He said he would “drain the swamp.” Instead, he is draining America of the best brains in the world, the brains that have kept us on the forefront of technology, science, medicine, the arts, economics, you name it.
But isn’t that what Trump wanted? In his rage at the intellectual elite, the “in crowd” he couldn’t buy his way into, the group that rejected him, Trump has curtailed funding for critical research, revoked visas for premier foreign students, and threatened stellar universities who refuse to capitulate to his illegal demands.
The result? Just look at Harvard’s international students, arguably the best and brightest in the world. Not only do the students contribute financially by paying far more in tuition than their American counterparts, but many of them stay in the U.S., contributing to major breakthroughs in critical fields, such as medicine and artificial intelligence, quantum mechanics and robotics. These are fields where America has tough competitors around the world, such as China and Russia.
And now these students are being actively recruited by those tough competitors. And the students are weighing seriously their options to take their money and their brains out of the U.S.
Losing foreign students is not the only damage Trump’s policies are effecting. American scientists who have lost their government funding and are concerned about academic restrictions and instability in the U.S. are being wooed by foreign governments. Canada, France, and Australia are launching initiatives to attract American scientists with funding and academic freedom. American scientists are being offered competitive salaries and relocation packages.
Perhaps the Trump Administration should take a lesson from China’s Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, when the intellectual elite were targeted. Schools and universities were closed, books were burned, art was destroyed, libraries were attacked. A generation of Chinese grew up without an education. China has yet to fully recover from the damage that was caused by the Cultural Revolution more than 50 years ago.
Are we headed for a cultural revolution in America?