Welcome to the Resistance

You signed up to be a scientist, to go to college, to work in a university. You didn't join the fight against authoritarian malfeasance. But here we are, together.

We were just minding our own business. Doing our science, teaching students about how the world works, training researchers, publishing peer-reviewed research, securing federal support for our investigations.

Science has always been political, but in these United States, most of us had the latitude to exist as scientists and investigate research with the purpose of advancing knowledge and maybe even doing some good for people. Even those of us who were working in areas that brought us into conflict with monied interests and grifters (such as climate change, public health, evolution) could have made the choice to stay above the fray, keep our noses down, and do the work.

But now, they’re coming for all of us, and all of our colleagues across the disciplines, because, well, that’s a complicated situation but education, facts, scholarship, and science are enemies of the state in an authoritarian regime. Because education and research are the routes to liberation¹, and they’re working to subjugate us, then we’ve got a target on our backs simply because we are teaching and researchers.

They are saying that universities are the enemy, and they have a detailed plan about how to dismantle us, which is well underway. Because these people are controlling the White House, both branches of Legislature, and the Supreme Court, when they make us their enemy, this isn’t something we can ignore (any longer).

To be clear: Just by being who we are, they have declared us as an enemy, and our ability to persist relies on our capacity to fight against their attacks on our institutions and our people. I don’t want to be a fightey guy, I would prefer to just doing my work in the field, in collections, in the lab, and train students for success. But I want my students to have a future ahead of them, and I want my results to mean something for the world in the future. So that means I’ve got to advocate. That means you have to advocate and resist, because we are all in this mess together. We can’t count on our institutions to do the work on our behalf. It’s on us.

How do we go about defending science and our people in a time of such urgency? The path forward for us is clear. It turns out that many people in our community have had the experience of being under attack for merely existing. Ask any gay person who survived the Reagan era, a person who might look vaguely from the middle east in the aftermath of 9/11, or literally anybody anytime anywhere in the US who is Black. There are people in our communities who are absolute pros at defending their right to merely exist. What everybody in science and universities are experiencing now is what these folks have been living under for their entire lives. Some have managed to persist, and even thrive, while being the target of discrimination and persecution.

You know all that talk about being “allies” in DEI space? Like it or not, whether or not you want to be, we’re all allies because now we’re all being targeted. If you’re looking to learn what it takes to be effective at this moment, then you can literally look up what it means to be a responsive and reflexive ally.

There already is the infrastructure there to respond to these attacks. Over the decades, this work has been underfunded, reliant on soft money, undervalued by institutional power, and placed on the margins. The action to fight against these federal attacks is not to invent our own apparatus from scratch, but to join up with the people who we should have been fighting alongside all these years. We don’t need to be the leaders of this movement to resistant against the current federal government, we need to find the people among us who have already been leading this work and give them a boost. Maybe stop looking in the Ivy League for guidance and look where these people have been doing the work all along.

1. If this sounds like a radical idea rather than just a statement of fact, get thyself to some Friere, or some bell hooks.