Souleymane Bachir Diagne: 'Our era is marked by a generalized withdrawal into identity, universalism has died'

Souleymane Bachir Diagne is in an ideal position to observe Donald Trump's decisions on education or his stances on Africa. The academic was born in Senegal in 1955, trained at the Ecole Normale Supérieure academic institution in Paris, notably with Louis Althusser and Jacques Derrida, and has been teaching philosophy at Columbia University in New York since 2008.

On Thursday, March 20, Donald Trump signed an executive order paving the way for the dismantling of the Department of Education. How do you interpret it?

This measure has been promoted for a very long time by the Republican Party, which believes that the Department of Education, organized at the federal level, should be the responsibility of the states and cities in a system as decentralized as the American system. Student grants and loans, which have until now been awarded by the federal government and administered by the Ministry of Education, could now be managed by private organizations. It is still too early to see how the protests will be organized in response to these measures.

In early March, President Trump cut $400 million (around €370 million) in federal funding to Columbia, whose administration has been accused of laxity in the face of pro-Palestinian protests on campus. In response, the university agreed on Friday, to undertake reforms, particularly in its management of student protests. What is your reaction?

First, there was a climate of uncertainty in which Columbia opted for silent diplomacy, asking for time to reflect. Finally, the university's interim president, Katrina Armstrong, and the board of directors decided not to engage in a costly legal standoff, yielding to the demands of the Trump administration.

It was probably inevitable given the scale of the consequences that we had already measured in relation to the suspension of the $400 million. We saw programs in medical research come to an abrupt halt. Budgetary trade-offs would have to be made across all departments of the university, such as the number of PhD students we could recruit in the future.

I recently had a meeting with my colleagues in which we discussed what we could give up financially, although these budget cuts mainly affect the health sector, including the university hospital and the medical school. The university's current goal is to lift the $400 million suspension and safeguard research programs that are heavily dependent on federal grants, for example.

Columbia University has also agreed to appoint a vice-rector to oversee the Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies (MESAAS) department after the Trump administration demanded that it be placed under "academic receivership"for at least five years. Did you expect this?

I was very surprised. This is an attack on academic freedom. An authority outside Columbia could now make all the MESAAS department's decisions, such as educational choices, course selection, how students are recruited, etc. In the spirit of the Trump administration, this academic supervision essentially targets Middle Eastern studies, even though the whole department will be affected.

Universities should, however, be able to decide what they teach, what research to conduct, and what knowledge to build and transmit. Despite this context, Columbia reaffirms its values: the importance of dialogue, the confrontation of ideas and freedom of expression, which is the sine qua non of the exercise of our profession.

Why do you think Columbia is being targeted?

These attacks are intended to direct fire at anything that resembles the establishment, namely cosmopolitan elites and academia. But these attacks are nothing new. For many years, the American right has perceived the university system as a hotbed of woke, leftist and elitist teachings. But until now, this has been a muted opposition. Today, we're experiencing an acceleration of the story.

While Columbia is taking center stage, many other American universities are also being brought to heel. John Hopkins University, for example, one of the world's leading public health institutions, has recently been ordered to forcibly remove a significant number of its staff.

After referring to African states as "shithole countries" during his first term in office, on March 4 the American president made a quip to Congress about Lesotho, a country "nobody has ever heard of." What do these words say about the American president's interest in Africa?

I observe a great ignorance of the African continent. Sub-Saharan Africa, apart from a few security issues, has never been of great importance in American foreign policy discourse. Will this new administration show any interest in Africa? To date, there's been the mockery of Lesotho, whose name perhaps seemed to sound exotic within the president's remarks. A slightly more serious dimension is the current quarrel with South Africa, which Washington is criticizing for its alleged policy of oppressing the white minority.

But behind the effects of rhetoric, there are American decisions already having an impact on the continent. For example, suspension of American development aid is measured in health disasters and deaths. Up to this point, USAID [the US Agency for International Development], regarded by the US government as a budget-eating and woke agency, has brought some relief in the fight against disease in Africa. Is this the first salvo after which the administration will back-pedal in certain sectors? Is a form of chaos being introduced and then made good? It's too early to say.

How do you view the US and Israel's willingness to send Palestinians from Gaza to Sudan, Somalia and Somaliland?

I wonder how serious these statements are. Why Somaliland, Sudan and Somalia? These are war zones. I don't think these ideas are random. These three countries were mentioned in the same way as Timbuktu, in the sense of something far away. On the other hand, there is an urgent need to find a lasting solution to the Middle East crisis and its trail of atrocities.

More broadly, how do you feel about global developments since Trump's arrival in the White House?

Our era is marked by a generalized withdrawal into identity. In the US, as elsewhere, ethno-nationalism is unfortunately widespread. Multilateralism is being called into question, which I consider to be a regressive policy, as illustrated by the American decision to withdraw from the World Health Organization (WHO) on January 20. With different perspectives, Africa and the Sahel are not untouched by these policies, which begin and end in proclamations of identity.

Today, there's scorn for the idea that one province of the world could dictate what universal means to another region of the globe. Universalism has died a natural death. On the one hand, resigning oneself to a world of isolated cultural identities would be a dead end. On the other, reaching out towards universality is criticized. Faced with the scale of the struggle, we need to hold firm to the principle of the universal in order to forge things together. This is what leads to the idea of reinventing the universal.