Where universities are victims of Trump’s colonialism

The other night I uploaded my medical report to the Fulbright website. It was the last bureaucratic hoop to secure health insurance and a visa to spend the coming semester in Budapest, Hungary.

I closed my laptop and went to bed.

‘A Letter from the President of the United States’ appeared in my inbox in the morning.

My stomach dropped. My first reaction: “Did Trump see After American Studies?” – my 2017 book which suggests abandoning ‘American’ as a qualifying adjective (or noun). “It can’t be,” I thought and clicked.

It was a form letter about participation in State Department programmes. Initially I thought the text was the work of a ghost writer, but on closer inspection, it appears Trump may have been the author.

Along with an oddly large font (larger than the White House letterhead characters), the date and signature are centre-justified and the word ‘Nation’ is capitalised throughout. The author uses ‘I’ frequently: “I have made it a top priority to strengthen and maintain our Nation’s oldest friendships and build new partnerships in pursuit of peace. This program is one of the many ways our Nation is achieving this goal. I am proud to have you take part in this special opportunity.

“Participants of this program represent our Nation as citizen ambassadors. You have the responsibility to demonstrate American values and display leadership around the world.”

While Trump’s other communiqués misspell words like succuess and lament that “there blood sweat, and tears was a total waist of time”, here he commands that scholars exemplify what he calls “American values”.

The remark is perhaps more absurd read at my desk in Puerto Rico than it would be for scholars elsewhere.

Trump’s attitude to Puerto Rico

Just over a year ago Hurricane Maria brought havoc to my family, friends, community and university. Donald Trump’s disregard for Puerto Ricans intensified the disaster. Around 3,000 died under his negligence – including Carlos Fajardo, an artist and professor in my department.

For Trump, Puerto Rico is “an island surrounded by water, big water, ocean water”.

“He is a racist president who does not understand that his role is to help, not attack or persecute,” said Yulín Cruz, mayor of San Juan.

After lampooning Puerto Ricans gripped by tragedy, Trump echoed the colonialist contempt of long-past US administrations, saying self-determination for the island is an “absolute no.”

Trump’s colonialist approach has been reiterated by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, which has weaponised accreditation, threatening to rescind the University of Puerto Rico’s certification as a means to coerce compliance with the financial exigencies of the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA).

De facto government

PROMESA granted a seven-member non-elected fiscal board plenary control to overrule the Puerto Rican legislature.

The board is “a de facto government”, said Carmen Beatriz Llenín Figueroa, a member of the humanities department at my university, “a farcical colonial apparatus wielding autocratic, absolute control of all Puerto Rican public institutions”.

Since PROMESA was put in place in 2016, students have been burdened with a 100% tuition fee rise for 2019 and an additional 75% increase by 2023. Faculty benefits and pensions are on the chopping block.

The struggle with this board is an everyday affair in the public university system – affecting not only finances but use of language, topics of study and the academic calendar, among many other facets of faculty life. These concerns may have a more despotic, Trumpian tone of late, but they are not new. As Félix Córdova Dávila said in 1928, Puerto Ricans “are not asking for charity, but for rights”.

Democratisation

Donald Trump’s policies evidence a broken democracy. His views on Puerto Rico are relics of when imperial sentiments – and all that go with them – dominated US intellectual life. While some scholars defend imperialism, my experiences in a university shaped by policies formed outside of Puerto Rico lead me only to affirm that local governance and increased democratisation of public institutions enhance what we do in the classroom.

It is an honour to represent the US in the Fulbright programme, though I would much prefer a message from someone like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, José Serrano or Sonia Sotomayor.

As a way of expressing ‘American’ values, I will delete the president’s letter.

Illustration credit: Maya Spielman

Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera will be the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in American Studies at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary, in the spring of 2019. He is an associate professor at the University of Puerto Rico.