Speaking Out Against the Trump Administration

Letter: Prize-winning political scientists speak out

From Francis Fukuyama and others

(Financial Times online, May 23, 2025)

It is from a position of scholarly responsibility that we, as winners of the Johan Skytte Prize in political science — an award recognising the most significant contributions to the field — speak out. 

We are deeply concerned about recent actions taken by the Trump administration that undermine the independence and academic freedom of research universities, colleges and scholarly institutions. 

In the words of Harvard president Alan Garber: “No government, regardless of which party is in power, should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and what areas of study and research they can pursue.” 

We strongly support these values. As award-winning political scientists who do not know each others’ political affiliations, we collectively fear that the current actions of the US government are a threat to the rule of law and civil peace, and we condemn the tools being used to achieve the administration’s goals. Specifically, we condemn the US government’s use of extortion to coerce independent institutions to act in accordance with the administration’s preferences; its illegal detention and deportation of hundreds of our international students and our international faculty colleagues; its deliberate fostering of bitterness among students and faculty on hundreds of university campuses in America; its punishing of researchers unrelated to the charges against their universities; its fear-mongering against those with whom the president disagrees; its short-sighted and senseless cuts to basic research that benefits the US and the world; and its encroachments on academic freedom and the core mission of American universities and colleges. 

These actions threaten the world’s leading free and open society. Decades of political science research show that societies that are open and pluralistic, with high levels of both individual and political rights, are more prosperous, more peaceful and more effective than autocracies that are closed and stagnant. President Donald Trump and his administration are on a spectacularly dangerous path. 

We, the authors of this letter, have been awarded the annual Johan Skytte Prize at Uppsala University for outstanding contributions to political science. As political scientists we have learnt how easily voters can be swayed to support anti-democratic candidates; but it is democratic and civic institutions, ones that Trump seeks to dismantle, that often save us from ourselves. 

Our concern is that American universities will not be able to continue to be the best and most innovative in the world, attracting brilliant minds from around the world to flourish in a community of students and peers. 

The price of such a disastrous future is incalculable. 

Francis Fukuyama, Stanford University 

Peter J Katzenstein, Cornell University 

Jane Mansbridge, Harvard University 

Pippa Norris, Harvard University 

Robert Axelrod, University of Michigan (emeritus) 

David Collier, University of California, Berkley (emeritus) 

Jon Elster, Columbia University (emeritus) 

Martha Finnemore, George Washington University, Washington, DC 

Robert E. Goodin, Australian National University (emeritus) 

Jürgen Habermas, Johan Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main (emeritus) 

Robert O. Keohane, Princeton University (emeritus) 

Herbert P. Kitschelt, Duke University 

David D. Laitin, Stanford University 

Arend Lijphart, University of California, San Diego (emeritus) 

Margaret Levi, Stanford University 

Carole Pateman, University of California, Los Angeles (emerita) 

Robert D. Putnam, Harvard University (emeritus) 

Adam Przeworski, New York University (emeritus) 

Philippe Schmitter, European University Institute (emeritus) 

Rein Taagepera, University of California, Irvine (emeritus) 

Alexander Wendt, Ohio State University

Peter Niesen: Felmon Davis (1.1.1949–7.5.2025)

The philosopher Felmon Davis passed away at the age of 76 on May 7, 2025 in his adopted home of Mannheim, Germany. Before his retirement in 2018, he was Professor of Philosophy at Union College, Schenectady, NY. He grew up in Philadelphia and attended Haverford College. This is where he met Richard Bernstein and was first introduced to the thought of Jürgen Habermas. After taking his BA at Haverford with distinction, he went on to Princeton to do his PhD with Richard Rorty. In 1974-75, he spent a year in Munich to engage with the researchers at the Starnberg Max Planck Institute during Habermas’ tenure there. After Rorty had departed for the University of Virginia, Davis completed his thesis under the supervision of Raymond Geuss. The dissertation analyzed the notion of ‘unavoidability’ in Habermas’ theory of communicative action, in a critical attempt to clarify its sources of normativity. From the late 1980s, he regularly visited Frankfurt, later Gießen Universities, first as a DAAD scholar. He soon established himself as a highly regarded figure among colleagues and students, whom he treated with unflagging curiosity and egalitarian respect.

Felmon Davis’s research centered on moral theory and the philosophy of religion. He tried to convince his Frankfurt friends of a meta-ethically realist interpretation of discourse ethics, which he defended in a 1994 article entitled “Discourse Ethics and Ethical Realism. A Realist Re-Alignment of Discourse Ethics” in the European Journal of Philosophy. His style in philosophical debate was not adversarial, but invitational: He thought it his duty to present his position as attractive as possible in order to invite colleagues to join him. In the late 1990s, he pre-empted much of the current philosophical discussion on the notion of race, and about its origins in the history of philosophy, in a review of Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze’s path-breaking reader Race and the Enlightenment (Constellations, 1998) and in ‘Rassendiskurs, Gerechtigkeit und Demokratie in den USA. Eine Fallstudie‘ in Hauke Brunkhorst’s collection Demokratischer Experimentalismus (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1998).

In later years, he focussed on the epistemic credentials of religion. As a non-believer, having been brought up in a Catholic family, he vehemently opposed the liberal exclusion of religious discourse from the political public sphere, without thereby awarding it claims to rationality. The upshot of his decade-long reflection can be found in his chapter on Habermas on monotheism in the Habermas Handbook (C. Lafont, R. Kreide, H. Brunkhorst (eds.), NY: Columbia UP, 207-218), and especially in his article ‘Habermas's Expressivist Theology: Chalice Half-Full?’ (Las Torres de Lucca. International Journal of Political Philosophy 2012), probably the only paper to elucidate Habermas’ view of religion with Simon Blackburn’s theory of morality. His dialectical skills are shown to great effect in a recorded debate on the rationality of Christianity with William Lane Craig. He was an early adapter to all things digital and to computer ethics and metaphysics in particular.

After their retirement, Felmon Davis and his spouse Elisabeth Egetemeyr relocated to Mannheim, Germany. Davis was a regularly visitor and guest at Regina Kreide’s doctoral colloquium in Political Theory at Gießen University. His reputation was legendary among the students he met and taught at Frankfurt, Darmstadt, Gießen and Hamburg. He increasingly despaired of the political development of the U.S., but always aimed at some reconciliation, at least on an epistemological level, as in his unpublished paper on ‘Democracy and the Religious Right’ (2019, on ResearchGate). He taught his final course on “Fear, Truth, and Democracy” in the Winter of 2021/22 at Hamburg University.

We’re privileged to have known him.

Peter Niesen, Hamburg, 9.5.2025

See also: "The Union community mourns philosopher Felmon Davis"