Michigan Tech Board of Trustees, 2025-04-25

Michigan Tech Board of Trustees
Sarah Green, Calumet Township
2025-04-24

I am Sarah Green, professor emerita and former chair of chemistry. Although I am still involved in several research grants here, today I speak as a concerned and outraged citizen.

Graduation is always an exciting time as newly minted alumni are launched into the world. However, this year they are heading into a profoundly uncertain future.

Graduates who aspired to careers of public service have been discarded as expendable, being fired from agencies that protect our health, improve our environment, design our infrastructure, manage our financial system, and conduct fundamental research.
Future graduates are having opportunities yanked from under them as visas are revoked with no explanation or research grants are canceled.

But this threat is far greater than the loss of a few jobs or grants.

Our democratic institutions are under attack. Historians, political scientists, economists, journalists, and leaders from across the political spectrum are raising the alarm that we are seeing a rapid authoritarian take-over of our system of government.

This is an emergency. I feel like I’m watching coyote suspended in the air after running off the cliff.

We are seeing ruthless and unprincipled attacks on research institutions, the press, and universities, in short any place that encourages critical thinking.

The easy response to this chaos for board members like yourselves is to make a few concessions, then a few more. But that’s a dangerous slope; with each capitulation the bullies return to demand more.

The only way to stop bullies and mobsters is to band together and fight back.

As of this morning, 443 university presidents have signed a letter “speak[ing] with one voice against the unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education.”

President Koubek’s name was not on this letter.

I urge the university to be fully transparent about government pressures, including the number of revoked visas, impacted grants and other impacts.
, I urge you to join and support efforts to oppose the illegal attacks on universities.
 
I’ll finish with a few words from journalist Adrienne LaFrance who interviewed numerous people who have lived under dictators and autocrats:

Today, right now—and I mean right this second--you have the most power you’ll ever have in the current fight against authoritarianism in America. Authoritarian leaders topple democracy faster than you can imagine. If you wait to speak out against them, you have already lost.