Donald Trump vs. Academia: A War on Science or a Loss of Trust?

Donald Trump at Princeton lectures to Karl Marx, Che Guevara, and Noam Chomsky. Image source: The Moscow Times

What determines the general public’s trust in science? This question is more complicated than it might at first seem. For decades, we assumed that a higher level of education would naturally lead to greater trust in science. But data from social science research now show that trust depends not so much on one’s knowledge as on one’s values and on how those values relate to the values held by scientists. For example, when a research topic becomes politicized, people stop seeing science as impartial. They perceive (or believe—and in this case the difference is irrelevant) that scientists are biased, and trust collapses.

Mis-education?

According to the Pew Research Center, Americans—regardless of political affiliation—believe that higher education in the U.S. is heading in the wrong direction. Not only Republicans (77%) but also a majority of Democrats (65%) share this view (since 2020 the percentage among Democrats has increased by five points). People are concerned that campuses are no longer true marketplaces of ideas and free expression, but have been captured by a single mode of thought, with activism displacing open inquiry and debate. Skeptical observers see academics as activists fighting for their political goals rather than impartial experts—so they cannot and will not trust them.

This perception has a real basis. The political distribution of faculty is strikingly uneven: the ratio of Democrats to Republicans among university professors ranges from 2:1 in engineering departments to nearly 100% in sociology and the humanities—for example, a staggering 98:1 in the humanities at Cornell University. The loudest voices in academia more and more often belong not merely to the political left, but to the far left. The percentage of radicals on university campuses is extraordinarily high: 40% of professors identify themselves as Marxists, radicals, socialists, or activists. Of course, academia is not an elected body, and we should not demand that it mirror the political spectrum of society. But such massive one-sidedness is concerning: surveys show that American society is generally centrist, with only about 10% radicals on each end of the political spectrum. Society no longer recognizes itself in academia, which has become an intellectual monoculture, apparent to the naked eye. In contentious fields—from bioethics to geopolitics—university courses present a strikingly uniform ideological narrative, failing to represent the full range of viewpoints. A major California study that used machine learning to analyze a vast database of course curricula showed that controversial topics, such as the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, abortion, and racial bias in the criminal justice system, are taught across universities in nearly identical ways, from an uber-progressive perspective. The counterargument is simply absent; students are not taught the complex, multifaceted nature of these issues but are instead offered a single, narrow political ideology.

This imbalance of beliefs and the politicization of education and science have existed for so long and have advanced so far that they have produced their own bureaucratic structures. Diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, created with good intentions, have turned into vast administrative machines that impose new forms of discrimination, promote dogmatism, and suppress open discussion—all under the banner of “social justice.” Organizations like Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression—FIRE—which defend free speech, give unsatisfactory ratings to most American universities. Their politicization has become so obvious that ever-wider segments of the public can see it—and lose trust.

Born in the USSR

I was born and raised in the USSR. One shared memory among people of my generation is stories about people who vanished from photographs—in family albums, textbooks, archives, and encyclopedias—and vanished from life. We heard these stories from our family members, and later—after Perestroika—from books documenting the history of Stalinist times.

In 2021, I had a strange sense of déjà vu. In my role as an editor of a chemistry journal, I sent a scientific paper—research on materials for solar energy—out for peer review. The reviewers’ comments were mostly routine, except for one that stunned me: “The article itself is good,” it said, “but the authors should avoid using the term ‘Shockley–Queisser limit.’ William Shockley held racist views, and we should not cite the names of such people.” The reviewer cited this viewpoint to support his criticism.

The suggestion to erase a widely accepted technical term because of the personal beliefs of the scientist whose name it bears unleashed a flood of memories from my Soviet childhood. It was the same impulse: to cleanse the past so that it conforms to the moral demands of the present, to rewrite history in accordance with the ruling ideology, to make every human activity—science included—serve the overarching political goal. That was when I realized I could no longer ignore what was happening. I began to write publicly about the politicization of science. And the reaction was swift. Some colleagues attempted to ostracize me; others tried to harm my career. But along with hostility came something unexpected: hundreds of messages from scientists in different fields who felt the same concern as me but were afraid to speak out. That was when I understood that I was not alone.

I am fully aware that one person or even a group of people cannot accomplish very much through personal action alone. But I refuse to act against my own convictions. Recently, I severed my professional relationship with one of the world’s largest and most important publishers, Springer Nature Publishing Group, because it now openly injects critical social justice into publication process. For example, the publisher encourages authors to take demographic characteristics into account when citing research, openly censors undesirable research findings, and even selects reviewers based on gender and race. The mission of publishing rigorous scientific work has been displaced by social activism, and I do not want to participate in this.

In Search of Tomorrow

I am a research chemist, and I love my work in the laboratory; I came to science for that, not for the struggle for justice. Slogans and activism are not my milieu. My work has always been tied to the beauty of understanding the world, expanding our knowledge of molecules and energy, and teaching students. I would like to return to the laboratory and focus solely on chemistry. But silence has consequences. The crisis in academia (English version here) has grown too deep to ignore. Some advocate reforming universities from within; others believe universities are too compromised to be saved and must be rebuilt from scratch. And I truly do not know whether the system can be “healed”; this conflict tears me apart. I dislike revolutions, but I do not yet see a sincere desire for reform within out universities or professional organizations.

And yet I refuse to give in to despair. I act not out of anger but out of necessity, guided by a simple truth that applies both to science and to civic life: if you don’t try, you have already lost.

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This essay, based on my interview conducted and summarized by Alexandra Borissova Saleh, was originally published in The Moscow Times on November 29, 2025 in Russian. The translation was prepared with help of ChatGPT. Jay Tanzman assisted with editing.