The anxiety greatly increased in October 1957, when Americans learned of the Soviet Union’s successful launch of the world’s first satellite, Sputnik 1. The vivid evidence of the technological superiority in rocketry of our Cold War enemy provoked a remarkably rapid response.
In 1958, by a bipartisan vote, Congress passed and President Dwight Eisenhower signed the National Defense Education Act, one of the most consequential federal interventions in education in the nation’s history. Together with the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, it made America into the world’s undisputed leader in science and technology.
Nearly 70 years later, that leadership is in peril, the single remaining U.S. institution among the top 10 is Harvard, in second place, far behind the Chinese Academy of Sciences. If this does not constitute a Sputnik moment, it is hard to imagine what would.
Now the leaders of American universities have done little more than duck and cover.
The N.D.E.A. reflected the widespread realization that something had to be done in schools and universities besides teaching students to hide under their desks. The country urgently needed more experts.
The act also played a significant role in diversifying the nation’s campuses by providing low-interest loans to applicants in need, incidentally challenging policies that had restricted admission for disfavored groups, such as Jewish, Asian, Black, Polish and Italian students.
What began as a project of national security blossomed into a generator for limitless curiosity, creativity and critique. The result of the huge influx of tax dollars was institutions that not only trained scientists, medical researchers and weapons engineers but also cultivated sociologists, historians, philosophers and poets.
By the 1990s, American universities had become global cultural icons — envied for their intellectual breadth, celebrated for their academic freedom and eagerly sought after by international students who viewed them as the apex of open inquiry and prestige.
But now, science research has been curtailed; postdoctoral fellowships have been abruptly canceled; laboratories have been shuttered and visas denied. The damage to scientific enterprise extends beyond our borders, whether it’s from the cancellation of nearly $500 of funding for mRNA research under the health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. or the purging of data on which climate researchers around the world depend. We will never know what diseases might have been cured or what advances in technology might have been invented had the lights not gone out in the labs.
Should the administration be determined to reshape the intellectual life and values of faculty members and students alike, then recovery will be impossible.
Our situation is not hopeless any more now than it was in 1957. The United States has won so many Nobel Prizes — far more than every other country, including China — not only because of generous funding but also because of an intellectual culture that encourages and rewards innovation and risk-taking, and because we have attracted gifted researchers from all over the world.
In following our values and principles, we must create a community with a culture that welcomes diverse perspectives and supports constructive debate about how values and science are intertwined. Remember the Tuskegee experiment led many African Americans to develop a lingering, deep mistrust of public science officials and vaccines.
Source: Stephen Greenblatt New York Times
