Growing up, I had a strong sense of character. It started at home, where I learned kindness, curiosity, spirituality, humility, gratitude, and other virtues.

It also extended into civic organizations I participated in, such as the Boy Scouts and Boys State, where I learned about duty, honor, integrity, teamwork, and selflessness.

It seems that there is a crisis of character of late, where we are exposed to leaders of all kinds who practice greed, fraud, injustice, hypocrisy, gaslighting, cruelty, and cowardice in public without a hint of shame.

I’ve made it my business to work with leaders and their teams on character strengths, and I would hope that others follow suit.

These fall into six buckets that are taken from the four classical virtues: wisdom, courage, justice, and temperance, with humanity and transcendence added in.

“Public virtue cannot exist in a Nation without private Virtue, and public Virtue is the only Foundation of Republics.” — John Adams, 1776

When John Adams first arrived at the White House on November 1, 1800, he arrived unceremoniously, with only his secretary in tow. The Executive Mansion was still unfinished, the plaster was still wet and only a handful of rooms were ready.

On that first evening in the sprawling place, he wrote a now-famous letter to his wife Abigail. It included the following two sentences, which Franklin Roosevelt had carved into the mantel of the State Dining Room:

“I Pray Heaven To Bestow The Best Of Blessings On This House And All that shall hereafter Inhabit it. May none but Honest and Wise Men ever rule under This Roof.”

While Adams could be irascible, vain, and proud, he also knew something about character: it was he who nominated George Washington to be the commander-in-chief of the Continental Army and recommended Thomas Jefferson to write the Declaration of Independence.

He was the only presidential Founding Father who did not own slaves, as a matter of principle.

In “Speech on the Issues of the Presidential Election, 1888,” Frederick Douglass had something to say about character:

“In a Presidential canvass three things are always in order: First, we have to consider the character of the candidate… A man in the presidential chair should stand for something more than a lucky and successful politician. He should be one among millions—a model man; one to whom the sons of after-coming generations can be referred as an example to them.”

That’s something I don’t think we give enough consideration to. What leaders and heroes do we use as models for our children?

We have a hard enough time keeping them off of their devices and social media; I can’t imagine we’re over-indexing on pointing out leaders with integrity and character.

So when the president addressed the nation following the Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity, this section stuck out to me:

“You know, at the outset of our nation, it was the character of George Washington, our first president, that defined the presidency.  He believed power was limited, not absolute, and that power would always reside with the people — always.

Now, over 200 years later, with today’s Supreme Court decision, once again it will depend on the character of the men and women who hold that presidency that are going to define the limits of the power of the presidency, because the law will no longer do it.”

My thoughts turn wistfully back to my days at Boys State, with my fellow idealists who were learning about civic duty and the inner workings of government.

I recall the scholarship I received from the American Legion and the couple of years I worked for the Department of Veterans Affairs, where I met and admired tough old men who had proudly served their country.

In each of these scenarios, I was surrounded by people who cared about norms and traditions, upheld by a common belief in character.

And now I have to wonder: does it matter anymore?

I hope so.

There’s so much to learn.

This article originally appeared on July 3, 2024, on the “Timeless & Timely” Substack from Scott Monty.

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With Control of the White House and the Senate, Republicans Are Poised to Upend U.S. Climate Policy.

The Associated Press called the race for Trump early Wednesday morning, ending one of the costliest and most turbulent campaign cycles in the nation’s history. The results promise to upend U.S. climate policy: In addition to returning a climate denier to the White House, voters also gave Republicans control of the Senate, laying the groundwork for attacks on everything from electric vehicles to clean energy funding and bolstering support for the fossil fuel industry.

“We have more liquid gold than any country in the world,” Trump said during his victory speech, referring to domestic oil and gas potential. The CEO of the American Petroleum Institute issued a statement saying that “energy was on the ballot, and voters sent a clear signal that they want choices, not mandates.”

The election results rattled climate policy experts and environmental advocates. The president-elect has called climate change “a hoax” and during his most recent campaign vowed to expand fossil fuel production, roll back environmental regulations, and eliminate federal support for clean energy. He has also said he would scuttle the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, which is the largest investment in climate action in U.S. history and a landmark legislative win for the Biden administration. Such steps would add billions of tons of additional greenhouse gases to the atmosphere and hasten the looming impacts of climate change.

“This is a dark day,” Ben Jealous, the executive director of the Sierra Club, said in a statement. “Donald Trump was a disaster for climate progress during his first term, and everything he’s said and done since suggests he’s eager to do even more damage this time.”

During his first stint in office, Trump withdrew from the Paris Agreement, the 2015 international climate accord that guides the actions of more than 195 countries; rolled back 100-plus environmental rules; and opened the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling. While President Joe Biden reversed many of those actions and made fighting climate change a centerpiece of his presidency, Trump has pledged to undo those efforts during his second term, with potentially enormous implications — climate analysts at Carbon Brief predicted that another four years of Trump would lead to the nation emitting an additional 4 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide than it would under his opponent. That’s on par with the combined annual emissions of the European Union and Japan.

One of President-elect Trump’s primary targets will be rolling back the IRA, which is poised to direct more than a trillion dollars into climate-friendly initiatives. Two years into that decade-long effort, money is flowing into myriad initiatives, ranging from building out the nation’s electric vehicle charging network to helping people go solar and weatherize their homes. In 2023 alone, some 3.4 million Americans claimed more $8 billion in tax credits the law provides for home energy improvements. But Trump could stymie, freeze, or even eliminate much of the law.

“We will rescind all unspent funds,” Trump assured the audience in a September speech at the Economic Club of New York. Last month, he said it would be “an honor” to “immediately terminate” a law he called the “Green New Scam.”

Such a move would, however, require congressional support. While many House races remain too close to call, Republicans have taken control of the Senate. That said, any attempt to roll back the IRA may prove unpopular, because as much as $165 billion in the funding it provides is flowing to Republican districts.

Still, Trump can take unilateral steps to slow spending, and use federal regulatory powers to further hamper the rollout process. As Axios noted, “If Trump wants to shut off the IRA spigot, he’ll likely find ways to do it.” Looking beyond that seminal climate law, Trump has plenty of other levers he can also pull that will adversely affect the environment  — efforts that will be easier with a conservative Supreme Court that has already undermined federal climate action.

Trump has also thrown his support behind expanded fossil fuel production. He has long pushed for the country to “drill, baby, drill” and, in April, offered industry executives tax and regulatory favors in exchange for $1 billion in campaign support. Though that astronomical sum never materialized, The New York Times found that oil and gas interests donated an estimated $75 million to Trump’s campaign, the Republican National Committee, and affiliated committees. Fossil fuels were already booming under Biden, with domestic oil production higher than ever before, and Vice President Kamala Harris said she would continue producing them if she won. But Trump could give the industry a considerable boost by, for instance, reopening more of the Arctic to drilling.

Any climate chaos that Trump sows is sure to extend beyond the United States. The president-elect could attempt to once again abandon the Paris Agreement, undermining global efforts to address the crisis. His threat to use tariffs to protect U.S. companies and restore American manufacturing could upend energy markets. The vast majority of solar panels and electric vehicle batteries, for example, are made overseas and the prices of those imports, as well as other clean-energy technology, could soar. U.S. liquefied natural gas producers worry that retaliatory tariffs could hamper their business.

The Trump administration could also take quieter steps to shape climate policy, from further divorcing federal research functions from their rulemaking capacities to guiding how the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention studies and responds to health concerns.

Trump is all but sure to wreak havoc on federal agencies central to understanding, and combating, climate change. During his first term, his administration gutted funding for research, appointed climate skeptics and industry insiders, and eliminated several scientific advisory committees. It also censored scientific data on government websites and tried to undermine the findings of the National Climate Assessment, the government’s scientific report on the risks and impacts of climate change to the country. Project 2025, the sweeping blueprint developed by conservative groups and former Trump administration officials, advances a similar strategy, deprioritizing climate science and perhaps restructuring or eliminating federal agencies that advance it.

“The nation and world can expect the incoming Trump administration to take a wrecking ball to global climate diplomacy,” Rachel Cleetus, the policy director and lead economist for the Climate and Energy Program at the Union for Concerned Scientists, said in a statement. “The science on climate change is unforgiving, with every year of delay locking in more costs and more irreversible changes, and everyday people paying the steepest price.”

The president-elect’s supporters seem eager to begin their work.

Mandy Gunasekara, a former chief of staff of the Environmental Protection Agency during Trump’s first term, told CNN before the election that this second administration would be far more prepared to enact its agenda, and would act quickly. One likely early target will be Biden-era tailpipe emissions rules that Trump has derided as an electric vehicle “mandate.”

During his first term, Trump similarly tried to weaken Obama-era emissions regulations. But the auto industry made the point moot when it sidestepped the federal government and made a deal with states directly, a move that’s indicative of the approach that environmentalists might take during his second term. Even before the election, climate advocates had begun preparing for the possibility of a second Trump presidency and the nation’s abandoning the global diplomatic stage on this issue. Bloomberg reported that officials and former diplomats have been convening secret conversations, crisis simulations, and “political war-gaming” aimed at maximizing climate progress under Trump — an effort that will surely start when COP29 kicks off next week in Baku, Azerbaijan.

“The result from this election will be seen as a major blow to global climate action,” Christiana Figueres, the United Nations climate chief from 2010 to 2016, said in a statement. “[But] there is an antidote to doom and despair. It’s action on the ground, and it’s happening in all corners of the Earth.”

This article originally appeared in Grist HERE.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

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There’s been a a certain amount of negativity floating around lately. So, let’s talk about a toxic, venomous freak of nature and the parasite that afflicts it.

Biology warning, this gets slightly squicky.

Let’s start with the toxic, venomous freak of nature:  the Portuguese man-o’-war.

If you’ve spent a lot of time in warm ocean waters, you’ve probably encountered one of these guys.  They’re hard to miss!  They come in a variety of colors — pink, blue, purple — and they’re pretty prominent, floating on the surface of the ocean like discarded party balloons.  And if you’ve ever been stung by one, well, you probably remember that.  Their stings aren’t lethal to humans, but they’re welt-inducing and painful.



So it’s a jellyfish.  Except it isn’t really: it’s several jellyfish, smooshed together.  And here’s where the “freak of nature” part kicks in.

I mean, yeah, strictly speaking nature has no freaks; every species that exists, belongs; everything is a product of evolution and Life’s Rich Pageant, yadda yadda.  But the Portuguese man-o’-war  — Physalia physalis, for you biologists — is honestly kinda freaky.  Because Physalia is a colonial organism.

What this means: a single Portuguese man-o’-war is composed of four or five separate animals.  (We’re not actually sure how many.)  One animal is the balloon-sail-thingy on top; another is the stinging tentacles; another is the digestive system; another is the gonads.  And they’re completely distinct organisms.

How this happens: when a Physalia egg is fertilized, it starts dividing, like every other fertilized egg.  But pretty quickly it breaks apart into two and then more distinct embryos — genetically identical, but physically separate.  And those embryos develop into completely different creatures.  Then, later in development, those creatures re-attach to form a single Frankenstein organism.  The various parts have their own nervous systems, which don’t seem to connect.

Here’s an analogy: imagine that before birth, you are identical twins.  But instead of growing into two babies, one twin grows into a bodiless head, the other into a headless body.  Then just before birth they stick together, but they don’t actually merge back into one.  No, going forward you are a bodiless head glued on top of a headless body, ever after.  It’s kind of like that.



Axe Cop copyright Ethan Nicolle, 2017. — Look, I said it was going to get a bit squicky.

Now, colonial animals aren’t unknown in nature.  But most of them are either dinky (Volvox, don’t ask) or they’re big, but it’s basically cut-and-pasting the same creatures over and over.  So, some corals are colonial, but all this means is that the individual polyps have grown into each other to produce a sort of living carpet interlaced through their stony skeleton.  But the man-o’-war is a respectably large animal — they can grow as big as a large house cat — and so are its colonial components.  And the components are extremely specialized:  the float-animal part of it looks and acts nothing like the tentacle-animal part. 

Physalia is by far the largest complex colonial animal.  And — this bit is odd — it doesn’t have any relatives.  It’s the only genus in its family.  Put another way, within the jellyfish it has no siblings and only a few very distant cousins.  (One of which is the ridiculous creature known as the Flying Spaghetti Monster Jellyfish, but never mind that now.)  It’s a very successful organism!  There are millions and millions of them, found all over the world in tropical and subtropical oceans.  So you would expect to see speciation, different relatives — big ones, little ones, a bunch of variations on a theme.  More on this shortly.

But meanwhile, the whole “colonial animal” thing looks like evolution’s first attempt to figure out, you know, organs.  I mean, the first multicellular animals were probably sponges, and sponges don’t actually have organs. But more complex animals have distinct and differentiated organs, modules of specialized tissue performing particular functions, because those turn out to be super useful.  Physalia and other colonial animals look like a beta-test platform for this new “organ” technology.  Most of the animal kingdom moved on to “oh wait, why don’t we just have one single creature that grows the different modules inside it”, but a few colonial animals stuck with Plan A and made it work.

Okay, so that’s the “freak of nature” part.  What about the “toxic and venomous”?  Well, as every good science nerd knows, toxic and venomous are two different things.  “Toxic” is something that, if you eat it or just lick it or touch it, you get poisoned.  Nightshade is a toxic plant; those brightly colored South American tree frogs are toxic animals.  “Venomous” is something that delivers poison with a bite or sting, like a snake or a wasp.  Most poisonous animals are either one or the other.

But not the man-o’-war!  It is of course highly venomous.  It has stinging tentacles that can drift for many yards behind it.  



The toxic sting is painful to humans.  To fish, it causes paralysis.  And once the fish is paralyzed… well…

“The nematocyst delivers a toxin that results in… general paralysis, affecting the nervous system and respiratory centers, and results in death at high doses. Once a tentacle comes into contact with its prey, the prey is carried up towards the gastrozooids near the base of the float. The gastrozooids respond immediately to the capture of prey, and begin writhing and opening their mouths. Many gastrozooids attach themselves to the prey – upwards of 50 gastrozooids have been observed to completely cover a 10 cm fish with their mouths spread out across the surface of the fish. The gastrozooids release proteolytic enzymes to digest the fish extracellularly, and are also responsible for intracellular digestion of particulate matter. The digested food products are released into the main gastric cavity for uptake by the rest of the colony.”

Got that?  The “gastrozooids” are short plump tentacles with mouths at the end, the many mouths of the stomach-animal.  They release enzymes that dissolve the fish into a nutritious slurry, which they then drink.  The fish may or may not be alive at the beginning of this process.  It is definitely not alive by the end.  And all of the different colony animals connect to the gastric cavity, so they can all absorb nutrition from it:  the stomach-animal predigests the food for everyone else.

Okay objectively it’s no worse than a lion biting into an antelope but, not gonna lie, this is some H.P. Lovecraft stuff right here. — But okay!  That covers the “venomous”.  What about the “toxic”?  Are they poisonous to eat? 

Ha ha, no, that would be too simple.  The Portuguese man-o’-war is poisonous to breathe.  It inflates its balloon-sail by using an enzyme to produce gas from its food.  And the gas it produces?  Carbon monoxide.  Fully inflated, the bell contains a mixture of normal air and deadly gas.  So if you grabbed one, bit into the balloon and then huffed it…  Well, there probably wouldn’t be enough monoxide to kill you dead on the spot, but you’d probably get sick and you might pass out.  So I think that counts as “toxic” by any reasonable standard.

And why does it use carbon monoxide?  This is “imperfectly understood”. 

And it’s not the only thing we don’t know.  For instance, there’s its reproduction.  These guys are either male or female, and they have gonads.  But they don’t have sex in any way we’d recognize.  Instead, every so often their gonads bud off things called gonodendra, which are… mobile gonads.  The gonodendra break off and swim away.  And what happens then?

“As larval development has not been observed directly, everything that is known about the early stages of this species is known from fixed specimens collected in trawl samples. Gonodendra are thought to be detached by the colony once they are fully mature, and the nectophores may be used to propel the gonodendron through the water column. Released mature gonodendra have not been observed, and it is not clear what depth range they occupy. It is also not known how the gonodendra from different colonies occupy a similar space for fertilization, or if there is any seasonality or periodicity to sexual reproduction. Embryonic and larval development also occurs at an unknown depth below the ocean surface. After the float reaches a sufficient size, the juvenile P. physalis is able to float on the ocean surface.”

— Yeah, there’s a lot of “is not clear” and “is not known” here.  You might think that an animal that is well-known, conspicuous, weird, and has potential economic impact (they’re considered bad for certain fisheries) would be better studied.  It isn’t.  I’ve been searching and the man-o’-war gets on average less than one published paper per year.  For something so interesting, it’s not much. 

(And yeah, the detachable free-swimming gonads.  Do they swim around until they find gonads of the opposite sex?  How exactly…?  And then do they…?   So many questions!)

Which brings me to this paper, the topic of this article.  You remember how, several paragraphs back, I noted that the man-o’-war seemed to be a weirdly isolated species?  Well, last year a bunch of marine biologists at Yale decided to test that.  So they collected specimens from all over the world and ran DNA tests on them.  And, lo and behold: they found that there were actually five species of Physalia.  We didn’t realize it because they all kinda look alike (to us, anyway).  I asked earlier why we weren’t seeing speciation.  It turns out we are.  It’s just very subtle and non-obvious and we had to look hard.

This wouldn’t be so weird if it was, like, one species per ocean.  But it’s not.  There’s one North Atlantic species, but there are four species in the Pacific, and one of them is in the South Atlantic too.

The technical term for this is “cryptic diversity”.  It happens a lot, especially with species that aren’t well studied.  It’s biology, yeah?  Look closely, and everything turns out to be more complicated.

So now a mystery has been replaced by a different mystery:  why are there five species (at least) of Physalia?  The open ocean is a big place, but it’s flat and there are no barriers.  The Portuguese man-o’-war sails around all over the place — it’s pretty darn mobile for a jellyfish.  You’d expect populations to keep mixing.  So, why have they split into different species?  Subtle differences in water composition, temperature or salinity?  Populations kept apart by wind and currents?  Different mixes of predators and prey?  And if they’ve split into different species, why do the various species still look and act so alike?  Right now we have no idea.

And speaking of mysteries, if you find a Portuguese man-o’-war, good chance you may find one of these guys too:

This is Nomeus gronovii, the bluebottle fish.  And it’s a parasite on the Portuguese man-o’-war.

You know clownfish, and how they can live in the stinging tentacles of a sea anemone, because they’re immune?  And they’re symbiotes — the anemone protects them, they share their meals?  Well, this is like that, except it’s not.  The bluebottle lives among the tentacles, but it’s not a symbiote.  It eats the tentacles.  In particular, it snacks on newly sprouted young tentacles, probably because they don’t have as many stinging cells yet.  And when it feels the need for something a little more solid, it also will bite chunks out of the man-o’-war’s gonads.  Even granting that the man-o’-war regularly grows new gonads, biting off your host’s junk is not the behavior of a welcome guest.

Oh, and: unlike the clownfish, the bluebottle is not immune to its host’s stings.  It has limited resistance — it can tank a sting or two — but if it gets stung too many times in rapid succession, it will be paralyzed and eaten.

(This raises an interesting question: why is it not immune?  We know that clownfish can evolve immunity to the stings of the anemone.  So why not the bluebottle?  Well, this is pure speculation, but my guess would be that it’s because the bluebottle is a parasite rather than a symbiote.  So there’s probably an evolutionary arms race: the man-o’-war keeps evolving new venoms that can kill the bluebottle, and the bluebottle only has time to evolve limited resistance before the man-o’-war shifts venoms again.)

The bluebottle survives among the tentacles by being small and very nimble.  It has actually evolved extra vertebrae so that it can twist and weave better!  But at some point, it simply grows too big.  So, only juvenile bluebottles live as parasites.  When they reach a certain size, they swim off and… uhh, we’re not sure, actually.  They seem to be demersal (bottom dwellers) because they turn up in trawl nets sometimes.  But how they live, how they mate, what they eat and what eats them… we have only the vaguest idea.  As far as I can tell, the last paper specifically studying Nomeus gronovii came out in 1983.  Nobody seems to be working on this right now.

Just a few days ago, my CT colleague Kevin noted that there are more crap academic papers out there than ever.  I’m not an academic, but yeah, that sounds legit.  But at the same time, there are so many good papers out there waiting to be written!  There’s so much we still don’t know!  Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink!

But anyway.  We knew these guys were wind-sailing, carbon monoxide powered, venomous colony creatures with clusters of squirming mouth-tentacles and detachable gonads.  But it turns out they were hiding even more complexity and mystery.  

I just think that’s cool.  If you’ve read this far, I hope you agree.

Together with many other academics in the Netherlands, I have been very busy in organizing a nation-wide demonstration next Thursday against the 1 billion budget cuts to higher education that our very-right-wing government has announced. (For background explanation, see this earlier post).

Today, I have a long opinion piece in the daily newspaper NRC Handelsblad analyzing the crisis in higher eduction. For our non-dutch speaking colleagues, and anyone with an interest in this matter, my colleague from the law department Bald de Vries edited an AI-based translation (to which I made a few further tweaks) – you can find it below the fold.

The weaker the university, the easier it is for the cabinet to implement authoritarian policies

First the official line. Eppo Bruins, Minister of Education, Culture and Science (a member of NSC), has admitted to finding the cuts ‘ugly’. But the cabinet has now decided to cut higher education and science by a billion, and he has to implement it, Bruins argues.

Anyone open to rational argument must conclude that these cuts are completely irresponsible, unnecessary, and not at all legitimate.

They are irresponsible because under the previous government [Rutte III], several independent bodies found that universities were not adequately funded. An independent report by PriceWaterhouseCoopers concluded that universities were a billion euro short of performing their tasks. The Netherlands Court of Audit also issued a report in 2021 stating that universities can only perform their tasks thanks to structural unpaid overtime.

The last Rutte government, which included former Education Minister Robbert Dijkgraaf (D66), therefore proceeded to make a much-needed investment. But apparently, the current Schoof government does not find it necessary to fund universities adequately, as it decides two years later to cut another billion.

The cuts are also economically irresponsible. Every euro the government invests in university research pays for itself four times over. Some 40 companies therefore signed a wake-up call letter against the cuts. Employer association forewoman Ingrid Thijssen also argued that the cuts are not necessary at all. Better to have a budget deficit than to destroy the innovative power of the economy.

But if the government does not want a budget deficit, it would make much more sense not to proceed with the dividend tax cut for foreign shareholders, or the box 2 tax cut [this amounts to a cut on taxation on income from wealth]. Together, these tax cuts account for a billion euros in lower taxes for wealthy people, which do not serve our economy and country.

Moreover, the cuts are not lawful because they amount to a breach of contract. Minister Dijkgraaf closed a 10-year administrative agreement with the sector of higher education in 2022, which was supposed to bring calm and stability to universities. That agreement is now being unilaterally terminated by the government, without substantiation and without consultation. Calm and stability have turned into great unrest and panic, and it is only a matter of time until we will lose excellent scholars and scientists to foreign universities.

If austerity is irresponsible, economically unwise, unnecessary for public finances, and a breach of contract, then we must ask the question: what is going on here anyway? How can we understand why the government is creating this battleground?

To answer that question, we need two insights. The first insight is that one of the functions of the university has always been to keep society on its toes. The critical function of the university is crucial for truth-telling, for technological and economic progress, and for understanding society.

Universities differ from corporate R&D-departments, or from scientific think-tanks related to political parties, in that they are not supposed to serve any master other than truth, in all its dimensions. Scientists and scholars provide the facts and interpret the relevant context to societal issues. Scientists and scholars think about what questions should be asked. When they observe that untruths are being told, they should criticise it. That is the value of the university. But to act on this value, universities must be funded in a way that enables them to fulfil that role.

The second insight is that history teaches us time and again that democratically elected politicians with authoritarian aspirations try to undermine public institutions because they are crucial for truth-telling and the protection of liberal fundamental rights. Academia, journalism, art, culture, the civil service and the judiciary are the first to be attacked as soon as authoritarian politicians gain power. Once these institutions are sufficiently weakened, and therefore the resistance to spreading falsehoods has diminished, authoritarian parties can further strengthen their grip on society by deploying propaganda.

In the past, a lot of authoritarian politicians grabbed power from within a democratic system. The American philosopher Jason Stanley, professor at Yale University, stresses in his book How Fascism Works that we should not think that authoritarian and fascist policies only take place under a fascist regime. Even in a (weakened) democracy, a government can work on and execute fascist policies, such as dehumanising certain population groups, ignoring facts, undermining rational public debate, and spreading all kinds of myths about the nature and history of the country in order to shape the future according to its own ideal.

And let the university be the very place where young people are trained to look critically and constructively at society and policy, and where facts are distinguished from fiction. These are not the kind of things authoritarian leaders appreciate. For authoritarian politicians, a university is an institution that should be tamed as much as possible. Authoritarian politicians want the university to be subservient and conform to their agenda. For authoritarian politicians, anti-intellectualism is therefore part of their strategy: the weaker the position of professions that think and analyse, the easier it becomes to roll out authoritarian policies.

The announced cuts can easily be explainable when we recognize that the [current Dutch] Schoof government is a coalition in which anti-intellectualist parties set the tone. BBB and PVV love to create their own fact-free reality. And in doing so, scientists get in the way. Those who want to continue the current agribusiness because it yields the most short-term financial gains only find scientists’ findings on the nitrogen crisis, biodiversity loss, and climate change annoying. Nor does the PVV value social critique by scholars and scientists. Because in doing so, those scholars and scientists puncture the myths that the far-right spreads about the Netherlands’ past.

Moreover, scholars from the social sciences and the humanities sound the alarm bell about the weakening of democracy and the rule of law, and ask legal and moral questions about extreme-right policies.

For anti-intellectualist parties, it is essential that universities weaken. If they want to tighten their grip on the country, it has to be part of their long-term strategy.

What role do the other two coalition parties, VVD and NSC, play in this account? In theory, the VVD is a classical-liberal party, so it should agitate with full force against anything that erodes liberal democracy. But apparently, within the VVD, the neoliberals, who are willing to sacrifice liberal principles for tax breaks and economic policies that benefit the wealthiest part of their constituency, are pulling the strings. The question is therefore how strong the real liberals within the VVD are, and whether they will be able to protect the institutions crucial to liberal democracy from the coalition partners’ anti-intellectualist agenda.

What about NSC then? In its election manifesto, NSC promised to curb neoliberal policies, but this austerity is a neoliberal measure par excellence. And despite NSC’s emphasis on good governance, this party did appear willing to provide a minister who will unilaterally cancel the administrative agreement with higher education, without a glance. We can only hope that NSC politicians read Jason Stanley’s book and come to the conclusion that they should not want these policies on their conscience.

In his book On Tyranny, the American historian Timothy Snyder gave twenty recommendations on what we can do today if an authoritarian leader is elected. Lesson two is about universities, trade unions, the media, the rule of law and other institutions of free society. The lesson is: ‘Defend institutions’. This is what we should certainly expect from VVD and NSC politicians: that they conclude that their own values are being undermined with these austerity measures. And then do what is in their power to stop these cuts.

Students and scholars expect university administrators to fight the announced cuts by any morally permissible means. But in several places in the Netherlands, we see administrators who, while saying that the cuts will be disastrous, are already publicly presenting plans on how they will implement them. In doing so, they publicly accept the cuts, and hence legitimize them.

Some degree programmes had been facing financial problems for years due to the funding model, financial choices by administrators, and limited student enrollment. Deans have been working out a future-proof model for some time. But the changes now before us are of a very different order. At the University of Leiden, several programmes are being merged or scrapped, including the unique African studies programme. At Utrecht University, the undergraduate programmes in Italian, German, French, Celtic, religious studies, and Islam and Arabic are being scrapped. Even before the cuts are approved by the Lower and Upper Houses of Parliament, university administrators are already implementing them.

Our administrators should sit down with Eppo Bruins to explore what the government can do to ensure that these programmes do not disappear, instead of accepting the cuts.

Universities have become increasingly hierarchical in recent decades. In a number of faculties, professors and lecturers have virtually no say in what happens to programmes and disciplines. The thin layer of democratic varnish in university governance cannot withstand this crisis. Officially, there is co-determination, but in many places this is nothing more than a sham. It is like weakened democracy, where attempts are also being made to govern with emergency laws and without sound justification.

We need university administrators who refuse to go along with the submissiveness that the government in The Hague is trying to enforce. We need politicians who are willing to look at this issue rationally, and recognise that the planned cuts are irresponsible, unnecessary, and not legitimate. And above all, the Netherlands needs political parties that understand the bigger picture, and then decide that it is better to retract while still possible than to err completely.

We stand on the shoulders of the greatness and bravery that came before us.  It’s our turn to stand up and demand not only our civil rights as citizens, but our humanity and our dignity in the face of a political party and a president elect bent on dragging us into the the cruelty and bigotry of the past. 

Those who have gone before us stood up to oppression and did not fear consequences that included arrest and trial on spurious charges and conviction for crimes they did not commit and even time in jail. They demanded respect and rights that had been denied to them. 

We stand on the shoulders of the Black sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee who marched silently carrying signs reading “I am a man” as they faced down armed National Guard troops.

We stand on the shoulders of Rosa Parks, who refused to be made to sit in the back of a public bus she had paid money to ride.

We stand on the shoulders of the gay and trans people in New York City who stood up to police beatings and arrests and said, we are not going to take it anymore.

We stand on the shoulders of Vietnam veterans who threw their medals over a fence around the Capitol and said, we will not fight your illegal wars anymore.

We stand on the shoulders of Cesar Chavez and the farmworkers who stood up and said we will not pick your fruits and vegetables for plantation wages.

We stand on the shoulders of women who demanded the rights to equal pay for equal work and the right to control their own bodies.

It is not our job to save America from itself.  We tried that with our votes.  This country will have to save itself in other ways.  Politics is not, as the saying goes, the art of the possible.  Most of all, politics is not the only mechanism by which democracy works. 

Democracy is in the notes strummed on a guitar, in the feet pounding the pavement on a picket line, in the face of a teacher helping children learn to read and write, in a brushstroke of paint on canvas, in the electrical charges across a transistor enabling communication, in the clang and bang and whirr of a newspaper press, in the cry of a newborn gasping a first breath, in the hush of a hospital corridor where the sick are healed, in the heat of a stove where soup boils to feed the hungry.

Look around you.  Democracy is everywhere.  It didn’t go away on Tuesday, the 5^th of November in 2024.  It’s in the text you just answered from a friend, in the eulogy read for a loved one who has died, in the sweet nothings whispered between lovers, in a question asked by a student in a seminar, in the silence of the desert or the mountains at night, in the stars above us and the dirt beneath our feet.

We must not fall into the trap of feeling that we are special because we strove with our votes for goodness and have been crushed by our losses at the polls.  When Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white man, she did not even have the right to vote.  When the gay people at the Stonewall were arrested, loving someone of the same sex was illegal in most states, and they could not vote their way out of jail. 

I remember Moratorium Day at Fort Benning, Georgia in 1969.  There was a tiny protest outside the gates of the post – a few women, wives and girlfriends of soldiers, one with an infant in a stroller, all of them trying to stop their soldiers from being consumed by a war in Vietnam that everyone, including, we now know, the generals and the President of the United States knew could not be won. 

I remember their hand-drawn signs and the phalanx of military police behind them on the other side of the entrance to Fort Benning and the police facing them on the Columbus, Georgia side of the post gate.  I remember most of all their faces, frightened and amazed at what they were doing and the ruckus it had caused, but defiant as they shouted “Stop the war!  Bring them home!”

Democrats tried and failed to end that war in 1972 with their votes for George McGovern and lost.  Remember the magnitude of that loss?  Richard Nixon carried 49 of 50 states and won the popular vote by 18 million votes. 

What those protesters at Fort Benning wanted didn’t happen overnight, but it did happen. In 1973, the soldiers were brought home, and two years after that, the war ended because we lost it and pulled out of Vietnam militarily for good.  It was unrestrained power and idiocy that started the war in Vietnam.  It wasn’t the power of the vote in our democracy that ended that war.  It was hundreds of thousands of protesters just like those at Fort Benning who did it.

There are four long years before we can use our votes again to elect a new president, and two years before we can use them to make a difference in the House and Senate.   In the meantime, we are going to need our own Birmingham bus boycotts, our own Stonewall riots, our own sanitation strikes, our own college class walk-outs, our own marches on Washington.  We will need courage, we will need pride, we will need defiance, and we will need bodies.  We have done all this before.  We can save ourselves, and we can save the lives of others, by the force of our ideas and the righteousness of our cause.  All we need to do is to want it badly enough.

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