The Fall of the Ivory Tower
How the academy traded neutrality for ideology — and guaranteed its own backlash
In 2020, Terence Tao — the "Mozart of Math" — joined more than 300 academics in signing an open letter declaring that America is a "white supremacist society" and that complicity with these systems of oppression is "deeply rooted in the origins of this country." It was a striking moment: one of the world’s most celebrated mathematicians lending his name not to mathematics, but to the moralizing tide of politicized academia. The message was clear: neutrality is complicity, and scholars must join the struggle.
Fast-forward to 2025. Tao now finds himself in the headlines again, but for very different reasons: the Trump administration has slashed his research funding. His lament is striking: "This is not a routine policy shift – it is a deliberate dismantling of the institutions, funding, and freedoms that have sustained American science for generations." In other words: politics has invaded the domain of science and sabotaged its neutrality.
The irony is painful, but it was always inevitable.
The Betrayal of Neutrality
For centuries, the academy survived and thrived precisely because it was trusted to be neutral. Mathematics, physics, and biology carried weight because they operated above the political fray. Their authority rested on independence — the ability to produce knowledge unsullied by partisan loyalties. That fragile social contract was shattered when academics decided that silence was no longer permissible and that every field, even the most abstract, must declare allegiance to a political vision.
When Tao and his colleagues framed their disciplines as not just adjacent to, but complicit in, systems of oppression, they were saying explicitly: science is political. If that’s the standard, why should anyone be surprised when a politician like Trump takes them at their word and treats science as a political faction to be punished?
The Inevitability of Retaliation
The moment scholars abandoned neutrality, they lost the only protection they ever had. If science declares war on one half of the electorate by branding the entire society structurally white supremacist, it forfeits the claim to universal legitimacy. That is not just rhetoric; it’s a declaration that your work and your institutions are no longer impartial. And once you’ve done that, why should your funding be considered sacrosanct? If you turn science into politics, then politics will happily turn science into a battlefield.
Academics imagined that they could wield politics as a one-way weapon, mobilizing moral fervor to protect their institutions from scrutiny. But power never flows in one direction for long. The sword they forged is now being used against them.
The Lesson
The tragedy of Tao’s situation is not that Trump cut his funding. The tragedy is that Tao, and many others, made this outcome unavoidable. By politicizing science, they invited political reprisal. By insisting that neutrality is complicity, they destroyed the neutrality that protected them. The academy once held a privileged position because it stood outside the tribal wars of ideology. That privilege has now been squandered.
Science can survive many things: lack of funding, social indifference, even persecution. What it cannot survive is the loss of trust in its neutrality. Once the public sees the academy as just another partisan institution, it will be treated accordingly — with all the suspicion, hostility, and retaliation that partisanship entails.
The academy thought it was seizing the moral high ground; in truth, it was sawing off the branch it sat upon. The irony is that Tao’s funding cuts are not an aberration but the natural consequence of the logic he helped legitimize.