Sometimes, you have to know when to take inspiration from China. In 2009, we met Ding Hong in Beijing, a 39-year-old physicist who had just settled into a brand-new laboratory at the Institute of Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Ding had just come back from the United States, where he had gone in 1990, as a student disillusioned by the Tiananmen Square massacre. Since then, he became an American citizen, started a family, and secured a tenured position in the physics department of Boston College, in Massachusetts.
What could have possibly driven him to leave this dream life? A decision by the US National Science Foundation, which funded his research at Boston College, to suspend his funding as part of cost-cutting measures. The financial crisis had just struck. Hong Kong had made the young physicist some job offers, Boston College had put forward counter-offers, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences had outbid them. "Overall, in terms of research and funding, it was the best offer," Ding told us back then. "Here, I can focus on my fundamental scientific work."
Sixteen years later, it is not the financial crisis that has sparked panic in American universities and research centers, but an ideological revolution, driven relentlessly by the Trump administration and its bad genius, Elon Musk. Budgets were slashed overnight. Prestigious institutions face the threat of losing hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding if they do not comply with political demands, which run counter to their ethics.
Some have anticipated the changes, laying off staff and giving up on recruiting. Foreign students who protest have been arrested in the streets by plainclothes police officers. Wise professors have begun to leave their usual phones or computers behind when traveling abroad, for fear of having to submit them to immigration authorities upon their return. Academic freedom is under attack.
'Help our colleagues over there'
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