The Trump administration’s assault on America’s universities by cutting billions of dollars of federal support for scientific and medical research has called up from somewhere deep in my memory the phrase “duck and cover.” These were words drilled into American schoolchildren in the 1950s. We heard them on television, where they accompanied a cartoon about a wise turtle named Bert who withdrew into his shell at any sign of danger. In class, when our teachers gave the order, we were instructed to follow Bert’s example by diving under our desks and covering our necks. These actions were meant to protect us from the nuclear attack that could come, we were told, at any time. Though even in elementary school most of us intuited that there was something futile in these attempts to shield ourselves from destruction, we dutifully went through the motions. How else could we deal with the anxiety caused by the menace?
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. According to the latest annual Nature Index, which tracks research institutions by their contributions to leading science journals, the single remaining U.S. institution among the top 10 is Harvard, in second place, far behind the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The others are:
The University of Science and Technology of China
Zhejiang University
Peking University
The University of Chinese Academy of Sciences
Tsinghua University
Nanjing University
Germany’s Max Planck Society
Shanghai Jiao Tong University
A decade ago, C.A.S. was the only Chinese institution to figure in the top 10. Now eight of the 10 leaders are in China. If this does not constitute a Sputnik moment, it is hard to imagine what would.
But if America’s response to Sputnik reflected a nation united in its commitment to science and determined to invest in the country’s intellectual potential, we see in our response to China today a bitterly divided, disoriented America. We are currently governed by a leader indifferent to scientific consensus if it contradicts his political or economic interests, hostile to immigrants and intent on crippling the research universities that embody our collective hope for the future. The menace now is within. And with very few exceptions, 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 trained physicists, chemists, mathematicians, aerospace engineers, electrical engineers, material scientists and a host of other experts in STEM fields, and the government grasped that to get them would take a massive infusion of money pumped into schools and universities: roughly $1 billion, the equivalent of more than $11 billion today.
From the start, this government investment in education wasn’t free of ideological interest. It was fueled by fear — fear of the Russians, fear of the atomic bomb, fear of falling behind in the “space race” — and intended to influence curricula. Not, to be sure, in the catastrophic manner of the Soviet Union, where Trofim Lysenko’s theories of genetics set back Soviet biology for decades, but rather by strengthening science departments across the country.