Penn’s History Department organized a forum discussing the first 60 days of the second Trump administration.
Credit: Sanjana JuvvadiPenn’s History Department hosted a public forum to discuss the first 60 days of 1968 Wharton graduate and President Donald Trump’s administration last Wednesday.
The March 19 event drew around 250 Penn students, faculty, and staff to the basement of Meyerson Hall for a discussion between ten History professors. The forum examined the current state of American democracy, civil society, and how Penn has been impacted.
The panelists connected the country’s recent political division to similar episodes throughout history, including 20th-century Germany.
Panelist and History professor Anne Berg described “German society at the end of the 1920s and into the early 1930s” as “profoundly divided.”
“Moreover, over the last three years of the Weimar Republic, because of these divisions, Parliament was actually unable to form coalitions to pass laws,” she added. “There was no master plan, but the entire process was chaotic and reactive, anticipating opposition and throttling it before it could manifest. Because it was so chaotic, it was really effective, so it was difficult to make sense of what was going on.”
History professor Amy Offner discussed the historical relationship between government and private interests in the United States to contextualize the rise of 1997 College and Wharton graduate Elon Musk and his attempt to “dismantle the welfare state to allow the federal government to transfer wealth to him and to his companies.”
“The US state has always had a hybrid and decentralized character,” Offner said. “It’s always grown and functioned by delegation and has often delegated power and resources to private capital and to business associations to do its work.”
The panelists explained the centralization of individuals in the context of Trump’s termination of $175 million in federal funding to Penn.
“We are in a war with the current administration,” Alan Charles Kors Endowed Term Professor of History Benjamin Nathans said. “This is a full-scale assault on higher education, and this war is going to last for a long time. The punishment is so insanely out of proportion with the claim of what happened — whether you accept that claim or not — that it’s obvious other subterranean battles are being fought with those punishments on steroids, not the stated reason.”
Nathans also referenced the March 20 protest against the current administration’s federal actions against higher education, along with Penn President Larry Jameson’s response.
“I don't conceive of this demonstration as being anti-leadership or anti-Larry Jameson,” Nathans said. “The people who lead this university are in an extraordinarily difficult situation. One of its functions is to show that the calculus of how to behave in College Hall is not all about what’s coming out of Washington, D.C.”
Nathans noted that the relationship between Penn and the Trump administration has received increased scrutiny.
“I had a conversation with someone who works in Jameson’s office, and I asked them how Penn didn’t end up on the lists of universities being targeted by the administration,” Nathans said. “They said, ‘We have no idea. There was no secret deal struck, no outreach to an influential person.’”
He called it instead “a deliberate technique to keep people off their game,” adding that while Penn was not on either of those lists, the University is “absolutely in the gunsights of the administration.”
On several occasions, the panelists called for collective action and resistance, especially in the face of uncertainty and exasperation in light of federal action.
“When a government rules by decree and [when] parliamentary process is basically stopped, people lose faith in institutions,” Berg said. “What we have heard for decades, from across the political spectrum, is that the system doesn’t work for people. If you say that often enough and loud enough, it becomes much more, much easier to dismantle the system.”
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