The Trump administration is attacking academia because it threatens existing power structures and dominant elites. This is seen most clearly when it comes to Palestine.
Ignorance is usually thought of as the passive obverse to knowledge,
the darkness retreating before the spread of Enlightenment.
But . . .
Imagine an ignorance that resists.
Imagine an ignorance that fights back.
Imagine an ignorance militant, aggressive, not to be intimidated,
an ignorance that is active, dynamic, that refuses to go quietly—
not at all confined to the illiterate and uneducated but propagated
at the highest levels of the land, indeed presenting itself unblushingly
as knowledge.
– Charles Mills, “White Ignorance”
It’s common nowadays for academics to say that they are in the business of “knowledge production.” That way of putting things can sometimes sound a bit pretentious, since it suggests that we are laboring on the assembly line, manufacturing essential intellectual goods. But the service of providing knowledge to a wider public in the United States has never seemed more necessary — and more threatened. That is largely because knowledge production is being met by the Trump administration with an active attempt to produce ignorance, in a number of domains, in what may be the severest ever clampdown on universities in American history.
Especially in political contexts, ignorance can be understood not just as the absence of knowledge, but as the product of an active process of suppressing and discrediting knowledge that threatens existing power structures and dominant elites. Results in many areas of academic research undermine the right-wing ideology of the current US administration, including scientific research on climate change, vaccine safety, environmental protection, and alternative energy sources, and historical scholarship on race and gender, to name a few, and that goes a long way to explain the current assault on universities.
Recent academic work on Palestine falls squarely in this category, which is why it is in the crosshairs of the federal government and has been specifically targeted in recent months. That was clearly a major focus of the infamous Department of Education letter to Columbia University, of March 13, 2025, which singled out the Department of Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies, and demanded that it be placed in academic receivership for a minimum of five years. It was also evident in Harvard University’s panicked response to the Trump administration, when it dismissed the director and associate director of its Center for Middle Eastern Studies without citing any justification, since it was a “personnel matter.”
These institutions are being targeted to make examples of them primarily because they’ve dared to teach the truth about Palestine. It was all right as long as knowledge was confined to the ivied halls and dusty libraries, but once it sparked a full-fledged student movement and spread to unions, non-governmental organizations, church leaders, rabbis, and other sectors of society, something had to be done. So what the federal government is trying to do now is nothing less than the complete suppression of knowledge about Palestine. The imposition of ignorance in this area has three aspects to it: undermining the credibility of academic researchers, suppressing and denying the results of their research, and falsely accusing the student movement fueled by this research of antisemitism. (more...)
Palestine and the production of ignorance
