Of Academics and Journalists who turned silent

You will have heard about courageous Harvard University withstanding President Trump’s attempt at curtailing the academic freedom that once Made America Great. And you will have read about shameful Columbia University giving in to his censorious orders. But you might not know what effects the Trump Administration’s war on “wokeness” is having on academic institutions, public libraries and local media where there isn’t big money involved, less attention given and little power to resist; that is in small-town-America where the agents from Immigration Patrol (ICE) visit the local college or the place where immigrants hang out – and nobody knows what really happened, with hearsay making its frightening round. This story is about the people wo did not respond to my request for a chat or an interview during my travels through the “flyover country” and about what could have motivated them to remain silent. 

I had met – let’s call her – Anna when working in an East African country a few years ago. She was a young and smart master student of Psychology at one of the best African Universities destined to go places. When I heard that she was doing her PhD at a university in the state of Mississippi, I called her to meet up. But Anna’s first response to my request was unusually guarded. She would think about it and ask if some co-students and lecturers wanted to talk to me. In the end, they would not, and she was afraid to continue our exchange via whatsapp. 

It emerged that Anna’s university had advised students not to leave the country, because they might not be able to come back again; to not talk to journalists or outsiders, because that might get them and the institution into trouble. Among themselves students did no longer communicate important issues via social media but only from person to person since they had heard that there were “spies on campus” informing ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) to have them deported. 

Anna is just one of 1.1 million foreign students enrolled in the US today. According to “The Atlantic” they contribute 44 billion Dollars to the US economy supporting 378.000 jobs over the last academic year. But this fear of being deported is also the long-term effect of the now Vice-President JD Vance having called universities “very hostile institutions” in 2021, which needed “to be attacked aggressively”.  

Anna’s fears might have been partly based on rumours, but they served their purpose to cow students and academic staff into silence and submission; as I found out when contacting professors and lecturers of social science at some universities in the American South to talk to me about history, politics, religion and Donald Trump’s education policies. Nobody replied to my email-requests, not even writing back that they were too busy. 

When I covered the United States in the early 90s nobody refused the interview request of a German correspondent. Everybody wanted to talk to me and proudly explain their country to the foreigner. When I travelled through the back country Europe was far away for most people, but they still asked questions about the world out there, be it about the fall of the Berlin Wall or a crisis in the Middle East. At that time there was some fear that Japan would swamp the country with cheaper computers and better cars, but this did not cloud people’s political judgements at home or poison international relations.

In the spring of 2025, it was different. Trump voters kept explaining to me why some drastic action was needed to lead America back to greatness and confront China. Yet many journalists and academics seemed to have gone underground with their opinions on what has happened to America.  

There was the editor of a West-Virginian newspaper who neither answered the phone nor email requests. The same with the Religion Correspondent of a paper in Nashville or a columnist of a local rag in Georgia. There was the school intendant who eloquently wrote about the disadvantages of home schooling but would not talk to me about education policies.

There were the librarians in America’s wonderful and well-equipped system of public libraries who excused themselves for very understandable reasons, some of them being braver than others. 

Of course, I found members from the professional classes who opened their hearts to me in private conversations tinged by despair or open hostility to Donald Trump and his acolytes. “What”, a friend in Washington D.C. had said to me, “you are travelling to Dumbfuckistan”, when he heard about my planned route through the back country. He had tried to excuse first-time Trump voters in 2016, but for those routing for him again in 2024, he could only feel deep disgust. “I am fucking angry that Trump has been dominating my life for ten years now”, said another friend in Atlanta. But these were people in retirement who could express their opinions and anger freely without fears of retribution.  

And then there were the academics at the “enemy institutions”, the liberal-left administrators of “wokeness” and DEI programs in universities as Republicans would see them. They just did not want to talk to me. I could call, send emails or confront them in the hallways of their departments of history or social science. They had no time, showed no interest, or pretended to have no knowledge when I asked them directly questions about culture and politics. 

Going through the biographies of academic staff of some southern universities I could see the point of conservative critics that accidental expertise about marginal issues seemed to have taken the place of more traditional subjects. It was indeed difficult to find an expert for my more mundane questions - not on Buddhism in Bhutan but on Southern Politics - who then would not answer my call anyway. 

Since I could not ask them about the reasons for their silence I have to speculate. Was it fear to get into trouble with an equally scared leadership of their university? Or shame to discuss what has happened to their country from the perspective of a Democrat-voting liberal, in a place they no longer understood? Has academic life become so hectic and challenging that there is no more time to meet a curious visitor? Or is it the shock about the oldest modern democracy suddenly undergoing an Orwellian Scenario? Are these academics too busy, rereading “1984” and imagining themselves no longer in Tennessee or Mississippi but in “Oceania” trying to figure out what they should do in the role of the novel’s main protagonist Winston Smith?

I don’t know, and I wonder if they do. Yet to me the silence of those academics and journalists serves as a warning. Hence, we should not be looking at fear in America today assuming that a similar scenario couldn’t unfold in Europe tomorrow as well - and again. Would our academics and journalists be more courageous? Maybe it’s us Europeans who should be reading Sinclair Lewis’ dystopian novel “It can’t happen here” in which the American author was warning his countrymen and women in the mid-30s to not copy the European fascisms of the day.