- I think they are going to come for all of us

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Saturday 18th. of October Nancy Kanwisher, tenured professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will take part in nationwide demonstrations under the banner No Kings (see fact box). So will faculty all over the country, together with a multitude of opponents of the MAGA government.

Professor Kanwisher was invited to Trondheim 2024 to receive the Kavli Prize (see fact box). Nobel Laureate Edvard Moser title her as «a fantastic scientist». At MIT she runs her own lab, but is prepared to shut it down if worst come to worst.

- Are you seriously considering leaving the US for going to somewhere else?

- Not immediately but I will tell you it made a huge change in my mood when I saw Edward Moser a few months ago in Oslo and he told me that if I have to, I could just go to Trondheim and join his institute for some time on short notice. I can't tell you how much better I feel. I'm not planning to do it immediately. I'm still staying here trying to fight. My life is here. My friends are here. My colleagues are here. It was never in my plans to get up and move. But the fact that I have an escape hatch at a really nice place with really good scientists, where I wouldn't have to stop being a scientist, has really made me feel so much better.

- So you have an escape plan?

- I have an escape plan. Thank you, Edvard. Colleagues I know who are most politically active, we all have escape plans.

- Are you kidding me?

- How are other faculty at MIT reacting to the political development?

Fakta

No Kings 18th of October

While protests against President Trump have not been uncommon since his first term, No Kings Day kicked off on June 14. These gatherings were organized in response to the U.S. Army’s 250th anniversary military parade in Washington, D.C., which coincided with Trump’s 79th birthday.

Across the country, 2,000 No Kings protests are scheduled for Saturday 18th, according to a post from the Indivisible project. There are plans in major cities like Los Angeles; Boston; Washington; Chicago; Atlanta; New Orleans; Kansas City, Mo.; and Bozeman, Mont. Planned protests stretch into Canada and as far south as Madrid, a town in Mexico.

“On October 18, millions of us are rising again to show the world: America has no kings, and the power belongs to the people,” reads the main page on the No Kings website.

- Since February, there has been a range of responses in the US. Most of my colleagues for months would say, oh, we just need to hang on for two years. I would say, are you kidding me? What gives you any confidence that we will have a real election in two years that will be honored? And they're like, oh, it will be fine. And now they're all losing their funding, they're getting a little more nervous.

“The question is how dark it’s going to get”

- You are working at MIT, a technological university. Is there a sentiment among your colleagues that you are in less danger?

- People here hope they are less in the crosshairs. I think that's naive. I think they're going to come for all of us. I hope I am wrong. MIT, we are the military industrial complex, so the government needs us in some way more than they need Harvard. And so it's possible that for those reasons, MIT is a little bit exempt.

Earlier three university presidents were told to meet to a Congressional hearing. Only one of them survived in present position: Sally Kornbluth of MIT. Liz Magill of U-Penn and Claudine Gay, Harvard, did not.

Worse than McCarthy era

To Professor Kanwisher, the present attack on US universities, resembles another infamous period.

- Some compare with the McCarthy era, but it's worse than that. The McCarthy era was more targeted to particular groups of people, like those involved in the movie industry and the like. This is undermining not just elite academia but journalism, business, everyone.

- Did you see this coming?

- I was terrified that Trump would be re-elected. And I thought it would be very, very bad if he was re-elected. But even I did not think it could get this bad. Certainly not this fast. Every single thing of value is being destroyed. These days, after the killing of Charlie Kirk, people are getting fired simply for quoting him.

- Do you feel safe personally?

- I don't feel unsafe yet. I do think it's not out of the question that I could lose my job. I don't think it will happen in the next six months. But we are on this insane trajectory that you can't figure out what will happen. I go to all the protests that I can get to. I broke my lifetime record last weekend and went to four protests in one weekend. I don't think it is brave of me to do in part because I live in a blue state, where most people are like-minded. So I don't think it's seriously unsafe yet. But there are guns all over, even in Massachusetts, God help us.

In denial

- How would you describe the mentality or the feeling on campus?

- I think a lot of my colleagues are still in denial. They know it's very bad. They are worrying about the funding of their labs. But I think most of them still think, ah, at the midterms, we will vote out some of the Republicans and then it will be okay. And then we'll get back in power in two years, and we just need to hang on. I think that's very naive.

- What do you think will happen?

- I think that Trump is not behaving as if he intends to ever subject himself to an actual election. If he did, how could he possibly be willing to destroy the economy with tariffs? It's incredibly unpopular. His base, like farmers, are losing their crops because they can't hire workers because they're being deported. If he was expecting to stand for an actual election, I don't think he would do these things. The fact that he is implementing these policies that are harming not just people like me, but his base: to me this says he's not planning to stand for a real election. Instead, we might have an election like they do in Russia or in Hungary.

The defunding of science is very serious, but the deconstruction of democracy is far worse, the MIT professor argues.

- They are throwing people off the voter rolls - is taking many different forms like gerrymandering in red states. They find the thinnest excuse and find a bunch of people in a blue district and say, oh, let's throw these people out.

- I have a good life

There's many mechanisms of disenfranchising people, according to Kanwisher.

- And they throw these things at us like a fire hose. There are heroic organizations who are trying to sue after each of these actions, because most of them are flat out illegal, but they can't keep up with a firehose of insanity.

- How do you experience the last six months events on a personal level?

- It's extremely discordant because I am a privileged university professor. I have a good life. I have incredible colleagues and students. My lab is still going for now. It will go for another year or two before I run out of money. I live in a beautiful place. I have wonderful friends. And so my local life is very privileged and wonderful and same as it ever was. And yet, if I look beyond my immediate bubble, it's a total catastrophe.

Nancy Kanwisher says at first people said to each other, this is going to pass. Best thing to do is to hunker down and wait it out.

- We thought all these sources of entrenched power will oppose Trump. Business interests will be harmed. They will oppose his actions. Universities are powerful. They will oppose this. Private foundations are being harmed by this. They will oppose this. The Supreme Court will oppose this. But no, none of them are standing up to oppose Trump.I've learned, that the more power an organization has, the less it will do.

- Why is that?

They are scared shitless

- Because the more power you have, the more he's in a position to harm you. So why don't university presidents stand up and say, ‘fuck this. We are uniting. All the top 100 universities are uniting. We are not going to do any of the things you're asking. They're illegal. Take us to court. We are not doing it’. Why aren't they doing that? Because they are scared shitless, and they feel each vulnerable and each of them is hoping, if I hide, maybe they'll go for that guy and we will survive.

Trumps big threat is named Tax exempt status, she explains

- These institutions have big endowments that can be taxed at much higher rates than they are now being taxed. They are vulnerable precisely because of the money they can lose.

- What about the accusations of wokeness, and leftist liberal forces dominating the universities?

Fakta

Nancy Kanwisher

• Nancy Kanwisher s the Walter A Rosenblith Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a researcher at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research.
• She studies the neural and cognitive mechanisms underlying human visual perception and cognition.
• Kanwisher visited Trondheim last year to share The Kavli Prize in Neuroscience for the discovery of a highly localized and specialized system for representation of faces in human and non-human primate neocortex.

- It’s not important. If you're unhappy that somebody said you were insensitive to transgender people, too bad! Meanwhile, we have people in this country who are being beaten by the side of the road because they're stopped by a cop and they're black. We have people who die early because they don't have access to healthcare. We have real problems in this country and wokeness is not one of them.