FRIDAY: "There's a lot of madness in the air!"

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2025

Is something being withheld? "Something we were withholding made us weak?"

Below, you see part of Michelle Goldberg's new column for the New York times.  She claims that Donald J. Trump, and some of those around him, want to bring the whole of academia crashing to the ground.

It almost sounds like the way Samson is said to have pulled the pillars of the temple down. For the record, Samson was once diagnosed, though only in a theoretical way, as suffering from antisocial personality disorder. 

For the BBC's account, just click here.

At any rate, here's part of Goldberg's column, in which she says "madness" seems to be general over this failing nation:

Trump Wants to Destroy All Academia, Not Just the Woke Parts

In 2021, JD Vance gave a speech to the National Conservatism Conference, a gathering of Trumpist thinkers and politicians, titled “The Universities Are the Enemy.” It contained the usual complaints about critical race theory and gender ideology, but it went much further, arguing for a frontal attack on the power and prestige of higher education writ large...

[...]

...The striking thing about Vance’s speech was its deep hostility to the entire academic enterprise, not just the so-called woke parts. He wasn’t talking about making more room for right-wing ideas in universities or even dreaming of taking them over. He wanted to destroy it all.

And now he’s part of a government taking steps to do just that. I’ve written about Donald Trump’s plan to crush the academic left, but it increasingly looks as though he and his allies are targeting academia more broadly, including the hard sciences that have long enjoyed bipartisan support. “I think the extremely strong desire is to just punish universities however possible,” Kevin Carey, the director of the education policy program at New America, a public policy think tank, told me. “It’s not based on any kind of coherent policy agenda. It’s just a desire to inflict pain.”

Goldberg's specific assessments could be right, though of course they could always be wrong. That said, in her assessment, Trump and Vance "want to destroy it all." 

(Carey says there's nothing coherent about it. "It’s just a desire to inflict pain.”)

In Goldberg's view, Trump and Vance have a bad idea. We're asking you to think about the key word she employs later in her column:

...The post-World War II system of government-funded research universities has fueled American scientific and technological dominance, but our continued pre-eminence is in no way assured.

China, after all, continues to invest strongly in its universities. “Part of our decline as a culture and economy would be our disinvestment in higher education,” said Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan University. “Maybe we’ll just invest in World Wrestling, but I don’t think that’s going to mean that other countries and other cultures won’t continue to invest in the capacity of their citizens to learn in such a way as to create new modes of living, new modes of fighting disease, new modes of creating companies.” To torch America’s advantage in these realms seems like madness.

But there’s a lot of madness in the air these days. In December, Max Eden of the American Enterprise Institute published an article about how Linda McMahon, the former World Wrestling Entertainment chief executive whom Trump nominated to be secretary of education, could give the “college cartel” the “body slamming they deserve.” ...

And so on from there.

"There’s a lot of madness in the air these days," Goldberg says. At this site we strongly agree. That said, the columnist seems to be speaking colloquially. This is the question we'd ask:

If you see so much colloquial madness all around you, has it ever crossed your mind that you may be looking at some form of clinical "madness?" Might it help us understand what's happening if you simply said so?

"Madness" isn't a clinical term, but neither is "avoidance." Is something being withheld in columns like this? Might it be keeping us weak?

In Frost's poem, something eventually happened. Eventually, it came to this:

...we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender

It was ourselves we were withholding! Could that be what we're doing today, as we refuse to speak about what's sitting right there before us?