This year, the American Nobel laureates were shunned by President Trump. Breaking with recent tradition, he refused to invite them to the White House.,,,,,
The contrast between their warm celebration in Stockholm and their cold reception back home is a harbinger of the United States’ future irrelevance.


Attending the Nobel Prize Ceremony After Trump Snubbed the Winners




Last week, we found ourselves in an unexpected place: in the very back of the top balcony in the Stockholm Concert Hall, watching as King Carl XVI Gustaf awarded medals to this year’s Nobel laureates — in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and economics. As Americans spending the year in Sweden, we were honored and surprised to learn that we had been invited. While we were inspired by the pageantry of the celebration of human achievement, we were simultaneously sobered by the realization that the Trump administration is attacking the very institutions that make Nobel Prize-winning careers possible. In doing so, our country is charting a path to its own irrelevance.

The Nobel ceremony takes place each year on Dec. 10, and tickets to the 1,800-seat hall are hard to come by. Each laureate gets 35. The royal family and political figures get their share. Some tickets are given by lottery to students, who wear sailor caps with their universities’ insignia. The remaining invitations are issued according to some unknown hierarchy. Most Swedes end up watching it from their living rooms. Befitting our low rank in the hierarchy, we found out only in late November that we would be attending. We dressed as best we could — a boring suit and tie instead of tails, a borrowed cocktail dress instead of a ball gown — and made our way to the ceremony.

As Americans, this was an especially good year to attend. An impressive eight of the 12 individual laureates were American. Watching the ceremony, it was easy to feel patriotic. The laureates on stage represented decades of persistent, innovative work. They showed the intellectual power of the United States’ educational system and the transformative research it produces. We thought about the thousands of students who had passed through their labs, classes and office hours. While the awards are given to only a select few, we know well that each laureate represents an entire intellectual community.

But this year, the American Nobel laureates were shunned by President Trump. Breaking with recent tradition, he refused to invite them to the White House. This is difficult to understand. If you’re interested in building up and blaring out American greatness, why not show off what’s already great about the country? In this scenario, the laureates are like the proverbial canaries in a coal mine. The contrast between their warm celebration in Stockholm and their cold reception back home is a harbinger of the United States’ future irrelevance.

All of the American laureates are university professors. Yet the current administration and its supporters consistently attack universities as biased, irrelevant and hyper-politicized. It ignores the many contributions that “basic research” has made to human liberty and security. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has no experience — professional or personal — with public schools and no familiarity with fundamental concepts of education. The administration uses dishonest critiques as an excuse to push its political agenda, cutting funding for research that is politically inconvenient. In our own state university system in North Carolina, conservative political appointees to the governing board have closed research centers focused on poverty and banned litigation by the Center for Civil Rights. They are exploring ways to force conservative views onto campuses through intellectual affirmative action. The United States has the best system of higher education in the world, yet this administration and its acolytes seem bent on tearing it down.

This strategy extends to a broader attack on science and knowledge, one that is the antithesis of the Nobel Prize. The head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, rejects scientific consensus linking human activity to climate change. Government employees are straitjacketed, unable to draw on government research showing that climate change and its effects are real. These moves have stoked fear among the scientific community, as manifested recently by the response to reports that the management at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was advising against the use of seven common scientific terms. More broadly, the president is fulfilling his promise to select cabinet members with no governing experience. Time and time again, their lack of expertise shows in the day-to-day dysfunction of their agencies.

Finally, two of the eight American laureates this year are immigrants. In fact, since 2000, 39 percent of prizes awarded in physics, chemistry or medicine have gone to immigrants. Rainer Weiss, awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics this year for his contributions to the observation of gravitational waves, was a refugee who escaped Nazi Germany. The Trump administration’s hostility to immigrants and refugees is well documented. It deports children brought to the United States by their parents, children who have never known another home. It hammered away at the ill-considered travel ban until it squeaked — for the moment — past judicial review. It even tried to block a girls’ robotics team from Afghanistan from entering the United States for a competition.

Continue reading the main story
Advertisement

Continue reading the main story

It takes ingenuity, persistence and intelligence — maybe even genius — to become a Nobel laureate. But those attributes will fall short if they’re not part of a culture that fosters, sustains, respects and rewards the collaborative pursuit of knowledge. Undermining — even demonizing — that culture, as many in the United States seem intent on doing, will not make America great. It will make America alone: no longer a presence on the Nobel stage, no longer a leader on the world stage.

Sarah Bowen and Mark Nance are associate professors of sociology and political science, respectively, at North Carolina State University. Both are visiting researchers at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/20/opinion/nobel-ceremony-trump-snub.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fopinion&action=click&contentCollection=opinion&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=sectionfront&_r=0