“Too risky”: Scholars who study America say they won’t visit

VIENNA — It can be a maddening experience, living in America and not supporting Donald J. Trump.

In what has been billed as the greatest country on Earth, democracy is being unraveled because a majority of the nation’s white inhabitants voted for a 79-year-old man who is temperamentally unfit for any public office, much less one that comes with nuclear weapons. A once-proud nation of immigrants is being subject to military occupations because a man, in a marriage to an immigrant, says that foreigners are “poisoning the blood” of the nation, and that they are to blame for all that one finds wanting in life.

Perhaps the end of the flawed American project comes as no surprise, but even the most jaded observer — one aware that the land of the free was also the home of the slave — has had to marvel that the collapse could be brought about by this, of all guys; not by some charismatic general, skilled at feigning empathy for the common people, but an elderly conman who’s only selling them crypto.

Take some solace, then, in that you are not crazy for thinking this is insulting, in all of its dystopian absurdity. Those who study and teach about America, abroad, also think the country has become a frightening shell of its past, imperfect glory.

At a packed Oct. 4 forum in Vienna, Austria, academics who have taught thousands of students about the culture and history of the United States expressed shock and dismay at how quickly the liberal future imagined, if not realized, with the election of Barack Obama has given way to the ugliest form of American reaction.

“We’re all also overwhelmed by the situation,” said Alexandra Ganser, a professor of American Studies at the University of Vienna. A former Fulbright Scholar who studied in the U.S., she lamented that the country’s descent into authoritarianism was “all pretty new” and required rethinking how academics approach their work.

“We need to prepare ourselves better, maybe also on a departmental level — [and] prepare students who are traveling to the U.S.,” she said, the forum coming as part of a conference dubbed “Ruptures, Fractures, Discontinuities: Troubled American Studies.”

Already, she noted, those thinking of heading to Trump’s America are being warned not to bring their own phones and to “get other computers when you travel.”

That guidance comes amid the Trump administration’s crackdown on academia and, in particular, foreign-born students.

Rümeysa Öztürk, a Ph.D. student at Tufts University and a former Fulbright Scholar, did nothing more than lend her name to an op-ed urging her school to take seriously students’ concerns about its relations with Israel. For that offense, she was grabbed off the street by a half-dozen plainclothes federal agents and detained for weeks in a decrepit ICE facility, thousands of miles away.

Yunseo Chung, a legal permanent resident, attended a sit-in at Barnard College over Gaza. For that non-crime, the Trump administration sought to deport her to South Korea, a country that she left at the age of 7.

There are now countless such stories of students and tourists being arrested and detained over perceived slights to MAGA America. And top U.S. officials have promised there will be more.

“Visiting America is not an entitlement,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio has lectured those who wish to study at the universities that have accepted them. “It is a privilege extended to those who respect our laws and values.”

Now, even academics whose specialty is America — well aware of its virtues and flaws, even before its recent authoritarian turn — are afraid to visit the object of their studies, at least so long as the present regime is in power.

“I thought to myself, If I were 10 years, 15 years younger, and I have no kids, I would absolutely do it, because I want to,” Ganser said of her own security assessment. “I want to feel it. I want to see it — I want to see what’s happening to you… With two kids, I cannot. It’s too risky.”

In November, the American Studies Association is hosting its annual conference. It’s in Puerto Rico, a fact that organizers seem apologetic about. The conference website, seeking to address safety concerns, explains that the organization is contractually bound to host events in the U.S. for the next couple of years.

“We have inherited a conference model based on mid- to late-20th century assumptions about higher education and about the world,” the group states, one that does not account for “politically motivated attacks” on academia and efforts “to outlaw critical analysis of American political, social, and cultural institutions, ideologies, and practices.”

But it’s not as if the post-war liberal order in Europe can be taken for granted, either. That’s another lesson from developments in American politics, observed Ingrid Gessner, a professor at the University of Education Vorarlberg in Austria.

As president of the European Association for American Studies, she plans on attending that conference in Puerto Rico (this year’s topic: “Late-Stage American Empire?”). But living in Austria, where a far-right party out-polled all its rivals in the last election — and where illiberal hegemons are now to both its East and West — the threat to democracy and intellectual inquiry cannot be dismissed as just an American thing, Gessner noted.

Even so, the MAGA brand is no doubt a contributor to an unsettling trend in politics, everywhere.

“I was probably not as much aware as I am now that I do have students, especially young male students, who would actually give anything to attend a Trump rally,” Gessner said. “That is very real in the classroom.”

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Confronting right-wing populism, American-style, is one thing when it’s a European classroom. Most European academics appear less willing to risk a confrontation with its manifestation on American soil.

Heike Paul, chair of American Studies at Germany’s Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg, was blunt about whether she planned to attend any more conferences in the land of the free.

“I’m not going to the United States,” Paul said with a laugh. She noted that a conference hosted by the Bavarian American Academy, previously held in Berkeley, California, has now been moved to Montreal.

“Thank God for Canada,” she said, “because I think that also many other associations have done the same thing … and [decided] not to come to the United States.”

That the country these academics have devoted their professional careers to studying and teaching about is no longer safe to visit is a sad and unexpected development. In 2015, most European scholars — like most American liberals — could not have imagined a budding dictatorship led by a guy from “The Apprentice.” Since Trump’s rise and return to office, Paul said, the U.S. has fallen into the same category as countries like Russia and China.

“Now, when I think about going to the U.S., I talk to a lot of my colleagues in Sinology. I talk to a lot of my colleagues who travel to Egypt and many other [authoritarian] places,” she said. And she, like others who have witnessed the loss of what was once assumed to be stable democracy, must ask: “What does it mean to travel to a place where certain things can no longer be taken for granted?”