US research in danger: solidarity with our colleagues

The Swiss and international scientific community is observing with consternation and horror the unprecedented and systematic attacks on research in the United States by the new Trump administration. In recent weeks, tens of thousands of scientists have been fired, essential funding brutally cut, and whole swathes of research brought to a standstill by the new regime, which seeks to inflict as much suffering as possible, by accompanying this destruction with vindictive rhetoric and deliberate cruelty. The National Institutes of Health (NIH), which funds biomedical research, abruptly suspended the payment of grants, leaving many colleagues without pay and leading to the dismissal of over 1,000 employees. The National Science Foundation (NSF), for its part, has seen its budgets slashed by over 60%, and vital scientific projects from the study of ecosystems to the prevention of pandemics are now threatened or suspended altogether. Major demographic, epidemiological and climate change databases, used by thousands of researchers for their scientific work, have been taken offline and are now inaccessible.

Any study of discrimination and social inequality has been formally banned in public research organizations and in publicly-funded academic work, threatening to cut off subsidies to the universities that host them. Grotesque repertoires of dozens of prohibited words, worthy of Orwell’s “1984” and straight out of the neo-fascist imaginary, are decreed top-down by political power: “global warming”, “LGBT”, “gender”, but also “biais”, “inclusion” or “diversity”, and even “socioeconomic”, “disabled”, “woman” and “elderly” are to be struck off scientific production. Researchers at public agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), treated as enemies of the state, are ordered to retract articles already written and submitted to scientific journals if they contain even one of these words, in order to purge them. Presented as a scapegoat for people’s economic hardships, a list of the many projects defunded by the NSF is cynically published and gleefully submitted to popular vindictiveness, on the absurd grounds that they “promoted Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) or advanced neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda” (sic).

We are witnessing a sudden breakdown in the constitutional order that many eminent specialists in authoritarian regimes have analyzed as the onset of a coup d’état. The accompanying violent crackdown is designed to stifle any critical or simply independent voice, in the scientific community as well as in all sectors of the federal government and its institutions. These purposefully sadistic attacks are not only a direct threat to hundreds of thousands of American colleagues: by subjecting their work directly to a new centralized political police with demented demands, they jeopardize the capacity of the United States to produce the free and independent knowledge essential to an enlightened democratic existence.

In Switzerland, although these unprecedented events may seem remote, they should not be perceived as an abstract threat. The current global climate bears witness to an upsurge in similar attacks, fuelled by misinformation and a growing desire for political control over scientific production. In the face of this, silence or indifference are tantamount to condoning a worrisome drift towards widespread authoritarian obscurantism.

The Collective for Academic Freedom, Democracy and Solidarity (CLADS) expresses its full and unconditional solidarity with all researchers in the United States affected by this campaign of scientific annihilation and mass layoffs. CLADS fully associates itself with Stand Up for Science Day, organized on March 7 in the United States and around the world to defend academic freedom, and calls for a broad mobilization in support of our American colleagues and free research. We call on all Swiss academic and scientific institutions, as well as our European and international colleagues, to take a clear stand against this unprecedented offensive. It is imperative that our voices, united and firm, recall that without academic freedom, there can be no democracy.