College Educated? You’re Needed
By
Leonard Zwelling
A great deal has been made of the fact that the traditional Democratic-voting blue collar workers of America switched their support to Donald Trump in 2024. Less has been made of the majority of the college-educated who voted for Ms. Harris. Yes, there are many college-educated people who voted for Donald Trump, but most did not.
Since the election and even before, the “elite” of academia have made fools of themselves handling demonstrations on their campuses and justifying their actions (or inactions) before Congress. When a significant portion of the student body cannot make it to class for fear of being hassled (the Jews), something is wrong with the administrators on campus and many did nothing to rectify this situation.
When this poor performance is combined with the arrogance of the Hillary Clinton campaign of 2016 and a general mistrust of science that emerged from the manner in which the country’s health leadership handled the Covid pandemic, it has not been a good time for the highly educated. To be blunt, we look like ninnies. We kept schools closed during Covid to the detriment of our children. We made up masking and distancing rules during the pandemic. And, we geniuses still don’t know where the virus came from, although you have to admit the geniuses in China at the Wuhan Institute of Virology are the likely source.
Now, it seems, the heart of American intellectual excellence is under attack by the Trump Administration to the glee of red state America. This is too bad because American greatness depends on the excellence of our education and research AND the exemplary labor of our blue-collar workers who actually build things. Both matter. We should not be pitted against one another as we are by the MAGA crowd.
Nonetheless, American higher education is under siege. Grant funds are being cut stopping some research in its tracks. Research animals are being euthanized as the source of their food is being cut off. That indirect cost rate you hear about pays for that food and the air conditioning and the lights. Cutting that rate from the mid-60s to 15% will cost academic research institutions millions of dollars.
Everywhere you turn, the war on science and knowledge grows. Mr. Trump is thriving on it. Yes, Harvard has a $50 billion endowment, but the vast majority of that money is spoken for and not available to supplant what the government is taking away. If Mr. Trump also revokes the tax-exempt status of these places, they may have to halt huge numbers of research projects.
Here at Duke, where we are spending the weekend for Dr. Kleinerman’s Medical Alumni Council meeting, there is real concern that major projects investigating all aspects of human disease and the development of new diagnostics and treatments will be interrupted. The time is now for all alumni who believe in their own educations and the education, research, clinical, and community involvement missions of their alma maters to reach deep into their wallets, IRA’s, and portfolios to help support American higher education.
What is at stake at colleges, universities, and all graduate level institutions is the future of American excellence. The country cannot afford to lose an entire generation of college-educated professionals, yet that is exactly what the Trump Administration is threatening to do. Although all of this will be fought out in court, funds to major universities are already being withheld by the government. The NIH, the major funder of biomedical research, is under attack inside and out—intramurally and extramurally.
It is not likely that philanthropy can offset all of the financial losses, but it will go a long way to allowing institutions to maintain strategically-critical programs like many here at Duke. If you care about the education you got, now is the time to demonstrate that. Make a contribution of any kind. It’s not so much the amount that counts, it’s the degree of participation of all graduates.
Give what you can.
