Maybe it's time to move to Europe or China
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EDIT: For people wondering why I think it's worse in Europe, it's because in Europe the ruling class and the universities are on the same side. And when I say Europe, I mean UK, France and Germany.
If you truly believe that the whole world is "just as bad" as this, then you are unimaginably far to the right.
Or Dutch professors openly criticizing the plans by the right-wing government (which just fell) as being damaging, unproductive amd sometimes unconstitutional?
The only examples I see are the opposite of what you say. Can you name any examples in Germany, Sweden, Norway or Holland? (Those are the countries that I'm confident talking about at least)
Oh, so I can freely go up against the German government's policies and have my career in academia unaffected and keep my government funding?
I lived in Germany and don't remember people or organisations ever being able to break government rules with no consequences (unless they had high friends in politics).
Something smells here.
I lived in Germany and the moment you don't do what the government says you get the full shaft. Nobody let's you rebel against the government with no consequences, not in US, not in Germany, not in UK, nowhere.
People painting Germany like a bastion of free speech are coping hard. Only if you consider free speech doing and saying only what the government says.
If you're fully aligned, there's no telling what would happen if you weren't, and you can't use "nothing happens" as evidence that nothing would happen - you're always allowed to share the opinions of whoever funds you.
If Germany got a right-wing government on the federal level, I expect to see either funding being slashed or universities adjusting their positions.
People here argued that the US is fascist because in academia you can't get away with breaking governments rules getting you defunded and pointing at Germany for being superior in this regard.
So then I asked for proof that in other countries you can get away in academia with breaking the government's rules and not get defunded. It really is that simple.
However, in this case, it's quite hard to argue that Terrence Tao had anything to do with antisemitism or anything against Trump's policies. Actually I don't think Terrence Tao did anything that Trump cared about. This isn't really a free speech issue, it's more like some fundamental instability in the US, and maybe the US government is running out on money and trying to cut down on research expenditure using excuses.
What about Christian Drosten who criticized a lot of the Corona decisions, Jan Boehmermann who is very critical but still employed by state-financed TV. Fridays for Future?
I'm sure the German government will react with much more leniency than the US.
Sounds like a feature, not a bug.
> And when I say Europe, I mean UK, France and Germany.
Europe is much larger and more diverse than those three countries. Scandinavia for example consistently top the list in most well-being statistics.
It's never been any different, all the way back to when Germans or Irish or whoever were the 'demonized immigrants'. This is what made America great. Anytime we want it, those conditions can return. It was no illusion.
Other countries like the way the US used to be 15 years ago? Is your argument really "other people don't have rights, therefore we shouldn't either"?
It’s researchers who are not at the top of their fields who will have a much harder time leaving America to find research positions, since academic positions and funding haven’t been easy to obtain in places like Canada, Europe, Australia, and Japan for at least two decades.
What will most likely be the case is that scientific careers will be halted temporarily or permanently from these funding cuts. Graduate admissions are harder than ever now, it’s harder to find a research position, and I can’t imagine how much more difficult tenure will be to obtain if professors can’t fundraise and publish. Industry isn’t always an option, either. A lot of researcher’s careers will face major setbacks, some unrecoverable, all due to the capriciousness of our rulers.
AFAICT, no German academic institutions have lost funding as a result of the student's protests. Those protests were stopped, police action etc., but no funding change to the academic institutions.
In fairness, it can be either, and which it is depends if in the specific case it's more accurate to phrase it as "the ruling classes are on the side of the universities" (good) or as "the universities are on the side of the ruling class" (bad).
It's silly to say that EU is better jut because people don't see the government interfere with universities in the EU, when EU universities would never go against the central government to begin with, because that's where all their money comes from. Why would you bite the hand that feeds you?
Meanwhile universities like Harvard have so much private money they can publicly tell Trump to shove it. EU universities don't have this privilege so they exercise a degree of self censorship based on how the government tells them to dance.
For example the anti-swastika or anti-cult laws, which I am not against, it's just a different approach to something like this happening
In the abstract. In actual practice, it's not clear, and you could even build quite a strong case for the opposite view. "Cancellation" over mere words has been commonplace for over ten years, and is much more common to the US than to Europe. And as for laws... What just happened to Tao and UCLA has, to the best of my knowledge, never taken place in Europe in recent decades.
What did he criticize? Did he ever criticize all the crimes due to illegal migrants? Of course not because that's not allowed by the state.
He is just a government mouthpiece acting like a jester to give people the illusion that the government allows criticism, but he's not a proper critic of the government, as those are banned.