To attract American researchers, Minister for Education Johan Pehrson (L) should strengthen academic freedom.
“The universities are the enemy,” declared JD Vance back in 2021. Now, four years later, he is vice president in an American administration that is acting with relentless force against the country’s prestigious and historic institutions of higher learning. As a result, many researchers are now considering leaving the country.
Fighting antisemitism on campus is being used as a pretext to launch a hard-line attack on universities. Just like in Sweden, the war between Israel and Hamas has led to student protests and a charged atmosphere that has made many Jewish students feel unsafe. Some institutions have undoubtedly failed to handle the situation and ensure safety.
This has resulted in violent removals of protesters and confused statements like the one from Elizabeth Magill, former president of the University of Pennsylvania, who resigned after failing to give a clear answer on whether it would violate the university’s code of conduct to call for genocide against Jews (SVT, 10 December 2023). “It depends on the context,” was her reply. The presidents of both MIT and Harvard also wavered in similar ways.
But the Republicans’ distrust of academia goes deeper than that, and is tied to opposition against what they themselves would call “woke ideology.” This is also a debate that has been imported to Sweden, though without becoming as deep or as toxic – everything, as we know, tends to be bigger in the US.
That the threats to academia are rooted in a kind of war against wokeness, or a perceived overemphasis on diversity, is clear from some of the new conditions Donald Trump’s administration is attaching to federal funding. One such demand is that diversity offices be shut down.
Universities are also expected to cooperate with immigration authorities to monitor foreign students, and to alter governance, hiring processes and admissions procedures.
Even if one is critical of trigger warnings and microaggressions – often labelled as classic “woke ideas” – it’s impossible to ignore that what Trump is doing amounts to a major infringement on academic freedom. Infringements that cannot be justified by the flaws in certain academic trends.
For Harvard, it means $2.2 billion in frozen grants; for Columbia, $400 million in withdrawn funding. Unsurprisingly, this is being seen as draconian punishment of the country’s strongholds of higher education and research – not least by the institutions themselves. Many American academics are therefore beginning to look abroad for new jobs.
Mimmie Björnsdotter Grönkvist is a writer at the Liberal News Agency
If they follow through, Sweden could benefit from an American brain drain. Minister for Education Johan Pehrson (L) has also touched on this. Roundtable talks have been held with representatives from Swedish universities. Pehrson’s willingness to revisit the completed inquiry on simplified migration rules is welcome, and hopefully won’t face resistance from the Sweden Democrats.
It’s also important how he highlights the long-term conditions for research, such as the funding included in the research bill. “No temporary, emergency measures, but long-term ones,” as Pehrson put it in Dagens Nyheter (April 15).
Beyond that, measures are needed to strengthen academic freedom in Sweden. To prevent a situation like the one in the US, the independence of higher education institutions, Such as those in Umeå, Luleå and Skellefteå, must be reinforced. The American example is a warning that Swedish politicians should heed. Universities are not society’s enemies.
This is an opinion piece. Norran is politically independent and describes itself as liberal.