November 3, 2025

We live in unprecedented times.  A good friend and colleague once strongly advised me to keep my writing blogs entirely apolitical.  After all, there could be departments and colleges that do not share my politics.  There are surely college presidents and provosts who do not.  Even if many faculty members share my political predilections, one cannot afford to alienate potential paying clients, namely the administrators who run our universities. And I agreed with the advice.  It made good sense.  Before now.

But we live in unprecedented times.  As Franklin Foer wrote in The Atlantic , Trump has found his class enemy, and those of us who study or work in the academy are it. The federal government is at war with knowledge workers.  If you are a teacher, scholar, writer, or scientist (or studying to be one), you are now an enemy of the MAGA government.   Foer writes that the right-wing politicians in America have attacked knowledge workers because they believe we have propagated a progressive worldview on university campuses and hope to move from running our colleges to taking over the world.  Graduate students and faculty are iconic symbolic analysts who, by definition, are knowledge workers. We think, we study, we analyze, and we write.  If that work is now considered suspect, we are all suspect.

This is not idle speculation.   Consider the attacks on science in the last nine months.   Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy removed a panel of more than a dozen vaccine advisors, signaling the dismantling of science-based policymaking at HHS.  The federal government shut down a landmark project studying women’s health, the Women’s Health Initiative.  Nearly all funding for research on inequality, including women’s rights and racism, has ended. When you try to find the longstanding webpage for the Advance Grants to help bring women into scientific fields, you get a “page not found.”

Of course, the class warfare against knowledge workers goes far beyond defunding our research.  It also includes defunding our international students, defunding graduate training across the board,  taxing endowments, and forcing us to end all programs that help underrepresented students and faculty  take their rightful places in the academy.  Teaching, research, and writing are all under attack.

We must resist.  One way to do so is to refuse to be cowed.  Continue to think critically, teach thoughtfully, and write.  You may not have the data you’d like to have.  Your funding might be gone.  You may not be able to do as ambitious science as you would like.  But keep doing what you can. 

Keep writing.  There will be no new knowledge to teach our students without continuing our work, our research and writing.  Most of my clients, and all of my students, current and former, are social scientists.  We ask the hard questions about our world. We collect data and test hypotheses about our organizations, families, politics, and global dilemmas. We provide evidence for how everyday lives and social systems might be improved.  We write the articles and books that will be assigned in the future.

Writing is resistance.  Do not be cowed.  Do not be so depressed by the attacks against us that your work is halted.   The chaos around us may slow you down.  Do the self-care you need to stay strong and healthy. But do not let these attacks  stop you.   Science matters.  Social science matters.  Your writing matters.  Stay with it!

Writing is resistance.