It is becoming increasingly clear that the Trump administration is going to try to destroy higher education. Or, rather, transform it in the model of what Christopher Rufo did to the New College in Florida. By “destroy,” I mean that they will try to establish rigid ideological guidelines and force out any faculty that hold alternative views. They will try to replace “education” with “indoctrination.” In a well publicized incident, the new administration shut down the Gender and Diversity Center and threw out all of their books, describing it as “taking out the garbage.”

It’s not clear what the universities themselves can do. Some will be protected by the states they’re in. But much of what public research universities do is supported by federal funding. As that funding is withdrawn, universities will find it difficult to maintain their research programs. Or, indeed, to even pay for the capital investments they made prospectively to support research programs. In anticipation of these coming changes, universities are already withdrawing acceptances of graduate students, since the funding to support them is uncertain.

These changes will be catastrophic for science in the United States. We’re going to lose a whole generation of scientists and cripple the research programs that have kept the United States competitive globally.

It will be catastrophic, also, for the scientists doing this work. If your research lab experiences a gap in funding, you very quickly lose your ability to stay current and maintain competitiveness for future grants. Research is expensive. Without funding, you lose your trained staff and the resources you need to stay active: your whole enterprise loses momentum. And once you fall behind, it’s difficult to ever catch up.

What faculty mostly don’t have to worry about is their own salary. So I have a suggestion for my colleagues: Every minute that you are unable to conduct your research, you should devote to public advocacy in support of higher education. Join your union. Lobby your legislators. Write letters and articles. If thousands of faculty begin to devote themselves to writing op eds, publishing books, and holding public lectures about the importance of science and why the government’s grievous errors have endangered us all, it might make them wish they’d never unleashed these forces.