No FRUS for you
Trump fires all the historians.
An advisory committee of diverse historians helps ensure that the record of America’s history — especially classified and covert actions — remains unbiased, transparent and thorough.
President Donald Trump just fired all of the members of the committee.
These advisers help oversee the exhaustive publication series called the Foreign Relations of the United States — or the FRUS, as insiders call it — and lawmakers rely on it daily. It is available to the public in major libraries and online.
The volume began in 1861, when Congress demanded a full account of Lincoln’s foreign policy during the Civil War. More than 450 volumes have been printed since.
Later accusations that the documentation was partisan or incomplete were addressed with a congressional statute requiring the setup of an advisory committee of diverse historians.
Without proper oversight, “a great many of the important facts of recent history still remain secret long after security requirements have expired,” Sen. Margaret Chase Smith (R-Maine) wrote in a June 1953 editorial in the Rutland Daily Herald, pointing to huge gaps in the historical records from the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration during the early 1930s.
“Instead, the American people have had only the charges and counter-charges of political campaigns on which to base their impressions,” Smith said. She said she was worried that the historical narrative will “rely on the politically-colored partisan accounts of some of the participants.”
Sarah B. Snyder, a history professor at American University who specializes in the Cold War and was one of the historians fired by Trump, says the FRUS is “important for historical scholarship.”
“But it’s also important for the reputation of the United States in the world, to be seen as forthright about our country’s history,” she said after receiving the one-line message the other committee members received in April:
“On behalf of President Donald Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position on the Advisory Committee on Historical Diplomatic Documentation is terminated effective immediately. Thank you for your service,” said one of the termination emails obtained by The Washington Post and sent on April 30 by Cate Dillon, the White House liaison to the State Department.
It’s destruction for the sake of destruction.
Maybe more for the purposes of homogenization and sanitizing.
But that would run counter to the MAGA mission, because a “forthright” assessment destroys the mythology and hagiography that MAGA would replace history with. Things that don’t align with the Official Story didn’t happen.
Add to that the White House scrubbing all records of Trump’s “speeches” and tweetrums from the official record, they are wiping all Scientific papers they can find on NOA, NASA, etc, and redirecting education funds away from research at universities to fund more community college places for Astrologigical Basket Weaving and Aromatherapy Nail Varnishing.
This is a totally unfair depiction of community colleges. Community colleges are not woo-centers (at least not yet). They are trade schools that also have an academic program; the academic program teaches courses that are transferable to universities, meaning they have to be taught at university level. They perform vital services, and train people in a lot of industries, allowing people who are not academically minded to be trained for a trade in which they can make a living, and providing skilled people to fill those trades.
For academically minded students who don’t feel prepared for college (whether from terror of being away from home or failure to prepare during high school) they provide a transition from high school to college that is less threatening, usually with smaller classes and more intimate settings, and allow students to make up deficiencies in their education before they go to a four year institution. The credits are transferable, and much cheaper, so the students save a lot of money (which is the only reason I went to a community college during my program; it gave me basic courses and cost only about a third as much as the university).
The community college system is dismissed by too many as just advanced high school (it isn’t, not if it’s run properly) and less important than the colleges. If people would take time to learn a little about the community colleges before they popped off snarky comments about them, they would realize the extremely important role they play in education, and the value they provide to both employers who get the skilled employees and the students who are able to land much more lucrative jobs than they would have otherwise. People who might have spent their life working at McDonald’s or its like will actually be doing something more important than helping people clog their arteries, making more money and moving out of poverty, and gaining a degree of self-respect and a feeling that they are worth something.
Sorry for the rant. Dismissing community colleges always makes me see red.
@3 thank you. I’ve taught at both community colleges and at universities, and with one university department exception the community college students were more motivated, more interested in their studies, and more ambitious to succeed. (They’re there because they want to be, and because they have a clear idea of how an education will benefit them.)
I third that. Community colleges are a great thing. Students without access to huge pots of money can start there and then transfer to a high status university for the final year or two.
re: community colleges
They also have classes in the evening*. This is good for people with day jobs. My dad furthered his engineering degree that way.
*Called “night school” when I was a kid.
Ah yes, good point.
Iknclast #3
FWIW some years after getting some university degrees I took an evening class in the programming language C, at a community college.
Got my liberal arts degree at a state school but when I needed to make money I got my welding degree at a community college. I just wish tradesmen were required to take a few courses that would broaden their horizons.
Stealing research money is obviously not justifiable.