In 2016, Oxford University Press chose “post-truth” (based on popularity, in large part) as the word of the year: “Relating to… circumstances in which… facts are less influential… than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” This was also the year Donald Trump was first elected President of the United States. Almost a decade later, (post-) truth featured heavily in physician and writer Abraham Verghese’s commencement address at Harvard University: “This is almost the reflex of so-called strong men: To attack the places where truth and reason prevail.”
Since protests around the war in Gaza have intensified, more so after the start of Trump’s second term, free speech and universities in the US have come under attack. The Trump administration has tried to clamp down on their functioning, including in matters of diversity, curricula, and hiring. It has blocked federal funding for Harvard and imposed restrictions on international students at the university. But even this, Verghese noted, is not a unique moment. In 1975, when Indira Gandhi imposed the Emergency and thousands of protesting students were arrested, “citizens…expressed their outrage by voting; she was ousted”. Protest and a valiant defence of truth are the necessary pushbacks to assaults such as those evident in the current moment. The ban on international students’ intake was blocked by a federal judge; protests have persisted, and as Megha Vemuri, class president, MIT, said in her speech just this week, “we cannot let fear keep us” from doing what must be done.
The US — on paper and in practice — has been the staunchest defender of free speech. It has taught generations of its young what it means to stand up for reason and justice, to hang in there till the difficult moment passes. Perhaps this is what matters even now: To not be cowed down and to stand up for what is right. As Verghese wrote in The Covenant of Water, “In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
