Facing Trump’s Attack on Research | Katina Magazine

"The new US presidential administration has launched an unprecedented assault on research and higher education. This isn’t just collateral damage from wide-ranging realignment of budgets, which would be bad enough, but an orchestrated attack on academic freedom, research funding, and the institutional autonomy that underpins intellectual progress. Each of these will have immediate and downstream impacts on academic libraries.

The assault has taken two main forms. First is the systematic dismantling of research areas deemed politically inconvenient, including climate change, aspects of public health, and swathes of the humanities and social sciences. Second is the threatened financial strangulation of American universities, through tax hikes on endowments and the slashing of administrative support for research grants. At the same time, pressure to constrain scholarly inquiry is mounting, tenure protections are being eroded, and public trust in expertise is being actively undermined.

The consequences of the administration’s approach—a research sector stripped of independence and education reduced to a tool of political expediency—would be devastating. But they are not inevitable: immediate, collective action could stave off the most damaging effects.

Here, we—a newly appointed library dean and the CEO of an academic publishing house—offer our perspective, drawing on years of ongoing collaboration and shared professional interests...."