (Allea) has called out Trump’s actions as censorship and political suppression, and major journals have condemned attacks on the language of diversity.
As the European Journal of Public Health put it, “The 1930s were a period of intellectual darkness in much of our continent, as totalitarian regimes sought to purge academia and public health institutions of ideas they deemed ‘ideologically unsuitable’… The echoes of those policies are unmistakable in today’s America.”
Neither individuals nor institutions can afford to take the attacks on science lightly. Intellectual darkness can only be dispelled by strong and undaunted commitment to truth, evidence and democracy.
Stephan Lewandowsky is at the University of Bristol, Vera Kempe is at Abertay University, Ulrike Hahn is at Birkbeck, University of London and Dawn Holford is at the University of Bristol.
View this article on Research Professional