Tom Pepinsky

Category: Teaching

  • Science and International Studies are the Foundation of American Power

    The second Donald Trump administration has targeted science and international studies for devastating cuts in financing, coupled with unprecedented levels of ideological screening of scientific and educational activities. Led by Elon Musk, whose illegal access of private data and financial infrastructure is itself a shocking threat to national security, this lawless exercise of power by team of inexperienced private individuals without any security clearance whatsoever threatens to overturn a century of U.S. preeminence in science and higher education. Recent press coverage has begun to identify the depths of Musk’s threat to national security, and elected officials have begun to sound the alarm about the blatant illegality of these and other actions taken in Donald Trump’s name.

    These pieces focus on administrative law, legal process, and the separation of powers. But lost in this discussion are the concrete risks to the United States national security that would follow from these plans to cut funding for basic and applied science, monitor scientific research for politically incorrect speech, and gut core higher education funding mechanisms for topics like international and area studies. These programs were created in order to support U.S. national interests, and cutting them—even if doing so were fully legal—would amount to a full surrender of the United States to aspiring strategic competitors around the world.

    Great Powers Build Science and Education. Declining Powers Cut It

    First, the facts. There has never been a global power in the history of the world that did not invest public funds heavily in science and international studies through higher education. That is because every great power has understood the strategic value of higher education for creating a flexible knowledge base that can be deployed to confront unpredictable world events with national security implications. This is true of Germany before the wars, of the Soviet Union during the Cold War, of the UK during the 20th century, and the People’s Republic of China today. Funding to science and international studies is not an indulgence to support cozy academic communities and hifalutin theory work. Rather, it is a concrete way to commit public funds to encourage innovation, translational research, and deep knowledge building that creates repositories of expertise that every U.S. administration since Truman has recognized as foundational for U.S. national power.

    Great powers achieve these goals through advanced teaching and basic and applied research. In some fields, it means bench science and lab work. In others, it means language study, cultural immersion, and historical expertise. It means teaching students to equip them with the factual knowledge and critical thinking required to confront unprecedented challenges. Research and teaching is always done—always and everywhere—with an eye towards the public returns to public investment.

    At present, and for the past 50 years, the United States has had no peer competitor in this space. U.S. higher education supports the largest and most productive scientific communities in the world, the most comprehensive international studies programs in the world, and robust intellectual environments characterized by free speech, open criticism, and minimal political oversight.

    No one should ignore the outstanding scientific research conducted in other countries, nor the deep area expertise found in other national educational systems. And no one should downplay the many cases of U.S. administrations of using science and area studies knowledge to pursue disastrous foreign policy choices, and to support blatantly immoral and illegal military and political strategies. The point, rather, is that U.S. national power flows from its unparalleled intellectual and scientific environment.

    By this, I don’t mean just soft power (although that is also essential to U.S. preeminence). I mean specifically that the ability to design novel technical and military solutions to emerging security risks, to flexibly anticipate the consequences of changing international conditions, and to plan around a long-term perspective of U.S. national interest requires a scientific and intellectual community that is free to create, to innovate, to theorize, and to learn. No country in the modern world has developed these capacities without robust public-private partnerships and dedicated public funding.

    The U.S. education and scientific community has no equal in this regard. We know this by revealed preference: every country in the world that aspires to improve its international standing recognizes that the United States is their aspirational comparison. We also know that the global market for U.S.-trained scientists and teachers is robust; that market, fairly or unfairly, is not symmetric. What holds back world powers like the People’s Republic of China back is their inability to cultivate an environment of intellectual openness. From the PRC to Nazi Germany, when politicians politicize higher education, science suffers, and with it, national security.

    Knowledge is Hard Power

    The best evidence of the value of science, of international and area studies, and of higher education more generally for supporting U.S. national interests comes from the symbiotic relationship between the U.S. defense and higher education sectors. Again, there is nothing usual about this arrangement: the same is true for defense and higher education in every global or regional power in the world (PRC, Germany, France, the UK, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Russia, Singapore, Australia… there is no exception).

    The close relations between defense and higher education/science are not just about producing scientific and technological innovation, things like stealth technology, drones, cyberwarfare capabilities, and so on. It also extends to basic science, social science and history, and the humanities and arts. Every U.S. service academy offers majors in fields like English, Foreign Area Studies, and Sociology. That is because the academies that train future defense leaders recognize the value of comprehensive, holistic education. Leaders are not just engineers: they are thinkers, creators, and builders.

    The same is true for the cooperative relationship between defense and higher education in the thousands of public and private institutions of higher education around the country. To take one obvious example, every senior military officer in the United States will attest that robust area knowledge is essential for assuring military superiority over our peer competitors. Those who have led missions overseas will readily attest that they both desire and value expertise in social science and regional studies.

    Of course, reckoning with the history of U.S. funding for science and international studies can be uncomfortable for some corners of U.S. higher education. This is especially so when it comes to the role of the Department of Defense (and the defense industry more generally), whose interests are often not aligned with those of individual researchers. There is a history of resistance to ROTC programs on certain campuses. But even those college and university professors who are vocal critics of the U.S. foreign policy and military adventurism invariably welcome ROTC students into their courses with open arms. Almost without exception, they prefer to teach future officers, because they recognize the university’s solemn responsibility to educate future military leaders on how to act with wisdom, reason, and ethics. For their part, ROTC students, Foreign Area Officers, and other career military who pass through U.S. college and universities are some of the most motivated, committed, and serious students—and their careers are transformed by the experience.

    Crippling science, area studies, and higher education more generally by subordinating it to the narrow political calculations of unaccountable actors is a recipe for defeat. Rather than looking to Vichy Twitter for uninformed commentary and vapid anti-intellectualism, our elected officials should look to defense and university leaders to understand how higher education supports U.S. national interests.

    Robust Oversight Exists, But Anti-Science Activists Are Ignorant

    One argument commonly invoked anti-science and anti-education activists is that public investments in higher education, science, and international studies are wasteful. This implies that public oversight and scrutiny over scientific research and public funding is needed. Such arguments betray the basic ignorance of those who make them, about the organization of public funding for science and higher education in the U.S. Federal agencies are governed by strong regulatory frameworks that manage how funds are allocated, how decisions are made, and how public benefit is measured. It is a very good idea to review these frameworks, to open them to public discussion, and to invite critical commentary from stakeholders and taxpayers. But to pretend that such oversight does not exist is ignorant and stupid.

    As a consequence, expending bureaucratic energy to cancel National Science Foundation grants that say the word “diverse” in them is not just foolhardy and wasteful. It is defeatist. It is declinist. It is exactly what the U.S.’s lagging competitors currently do—the true U.S. advantage over aspiring world powers is specifically that our government does not make scientific research conditional on political correctness as determined by unelected political appointees. As the case of German universities during and after Nazi rule demonstrates, the effects of public funding cuts and ideological screening will be felt for decades to come. Canceling scientific research in the name of political correctness is what people who wish to surrender strategic dominance to foreign powers choose to do.

    The best indicator of a declining national power is the belief among leading classes that education serves no point, that basic research has no public use, and that politicians should worm their way into the scientific process, prioritizing their own interests over logic, reason, and evidence. The U.S. is therefore at a decision point. Does it wish to cede strategic advantage to its competitors? Or does it wish to support the scientific environment that has made the United States the most powerful country in the world for 75 years?

    How to Act

    If you are a scientist or an educator who is reading this, and wondering how you can support our scholarly and scientific community, here are some ideas.

    1. Call your elected representatives on the telephone. Many Americans believe that their voice does not matter. This is incorrect: your Senators and Representatives may not agree with you, but they will hear you. This is especially true if you believe that your Senator or Representative is unsympathetic. These are the people who need to hear from you the most.
    2. Write the senior leadership team at your college or university, or the owners of the business where you work, and ask them to speak on your behalf. Almost certainly you can send an email to president@ABCD.edu, provost@ABCD.edu, or ceo@ABCD.com. It might not get a response, but it will be read.
    3. Write to your professional association’s leadership and invite them to speak up in defense of U.S. national interests. This is an area where the National Academies ought to collaborate; you can certainly ask them to do so.

    In all of these communications, your goal should be to communicate that cuts to education and science are threats to U.S. national security. You might also inform them that public education in the United States places world-class research institutions in every single one of the 50 states, and that these are significant local employers with clear spillovers for the local private sector. You might invite them to consult with officers in the U.S. military about their own educational experiences, to learn about what skills our colleges and universities impart. Finally, you may observe that no rigorous study of the return on investment for higher education finds that those returns are negative. The ROI on education for everyone, even humanities majors, is positive, and sizeable.

    The current political situation in the United States is a moment of clarity for industry leaders in science, education, and international studies. The decisions that this government makes in the coming weeks will have implications for decades to come. They should hear from you about it.

  • Short Reviews of Modern SEA Fiction (7): lê thị diễm thúy, “The Gangster We Are All Looking For,” and Ocean Vuong, “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous”

    After a break, I am returning to my series of short reviews on modern Southeast Asian fiction. This is a special two-parter, featuring two connected books that engage with the Vietnamese American refugee experience. There will be spoilers. As always I’m pleased to have had the chance to develop these thoughts as part of a course, so credit is due to my students—this semester there are two—as well.

    Previous reviews:

    1. Short Reviews of Modern SEA Fiction (1): Rachel Heng, The Great Reclamation
    2. Short Reviews of Modern SEA Fiction (2): Gina Apostol, Insurrecto
    3. Short Reviews of Modern SEA Fiction (3): Ayu Utami, Saman
    4. Short Reviews of Modern SEA Fiction (4): Tash Aw, We, The Survivors
    5. Short Reviews of Modern SEA Fiction (5): Thuận, Chinatown
    6. Short Reviews of Modern SEA Fiction (6): Dorothy Tse, Owlish

    Although I will discuss both books here, I will start with the more recently published one first, as this is the order in which we read them.

    Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

    If you have even a passing interest in Southeast Asian or Asian American fiction, you’ve probably heard of Ocean Vuong‘s monumental first book, which I first encountered through NPR. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is, at one level, the story of Little Dog, a Vietnamese American boy growing up in Hartford, CT, exploring his experience as an refugee, his relationship with his mother and his extended family, his race and sexual identities, and others.

    Spoilers: we learn over the course of the book about Little Dog’s mother, a mixed race daughter of an unknown American soldier, and his grandmother, who left her South Vietnamese village after an unhappy marriage and made her way through the Second Indochina War as a sex worker.

    At another level, this is a book about interweaving the American and the Vietnamese experiences in the late 20th century. That’s not even correct, though: the point is that the Vietnamese experience in America is the American experience. The book describes the racial landscape of Hartford, agricultural work in Connecticut*, with extended reflections on class and nation, and especially on white poverty, fentanyl and heroin, violence, and trauma across generations. And moreover, on the intimate connections that are not there: fathers who are not biological fathers, grandfathers who are not biological grandfathers, and fathers who are biological fathers but do not parent, and so forth.

    I will resist injecting too much of my own personal reflections into this discussion, but the book’s setting in Hartford is important. Southern New England happens to be my own entry point in the geography of Southeast Asian American life: humid summers and damp cold winters, a racial and ethnic landscape that does not match what one learns about in high school U.S. History classes. There are other Southeast Asian Americas, in California and Washington State, Philadelphia and Minneapolis, Houston and North Carolina and Hawai’i, and everywhere else as well.** I don’t know all the connections among these Southeast Asian Americas, just that the diaspora is aware of itself as a diaspora within a sprawling continental empire.

    Stepping back from the subject matter, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is also an important piece of literary fiction, in which the writing itself is as much the centerpiece as is the content. Vuong is a poet, with an amazing way with words, describing grinding rural white poverty and the economy of the nail salon. His writing about sex and violence is artful and clinical at the same time. The book is nonlinear, multiperspectival, poetic. You must read it closely and carefully to see all of the layers.

    lê thị diễm thúy, The Gangster We Are All Looking For

    In an interview with Literary Hub, Ocean Vuong described lê thị diễm thúy‘s The Gangster We Are All Looking For as a formative influence. He focuses on the narrative structure:

    thúy not only breaks the rules of traditional Western narrative; she insists that such rules can be consciously rejected because their rubrics were made without considering the bodies her book holds—even at this risk of rendering it, in the eyes of critics trained to recognize and celebrate hegemonic styles, as nonsensical or wrong. The result is a bold and empowering refusal of conformity in search of other ways of speaking and being.

    In my own read, though, I hardly noticed any of these aspects of lê’s book. What took me in, instead, was the story itself. thúy’s account is autobiographical, the story of growing up in a boring suburb somewhere in San Diego County, the daughter of two hard-working, troubled parents who had lost two young children while fleeing Vietnam after 1975. A heartbreaking spoiler is that thúy’s birth name was not thúy: that is the name of an older sister who drowned in a refugee camp in Malaysia. Owing to a mixup during processing, thúy ended up with her older sister’s name and it has stuck ever since.

    The Gangster We Are All Looking For is thúy’s father, a Buddhist and a criminal from northern Vietnam who married a Catholic from the south during the war. He endured the tragedy of learning of his son’s drowning while interned at a reeducation camp before fleeing to the United States with thúy (her mother came separately). In the U.S. he works several jobs alongside his relatives, thúy’s “uncles,” before ending as a gardener. He drinks too much on the weekends, and when reunited with his wife in the U.S., they build a life anew. They fight, they cry, they lose their home. Their daughter is haunted by her lost brother and sister, and flees east for college. But before she does, she relates the experience of growing up in hot sunny southern California, the smells of mimosa and night jasmine, the boredom of the suburbs when you have no car, the experience of being lumped with the Cambodian and Lao and Hmong of the area as just another “Yang.”

    There are parallels between Vuong’s narrative and lê’s. Besides the obvious diasporic linkages, their rooting of American refugee experience in the tragedies of the war in Vietnam, there are issues of race (thúy’s father has a high nose, a sign of his partial French ancestry), of sex (thúy’s experiences in a “kissing box” are presented much more tenderly than Little Dog’s first sexual forays). There is also a parallelism in that the narrators know their families’ checkered pasts. Refugee histories are real and present, and there is no time for mythmaking. The ancestors are not all nobles.

    Read together, these books were a moving reflection on not just the refugee experience, or the Vietnamese American experience, but on America itself. It led me to remember my own upbringing; my hometown had its own Vietnamese refugee population, after all. It brought back heavy memories of my own experiences with refugee communities in southern New England. These are not just a stop along my own intellectual journey, they make me who I am today.

    I do not think of these two books as Asian American fiction (although they are), or refugee fiction (although they are), but rather as American fiction. The point of these books, as I see it, is that Vietnam is here, just as America was there, and we constitute one another. Just like Fievel sings about sleeping underneath the same big sky, lê’s parents look to the ocean in California to see the same water that claimed their children, the water that they crossed to find America.*** That ought to be everyone’s story.

    NOTES

    * Before reading this book, I had no idea that there was something called Connecticut Shade Tobacco. Amazingly—although perhaps not surprisingly for the Nutmeg State—the tobacco cultivar used in Connecticut is a Sumatran variety. A New World crop like tobacco moving to Sumatra and then coming back to Connecticut is such a wonderful expression of the Columbian Exchange.

    ** My Vietnamese class in grad school had students from Rancho Palos Verdes, Terra Haute, Bridgeport, Cincinnati, Albany (the one in NoCal), Philadelphia, Dallas, and other places I’ve forgotten, all but two of us the children of South Vietnamese refugees. RIP Anh Brandon.

    *** The Vietnamese word for the United States is Mỹ. This is notable because mỹ is also the Vietnamese word for “beautiful.” It is also lê’s mother’s name, and through the fence of the internment camp, she calls out to her husband from the north (named Minh, wink wink), Anh Minh, em Mỹ. Which you might translate as “oh brother, it’s your sister.” But there are other readings too.