Ideology’s assault
Saikat Majumdar | 03 January 2024 | The Telegraph
Donald Trump has declared that if he claims the White House this year, he will create an “American Academy”. He will fund it by raising “billions and billions of dollars” from “taxing, fining and suing excessively large private university endowments” to “compete directly” with “very costly” four-year universities. The vicious ideological wars around the Israel-Palestine conflict and their resonant echoes through legislatures, endowment trusts and university leadership are Trump’s immediate context but he has made no secret of the fact that his plan behind this American Academy is to create an antidote to ‘woke’ universities driven by a political awareness foregrounded by the humanities and the social sciences.
With the world’s most powerful cloud computing investors waiting predatorily to monetise the next big leap in the development of Artificial Intelligence and teachers in high schools and colleges struggling with a flood of ChatGPT-aided student work, the future of the humanities, along with….