“The demand for lockstep obedience to the party line is the purest Sovietism and it is exactly why autocracies of knowledge always end up damaged by their intellectual self-harm”.
Simon Schama makes the point of the current Republican experience in America. He ends his essay quoting a well known American philosopher.
Hannah Arendt, historian, philosopher and author of, among many other things, a powerful essay on “Truth and Politics”. You must hope that her statue will feature the obligatory cigarette together with an ironic smile, knowing that she provides a plinth text that Donald Trump is bound to appreciate.
“Truth, though powerless and always defeated in a head-on clash with the powers that be, possesses a strength of its own: whatever those in power may contrive, they are unable to discover or invent a viable substitute for it.
Persuasion and violence can destroy truth, but they cannot replace it.”
We must know what happens when a nation turns against its universities. It is becoming a war on knowledge and Schama puts the attack on universities by Trump and others in the perspective of 250 years
The trigger-happy firing range that is the Trump administration has put America’s universities squarely in the crosshairs. The more liberal the faculty, the heavier the hit: billions in federal grants stripped from Harvard, hundreds of millions from other Ivy Leaguers.
What is happening in America is not however happening in the Far East and Europe, it is not in the UK, so far as we can be made distinct from Europe in our academia. What will happen to our ripe spots of intelligence?
We know of examples of this before, Schama expertly explains how from Jefferson onwards, war on knowledge drags down thinking.
I don’t know enough about the ideas behind the SDP, but I am keen to read articles by clever academic people which can help me understand wider issues.
This article by Sharma helped me understand why 40% of Americans are graduates
Only a minority of people in the USA go to higher education, I would be interested to know if more went to further education in the UK
If there is space in this country for populism, there is space for a academic party whose policies are based on academic research.
It strikes me that just as America is demanding an end to thinking, there will be a brain drain into Europe, the Far East and other parts of the world.
I am happy to be a graduate in the UK and keen to help those didn’t have that privilege. The spread of thinking and learning is crucial and thank you to my former colleague Hilar Salt for being one of the energisers of the SDP.
While both the UK and the US may consider themselves to relatively strong in higher education, the UK historically has a slightly lower percentage of adults who have completed a higher education degree compared to the US.
In the UK, 42% of adults up to 64 years old hold a degree, while 44% in the US hold a degree.
The UK, however, has a higher entry rate, meaning a larger percentage of the population, 58% compared with around 40% in the US, start higher education by age 24.
Wow! really interesting Byron