Teachable Moments

Emma Green’s piece provided a thorough examination of the effects that the Trump Administration’s attacks on higher education are having on research (“Degrees of Hostility,” October 20th). After twenty-four years of teaching at a suburban public university—one that primarily serves working- and middle-class students—I find that this is not the aspect of the Administration’s actions that frightens me most. What I see today is that, under Donald Trump’s direction, critical thinking is under assault. Across disciplines, Trump’s agenda threatens one of higher education’s core missions—to teach the next generation to think critically about power’s relationship to knowledge. When the search for knowledge is subsumed by ideology, we’re no longer in the business of education so much as that of teaching people to accept the dictates of official power.

Eric J. Weiner Professor of Education Montclair State University New York City

According to Gallup, the share of Americans who view college as “very important” has declined sharply in recent years, from seventy-five per cent in 2010 to thirty-five per cent today. Many commentators have framed this as a symptom of anti-intellectualism. In my opinion, what this transition really reflects is decades of capitalist individualism. We stopped treating higher education as a shared civic good, and started selling it as a private investment promising personal prosperity. When the investment failed to pay off as promised, public trust collapsed.

In this respect, universities bear some blame for their own decline. Chasing privilege, tuition revenue, and rankings has blurred their mission. Green shows how federal strategy has weaponized this distrust by building on a feeling, already possessed by much of the public, that universities are not public partners but misbehaving contractors. This strategy deepens the cynicism that it exploits. If we want people to value higher education again, we must stop marketing it as a luxury with uncertain returns, and restore it to the status of a public good with collective benefits.

Sarah Mosby St. Louis, Mo.

I appreciated the insightful piece by Green, but, as an architect, I wish that she had refrained from architectural criticism. The Lyndon Baines Johnson Department of Education Building, in Washington, D.C., is not, as Green calls it, an “ugly” “concrete shoebox” but an elegant example of International Style modernism, and an important part of our capital’s modernist heritage.

When it opened, in 1961, Federal Building No. 6, as it was then called, was lauded as the first modernist building in the capital’s monumental core, befitting the very modern mission of one of its first occupants, NASA. The austere structure, made of limestone (not concrete) and glass, demonstrated the compatibility of modern design with D.C.’s classicism—a concept that has since been attacked by Trump’s regressive executive order on “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture,” which aims to purge modern architecture from the federal real-estate portfolio. Just as this Administration seeks to diminish or eliminate social-welfare agencies—the Department of Education, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Environmental Protection Agency, the list goes on—it is moving to dispose of the mid-century-modern buildings that house them.

Belmont Freeman New York City

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